Penor's First Grow

Hey everyone!

A couple of months ago, a lifelong friend and I decided to take a favorite passtime of ours (smoking fatty), and try to make it cost as little as possible. We are both medical cannabis patients in our state. I want to share info and pictures of my grow in hopes of getting better results, learning, and perhaps help others learn as well.

I became unemployed around the first of the year, and found myself in a unique situation in life that I knew would not present itself again. I was the recent recipient of a large check from a "gentleman" who was paying me to not take him to court for punching my face in. I knew upon becoming unemployed that I was going to become a full time student again, and decided to put my new funds to good use.

Starting back in October, my friend threw a couple seeds in a bucket in his closet. This wasn't the first time he or I had thrown some seeds in dirt. We had never finished a plant though, most of them didn't even make it past week 2.

When I became unemployed on the 2nd of January this year, I immediately upon arriving home started all the seeds I had on hand, and began procuring more from friends.

By the 4th or 5th, I had some odd 32 seeds in little soil starters. I'll briefly explain my setup and the process of the grow so far. I plan to create a new journal for a 2nd setup that I am starting in the next couple days, which I will talk about briefly here.

Here's a pic of where things are now.

First let me say this is my first grow. I went into this knowing nothing more than gardening basics and have spent as much time as possible reading, researching, and fixing what is wrong all while preparing for the REAL first grow with a solid setup from day one.

Here I'll outline my setup and provide some sources to the info I used if possible.

The basics first: This was an indoor grow in soil that started with CFL / LED lighting and grew to 1200w of HPS over time.

Current setup:

Mother / Veg / Clone area: 2x 105w 5000k "400w comparable" CFLs - http://www.e3living.com/105-watt-high-wattage-cfl-400-watt-replacement

One growUFO - http://shop.sunshine-systems.com/product.sc?productId=8

Flower room: 2x 600w HPS. Lumatek electronic ballasts, Xtrasun vented hoods, hortilux bulbs.

I have a closet that I am currently using that is about 28 inches deep and 56 inchees long, and is too tall to mention. The doors are big awkward rolling / sliding mirrors which do not seal the closet from light very well.

I have the bottom 5ish feet as the flower area and the upper remaining space as my 24 hour light area. They are separated by a half inch piece of plywood that creates a second story in my closet. Right now I am using dark sheets staple gunned to the walls, ceiling, and shelf to stop light from getting into the flower area during the dark period.

The floor of the closet is unfinished cedar which is very easy to replace if it gets damaged during the grow. I have covered it with a couple super thick black yard waste bags with water bottles in the bags around the edges to create an elevated border around the whole grow area to prevent water from running off the bag and onto the cedar. The walls were already painted a nice reflective white, and the closet also had multiple closet rod holders at a few different levels which have worked out great for hanging lights and such.

Things I like...

I am very happy with all my HPS lighting equipment. The light that the two 600w lights puts out is like 5PM on an August afternoon on the west coast. I can definitely see why HPS is good for flowering - plants think it's getting on towards fall & it's time to make some big ol' donkeydicks!


The two 105w "400w comparable" CFLs are really nice. I would totally suggest these to anyone who is just starting out who wants to get some plants vegging while looking at real lighting. I will continue to use these to veg my mother plants. I am actually hanging one of these down into the canopy of my four larger plants to light them under the big ol' leaves.

I do not like the soil that I used. In my ignorance, I used a "premix" fertilizer like the video I linked suggested. The plants did great for the first month, and then when I went to the local hydro shop for the first time the guy there showed me the error in my ways. I will now be growing in soilless mediums and feeding as I go.

Things that I don't like, that suck, and that I won't use again and wouldn't recommend...

The growUFO is an expensive gimmick, but my choices for lighting were very limited when I started. I did not want to use anything that created more heat than a CFL for various reasons, and I'm a sucker for nifty looking new technology. The color of the light it puts out is quite interesting - very pink / purple. My plants spent their first 3+ weeks once they had sprouted under the UFO, and they did great. As for continuing past a couple weeks though, I wouldn't recommend it. I have some cool project ideas for the UFO, but for now it's just lighting my one mother plant in my veg area.

Pics

Here's some pics of my setup. You can see how I have my lights set up in one pic. They are hung from the bottom of my shelf with U brackets that have chain hung over them. They connect to the lights with a "beaner" (I don't know how to spell the whole word). I have a closet rod hung up top with a vertical stand fan tied along it. This blows the hot air off of the lights and out of the closet.

There's also a pic of my electric cord mess. I desperately need to fix my wiring, and probably even run another circuit to my room.

