knightryder215
Member
So I'm a noob, and I can use all the help I can get! So any and all comments are appreciated. But +rep if you give me some solid advice. I'll be providing alot of details up front to help anyone else out in the future. I'm planning to grow 1 female, and maybe 2 if they appear to be staying quite small. I was tired of dealing with shady characters to acquire some. I will only be growing enough for myself.
First of all I'd like to refer people to two articles I found very useful to a noob and anyone growing on a budget or with "ordinary" item you can find at almost any place in your hardware stores and local walmart.
First Time CFL grow
Cranker's Guide to using Pre-nuted soil and not failing
I wanted to not have a ballast, as they are scary and can cause fires...but more importantly I wanted something user friendly, cheap, and well I wanted CFL's lol. So the above article was great as a grow showing that it can be done.
Cranker's miracle gro guide was great and I used something very similar. I also germinated my seeds directly in this mixture and got 5/5 to pop! I was very happy.
Lots of pics up front as I've been waiting to germ to upload them. I purchased my seeds from the single seed centre (normal Northern Lights seeds) and I was very anxious. I placed an email bc my seeds had not having shipped two days after I placed the order. But I ordered on a saturday, and they shipped the next morning. I received a prompt email though, which was comforting, in reply to my anxious email. I received my seeds about 10 days after placing the order but I wasn't home when the mailman swung by and I had to wait till the weekend to pick them up at my local post office.
In that time I read pieces of two grow books (grow great marijuana from Logan Edwards and The bible from Cervantes), purchased supplies and asked questions and read here on RIU.
While I placed 5 seeds (of my ten for fear of losing them all to a freak accident) into a shallow cup of water to soak for 6.5 hours (I aimed for 6 but was asleep lol), I mixed my soil.
I used Cranker's soil mix referenced above.... Miracle-gro perlite and Miracle-gro moisture control in a 2.5:1 ratio. I Put the appropriate amount in a trash bag, closed tight and stomped on it to break the nute containing spheres in the soil. Then I put the soil into the clear cups (i later put opaque cups over these to prevent light reaching my roots).
Then I put the seeds into the soil, and sprayed with pH 6.0 water (using the cheapo drop solution to adjust pH with vinegar as my tap was 8.0+) whenever the soil was dry. I ran a humidifier in the room of my 2'x2'x4' tent to increase the ambient humidity and ran 3 cfl's about 1.5 ft from the top of the soil to keep the temps in the tent up.
No exhaust fan was run to keep temps in the tent up. In my next post I'll talk about temps/humidity and how the babies germed.
These are pics of my setup. I'm using the GL40 tent from growlab bought on ebay. I have an exhaust fan (80 CFM) connected with 4" ducting and a humidity/temp monitor inside my tent which relays info to the screen on top of the tent shown. The little box taped to the inside of the tent is shown here. (it can be confusing but the "outside" temp/hum on the unit is actually inside the tent).
First of all I'd like to refer people to two articles I found very useful to a noob and anyone growing on a budget or with "ordinary" item you can find at almost any place in your hardware stores and local walmart.
First Time CFL grow
Cranker's Guide to using Pre-nuted soil and not failing
I wanted to not have a ballast, as they are scary and can cause fires...but more importantly I wanted something user friendly, cheap, and well I wanted CFL's lol. So the above article was great as a grow showing that it can be done.
Cranker's miracle gro guide was great and I used something very similar. I also germinated my seeds directly in this mixture and got 5/5 to pop! I was very happy.
Lots of pics up front as I've been waiting to germ to upload them. I purchased my seeds from the single seed centre (normal Northern Lights seeds) and I was very anxious. I placed an email bc my seeds had not having shipped two days after I placed the order. But I ordered on a saturday, and they shipped the next morning. I received a prompt email though, which was comforting, in reply to my anxious email. I received my seeds about 10 days after placing the order but I wasn't home when the mailman swung by and I had to wait till the weekend to pick them up at my local post office.
In that time I read pieces of two grow books (grow great marijuana from Logan Edwards and The bible from Cervantes), purchased supplies and asked questions and read here on RIU.
While I placed 5 seeds (of my ten for fear of losing them all to a freak accident) into a shallow cup of water to soak for 6.5 hours (I aimed for 6 but was asleep lol), I mixed my soil.
I used Cranker's soil mix referenced above.... Miracle-gro perlite and Miracle-gro moisture control in a 2.5:1 ratio. I Put the appropriate amount in a trash bag, closed tight and stomped on it to break the nute containing spheres in the soil. Then I put the soil into the clear cups (i later put opaque cups over these to prevent light reaching my roots).
Then I put the seeds into the soil, and sprayed with pH 6.0 water (using the cheapo drop solution to adjust pH with vinegar as my tap was 8.0+) whenever the soil was dry. I ran a humidifier in the room of my 2'x2'x4' tent to increase the ambient humidity and ran 3 cfl's about 1.5 ft from the top of the soil to keep the temps in the tent up.
No exhaust fan was run to keep temps in the tent up. In my next post I'll talk about temps/humidity and how the babies germed.
These are pics of my setup. I'm using the GL40 tent from growlab bought on ebay. I have an exhaust fan (80 CFM) connected with 4" ducting and a humidity/temp monitor inside my tent which relays info to the screen on top of the tent shown. The little box taped to the inside of the tent is shown here. (it can be confusing but the "outside" temp/hum on the unit is actually inside the tent).
