Need Help - Plants are tall & have small leaves

Hi there - We are new growers and seem to be having some difficulty. We planted 4 seeds on June 20th. They came up right away (2-3 days) and have been growing decent, however they are getting very tall and the leaves on them appear to be small. I looked at other pics on here and our leaves are nothing compared to other plants of the same age (2 weeks).

I just read a sticky about replanting tall plants, so we just did that and moved the lights down.

The lights are on for 15hrs a day and off for 9hrs. We also have a fan blowing for those 15 hrs. We are using 2 T5 28watt light fixtures that each hold 2 bulbs (so 4 lights total).

Thanks for any advice you can offer me!

The "before" setup


The "after" setup (we replanted and moved the lights down)


One of the plants before replanting


Closeup of leaf

Definitely need to keep the lights inches away.. Those are badly stretched. Also, I would bump the lighting to at least 18 hrs on 6 off...

i agree with imbroken you need to move the light closer i would say about 4 or 5 inches away and i would even get another light if you do this they will stop stretching . also imo you need to put light cycle at 18 on and 6 off and i wouldnt put the fan directly on them either

18/6 is boring, if you have to do 15/9 you can. as long as it gets less than 12hrs of darkness, it wont flower (unless u have autos). and as everyone else said, they were stretching badly for the light, with the light lowered now it should be ok.

just curious, are u planning to flower out the plants with that light?

Those are small. More lights closer is the answer.

Thanks everyone for the quick replies. We did replant the plants last night and moved the lights down. They are about 2" from the plants now. I hope that doesn't shock them and kill them. Will this make the leaves bigger? They seem so puney.

JCashman - To be honest with you, I have no idea what lights we'll use to flower with. What is recommended? We are brand new at this and it's beginning to be a lot more work than I thought.

Thanks again!!!

Light light light!!!

if you wanna stay with your reg get some bulbs made for flowering, 2700k I believe. If you want to spend some money buy a HPS system. 150 seems popular for small grows buy for a couple bucks more you could get a 400 watt or a 600 watt.

Can you use the HPS for all of the light needs?

ChrisRudy said:

Can you use the HPS for all of the light needs?

Click to expand...

i strongly suggest you read a lil bit about lights, most of the info u need is on this site

but to summarize, since your just starting, i would go with CFLs, they're cheaper. but CFLs come in different light/color, you will want around 6500k for veg (honestly if the light u have is bright white, its probably near 6500k) but then for flowering you are going to want the CFLs marked as 2700k, the light they emit is more orange/red and is encouraged for flowering. you can get the bulbs at any hardware store (menards, home depot, etc)

Goodluck!