Last pic is my momma plant. I was given some skunk / haze clones part way through my grow, and I took one to mother from. I've taken four cuttings which are getting started in my new grow setup. The momma is under the UFO, so you can see the weird pink/purp light in the pic. I took the mom out of the UFO light for a couple days to set it under the HPS when they were on, but the mother started to show pre-flowers after just TWO days of 12 hours HPS and 12 hours LED...

I started with 32 seeds. This narrowed itself down to 12 that I considered worth putting into pots.

The seeds took 4-5 days to poke out of the soil. Once they were out, they vegged for about a month.

After three weeks of vegging, they were all around 8 inches tall. Obviously there were still no signs of sexing. I decided to FIM my plants after doing a lot of reading into different height control / cola multiplying methods. I apparently need to practice this FIM method as... I missed. Yes, I managed to miss on a method named after missing. Of the four good females I still am growing, two came out correctly FIMed and two are just big ol' lanky fuckers with a single trunk.

Another week of vegging showed new growth where the plants had been FIMed. There was no way to tell if I did the procedure correctly, but there was good new growth on all my plants.

The plants were transferred into their final large pots, and had the lights turned off that night for the first time.

During all of my vegetative growth, only a couple leaves on a couple of my dozen vegging plants showed any signs of plant abuse or disease. My four large plants had some shade leaves that started to get "leathery" for a while, but seemed to recover. I think the transfer from 24 hour light AND repotting them shocked them and stopped growth for a while. They did not show much growth at all for the first week of 12/12.

I did not prune any veg growth during the veg period. I still have not pruned any healthy looking vegetative growth off these plants other than two bits from the first known female to make clones from. After reading endless arguments about pruning vs not pruning, I decided to not prune for many reasons. First of all, I am lazy fucker and less work is good with me. I also don't think you should cut any part off a plant unless it is unhealthy as it will shock the plant. I also like the arguments for letting the leaves die on the plant so the plant can use the sugars from the leaf as it dies.

I put my plants on a 12/12 light schedule around the 4th of the month. This was about a month after the seeds first showed through the soil.

Right before changing the light schedule, I replanted the plants into their final containers. I had also FIMed the plants right around the same time. This shocked my plants and all growth seemed to come to a standstill for a week after changing to 12/12 light. Perhaps this is normal (this is my first grow, I have no way of knowing), but I attribute it to the shock of light change, FIMing, and repotting all at once.

Growth resumed about a week after 12/12 started. It was quickly obvious which plants had been FIMed correctly and which were going to have to be tied down.

VERY quickly after growth resumed, I started to see pre-flowers on a couple plants. The whole grow, I had two plants that were taller than all the others. No surprise that these two plants showed pre-flowers first. As this is my first grow, I was very excited to see any sort of change after moving to 12/12. I had a big hunch that these two large plants were males or hermies from my readings. They grew much faster than all the others, and the internodes were much farther apart than the rest.

I didn't want to jump to any conclusions and screw up a couple of plants that could be my first females, so I left them in the closet for a few days. During these days, FINALLY one of the plants began to show female flowers.

I woke up one morning and looked in and saw one plant with a pair of female flowers that were textbook perfect. Once I had seen a REAL female flower in my closet, I knew the two big plants were without a doubt not the same thing. Whether they were male or hermies, I don't know or care. I pulled them out, chopped them down, and hung them up to dry.

I had 10 plants in my closet when I started flowering. Of those 10, 2 quickly revealed themselves to be males. I gave one of my babies to my friend who was having bad luck with his plants at the time, so that left me with 7. During the second week of flowering, another three plants turned out as males.

So... 32 seeds. They were all seeds from homies. Some were bag seeds, some were from some guy who "said they were really good seeds dude man bro". 14 worthy of planting in pots and giving a chance. 10 good enough to put into big pots & put under 12/12. A bunch of male / hermie plants and a donation to a friend later, and I am left with 4 females. 4 stinkin' plants from 32 seeds.

Now that I have hopefully explained my setup, I'll just be posting updates with pics as things change.

Currently the plants have been budding for 24ish days. The three clones look like hell - the large leaves are dying and turning yellow with spots... and then falling off.

The big plants look pretty good - of the two that FIMed correctly, one of them is showing over 10 recognizable bud heads. With some tying down, I was able to get the heads on the faster growing FIMed plant to become an even canopy in hopes of getting lots of light to all the tops. The slower growing one has needed no tying. It looks like a dang shrubbery.

The two plants that I didn't manage to FIM right are cool as well. The top of one of them is making a break for the border and will probably have to be tied down unless it slows down in the next couple days.

I hope someone can help me with my clones - I'll post pics below of the leaves. They start out by getting little brownish spots all over the leaf. Then, the leaf starts to turn yellow and the spots expand. Within a few days, the leaf is completely dried up and crunchy. This was just on the shade / veg growth leaves at first, but now it's starting to move onto the bud leaves which MAKE ME SAD

Here's some pics of my big sexy girls and of the punkass little clones that are angering me.

