Seeds

Looks like under the table and its hard to believe the 36W Levins can grow those plants, cost $12, and be so affordable. Nothing magic in having six plants. You choose the number you want to grow. Looks like the all-American growing plan to me. The only thing I can think of is ventilation, ideal location, and I assume RO water. Thanks for the picture.

No, I make a point of using plain tap water, with 350 ppm dissolved crap. I suspect the plants like the extra minerals.

I don't know about using better water for germination. I get a pretty poor germination rate lately (50% worst, 80% best). Pure water didn't seem to make a difference last time I tried it.

I haven't figured out why my seeds are such duds (over dried with gel packs?), but since I have 2000+ seeds now (stopped counting), who cares?

The 6 is the law here. Limit is 6 per household.

Ventilation: Yep, room gets very humid and I have to wonder if there's enough CO2 when the door is closed.

Smell? A little maybe. One UPS guy said he wondered about the smell when he delivered a package but it was too faint to be sure. That was with 6 plants, with mature buds.

He didn't mention it though, until I showed him the grow room.

HI law provides that a person with a "debilitating medical condition" is allowed an "adequate supply" - an amount of marijuana jointly possessed between the qualifying patient and the primary caregiver that is not more than is reasonably necessary to ensure the uninterrupted availability of marijuana for the purpose of alleviating the symptoms or effects of a qualifying patient's debilitating medical condition; provided that an "adequate supply" shall not exceed: seven marijuana plants, whether immature or mature, and four ounces of usable marijuana at any given time.

I think they transferred the program to the Dept of Health from the Narcotics Branch of the HPD.

A walk-in closet would not be a good place to grow. An empty bathroom maybe. Under a table, crack the window, Fall is coming, let the fresh air in. The work begins.

Daniel Lawton said:

Here's what growing with the 36W Levin led lights looks like (see pic). I guess my digital camera is kind of stupid when it comes to judging colored light.

Some points about growing with E26/E27 bulbs, not so much for you guys, but because in general, single plant growing encouragement is sparse on the net.

E26 and E27 bulbs (that's the thread type everyone here is familiar with) both fit in american sockets. All of the LED bulbs I bought will accept european or american voltages. Possibly that's why they take a couple of seconds to come on, they're judging the input voltage.

Most info about growing you'll find on the net is oriented towards growing a bunch of plants to maximize yield (drug dealers). So far, there doesn't seem to be a lot of hobby growing info, for people who just like that plant and aren't intending to sell anything. And so formulas for things like STS are way out of wack for a single plant grower. Even colloidal silver making is described in excessive quantities sure to end up wasting most of it.

LED grow lights are relatively new, so info on which ones work well hasn't been established yet. The 36W Levin is the best I've found which will grow a single dwarf plant to maturity. And only $12 on amazon. I suspect that'll fall to $8 soon.

36W Levins use nearly no electricity compared to other stuff. If you're growing your 6 in California, you'll hardly even notice the bump on the electric bill. 6*19W = 114W. It's like keeping an old bug light on all the time, on the front and back porch. Certainly no one's going to get suspicious of that electric bill, if you live in a state that worries about such things.

Get the Levin 36W, get the cheapest clip on holder you can get, remove the metal hood if you can (interferes with the heat dissipation fins), and just clip the light to a table. When the plant is a baby, you'll probably have to prop it up with a box, to get it closer to the light. The LEVIN reaches 60K lux at about 8 inches from the plant. For a baby, keep it under 30K lux. Note: The lux is not accurate since there's no green leds, and the lux meters are designed for sunlight. But it's not so wildly off you can't use a lux meter to figure out how bright it can be.

When it's bigger, you'll have to remove the box and lower it. If you burn a grown plant, only a few leaves will turn yellow and you'll figure it out pretty soon. I keep them as close as 8 inches when it's a mature plant. The rules you read on the net saying 18 inches are for drug dealer grow lights, not tiny Levins.

Get some mosquito dunks. If you have 6 plants, you're going to need it! Gnats are the main threat to growing under the kitchen table.

Click to expand...

I'm definitely going to get some of those lights. I bought a 40watt led panel in the beginning and thought I needed stronger brighter lights n went with cfl's. My brother lives in my garage and is supposed to be moving out, when he does, I'm taking this to another level, n those LEDs you have look like what I need.

Stick with something short for those, like Super Skunk, Amnesia Haze, AK47, or LowRyder. Otherwise they spread out too much and I fear you might need 2 of them (though I haven't proven it yet). At any rate, you'll get at least an ounce, more likely near to 2.

But if you have 2 of those lights, you can overlap them with 2 plants once they spread out. For babies, point straight down and you'll never get such a perfect compact plant. When they stretch, shine from the side towards another plant, with his shining towards the first, so spillover isn't wasted.

