buzzlightyear420
Member
Hello RIU,
This is my first indoor grow attempt I know I should have started a journal it the beginning but better late than never. I'll try to hunt down some of the pics from earlier in the grow and give a timeline of what I can remember I've done.
- Started with some bag seeds from some cheap commercial bud that had a really good sweet fruity taste.
- November 01, 2011 I got 50 best looking seeds started each one in its own jiffy peat pellet seed starter, about 20 of those germinated on their own but 30 or so so never popped so I had a wet paper towel soaking the whole time with the rest of the seeds I had and I picked out the best looking seeds that had the tap root already poking out and manually inserted them into the rest of the peat pellets.
- November 04, 2011 I put a 1000w Hydrofarm (separate ballast, non vented hood) MH lamp on the tray of seedlings (about 12-16 inches up) for about a week or so and also put them in direct sunlight during the day which I later found out was stressful and probably not a good idea.
- The only ph-ppm meter I have right now is a cheap-o "Luster Leaf 1818 Rapitest Mini 4-in-1 Soil Tester".
- I'm using 3 gallon sunleaves grow bags filled with straight happy frog soil (couldn't afford the ocean forest but that's what I wanted). Tested the soil with the meter when I first opened it and several times since then in each bag and it always reads exactly the same at 6.8 and the "fertility meter" on it always says very low but I think this thing is junk.
- So I had 50 seedlings going (I only started with so many because of murphy's law I knew I would end up killing most of them accidentally and some purposefully.
- I only had enough money at the time to get 2 big bags of happy frog soil so they ended up filling 11 of the 3 gallon bags.
- Now, against my better judgement and the wise advice of my own mother I ended up putting 4 seedlings in each grow bag when the roots were starting to show at the bottoms of the peat pellets. I didn't want to just pick the 11 best looking seedlings and kill the rest because I figured I would end up with only a couple good girls. I intended to only veg them together like that for a week before turning to flowering and killing all the males, but I was vegging them in a tiny closet the bags barely fit in while I was finishing remodeling my bathroom with a hidden 4'x7' grow room that used to be a huge shower.
- So the flowering room construction took longer than I thought and those 44 seedlings started growing out of control. I was turning the 1000w MH light off during the sunny days and letting them soak up direct (nov-dec) sunlight in our climate controlled sun room and they seemed to be loving it but I learned later that this may be stressful and I think it may be one of the reasons I'm having the problems I am.
- About 3 weeks into veg it became apparent that about half or more of these plants (about 5 nodes tall now) were growing mutant leaves. Having all single leaf sets with deformed shapes. I gave them another week or so then started the process of natural selection and cut the mutants out.
- Always used store bought distilled water (ph unknown, I have no way to test ph or ppm of my store bought distilled water but I know my tap water hardness here is so bad that Culligan refused to install a water softener so I refuse to use it) and I also used no nutes all the way through the veg until about day 21 when they were growing very fast at which point I gave them 1/8 teaspoon of miracle grow 15-30-15 and a couple drops of superthrive in a gallon of water split between all 11 bags. Of course within a day or so it was apparent they got nute burned a little on the biggest fan leaves.
- December 01, 2011 So the flowering room ended up being ready exactly 30 days after I started soaking the seeds and these "seedlings" were monsters! They ended up being about 4 feet tall each. I forget how many were still in each bag after killing the mutants but some bags still had 3 plants some 2 some only had 1. I put all the big bushy bags in the 4x7 flowering room, which didn't leave any room to move around in there at all. I plugged the light into my new 7 day digital power strip timer and set the timer to come on at 9pm and go off at 9am every day and put them all to sleep for their first night.
- I think for the first week or so of flowering I may have had a small light leak situation plus a couple mornings I didn't get the door to the room closed until about 930am or so and then I realized the small space heater I was using in there during the dark period had a red light on it that came on when the heater was running. After all that stuff was fixed the plants the plants started showing their sex within a few days.