Here is some pics of one of the clones that is looking terrible.

The leaves start with brown spots that expand as the leaf dries and turns brownish yellow and then gets crunchy. This was at first just with the veg leaves, but is now starting to effect the bud growth leaves

Please, any suggestions would be great!

Also included is a pic of my next setup in the makings...

Nice looking plants. Subscribed.

The problem with the clone looks to be pH related. Looks like a lot of deficiencies at once and that tells me that some lockout may have occurred.

I totally agree about the pH problem. When I picked up the stuff for my next grow, I also bought a pH / EC / PPM meter. I hadn't checked the water at my house AT ALL up to that point for pH.

Turns out my houses water sits ~8.

Unless someone has better advice, I think I'm going to take a ton of water at about pH of 5.8-6ish and leech the little plants again.

I was also thinking of checking the runoff pH, but since I already know my tap waters pH is so high I feel I might as well just leech away.

After doing a lot of research about what could be causing my leaf issues on my little clones, I started to think there was a pH problem. Another dude also suggested this in my thread in the "plant problems" section. I got this idea because there was no single "deficiency" that my plants seemed the match the description and pics of.

So... I took my four small pots (three budding foot tall mini-plants and the other clone I got with them that is a mother) into the bathroom and put them in the tub. I took a big tupperware jug and filled it up and adjusted the water to around 5.8-6ish and using a long piece of tubing made a siphon.

I spent the next few hours in the bathroom refilling, re pHing, and watering the shit out of these four little plants. I am too lazy to go to the grocery store for just distilled water, and I want to con a friend into helping me carry the 15-20ish gallons I will need up the stairs to my grow area.

Of the three clones, one looked really bad, one looked kind of sickly, and the third looked almost 100% healthy. I trimmed all the super crappy leaves off the really bad plant as they were far past any sort of recoverable state - they were as crispy as dorritos.

My four big plants are in the same soil mixture as the little clones, yet they haven't had any sort of pH related nute lockout that I can see yet. To try and prevent, this, I will be pHing my water before each watering / feeding with the big girls from here on out in hopes of preventing any trouble.

After this experience with pH and water, I am rethinking my DWC setup for my next grow. I will probably end up using filtered or distilled water, which isn't exactly what I had in mind. I don't want to have to go to the grocery store every week or so when I need to change my tank.

I had taken some cutting from the mother plant I have about 8 days ago when I picked up some rockwool cubes at the hydro shop. I used the root gel they sold me and the rockwool cubes, but did not pH the water as I did not have my meter yet. The guys at the store told me to use distilled water and to also soak the cubes in pH 5.0ish water like the packaging says. I did neither of these because I didn't have what I needed and I wanted to see how things came out with the worst possible conditions.

I had these six "clones" in rockwool cubes in my clone box (cheap plastic enclosure that holds moisture in) for about a week, and then the past couple days they have been sitting in hydroton in my DWC bucket with a super light nute mix in water that is pHed correctly.

I tore one of the cubes open today after reading some info about how important it is to have the rockwool set up correctly to start with. I found NO roots - not even a single sign of rooting, just a gross wet hunk of rockwool with a perfectly healthy looking cutting sticking in it.

My mother was looking a little underwatered, so I decided to not take more cuttings today. I have 6 rockwool cubes sitting in pH 5.0 water over night, and tomorrow I will be taking some cuttings.

Hopefully tomorrow I will also be procuring some good quality clones. I have been growing "unknown" seeds and 4 clones of skunk / haze mix. I want to be using 3-4 DWC tubs and have a constant rotation of plants being harvested. I want to perfect a method of growing donkeydicks - when I see pictures of gardens that are rows of 2-3 foot tall donkeyschlong colas I get giddy. I've been looking for different strains that will work well for donkeydicking.

So far, I have come up with AK-47 and northern lights as a couple strains that might work well. Any suggestions?

As I mentioned earlier, I had a couple of my four ladies end up FIMed incorrectly. This resulted in normal single stalk plants which were shooting up way faster than the bushy FIMed "spiderplants".

I had been tying down one of these, and the other I just started tying down last night.

I thought I'd post some pics of the tie down process as it's a drastic change in the plants growth in just a matter of 24 hours or less.

*NOTE* This plant is extremely stretched out. The spacing between the internodes is pretty crappy. I attribute this to a few things - this being my first grow is one, but mostly I attribute it to the use of CFL / LED lighting for the first month and a half of the grow. Where LED / CFL may work for veg, I will never again attempt to flower under them as I could literally watch my plants shoot up daily in height while showing no increased bud size.