Manic's First with CFL's

MaryJManic

New Member
Hello everyone, this is my first real grow that I've started here so let's see how it goes.

I have 10 little plants that I've started from seed, in the next couple weeks some are going and some are staying, but in the end there will not be this many plants budding here.

Of These 10 plants i presume 7 of them to be Easy Sativa. I ordered a pack of feminized seeds that came with 5 free Hash Spice so I'm pretty sure the three short ones are the Hash Spice.
I germinated the seeds in cheese cloth right before putting them in rock wool cubes to go under the Lights.
After the little ladies came out of the rock wool i put them in a peat moss cup with fox farm soil. And when they get a little bigger I'm going to put them in coffee containers.

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Speaking of lights I have a setup with 4 CFL's 26 watts a piece at 1750 lumen. To the best of my knowledge they are warm spectrum lights. in the next couple of days I'm going to be adding 2 more 26 watt CFL's.

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The whole cabinet I'm using is 5 feet tall, three feet wide, and 18 inches deep. Its not the biggest space but I'm not planning on having more than three or four plants in here at a time.

I'm going to be keeping up with this until the end and if anyone has any advise for me along the way it would be much appreciated.

:peacetwo::roorrip:
 
Forgive me but I am a little confused as to why you would plan on throwing out perfectly good female plants. If you only have room for 3 and all female seeds you should only grow what you have room for. Again pardon me if I misunderstood.

Are you going to add 4 more of those bulb splitters to the existing 2 splitters? I did that and it worked great by spreading the 4 lights on each plug out in a circular pattern.

Your plants are looking very healthy :)
 
Fear not, 4twenty4all. Those plants will just be going to new homes. I'm just baby sitting while someone is on a cruise, only the Hash Spice are staying for the long hall.

What i was actually planning to do for the lights was replace the 2 way splitters with 4 way splitters, 2 of them to be exact. there will eventually be 8 26 watt bulbs for a total of 208 watts with just under 100 watts per square foot, more like 80.

Don't get me wrong i am eventually getting an hps bulb. It's only a matter of time.
 
I've done a few things in the past couple days to the cabinet. I put in 4 more of the same lights, 26 watt cfl's with 1750 lumens a piece, I have over 200 watts total now. My only concern is that all the lights are touching. Does anyone know if this is a bad thing?

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I've also added yet a 9th light, as you can see in the picture above, so i guess i'm up to about 230-240 watts.

With the hood down it looks something like this.
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I've organized the plants now that i can finaly tell them appart. The left most 4 are Hash Spice, an indica strain that we got for free for ordering Easy Sativa. Easy Sativa makes up the remaining 6. The Hash Spice are staying, and the Easy Sativa are leaving.
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Tomorrow should be fun, I'm going to start mixing the nutes at half strength to start the Hash Spice off nicely. I'll have more details about that tomorrow when i sit down to do everything. Oh, I'll have more pictures as well ;).

-Manic
:peacetwo::roorrip:
 
hey looking good so far, cool set up. What type of cfl's you got there? looks like softwhite by the orange tint being given off. your gunna want daytime cfls for the veg stage and softwhite for the flower. and if you cant get your hands on some mylar then try putting down some white poster board paper to boost the reflection.

Thanks, growguroo. I'm not sure what type of lights they are, there is nothing on the box that says anything about the spectrum of bulb it is. You may be right about the blue spectrum. I just don't know.
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and I do have some really reflective stuff that looks like mylar. Thats what i used on the light hood. Its just too bad that i don't have enough to cover the box. This is what i did insted:
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Just stapled some white paper on there. I don't have much of a budget and it works great.

I woke up this morning to water my friends and say hi and i was suprised to find this little guy making his way up to eat the light bulb. In fact, all of my plants were doing this. Is this extreme light stretch bad? I raised the lights a little bit to see what would happen.
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Today was the nute mix day. Made a half strength solution for the veg. stage. I used the BC Grow and BC Boost with another one of the recomended nutes in there. Tommorrow i'm going to start the 4 Hash Spice on this veg. formula for this week. After the other 6 leave and i get these into bigger buckets I'm going to boost to full strength untill budding.
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At the moment i have the lights on 24/7. I was wondering if i should change it to an 18/6 cycle. Which would be the fastest?

