Scrog, vermicompost help.

Okay, this is my second grow and i am working in a much more limited space. The grow room I have is 18" wide X 24" deep X 25" tall. I am growing 2 plants in a small dish pan (and before anybody starts reprimanding, yes I know not to have 2 plants in one container, it just sort of developed that way). The pan is 12" X 14", the screen I have fits right on top of that. There is 12" between the screen and the bottom of the lights.

I have 6 26W CFLs. I forgot exactly how many lumens, but i believe it is around 1600 - 1700 a piece. That is about 9600 total lumens. Not the best but it's what I got. I also have 2 42W "red" cfl's which will be added when flowering gets under way.

I decided to go with a ScroG method becuase of my size constraints. If anybody knows a good ScroG grow or grow journal they can point me to, I would be very grateful. I've been searching for one but no luck so far.

You have any pics of your box?

I do have a couple of problems. My plants seem to be growing much slower than I would have hoped. The 2 sprouted on 9/24 and are only 1 1/4" and 1 1/2" tall. They appear healthy (alittle light green for my taste so maybe a little more N), root system seems to be nice.

Not really sure how to speed things up. One thing I have found this morning is a post where it says you can put plants on 12/12 straight from sprout. They have been on 18/6 so far. It said that this will make the plants start flowering as soon as they are ready, which could be only a couple of weeks. I would assume that switching now will speed up the vegetative growth.

Another thought I have is raising up the plants so that they are at the right level to start winding through the screen (the screen's holes are 1.5"). This should help speed up growth as the plant reaches for light right?

Basically, I have no actual experience with scrog growing. i have read as much as I could find and I am pretty clear on the principles that it works off of. The problem is that I all the posts I've seen talking about it are explaining the basic principle, a design lyout of the system, and some finshed photos. I haven't found a grow journal which shows how somebody did an entire ScroG grow.

If any body has done a scrog, (esp. if it was in a quite limited space like mine) it would be great to hear how it went, what to expect, and so forth.

One last question for now is, on the thread about the 12/12 from sprout, it did say the people had done that lighting method with a ScroG method, however it didn't go into any further detail than that, if some one knows more and could expound a bit, it would help me alot.

sorry, no pics right now, maybe (big maybe) later today. (all I have is a cell camera, and I have to drive about 10 min. down the road to get service to send the pics to my e-mail )

well you menioned you were only using 2 cfls wich isnt a whole lot of nothing so that may have somthing to due with the slow groth also are you feeding our plant anything nutricious?

no no I have 6 cfl's, only 2 plants.

On the feeding, nothing yet as they are only 2 weeks old. What I did, as I am trying to go as natural and organic as possible on this grow is I went out into the woods by my house ( I live on a mountain) and I found this area which is like a little hidden swamp nestled in the woods. The soil there is almost BLACK! very rich. I mixed the soil 50/50 with peatmoss. I had it in a black plastic bag for a week, closed up, no light, slightly moist as I was waiting to plant. When I opened it up, there was fucking grass growing! with no light whatsoever. So the soil is pretty damn good. I am also working on my "Active Vermicompost Feed System" which I will explain more about later. I am hoping this will be enough nutrients to keep them healthy.

ok..well this tuesday im gettin my whole setup! finally gettin paid!! l
and i plan on doing a scrog. i have limited space as well. but once i get im starting a journal. with the scrog method

Okay, now I will explain my "Active Vermicompost Feed System".

Basically, I have my contanier with my dirt in it. I was interested in working on a worm farm to get some castings. In researching the vermicomposting, I found that there are quite a few benefits. 1) breaking down just about any organic material into useful nutrients 2) Aerating the soil 3) helping create the micro-nutrients found naturally in soil.

After reading this I began thinking, peat moss is a natural, organic material, as well as whatever is lying around in the dirt that I grabbed. What if I were to just go ahead and put the worms in my container? As long as every now and then, I dug a little hole in different spots and threw in some compost material, wouldn't the worms eat it and crap out a constant supply of strong organic natural nutrients? As well as keeping the soil nice and loose for my roots?

Well, It is already under way. I just added some food for them. I got them on wednesday and I think they've already eaten through most of the peatmoss. the soil has changed it's consistency alot. It is a lot looser now and is starting to get that granulated look of worm castings.