I just finished an outdoor grow too. I have plants at 3 homes, because you can only have 6 per house. And I'm breeding seeds, so 6 isn't enough (you often need to separate ones making pollen from the rest).

This home was an outdoor grow of White Skunk (White Widow + Super Skunk). Here's a poor quality pic. I've grown 8 of them so far, and the genetics don't vary a noticable amount. The worry about recessive genes popping out when you make a cross might be overblown for casual growers.

After this summer, outdoor growing never again for me. It's disgusting! The pot is full of bugs and brownish worm eaten patches. Giant caterpillars hide out. Little turds everywhere.

Washing in water got one of the bugs to bail out, but I had to pick the rest out by hand. I'm sure once it dries, there'll be some more trying to escape the scratchy dry pot.

Outdoor pot is only good for kief if you ask me, and even then you probably have to wash it to remove the poop that makes it through the screen.

I'm doing another 6 at the same site using neem oil spray next time, but I highly doubt that'll take care of the bugs.

In Taiwan, they grow tea so high on the mountains, it prevents many bugs from flying due to the air being thinner. It's interesting to see. here's a hotel that's right on the line. If you walk downhill on the grounds, you see tons of mosquitoes buzzing around. Go higher on the grounds, and the mosquitos can't fly. Since I was a guest, they gave me a cottage too high for the mosquitos.

So maybe growing marijuana originally in the Himalayans was because of bugs if you grow lower down?

Very handsome White Skunk neighbor. She's soaking up the sunlight. One seed floating tonight. My indoor enemy #1 is the spider mite. Don't know how this location will be yet. HI was pretty bad. I've got Azamax in case things go south and mites attack.

Here's why the LED light works so well on a one for one basis with short plants. Check out these 2, both under 12 inches tall, both Autoflower. And look at how a super skunk is forming, under the led light. They stay very low, store up energy, and when they spread out, I've heard it said they don't need as much light anyway. Plus the led light is 24 hours, compared to 12 hours of sun.

(Trying to upload 3 pics to show it, haven't done that before)

These are amazing pictures. The buds and the number of female seeds on a small plant. Are the planters about 3 gallons? With this low profile the plants can be grown in many indoor locations. It is perfect.

Actually the pot is only 1 gallon. I designed a hobby growers kit to sell at tattoo shows in California, so I can hang out with beautiful young women with pink and purple hair. (Only partially joking there). I also designed it to sell to the old women at Leisure World, just because it's amusing to see granny types with pot growing in their atrium.

Haven't sold any yet, there's issues with out giving free seeds. It's a grey area of the california law.

But I've concluded that the smallest for a dwarf would be a 2 gallon bag, filled with 1.5 gallons of soil. The soil in there is very rich, and as far as I can tell (from 30 grows so far), you really don't need to switch nutrients if you have high quality soil, and aren't trying to make the best buds in the world.

It's just Ednas, high N,K bat guano, worm castings, epsom salts, a little more perlite, sea weed (also high N&K), mosquito dunk powder, and some oscmocote.

When I first mixed it, I had my doubts about whether it mattered much. However, I've done some outdoor grows using other soil and nutrients (not nearly as rich), and that little 1 gallon bag grows better plants than outdoors in 5 gallons of soil.

Seed drying info for amateurs like me.

I had 3 batches of homemade seeds that I test sprouted this week. I stick 6 to 12 in wet jiffy cubes and wait to see who comes up.

By the way, in my experience, rapid rooter cubes do not have a better germination rate than jiffy cubes. I like them a lot, but you can buy a gigantic box of jiffy cubes for next to nothing, and easily keep them around for 15 years before using them (done it).

I have 3 homes at which I can put plants, so in California I can have 18. Any extras that pop up during germination are easy to find homes for here. Just go to the local nursery and find a young person.

One batch I sprouted was from the seeds the fell on the carpet, and became unidentifiable (there's 7 varieties dropped there). Those went into a jar with the lid open, and no other drying agent. Never went in the fridge. I considered them junk seeds, and gave them no special handling.

One batch of purebreds went into a jar with a stack of gel packs, which I changed each day for a week or two. I pampered the hell out of those seeds, but I didn't know any better about gel packs. After I thought they were "dry", they went into the fridge for a few months.

One other purebred batch dried in a jar with the lid off. After a week I added precisely the same weight in gel pack beads, as the seeds weighed, and put it in the fridge. I'd read up on gel packs at that point, and there's warnings out there about over drying.

First batch: 100% germination. Air drying with no other treatment seems to have positive results. And no seed hulls stuck on any sprouts.
Second batch: 50% germination. I think they were over dried by the gel packs. More than half that germinated needed help with the hulls.
Third batch: 80% germination rate for 6 seeds. Seed hulls were on the leaves on some, but easy to pull off.

