First Time - A Family Grow

So, I decided to go ahead and start a grow journal on my first attempt at growing. My two sons and I have been talking about growing for sometime because of the increased costs lately and we got a reluctant but OK nod from mom. I did a lot of reading and I think the biggest thing I learned from that is that there are many many methods and results can be all over the map. Since this was my first attempt, I decided, I was going to keep it simple and do what we could but don't plan to spend a bunch of money on the setup and attempt to be as natural as possible for an indoor grow. Since I was planning to keep a log anyway, i figured putting it up here was a good idea, to gain input from others on the experience.

I started on Monday 8/11/08 with bag seeds left over from a mixed variety of different batches collected over time. I decided on the "paper towel" method on a plate with 10 seeds. At the same time my son started his own batch of about 40 seeds with a similar method but instead put his in a zip lock baggy. After a day, his ended up on my plate. I guess he figured it would be easier for me to water them all together or he was just being lazy...

We soaked the paper towels with filtered water from our refrigerator PUR system. We figured this produced great tasting water so it should be good for the seeds. I did measure the PH balance of the water with a standard pool test kit strips to ensure that it was good. We are on a well so the standard chemicals introduced in commercial drinking water would not be a problem. Here are the estimated measurements of the water:

Free Chlorine < 0
Alkalinity ~ 40ppm
PH ~ 7.5
Calcium Hardness ~ 50ppm

Day 2 - We fed the seeds more water first thing in the morning, giving them enough water to get the paper towels wet but to much. I didn't want it to pool in the plate.

Some seed starter pics. More to come. Hopefully.

good start man, keep us all updated with pics! one tip tho, depending on how old your sons are make sure they absolutely do not tell a single living soul about your grow! teens like boasting about shit like this! (if indeed they are teens still)

and what strain are you growing? and whats your lighting setup?

keep up the good work.

We decided to check on the seed progress on Wednesday 8/13/08. To our surprise we had some good results. 4 out of the 10 that I started had opened up and produced small roots, another 4 from my son's batch were also moving along nicely. From what we have read many people suggested putting them in soil as soon as possible. Others suggested waiting for a 5mm root before doing so, but we didn't want to drown them in the plate and when ahead and put what we had into soil now. We left the other in the paper towel to see how many more we could get.

We ended up putting a total of 8 seeds into small paper cups with a very standard potting mix containing 21% Nitrogen, 7% Phosphate, and 14% Potash. The mixture was not quite what we have read to be ideal but we thought it was good for the early growing stages. Having read that Nitrogen is very important during early growth made me feel good about the 21%.

We carefully placed the seeds into the soil about .25 inch into the soil with a pair of tweezers. Again we had conflicting information on placing the root up or root down, so we decided to mix it up a bit and do a combo of each. Obviously root down made a lot of sense but we heard root up can create a stronger plant since the root would need to work its way down the flower its way up, resulting a strong root base. Unfortunately we didn't keep track of which was which.

We placed the 8 cups into a small plastic green house and put it under a 24inch 75w florescent grow light, specifically designed for growing seeds that was available at Walymart. I am not really sure of the color spectrum of this light but it produces a slightly pinkish glow. Since we were using paper cups we placed additional soil around the cups to prevent them from falling over, and I didn't want the cup to become water logged so figured this could help. We placed the whole thing in an available closet that is about 3.5'x3'. The light is about 2 inches from the top of the Plastic cover and about another inch to the soil. Installed a basic timer on the light to run 18hrs on and 6hrs off. The schedule is 6am to Midnight on, so that during dark hours we can ensure no other light is available at all. Placed a temporary thermometer at the base of the mini greenhouse to get a baseline of the environment. Right now we are at 76 degrees which should be good for now.

We continued to sprout additional seeds as well, so we are keeping our paper towels wet. We see some potential for more seed planting later in the week or tomorrow.

A few more pics:

mammal said:

good start man, keep us all updated with pics! one tip tho, depending on how old your sons are make sure they absolutely do not tell a single living soul about your grow! teens like boasting about shit like this! (if indeed they are teens still)

and what strain are you growing? and whats your lighting setup?

keep up the good work.

Click to expand...

Mammal - yeah kids are over 18 and they have been forewarned that this is very hush hush and only for personal use.

lighting info to come. we are starting slow but definitely need to buy some stuff as we go.

Thursday 08/14/08

This post should get us up to date with where we actually are at the moment. Since, I just started the thread the other posts, were catching up on progress.

Checked on the babies this morning and was surprised to see a couple popping through already - Very surprised.

The first thing I noticed was good humidity on the mini green house and the soil maintained a good moisture content as a result. I also noticed that the temperature in the Nursery (as we are calling it), had dropped to about 72 degrees, while it had climbed to almost 80 yesterday afternoon under the lamp. I figured this was due to the light being off overnight and the naturally cooler evening - even tho they have little exposure to outside air at the moment. I am sure that 72 - 80 degree swings between night and day are not a bad thing but definitely something I plan to monitor. I gave them all another drink to start the day. We are not really measuring the water or anything but going by eye at the moment to maintain a moist soil.

