First time. How's it look to you?

Hey everyone. This forum has been a lot of help to me so far, and for my first attempt I feel like I'm doing pretty well. I just wanna run everything by some experienced growers who could maybe point out where improvements could be made.

So, I'm just hoping to get maybe 2 or 3 females for my own personal use. I've got 5 plants in a space that's roughly 3ft deep, 4 ft long, and 7ft high (I'm not really planning on growing plants this large, though...unless anyone can convince me that I should! lol).

Right now they're under a 4ft 52W T5 strip light and 3 26W CFLs. I've got 3 2700k 26W CFLs I'll add for flowering and was thinking I'd get a second T5 and put 2700k bulbs in both when the time comes.

Plants are in a sphagnum/vermiculite mix. I filled the bottom 1/2 of the pots with an organic compost.

The only plant food I could get my hands on at the moment was some Schultz 10-15-10. I dosed them with a 1/8 strength solution a few days ago with no noticeable effects.

I made some ghetto aluminum foil reflectors out of broken down cardboard boxes. I think they help focus the light downwards towards the plant. The T5 strip seems to lose a lot of light out to the side.

What does everyone think? I'm about 2 weeks from the time these broke soil.

Comments? Suggestions?

looks good..is that foil your using? nono

is that foil your useing?

Yeah, it's foil. The T5 loses a lot of light from the side, if you check out the first two pics you can see how much brighter it is with the reflector on.

Plants are looking good, seems like they are getting what they need. Nutes are not so important at the moment as they are small and would not have used up the nutes that are already in the compost in the bottom of your pots. Invest is some good nutes, doesnt have to be complicated, a simple one part grow nute for veging and a one part bloom for flowering, dont bother with expensive nutes until you build up a bit of experience and get a couple of sucessful grows under your belt, your confidence will grow with your plants.
Get rid of the foil, when things get hot it will kill your plants with the hotspots it can create, imaging focusing the sun with a magnifiing glass, thats sort of the effect hotspots can have, plus foil is not good at reflecting the light spectrum you want. Invest in some mylar sheeting, if you cant afford mylar white wash the walls, even this would be better than foil.
Your on the right path and doing well, keep it up.

Lookin good. ya lay off nutes for the 1st month. least i do. maybe look in2 a cheap alternative to the foil, say like those emergency blankets at lowes or home de shit.

the color white reflects all color spectrums, unlike foil. i recommend swithing the foil out with reflective white poster sheets or somthing equivalent to such

dang i thought the foil idea was pretty good.....i was actually thinkin bout doin that after i saw yours but now i guess not!!!

mysticcobe said:

dang i thought the foil idea was pretty good.....i was actually thinkin bout doin that after i saw yours but now i guess not!!!

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Yeah, I thought it was pretty good too =) It definitely helps reflect light back down towards the plants, but I sure don't want to burn them up. The white posterboard idea sounds good, though. I actually have some leftover white paint, so maybe I'll take the foil off my cardboard ghettoflectors and paint them white instead. I might actually have some mylar wrapping paper laying around, would that work?


Thanks for the encouragement everyone! I thought I was doing pretty good for my first time, but it helps having an unbiased opinion on things!