- It seemed the males all showed themselves pretty well and quickly so they were easy to to get rid of. Several females showed themselves also so I thought I would have it all narrowed down to girls only within a few days. That didn't happen, I ended up with like 4 girls flowering like crazy and about 7 or so slightly weaker looking plants that just refused to show any sign of sex until after about 3-4 weeks of 12/12. I think only a couple ended up showing balls and the rest started flowering slowly.
- At about the time I started the flowering I also switched to using all rain water I've been collecting in empty distilled water jugs during storms. I also ave them a small dose of the mg 15-30-15 once more before going to the hydro store and buying a container of Fox Farms 0-50-30 Beastie Bloomz.
- About 3 weeks into flowering I got it narrowed down to 7 females I think and I lined up the 5 grow bags they shared across the 4 foot width of the room. The stalks were still pretty soft so tied the tops of the back to the wall so that the stalks were almost horizontal and I pulled the side branches up to the top. I gave them a few days for everything to start pointing back up towards the light and pretty soon I had a nice even canopy of bud sites all at the top. Then I put in a crude hand made netting made out of the only string I could find around the house which was an old cannibalized mini blind. This seemed to help keep the long soft bottom branches tall and sturdy until they got much stiffer.
- So they've been flowering nicely for about 4 weeks now and I cut off some of the large dead older nute burned leaves since the scrog was so thick with foliage there was hardly any air getting through and they were blocking light from bud sites.
- After cutting out some foliage I could do a closer inspection and I started finding hermie balls and a few small hermie flowers that had already popped open on just a couple of the weaker looking females.
- I immediately took the scrog apart, pulled them bad bitches out and cut em up. Even though these plants are hermies and way immature they were still covered in crystals and ended up tasting awesome and were very potent even with a quick dry.
- January 05, 2012 So going on 5 weeks of flowering now and I think I have 7 girls left, the few that started flowering first are looking very healthy and frosty, the rest just look like they're a few weeks behind. I've been giving them 1 gallon of water with 1/2 tsp of 0-50-30 and couple drops of superthrive once a week but usually water them every 3 days or so, I have been trying to wait until each bag has been light and dry for 1 day before rewatering but some of them still appear over watered I think.
- Another thing I didn't mention was that I am flowering with the same 1000w MH lamp which I know is intended for veg only but I ended up not having any money to buy a 600w HPS like I wanted to so I am just working with what I have right now.
- I did get a cheap-o wireless temp-humidity monitor that has temp alarms and I have been keeping the sensor on the wall at canopy height and keeping day temps around 74 and night temps I was keeping it at about the same 74 degrees for a few weeks with a baseboard heater in the flowering room but the power bill is getting pretty high now so now I'm letting it drop to about 57-60 degrees during lights off.
- The room has a decent bathroom ceiling exhaust fan since it used to be a shower room so I went with it instead of buying a larger cfm fan. The old shower room is kind of strange in that it is upstairs but the room sticks out from the house over open air (it used to be a small deck apparently) so I decided to cut a fresh air vent in the floor coming straight from outside. This turned out to be a bad idea the first night when the ice cold air coming in frost bit the lower leaves closest to the vent. So now the floor vent is all sealed back up and I'm back to ventilating with a big box fan and the grow room door being opened during lights on. This is working for now but it is a pain in the ass that I MUST be here at 9am and 9pm every single day to open and close the door. I have fans in there running 24/7 and the ceiling exhaust fan is on 24/7 but during lights off I close the door (which is sealed for all light leaks) and it pulls air from under the door where I put a large black towel to block the light but let the fresh air through easily.
- I don't have a clue what strain these are or how long the flowering time is but most of them looked mostly indica except for one that got really tall and had long super skinny leaves that ended up a hermie. The bud I got the seeds from was cheap bricked stuff but tasted really sweet which is why I saved the seeds. The buds growing now smell very sweet and almost like bubblegum.
Well I'm rambling now I don't have time right now to put together the pics I've been taking since the beginning but I will later, I can however post a link to a short video I made this morning just before the lights shut off. The video is kinda grainy and blurry but I have some good highres pics I will post later.
http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=zmjl0j&s=5
I'm open to any comments suggestions and insults,
Thanks for reading and wish me luck,
buzzlightyear420
This is my first indoor grow attempt I know I should have started a journal it the beginning but better late than never. I'll try to hunt down some of the pics from earlier in the grow and give a timeline of what I can remember I've done.
