First indoor with CFLs inside a fireplace

This is my first indoor grow and second in total.Tried outside last season but someone took away them at the very beginning of flowering.And here it is.

Four unknown bagseed,probably a sativa dominant hybrid.



Using a mixture of potsoil ammended with mycroelements(that’s what writing on it),pumicestone,powdered eggshell and banana peel.In solo cups for 10 days and in 1,7 liter pots for five days.

Now at day 15 from sprout,beginning of week 3.

Temp. is around 77-84 and humidity is around 50-55 (just using a towel and a bowl of water)

Growing inside a fireplace (don’t need an exhaust) with 6 CFLs all 6500K,two 65Ws inside a DIY hood and four 45Ws in desktype reflectors.The bigger watts are about 8 inches far and the other four are about 4 and my light schedule is 24/7.

Using two PC fans for intakes and an oscilating fan directed over the seedlings,under the bulbs.Exhaust is as mentioned above,chimney of the fireplace.

Just began using grow nutes ¼ strenght two days ago and a teaspoon of molasses per liter water.I’m using bottled water which have 7,0 PH and I don’t have a PH meter so I didn’t check the run off yet.My soil is balanced 5,5-6,5 normally.

Sorry about the photos,don’t have any battery for the camera so I took them with the phone.

Forget to give the dimensions.The measurements of the fireplace are something like that,100 cm (39,3'') width,65 cm (25,5'') depth,and the height is 130 cm (51,1'') but begin to reduce the width from both sides after 80 cm (31,4'')
And here is some before and after photos

From the beginning I'm talking about the actual watts for sure not the equivalents.

Now in veg. as I mentioned above,using 310 actual watts (two 65W/four 45W) in 6 feet square over 4 plants.And usually the amount of light is getting more in flowering,so according to that I'm asking the amount of watts with CFLs.I never had a plan going on with HIDs but maybe LEDs (probably will continue with 2700K CFLs)

In fact I need two answers,first,is the amount of light that I'm using now in veg. matched with my growing conditions and second,if so how much do I have to upgrade in flowering ?

I know most people using 23Ws but beside that there is a huge amount of growers using bigger watts even bigger then me.

Finally I'm not clear about all this stuff that I've written above,some doing like this and the others doing like that and newbie growers mostly recomended to find their own way.

Growing indoor is quite a nightmare comparing to outdoor I guess

Simple is the better

I guess I find the ideal conditions for my place

Only two 65Ws inside the hood are on about 8 inches far above

16 inches oscillating fan directed to the lamps and oscillating either

Temperature is 22 c or in other words 71,5 f

And the humidity is fixed to 68

That's cool for now

Fımmed two of them and topped the other two.
I did it a little bit earlier according to my schedule but the fifth nodes began to grow and I couldn't stop myself doing that.
The nodes were incredible short that I could hardly fimmed the best two.I'm not sure if I did it properly.
And I also changed my lighting schedule from 24/0 to 18/6 after 2,5 weeks and planning to go another 2,5 weeks like that.
And will switch to 12/12 then.I know five weeks veg is not ideal if you're beginning from seed.I will wait if the plants look like they need more time.

Day 20 now and I want to share some photos .They don't look healty,what do you think ?
You can notice the yellowing at the first set of leaves,after I noticed that I turned of the two 65Ws and instead put on the 45Ws.
I transplanted them from 250 ml (8,5 oz) solo cups to 1,7 lt pots 12 days ago and they seem growing so slowly to me.
Maybe this is because of they're growing horizantal more then vertical.I'm not using 2700K all my bulbs are 6500K.

I begin to think that the main problem is the soil that I'm using.All the others maybe secondary,like lights,humidity or PH.

I didn't make my own soil or bought a proper growing soil especially made for cannabis.It was a regular potting soil labeled as ''Verve'' and ammended with micro elements,no mention of NPK values or PH levels.

I only added egg shell powdery and banana peel powdery and besides mixed %50 pumice stone instead of perlite.I was planning to support the grow with bottled nutes.

I am not sure this is a good plan now.

The hydroshop here have only Biobizz Light/All Mix and Biobiz Coco Mix in hand.Do I have to start again from the beginning which will cost me 24 days or just add one of the Biobizz mixes on the next transplant,what will be your suggestions ?

Sharing photos below,they look pretty weird I know.Stunted growth still going on so yesterday I added two 26W 2700K bulbs in order to strecth them a little bit.I feeded them with nutes on the last two waterings and due to unknown PH added a little bit egg shell powdery to the top of the soil.

I'll have to buy a PH meter immediately if I'm doing indoor

First off I have to admire the set up, very creative. As for you questions, I think your best bet is to just transplant into that biobizz. I wouldn't even think of starting from scratch quite yet. If you were to start over, you would need a new medium anyway so you might as well try that biobizz out and see how they take to that. If they take kindly to that and recover, perfect. If they don't like that either then at least you just saved wasting another 20 days and another batch of seeds to find that out. From what I've heard biobizz has some pretty good products so you shouldn't have to worry about the latter. I hope you find a solution and these do recover for you, its still too early to cross them off just yet.

Thanks,much appreciated.
I'd guess the fireplace will need extra fan at the beginning of the chimney after I'll switch to 12/12 due to heat problems.