About the food I just added:
Seeing as I wasn't sure that my system was going to work, (still not completely sure) I put some worms aside in a small worm farm underneath the kitchen sink. They seem to be alive and healthy. When i got it set up, I had some newspaper and cardboard for bedding and I added a stalk of kale and some potatoe peels and some coffee grounds. well, the kale and potatoe peels didn't really seem to be doing much. I remmembered reading that the material has to be partially composted for the worms to eat it. Unfortunately, I have alot of work to go on my composting skill. I tried three times and failed pretty miserably. So what i decided was, I would use my little food processor to chop up the food as fine as I could and give that to the worms, hopefully it is small enough they can eat it. I chopped up half a bell pepper(nitrogen), a bananna, and added some coffee grounds and mollasses. Mixed it all up and put some in my worm farm and some in my grow box. I lifted up the planters that are sitting in the soil, and put it right underneath, so that even if the worms don't compost it, it will compost naturally and give off nutrients for my babies.

well, that's all I can think of for now, sorry bout the long post, guess i had alot to say.

Comments Welcome!

very cool, I will be following intently.
soil or hydro?
how many plants?

that's a lot of CFL's.

really? I had thought it was alittle light (get it? light? get it? huhuhuhuh). Although it is in a very confined area. whats a good lumen per square foot again?

Oh, the other question. Any opinions about switching right over to 12/12. I will probably be switching tonight. If anybody thinks this is a very bad idea can they let me know?

Well, so far I see no votes for nay. Basically, I see nothing too terrible about it. regardless of light, a plant won't start showing sex organs until it's good and ready. I think that the 12/12 will just speed up the plants maturation. And as soon as the plants mature enough it starts flowering, instead of keeping in veg to get it bigger.

Okay, there are two concerns I have.
1) the plants will hermie (assuming they're even female*)
2) It may not work as well with my ScroG. Meaning there may not be enough time to completely fill the screen.

Well, I am going to switch it tonight. We shall see. It is going to be an interesting experiment.

* One other benefit is taht if I do end up with 2 males, I will know alot sooner and be able to move on to the next grow sooner. Also, a question, can male plants hermie? They do have that X chromosome. Just never heard about it happening before.

Well, this morning I switched my hours to 12/12. unfortunately with my work schedule my babies are sleeping when I get home from work. So I can only check them in the morning.
On another note, after much consideration, I've decided to start a grow journal. I won't have a chance to start it tonight, maybe tommorow morning.
With my new work schedule, im working 50 fucking hours a week, and I have a newborn so I won't be able to update it that often. That's why I wasn't sure i was going to, but I figured that with the mini ScroG and the 12/12 from seedling it will be worth it. Hopefully it will have some very interesting results and I (and whoever else reads it) can learn from it.

Anyway, that's it for tonight, I'll let you know when I'm going to start the journal. It might have to wait till this weekend.

Happy tokes and chronic smoke!

Well I just started the grow journal, all further updates will be done there. You can find it here:
https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/29455-my-experiment-grow.html#post301306

Marijuana has a natural chemical that is released into the soil that inhibits other plant growth...
Even other weed plants.....
Naturally this occurs in many plants....
This evolutionary process is thought to occur naturally to help thriving plants fend off other
plants that may otherwise take light and nutrients from them.
This is probably why they are growing slow. I had to plants together and one became a midgey.
And one was a monster. So I seperated them. I did it in the dark and it didn't stress them at all.
The Midgey actually ended up growing faster and larger than the other in the end.
Just a thought.

I may end up trying to seperate them, however I'm not sure if it will be an issue, since I switched to 12/12 they've been growing pretty fast. As with the screen, it's not in place yet, however hopefully very soon. As soon as they are a little taller. I have already switched the light cycle, so like I said, this is more an experiment to see what I can do with it.

One thing I have been thinking about with trying to fill the screen is, can I harvest the main buds and then reveg to try and fill the screen out more, or just keep the plant in flowering? like when you harvest the main bud and let the smaller buds keep growing?

Oh, and if I do get a male, couldn't I cut the stem and let it die? Or would i have to cut all the branches?

Oh, and with the natural chemical, I'm not sure but, I do have the fucking grass from the dirt I took from outside that keeps popping up, like right next to my plants.

with all those CFL's you probably could have just invested in a MH lamp and in the end
saved yourself a lot of money.

well, the main problem with that is the heat issue, remmember how dconfined my area is, it would probably be a fire hazard. And the cfl's I had bought over a period of a few months from a previous grow, my goal this time was to not by anything else for the grow. I was mostly succesful, I did have to buy elbow brackets to raise the shelf ffor my grow room, and I bought some velcro strips to make a light proof door out of some cardboard, so sofar I've gotten by on about 8 bucks, I'm not planning on buying anything else for this grow-op.
Plus I don't know anything about electrical wiring and making a box to handle the wattage neccesary.