- Started with some bag seeds from some cheap commercial bud that had a really good sweet fruity taste.
- November 01, 2011 I got 50 best looking seeds started each one in its own jiffy peat pellet seed starter, about 20 of those germinated on their own but 30 or so so never popped so I had a wet paper towel soaking the whole time with the rest of the seeds I had and I picked out the best looking seeds that had the tap root already poking out and manually inserted them into the rest of the peat pellets.
- November 04, 2011 I put a 1000w Hydrofarm (separate ballast, non vented hood) MH lamp on the tray of seedlings (about 12-16 inches up) for about a week or so and also put them in direct sunlight during the day which I later found out was stressful and probably not a good idea.
- The only ph-ppm meter I have right now is a cheap-o "Luster Leaf 1818 Rapitest Mini 4-in-1 Soil Tester".
- I'm using 3 gallon sunleaves grow bags filled with straight happy frog soil (couldn't afford the ocean forest but that's what I wanted). Tested the soil with the meter when I first opened it and several times since then in each bag and it always reads exactly the same at 6.8 and the "fertility meter" on it always says very low but I think this thing is junk.
- So I had 50 seedlings going (I only started with so many because of murphy's law I knew I would end up killing most of them accidentally and some purposefully.
- I only had enough money at the time to get 2 big bags of happy frog soil so they ended up filling 11 of the 3 gallon bags.
- Now, against my better judgement and the wise advice of my own mother I ended up putting 4 seedlings in each grow bag when the roots were starting to show at the bottoms of the peat pellets. I didn't want to just pick the 11 best looking seedlings and kill the rest because I figured I would end up with only a couple good girls. I intended to only veg them together like that for a week before turning to flowering and killing all the males, but I was vegging them in a tiny closet the bags barely fit in while I was finishing remodeling my bathroom with a hidden 4'x7' grow room that used to be a huge shower.
- So the flowering room construction took longer than I thought and those 44 seedlings started growing out of control. I was turning the 1000w MH light off during the sunny days and letting them soak up direct (nov-dec) sunlight in our climate controlled sun room and they seemed to be loving it but I learned later that this may be stressful and I think it may be one of the reasons I'm having the problems I am.
- About 3 weeks into veg it became apparent that about half or more of these plants (about 5 nodes tall now) were growing mutant leaves. Having all single leaf sets with deformed shapes. I gave them another week or so then started the process of natural selection and cut the mutants out.
- Always used store bought distilled water (ph unknown, I have no way to test ph or ppm of my store bought distilled water but I know my tap water hardness here is so bad that Culligan refused to install a water softener so I refuse to use it) and I also used no nutes all the way through the veg until about day 21 when they were growing very fast at which point I gave them 1/8 teaspoon of miracle grow 15-30-15 and a couple drops of superthrive in a gallon of water split between all 11 bags. Of course within a day or so it was apparent they got nute burned a little on the biggest fan leaves.
- December 01, 2011 So the flowering room ended up being ready exactly 30 days after I started soaking the seeds and these "seedlings" were monsters! They ended up being about 4 feet tall each. I forget how many were still in each bag after killing the mutants but some bags still had 3 plants some 2 some only had 1. I put all the big bushy bags in the 4x7 flowering room, which didn't leave any room to move around in there at all. I plugged the light into my new 7 day digital power strip timer and set the timer to come on at 9pm and go off at 9am every day and put them all to sleep for their first night.
- I think for the first week or so of flowering I may have had a small light leak situation plus a couple mornings I didn't get the door to the room closed until about 930am or so and then I realized the small space heater I was using in there during the dark period had a red light on it that came on when the heater was running. After all that stuff was fixed the plants the plants started showing their sex within a few days.