-Manic
:peacetwo::roorrip:
 
At the moment i have the lights on 24/7. I was wondering if i should change it to an 18/6 cycle. Which would be the fastest?
Always 18/6 after a few days above ground.
Bog always said 24/7 through veg. :goof: He said more I don't agree with.
Ask a farmer when his crop grows the most!
:ciao:
 
yeah the white paper will help. how far do you keep the cfls away from the plants? my clf lights are within 2-3 inches, i would not recommend keeping them any further away. just check them every day to make sure they are not touching.

I have my lights a little farther away than 3 inches. More like 7 or 8 inches. The reason for this is that i figured out why all my plants were pointing up. With the lights 3 inches from the plants it gets to about 95 degrees in the box. There is no way this is good for plants. I backed off on the lights until tomorrow when i can get a fan in there. I'm planning on having a rather large fan at the exit hole, and maybe an oscilating fan down on the bottom.

Always 18/6 after a few days above ground.
Bog always said 24/7 through veg. :goof: He said more I don't agree with.
Ask a farmer when his crop grows the most!
:ciao:

That's what i thought. My buddy that is helping me insists that constant light will be better than 18/6. Those little planties need time to rest, too! lol.

It looks like i have some more work to do tomorrow. Fans, nutes, and timers oh my!

Thanks for the help guys i appretiate it.

-Manic
:peacetwo::roorrip:
 
I backed off on the lights until tomorrow when i can get a fan in there. I'm planning on having a rather large fan at the exit hole, and maybe an oscilating fan down on the bottom.
Sounds good. yeah you are going to need at least an outtake fan to suck out the hot air. Install that towards the top of the cabinet and if you could install an intake fan towards the bottom of the cab along with that oscilating fan inside. This will help move the air and keep the cabinet as cool as it is outside of the box.
I didn't have in and outtake fans set up and my plants suffered heat stress for a few weeks and barley grew.
 
I didn't have in and outtake fans set up and my plants suffered heat stress for a few weeks and barley grew.

My plants got a little heat stressed a couple days ago, but when i leave the intake and exhaust holes open at the top and bottom of the cabinet and my cieling fan actually blows enough air to move the plants at the bottom of the cabinet. The lights are still pretty far away until i can get a couple more fans going.
 
I took a few more pictures today. The damage plants needed to be trimmed and we have a C02 system now.

Below is the plant you saw earlier that was pointed streight up. I clipped the damaged parts of the smaller leaves off. It looks a lot better than a couple days ago.
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I had this one really droopy plant. Some leaves were just about touching the soil, so i clipped the ends of those leaves yesterday. It looks a lot better today for it.
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My buddy made a very ghetto C02 system that runs on 20 oz paintball tanks. It does the job.
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10 more days left for the sativa under these lights.
 
Hellow again. I've had a couple more interesting things happen in the last few days. I got a fan, some leaves are turning yellow, and my plants are getting a little dose of coffee.

I don't exactly have a picture of this fan, but its baby blue and blowing a good supply of air into my box. In a bit i'm going to put an even bigger fan at the exhaust but for now this will do.

I'll show you the good news first. This plant looks awesome. I really hope it turns out to be female.
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There are a few problems though. I have a few plants in my cabinet that I suspect of nitrogen hunger. I'm not exactly sure what else could be wrong, because after i put that fun into the cabinet the heat dropped to about 80.
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Sorry for the blurry picture.

Anyway, i thought about looking this up online a bit, and i saw a lot of stuff that said used coffee grounds worked well for adding nitrogen to a plant so i made a pot of folgers french blend (I woner if they have a flavor preference) and spread some of the used beans around.
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hopefully this wont make the soil too acidic, but I might just have to get some pH up if it does. I dont' know of anything else that will help boost nitrogen levels.

Also, i took a better look at the nutes i baught, i don't even know why i baught them now, they don't have the correct amount of any npk value for any stage of growth. It doesn't look like i'm getting any of the B.C. nutes again.

-Manic
:peacetwo::roorrip:
 
Grim days have arived with the onset of an unidentified problem uccuring in the plants. For the past couple days the leaves have been getting progressivly yellow and a few of the older leaves have fallen off.
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Some are curling up. Some are falling off. All of it is bad.

On a better note
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Some of the plants are actually doing ok. One or two of them at most.
 
How did this grow turn out?

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