So be careful about over drying with gel packs. Seems to make them too hard to rehydrate before fungus gets to them. If they do survive, one of the overdried ones took 14 days to sprout! (Average ought to be 3 days for good seeds).

Some other guy in here said, just use dried rice and keep them in the sock drawer in a jar, rather than the fridge. I think he's right.

Funny story: I hadn't planned to germinate the unknown seeds. Was just planning to give them away. But my Chinese Boss' wife is in the country now, and we were curious if she'd give up her Taiwanese prejudice against marijuana. It's a really strong prejudice there. Go to mental hospital, then to jail type of prejudice.

She germinated the unknown seeds, planted them, took pictures, and uploaded them to facebook. Her friends in asia will all be slightly shocked, but she'll get plenty of comments. She's posting updated pictures of what they look like, before she returns to Asia. Her explanation was, the Taiwanese are all farmers.

Plant washing info for newbees:

(Summary: washing removes caterpillars, and no noticeable trichomes are lost)

Outdoor grows are disgusting! I just harvested 5 White Skunk plants. Last time I harvested, I pulled the caterpillars out by hand. Found 8. After it dried, I discovered 2 more had hidden out.

This time I decided to wash the plants instead, because there were 5 at once, and hand picking takes too much time.

I filled a 5 gallon bucket with warm water. Not hot, just the warmth of a heated swimming pool. Comfortable. The fear is, cold water will stiffen up the trichomes and make some break off during washing.

As it turns out, larger (mostly green) caterpillars jump out of the marijuana after about 10 seconds of swishing gently underwater. They tend to immediately sink to the bottom, laying motionless.

I don't know what their survival strategy is for complete immersion in water, but it doesn't look like a successful one. Or maybe they're so stoned, sitting it out on the bottom of the bucket seems like a good idea.

Small caterpillars can hold on for a second round, falling out after another 15 seconds of swishing around. They tend to either float weakly, or sink a few inches. Eventually they fall to the bottom.

Third swishing of much longer duration: no caterpillars.

Water gets cloudy enough after 2 adult plants are washed in it, that you can't see the bottom to look for stoned caterpillars.

Testing whether you lose trichomes, I poured the dirty wash bucket water through a 25uM filter bag.

NO TRICHOMES!!! Those green bastards didn't take anything with them.

There was just a small amount of brownish residue, most of which I recognized from looking at the buds, to be partially eaten leaves and flowers, mixed with caterpillar poop. The caterpillars tend to focus on an area and eat it till it's a rotten brown color.

If there were trichomes in there, it wasn't enough to worry about, considering the amazing flood of kief you get when you process a couple of plants using the dry ice method. If I dried the brown residue, I suspect it would only add up to a pinch of matter.

Is a second washing necessary? Is it risky?

I became curious about what would come out with a second wash, and exactly how rough could you be without losing significant trichomes,

I have a fine 3" metal screen with a handle, used by Asians to scoop junk out of fry oil (if you don't have one, you'll love it for frying!).

It's such a fine screen, it will easily trap all the caterpillar poop. You can scoop it through the dirty wash water, to see the poop density.

1st wash: 100 poop per scoop. 2nd wash: 12 per scoop. Better wash 3 or more if you want the least poop.

Caterpillar removal: Submerging with no motion gets some to leave. Swishing gently gets more. Massaging the buds with fingers so as to remove bubbles and expose all areas to water gets the most.

Caterpillars removed: 20 first wash, but unfortunately, 4 on second wash! There was a rest of 15-30 minutes between, maybe some deeply buried ones started to move when air got back to them?

How about the kief? Is there no way to lose any?

Second wash, I swished the buds ROUGHLY. I did that after removing caterpillars the second time, to make sure that wasn't an important factor in caterpillar removal. This was only a test to see how much kief was lost. Water was slightly warm this time as before.

I strained the water through 25uM bag to get whatever kief might be there. Then I dried it at 150F.

Oops. It smelled like kief being heated for a melt. Visually, it's obviously mostly poop, but there's trichomes in there for sure.

To find out how much was trichomes, I added 100% alcohol. The alcohol turned a light yellow, like pure hash oil. But most of the material was unchanged, and obviously shaped and colored like caterpillar poop. I strained off the alcohol and dried the remainder so I could weigh it.

Total weight of kief+poop = 0.28 grams, weight after alcohol wash = 0.17 grams, trichome loss = 0.11 grams. Estimated trichomes on those 5 plants is 5*38g*14%=26.6 grams.

Trichome losses from rough washing is 0.4%. 1 trichome lost per 241.

