Hey Guys,
I have always wanted to grow my own plant instead of paying high dollars for good weed and I finally decided to take action and do it!
I'm starting with bag seed because I don't want to pay money for quality seeds and mess up the grow cycle. Also, I need to be somewhat stealth so I decided to use a sterilite storage compartment that was laying around the house. It should be a perfect size for one or two plants.
At this point I have germinated the seeds and they are now under cfl's on a 24/0 cycle in solo cups. Below are my two questions.
1) How much and how often should I water the solo cups during the seedling stage (Just planted them this morning)?
2) I'm using miracle grow potting soil... do I still need to add nutrients to the water? If so, what do you recommend?
I will be posting pics of my grow box to get any additional advice. Thanks for you help!
Peace-
I'm sure others will be jumping in this post to point some things out to you, but I'll go ahead and start. Hopefully this will give you the info you need to get you some beautiful girls.
First, congratulations on taking the first step into a really cool hobby with a very good reward for your efforts. After some practice it gets really easy and your smoke will be better than most weed you've bought.
Starting with bag seed may actually cause you more work. Because they're not feminized, you can count on growing some males (although you may get lucky). When you get to flowering and you see the sex of the plants you'll have to cut down your males and get them the Hell out of your box. You don't want the males polinating the females.
Also, you may end up with vastely different strains when using bag seed. If you have two strains that grow at different rates and sizes in the same box, you could end up with one plant right up against the light with the other so low it may not get the lumens. The easiest is to grow the same strains together (until you've got some practice or more room).
But, sometimes the budget and availability may not allow for purchasing of feminized seeds so here's what I would do in your case:
Grow them the best you can and get rid of the males when they appear. Watch the characteristics of the plants that you're growing. Once you've picked your favorite, take some cuttings from it so that you can clone from it. That way your next grow will be all female and all the same strain. If you can't time it where you can root your clones and get them into your box right as you're harvesting, then you can take your cuttings and put them in the refridgerator to put them in stasis. You can keep cuttings for up to 8 weeks by doing this.
The soil should be moist right under the surface in your cups. Make sure you've cut holes in the bottom for drainage. You don't want water gathered in your cups.
You DEFINITELY need to change your soil. Miracle Grow is not good for MJ. The Ph is around 5.0 and they run the ferts too hot. Go to Home Depot and get some Scott's or something like that with a Ph between 6.0 and 6.5. The bag should tell you how many weeks of fertilizer is mixed in the soil. Usually it's 3 weeks worth before you have to add more.
When you say that you are using a sterilite container, do you mean that it's full of soil and that's where you have your two seedlings planted? If so, you should probably make sure of the following:
- The container needs to have drainage holes in the bottom so that water doesn't collect
- Your soil should have sand, perlite, and/or vermiculite so that your roots can breathe
Something you may want to do is build an earthbox. It's basically a container within a container. The container sitting in the outer container will have holes drilled in the bottom so that excess water can drain but it also acts as a reservoir. You use a piece of PVC to allow you to add water to the reservoir from the top (the pipe passes through the soil in the main container through a hole that reservoir contaner.
Here's a site with some different designs. I use 5-gallon earthbuckets with aeration tubes.
http://www.seattleoil.com/Flyers/Earthbox.pdf
Good luck
PS: You should change your lights to 18/6 when they sprout. From what I understand, plants store energy when the lights are on and use it when the lights go off. When cloning I notice that my roots appear between the lights going off and when they come back on.
By the way, I'm not an expert, but I'm done lots of research and I'm pretty sure the info I gave you is fairly accurate.
its all in how they are applied to the grow and also what spectrum's your using for what stage of growth