We plan on maintaining a plain ph balanced water with no nutrients added for about a week. From what we have read the nutrients in our soil should satisfy the growth in the early stages. Later we will add nutrients as the plant develops. I also plan to label each plant as it grows so we can track the progress of each. We assume that some will not make it and some will turn male and need to be removed. Having labels should help identify each. I am going to use a first out - first number method and only number those plants that actually start.

Right now it looks like I have 2 pots that have started some sort of growth. #1 right in the middle of the pack, is what I believe to be the very first one we planted and had the longest root to start, I also believe we planted this root down. In this picture you can see it is popping its head out.



#2 is just to the right of #1 and also located in the center row directly under the light. This one looks a little odd in that it is fuzzy. This could be normal but I am not sure, I am hoping it is not early mold, indicating too much water. Here's a pic.



Also continuing the paper towel process and it looks like we have 7 more that could be transplanted in soil later on today or tomorrow. We are thinking about trying to get Jiffy pots for these to see if the results are any different.

Its Day 5 since I started the seeds in a plate and things are progressing along nicely.

After yesterdays post we noticed a 3rd plant pop its head up and to our surprise it took off like a bat out of hell. It jumped right up and presented a couple of round leaves very quickly and proceeded to race toward the light. #3 was out sprinting #1 and #2 and it looked like it was growing more every time we took a peak.

This morning all of the first 8 planted seeds in the Dixie cups have shown good progress.

Because of the great progress so far we decided to go out and purchase some items that will get us into the next stage. The first thing we figured we needed now, was a better Temperature gauge and we needed to add a Humidity gauge as well. We picked up a small unit for about 8 bucks at HD.



We also purchased some Nutrients that will be begin to add to the water next week. We purchased two different types of Jack's Classic, water soluble plant food. The first is a 20-20-20 mixtures of the basic ingredients Nitrogen, Phosphate, and Potash. We have read that a balanced mixture at this stage is good, however I am a little unsure about the Phosphate, I don't want to promote bud too soon. But I think keeping the light days long and the fact that our soil was a little low in this area to start with, we should be OK. Any advice here would be great.

The second mixture is 10-30-20. This is by far the highest concentration of Phosphate that we could find for the Bud stage later on. We plan to keep our water mixture very low to start since the little plants are still very weak. We are going to follow the directions for everyday indoor watering of .25 teaspoon per gallon of water. We might increase over time but will wait for result before we do.

We also purchased some larger pots for the second stage and some Jiffy pots for the remaining seeds we are looking to sow. We went with a very basic thin plastic disposable pot that is about 8" round and 8" deep, for the larger pot. We also planted 7 more seeds to the Jiffy pots and watered. In addition there is at least one more seed that looks like it holds promise that we will plant later today but the rest of the seeds don't look like they are doing anything and will likely be tossed. We will end up with 8 Dixie cups and 8 Jiffy pots, which I think is more than enough to work with especially this first go around.

Overnight the temperature dropped again to about 72 degrees and the humidity was way up at 98%. Of course we were still in green house mode so I figured this was OK. The soil did remain quite moist overnight and I decided not to feed the Dixie cup plants until later on for fear of over watering. The Jiffy pots being a little bit newer and still only seeds were given a healthy dose of water into the tray so they could soak up the water on their own.

As mentioned, we now have 8 plants starting in of all of the Dixie cups each at different stages. #1, 2, & 3, are all about 1 inch tall with 2 round leaves and just starting 2 additional scalloped leaves. #4, 5, & 6 are maybe .75 inch and trying to stand up strait and open the leaves. #7 and 8 are a little slower but we can see them starting to push out of the soil, with 7 further along than 8 at this point. Interesting enough we also have 1 plant popping up in the Jiffy pots already. I am going to call this one J1.

Here are some more pics. I really do want some comments on this Journal. I believe there was some mention of not adding comments to someones Journal but I would love the input from anyone who wishes to comment.

Looks great, I'll be watching.

thanks Tetra, I have a feeling I could use some advice as we go

make sure not to overwater, let the soil almost completely dry in between waterings, when you do water do so until there is some runoff.

Good call gangjababy, thanks. I was doing some reading myself and came to the same conclusion.

I decided not to feed them yesterday at all and they did dry out today. I just fed them today at 6pm and only gave them 10ml. We should be good to go now.

Thank isn't a black light is it? I looks kind of purple. Maybe my computer. Looks like you are off to a good start. Do you know what size room you will be working with and what light you are going to be using. Go with good equipment and you will be really happy! Good luck to you guys

So we figured it was time to give our little nursery area a face lift and get some much needed items to be prepared for the second phase. We are still quite a way from then but figured it best to get it prepared.

