Yo dude they look great, think i had a picture in my head of smaller plants, look really great too, nice and green. Probably need ferts in a few weeks but not at the moment. MG soil is great to grow in but just remember every watering activates the slow release nutrients so you have to be carefull with the watering and any additional nutes. Waiting till the leaves start to wilt is the best way to avoid overwatering imho and on smaller plants i only water the soil round the plant not the whole pot till runoff.
NOW although it will always be an argument i would like to clarify the HPS,MH against flourescents debate so bear with me! Flourescents match and out perform hps/mh within the first ten to twelve inches so long as you have a comparitive amount of flourescent to the hps/mh. Now it is easier to mix the light spectrum with flourescents and their light spectrum is more accurate than hps and mh so you will benifit here. What i am saying is that they match the sun better for light quality and not so much of the unused spectrums of light than hps and mh but their light penetration drops of severly after a short distance. People say use them for small grows but i would say they are better for short plants wheras mh/hps is better for taller plants. I could probably yeild more from a flourescent grow with lowryders than with hps/mh provided i had a decent amount of flourescents. You cant get mh/hps that close to plants except with a cool tube of some serious ventilation so light is wasted here too. Flourescents are pound for pound more efficient and cost saving for some grows but these are plants with a very short veg time and started flowering after a month or twelve inches, of course they are best suited for the veg room but you can flower with them too and especially auto flowering strains. Ok so bigger grows and the hps and mh out perform in wattage and light penetration all day long.
I'm not gona say one is better than the other when it comes to t8 and t5 size strip light flourescents and hps/mh but that they both have their distinct advantages so please don't argue as its like saying hydro is better than soil, it really depends on how you want to grow as both yeild amazing results.
Now we come to the cfls which are seriously lacking, here hps/mh not only hands down wins but is in a league of its own. Small 18w/24w cfls that claim they are the same as a 100wat bulb (which is a standard bayonet home bulb available in any supermarket or hardware shop) that is Hps i think. These claims are based on the physics that make the flourescent T8/T5bulbs so damn good and powerful! What a crock of sh!t these cfls are, mis-sold and lies, yer they will grow a plant but that plant will seriously suck, if you really have to use these then ok but you will never get a good yeild for the electricity you need. I know what i'm talking about here as i run the big daddies of cfls, the 250 watt version and the 200 watt version side by side, one red one blue in my flowering room and use the best make envirolight. 450 watts of envirolight cfls in a 70cm by 70cm by 1.2m tall and with 8 plants underneath. Now i get good yeilds and keep it perpetual to maximise yeilds but my mate had a 250hps and it was double the yeild of mine with only a week or two more veg.
Verdict on HPS and MH against T5 and T8 mixed spectrum flourescents are that they are as good as each other its just the type of grow that will make one better than the other. Obviously in veg the T8 and T5 is a little better than the HPS/MH due to the plants being smaller/shorter and the HPS/MH are slightly better than the T8's/T5's in the flowering room where good light penetration is needed due to tall plants and the fact that they are available in the higher wattage models such as the 600/100 watts.
Verdict on CFLs is that they have a long way to go till they are anywhere as good as T8's/T5's flourescents and the HPS/MH. They use a clever marketing to dupe you into thinking they are effective although i love my big wattage CFLs and they are the best solution for 100% flourescent light grow.
Overall its what you grow and how you grow although i know that 5x18w cfls will fail badly, maybe you'd grow a half ounce max in like three four months, good luck to you ( i appreciate that some do it this way to avoid the high price of the other lights! well 18w strip light flourescent fixtures are available everywhere at very cheap prices, you probably already got them in your homes or offices and will grow a lot more than one 18w flourescent).
Anyway since this guys plants look great and he obviously was just panicking maybe we should turn this thread into an HPS/MH debate instead till he gets some real problems!lol! And i was in no way implying that flourescent or hps/mh was better than the other in my earlier posts so dont think i really got an opinion. I do like the debate as to wether the the cost of electricity would be higher for HPS/MH or T5'/T8 flourescents to produce the same yeild in the same time, that might be the decider as to wether HPS/MH is actually the best over T5/T8 flourescents. Thanks.Lolol