Your answer is what I need to hear
I ordered the new soil but as you've said I'll have to wait a little bit more for a transplant.
At least the new tops shall grow much more and the roots will fit in that pot.

Thanks for the input

When or in which node can I FIM the new tops after topping ?
I got only one FIMmed plant,all others are topped and I decided to FIM them before flowering.
Can we switch to FIM on the new two stems after topping and at which node if I have to ask in the quickest way?

serog said:

When or in which node can I FIM the new tops after topping ?
I got only one FIMmed plant,all others are topped and I decided to FIM them before flowering.
Can we switch to FIM on the new two stems after topping and at which node if I have to ask in the quickest way?

Click to expand...

Once the new nodes have a set of fans you can get away with fimming/topping the new growth if time is of the essence. Also, it doesn't matter what technique you used before you can use whichever whenever

bryleetch said:

Once the new nodes have a set of fans you can get away with fimming/topping the new growth if time is of the essence. Also, it doesn't matter what technique you used before you can use whichever whenever

Click to expand...

Ready then,I'm planning to have 8 tops on these plants.

First,can I switch 12/12 directly after FIM ?
And second till to which week of flowering can I transplant ?

I couldn't find specific answers to these,maybe too nonsense to ask

Sharing the last photos I shooted yesterday

serog said:

Ready then,I'm planning to have 8 tops on these plants.

First,can I switch 12/12 directly after FIM ?
And second till to which week of flowering can I transplant ?

I couldn't find specific answers to these,maybe too nonsense to ask

Sharing the last photos I shooted yesterday

Click to expand...

You can but you may want to wait for the plants to recover from the shock of the pruning until you flip, it'll be a smoother transition into flowering that way.
As for transplanting, I would try your best to get them in their final containers around a week before the flip. The extra week also allows for a smoother transition and makes it easier on the plant. Getting pruned, transplanted, and then put under a new light schedule would be lot for them to handle at once, not that they couldn't handle it but there's really no reason to make them go through that stressfulness. You can get away with transplanting up to about halfway through flower, I just had to and it helped more than it hurt, but it's better to avoid doing that if you can help it, again the whole stress thing.
Basically anything you can do to keep stress levels low during flowering will get you the best results, of course towards the end of flower there are higher level stress techniques that are supposed to force more resin production but that's a different story

Now I've seen it all!!!!Computers,5g buckets,lockers,fridge,under the sink...and now the fireplace!
Way to go my man...I hope it works out for you.It's off to a good start for sure.

I just worry about height,when you transplant to larger containers.

bryleetch said:

You can but you may want to wait for the plants to recover from the shock of the pruning until you flip, it'll be a smoother transition into flowering that way.
As for transplanting, I would try your best to get them in their final containers around a week before the flip. The extra week also allows for a smoother transition and makes it easier on the plant. Getting pruned, transplanted, and then put under a new light schedule would be lot for them to handle at once, not that they couldn't handle it but there's really no reason to make them go through that stressfulness. You can get away with transplanting up to about halfway through flower, I just had to and it helped more than it hurt, but it's better to avoid doing that if you can help it, again the whole stress thing.
Basically anything you can do to keep stress levels low during flowering will get you the best results, of course towards the end of flower there are higher level stress techniques that are supposed to force more resin production but that's a different story

Click to expand...

I agree, let them settle in there new pots for a week and allow a little time for them to recover from stress that way when it comes time for the stretch there will be some nice tops.

Thanks for the inputs to my nonsense questions but really helped a lot

serog said:

Thanks for the inputs to my nonsense questions but really helped a lot

Click to expand...

Don't worry they weren't nonsense, we've all been in your shoes wondering the same things starting out. Glad we could help

I will keep them on veg one or two weeks more and transplant to their final pots before flowering.
Here are some photos of my unhealty plants

They'll keep on growing in that Verve soil more then a week and I researched a little bit and found some details about it.

Special mix organic planting turf enriched with micro elements,
EC:1,5 ms/cm
PH : 5,5-6,5
1,25 kg NPK/cubic meter slow released fertilizer

As I said before I'm using bottled organic nutes but I found these infos mostly at Non-organic forums.
Is it bad to use organic nutes with non-organic soils ?
I maybe wrong about if Verve is non-organic.Btw,I know organic growers hate from bottled organic nutes.

You can mix organics and non-organics but you're going to want to have a pretty light feed since that soil has time released fertilizer meaning that everything you water nutrients are released from the soil(in case you didn't know). That makes it easy to burn the plant if you feed too heavily since you're really feeding it twice, once with the bottle nutes and once from the time released ferts.

Some actually claim that plants can't even tell the difference between organic vs non, to them nitrate is nitrate and so on. Honestly, nutrient uptake isn't my most knowledgeable subject so I can't really elaborate reliably the differences between organics and synthetics. Seems like there's more preference than science when it comes to why people use nutrients anyway so for now you should be fine with what you have. I'm sure someone else can help you out a little better though

BTW they aren't looking too bad at all, I'd say better than before so that's always good

Come back again

Vegged for nine weeks then switch to 12/12 and after a week flowering began,that means next week I will be in the second week of flowering and 12 week in total.

I began to count flowering after the pistils seen clearly.

I wasn’t lucky enough,three of them were male and now I have only one.

Hope will share photos weekly.