Not enough to put up with poop.

RIPE said:

So the banks here are listed on this site? Is it too late for an outdoor plant? Indoors is a lot of work and this is a very hot summer here. Would prefer to grow outside. But need the seeds.

Click to expand...

I got Some going right now in Maine , I personally know some guys up here that run a seedbank and they're killing shit !!! Got that Grape Bubblegum & grape n cotton candy flavored shit from them growing right now

Whoa#Bubb said:

I got Some going right now in Maine ,

Click to expand...

Robert Bergman (ilovegrowingmarijuana) sent a newsletter a week or two ago saying it was the last chance to plant outdoors for the year.

A week or so later he sent a cool newsletter telling how to pierce the main stem of a plant, leave something in the hole, like a chopstick, tape it up a little above and below, causing the plant to produce more trichomes. It's worth getting his newsletter.

Tried to write this but site had difficulties. Third seed sprouted. Planted in vermiculite and garden soil. First sprout can't get rid of the shell. Second seed is standing tall. Third seed is still buried. Waiting for the Afghan to sprout. Bought some Ocean Forest locally way cheaper than Amazon.com. Debating whether to use one or two gallon containers. Debating whether to add guano, kelp, castings, dunks, etc. to Ocean Forest. Not sure if Ocean Forest will work for sprouting seedlings because of the hot nutrients. Bought two more Levin 36W LED lights and two clamps. Total of 3 lamps for three plants so far. Expect more to sprout but may only hit 40-50%. Ready for any pest with Azamax. Its pretty slow right now.

You need that enriched soil. I've tried it several ways. Liquid nutrients swapped at the right moment, high quality potting soil with only fertilizer sticks or osmocote.

The results weren'tt very good.

Here's what I got from reading sites like this, and comparing what people were using. Notice that the bat guano isn't any old bat guano, you need one with high readings other than the nitrogen. It's for the flowering stage. Don't overlook the odd stuff like seaweed. If you look up the nutrient details, you'll see it's also necessary to help the flowering stage.

12 gallons of rich soil for planting just 1 gallon each autoflower dward:

1.5cuft bag edna's (or foxfarms) = $10.82
1/2cuft or 14.6quarts or 15 pounds Worm Castings = $15
.034cuft or 4c sunleaves jamaican Bat Guano 1:10:0.2 = $7.92. Also can high P indonesian.
.067 cuft (7 cups) perlite = $0.80
4 tsp epsom salts = $0.18
Osmocote (in top 1-3 inches): 1 Tbsp per gallon. I used 3 month version
Kelp Meal (Ascophyllum Nodosum) meal = 1 Tbsp per gallon.
Total $37.41

Procedure: mix all soil ingredients together, except kelp and osmocote. Put osmocote and kelp into the last 2 inches of soil, below the 1 inch mark. The top 1 inch is soil mix, so the oscmocote and kelp are below that. Buying the kept prevents mold fuzz buildup which seems to attract the gnats more. Burying the oscmocote just looks better, there's no good reason I can give.

Sprinkle mosquito dunk on top if you have gnat issues in your area.

Hmm... Spell checker messed up.

I meant, 1 gallon for autoflower dwarfs. Not for something like blueberry.

And, burying the kelp prevents mold fuzz buildup. Aside from causing worry, the gnats seem to go nuts when they see an entire carpet of mold, which is what the kelp will do the first few days.

This soil made me very dense plants and very solid buds. And the plants were deep green the whole time, not some yellowish green. Blast away with the LED lights, never turn them off unless you have a variety with autoflowering issues, like blueberry.

I didn't find blueberry to be as good as it sounded. So far, Amnesia Haze is my favorite, the buds are very nice.

Got everything below for about $75 and free shipping. I decided to go with the two gallon pots for the autoflower Super Skunk and will probably use a 5 gallon pot for the fem Afghan.

15 pounds Worm Castings
3 lb Sunleaves Jamaican Bat Guano
1 lb Kelp Meal (Ascophyllum Nodosum)
Osmocote Plus Outdoor and Indoor Smart-Release Plant Food 2lb Plant Fertilizer (3 mo)
1 lb Epsom Salts
5 Vivosun Fabric Pots 2 Gal

The pots and Osmocote arrived today with all items in transit except the kelp meal. Both were sent by 2-day Amazon service even though the Sellers were ebay. The pots are smaller than I thought but just right for an indoor grow with autoflowers. I'll use a bigger pot for the Seedman seed. Can't wait to mix the soil and let it ferment while the seedlings are growing. This looks to be easier than the tent I used for my first grow with 10 gallon pots and White Russians and Majui Wowi. Had a helluva fight with spider mites during that grow. Have Azamax on hand and ready for the first sign of pests.