We totally removed the nursery from the closet and completely cleaned it out. We wiped all the walls with a mild solution of ammonia and water. Then we painted the wall with a mold and mildew white paint made for bathrooms. We hung a 2'x2' florescent fixture with rope that we picked up at HD for 35 bucks. We used Cool While bulbs removed the old 75watt pink grow light (might put that back tho later on). Then we mounted a shelf off the floor about 36" up. We also added a fan and removed the cover from the nursery to let the babies breath.



As mentioned in a previous post, it looked like we had too much water going and with the high humidity it was not drying out. We decided to not water yesterday at all and ended up giving them all 10ml of water on Saturday at 6pm, when we noticed the soil was now dry. We plan to keep the watering much lower going forward.

Ended up labeling our plants as discussed. I used D1-7 for the plants in Dixie cups and J1-7 for those in Jiffy cups. Right now it looks like we have at least 1 cup of each type that didn't make it, no signs of much growth yet. The others are doing fine it appears but they do appear tall for such a small plant, we shall see how that goes. i am thinking of creating a chart to show the progress for each plant. I think it will be easier to see how each is tracking against the other.

A point of note is that we are trying to treat each of the plants the same regardless of what stage they are in. For example the Jiffy pots plants are a day behind the Dixie cups but we have exposed them to the same changes in lighting, watering and incubation at the same time. We are not sure how these minor changes will effect the results.

Here are the latest pics of the babies:

New room pics didn't post correctly. here they are again.

edux10, nope not a black light. it is a grow light designed for plants. I figured it was good to use something like this during the early stage to give the babies plants a good start. we have removed this now and have moved to cool white lights. we will go back to warm white later on.

The full room is 3'x3.5'x10' - we will see if we fill it but we have now outfitted it completely. Check out the new pics.

So, it has been a few days since my last post, I was a way for a few days.

On Monday (Day 8 ), we began providing nutrients with our regular water feedings. We mixed our nutrients .25 teaspoon to 1 Gallon of water. We put the mixed nutrients in a Portable Drinking Jug used for camping. It has a nice water spout at the bottom that we can use to fill smaller water bottles for the actual feedings.

We also tried to reduce some of the water since we thought things were still much too wet. Unfortunately we may have dried them up too much. We reduced each individual feeding down to 10ml of water per feeding but we were only feeding once a day. I have heard we should feed when they want it or when they are dry. As a result, we got a few plants that have started to struggle a little bit. Most notable D1 and D4, which basically were laying completely on their side and bent at the base of the plant.

In addition, I think that our fan, was introduced too early or is too strong. We tried to keep this indirect for the most part but we did notice that plants near the fan would often be on their side and dried twice as fast as the others. In addition, all the Dixie plants generally dry faster than the Jiffies. This makes sense since the Dixie plants sit above ground and the entire cup is exposed to outside air, where the Jiffy pots are in soil which would allow them to retain water longer. Hard to know which is better at this point, but I would say that the Dixie plants are having more trouble with height and weight (top heavy), than the Jiffy pots.

The good news is that the leave growth is quite good. We have started too see our second set of leaves on quite a few plants. 9 of our 14 plants have a second set of leaves in slightly different stages of development. Leaves look good with most of them open up to the "sky" but still look a little dry to me, at least one is curled up. I would like to see the leaves with a little more "glossy" color to them indicating a little more moisture content, but I am not sure. I want to still be careful not to over water even tho we are on more of a feed when they need type of basis. For now I still plan to feed 10ml (2 teaspoons) with nutrients, but plan to feed them every time the plant looks dry. I am not sure if that will be 2 or more times a day but I think it will be more than once from now on. Our humidity and temp remains good at ~75 to 80 degrees and 55 to 60% humidity.

Heres what the girls look like now with some of the methods I have used to tied up the plants that are falling over. Some of these look tight in the tie up but believe me it is needed at this point on some of these. They will be loosened as we go and they become stronger again.

Please provide some feedback on the look of my plants and their leaves as well as soil moisture if you can see it in these pics. I believe these were just fed so should be a little moist in these.

****Having issues posting pics right now will try again later.*****

Wha'cha doing for pH measurements ??

dear mom,light must be closer to the seedlings...there's a lot of stretching because of that...good luck!

TetraHyC said:

Wha'cha doing for pH measurements ??

Click to expand...

When we started the ph was around 7.0 or so maybe even higher. I was only using a pool ph kit so lots of room for error here. However, we corrected this as of Saturday (Day 13 from seed). We are now 6.5 ph.

buresu said:

dear mom,light must be closer to the seedlings...there's a lot of stretching because of that...good luck!

Click to expand...

buresu, yeah we have heard this and definitely a mistake early on, they really did stretch out. I put the tray up on a box recently and we have seen some really good improvement since doing that. I am about to post an update on where we are and some other issues with lighting, would love some input.