- It seemed the males all showed themselves pretty well and quickly so they were easy to to get rid of. Several females showed themselves also so I thought I would have it all narrowed down to girls only within a few days. That didn't happen, I ended up with like 4 girls flowering like crazy and about 7 or so slightly weaker looking plants that just refused to show any sign of sex until after about 3-4 weeks of 12/12. I think only a couple ended up showing balls and the rest started flowering slowly.
- At about the time I started the flowering I also switched to using all rain water I've been collecting in empty distilled water jugs during storms. I also ave them a small dose of the mg 15-30-15 once more before going to the hydro store and buying a container of Fox Farms 0-50-30 Beastie Bloomz.
- About 3 weeks into flowering I got it narrowed down to 7 females I think and I lined up the 5 grow bags they shared across the 4 foot width of the room. The stalks were still pretty soft so tied the tops of the back to the wall so that the stalks were almost horizontal and I pulled the side branches up to the top. I gave them a few days for everything to start pointing back up towards the light and pretty soon I had a nice even canopy of bud sites all at the top. Then I put in a crude hand made netting made out of the only string I could find around the house which was an old cannibalized mini blind. This seemed to help keep the long soft bottom branches tall and sturdy until they got much stiffer.
- So they've been flowering nicely for about 4 weeks now and I cut off some of the large dead older nute burned leaves since the scrog was so thick with foliage there was hardly any air getting through and they were blocking light from bud sites.
- After cutting out some foliage I could do a closer inspection and I started finding hermie balls and a few small hermie flowers that had already popped open on just a couple of the weaker looking females.
- I immediately took the scrog apart, pulled them bad bitches out and cut em up. Even though these plants are hermies and way immature they were still covered in crystals and ended up tasting awesome and were very potent even with a quick dry.
- January 05, 2012 So going on 5 weeks of flowering now and I think I have 7 girls left, the few that started flowering first are looking very healthy and frosty, the rest just look like they're a few weeks behind. I've been giving them 1 gallon of water with 1/2 tsp of 0-50-30 and couple drops of superthrive once a week but usually water them every 3 days or so, I have been trying to wait until each bag has been light and dry for 1 day before rewatering but some of them still appear over watered I think.
- Another thing I didn't mention was that I am flowering with the same 1000w MH lamp which I know is intended for veg only but I ended up not having any money to buy a 600w HPS like I wanted to so I am just working with what I have right now.
- I did get a cheap-o wireless temp-humidity monitor that has temp alarms and I have been keeping the sensor on the wall at canopy height and keeping day temps around 74 and night temps I was keeping it at about the same 74 degrees for a few weeks with a baseboard heater in the flowering room but the power bill is getting pretty high now so now I'm letting it drop to about 57-60 degrees during lights off.
- The room has a decent bathroom ceiling exhaust fan since it used to be a shower room so I went with it instead of buying a larger cfm fan. The old shower room is kind of strange in that it is upstairs but the room sticks out from the house over open air (it used to be a small deck apparently) so I decided to cut a fresh air vent in the floor coming straight from outside. This turned out to be a bad idea the first night when the ice cold air coming in frost bit the lower leaves closest to the vent. So now the floor vent is all sealed back up and I'm back to ventilating with a big box fan and the grow room door being opened during lights on. This is working for now but it is a pain in the ass that I MUST be here at 9am and 9pm every single day to open and close the door. I have fans in there running 24/7 and the ceiling exhaust fan is on 24/7 but during lights off I close the door (which is sealed for all light leaks) and it pulls air from under the door where I put a large black towel to block the light but let the fresh air through easily.
- I don't have a clue what strain these are or how long the flowering time is but most of them looked mostly indica except for one that got really tall and had long super skinny leaves that ended up a hermie. The bud I got the seeds from was cheap bricked stuff but tasted really sweet which is why I saved the seeds. The buds growing now smell very sweet and almost like bubblegum.
Well I'm rambling now I don't have time right now to put together the pics I've been taking since the beginning but I will later, I can however post a link to a short video I made this morning just before the lights shut off. The video is kinda grainy and blurry but I have some good highres pics I will post later.
http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=zmjl0j&s=5
I'm open to any comments suggestions and insults,
Thanks for reading and wish me luck,
buzzlightyear420