Custom closet/cabinet grow from seed

[budhisattva]

Hi Everybody,

Long time learner who finely grew some cojones and am going to start a journal. I haven't grown for over 15 years and at that time I was quite naive and not successful. This year, armed with all the data from this site, I'm trying again.

Setup:

Inside of what is essentially a very large garden shed attached to our house, I created a small stealth closet which is approximately 4' x 2.5' x 8'. The room itself is covered with pegboard as is the rest of the room, which makes it appear nicely like nothing is there...move the towel out of the way and there is a deadbolt installed with a key that I keep with me at all times.

I have not been able to find any local source for an HPS light and have not worked up the courage yet to order one online yet. I am trying to not break the golden rule of "loose lips sink ships" and so I don't really want to have something delivered to a friend just yet. Therefore, I am using CFLs for this first grow.

I have 16 CFLs most of which are 27watts and a couple are different. I can't, at this time, recall the details of those bulbs but I can figure that out later if there is curiosity. I put a Y receptacle inside of each standard clipon reflector and built a small light rack out of 2x4's and hung this via chains from the ceiling so it can be lowered and raised as necessary (thought it turns out to be heavier and more of a pain than I anticipated so in the future I'll be redesigning the lifting/lowering system.

On the ceiling of the closet I installed a bathroom exhaust fan that moves approximately 120 cfm. The room is about 96 cubic feet. There is a 4" duct attached to the lower portion of the wall which is used for pulling in fresh air.

On the floor I have created a small table from the legs and one shelf from a 5 shelf plastic shelving system. This gives me a little bit of room to store my paraphernalia locked up tight.

Current Status:

I started this grow from bagseed just under a month ago in Jiffy pellets and amazingly all germinated just fine. Unfortunately I did not know that cannabis has difficulty punching through the wrap at the time, though this doesn't seem to have really caused any issues here. I have 5 plants currently growing 18/6. The were originally in small pots about 6 inches tall and 5 inches in diameter. Today I transplanted them into much larger black pots (10" diameter, 12" tall approximately).

The plants have had maintained a healthly looking (to me) color, but they had been growing relatively slow (at least in my comparison to posts by masters such as *****), which I believe was the result of two mistakes. One, I was underwatering. I know, I know, nobody underwaters. Everyone on here had me scared to death with the overwatering, so I was basically giving them water in their dish ever 2-3 days. I would basically fill up the dish twice as long as the soil would soak the water up quickly. I also had, due to initial mid 90s heat, had the lights approximately 18" above the plants. The seemed to be healthy but not growing all that fast (though it was steady). Eventually I lowered the lights to approximately 8" from the plant tops and I watered them enough (from the top) to where a little bit of water was coming out of the bottom. I did this once every 4 days for the past couple of weeks. I had also trimmed off some of the lower fan leaves and growth...and I probably did that before I should have. I have since stopped doing any pruning for the moment. They began to grow much faster after this.

However, I then became worried that they were getting root bound but I was a little scared to transplant them. Today I did the transplanting, and while they may not have been completely root bound, they were quite a lot of roots around the edges and bottom of the pot. I believe I may have damaged some of the roots on one of the plants trying to get them out (and not having much experience), but I learned quickly and the rest went pretty smoothly. Today was the day they would have been watered, so the soil was pretty dry and came out easily. My initial soil mixture was primarily an organic potting mix that I purchased and seemed to do fine. During the transplant I mixed new soil which is 1/3 compost, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/6 pete, and 1/6 potting soil (I was really going for 1/3 pete as is used with Square Foot Gardening, but didn't quite have enough so I improvised). The soil drains really well and seems quite nice.

I have yet to use any ferts, though I did pick up some fish ferts today (neptune harvest, 2-4-1), and will start using that in a week or so I guess (unless someone tells me better).

Anyway, enough of the jibber jabber, lets submit this, and then I'll read the post about uploading photos and upload photos of the room and the plants as they stand now. I appreciate any and all comments, suggestions, criticisms, etc :)

Budhisattva

[Medical Marijuana]

I have nothing but compliments for your prep and thoroughness. I will be following this journal, and am keen to see pics.

[budhisattva]

Thanks *****...wouldn't have made it this far if I didn't spend hours reading this forum :)

I just posted some pictures, which seem to have made it into my gallery fine. However, they don't appear for me in my last post...did I do something wrong?

[Medical Marijuana]

This will help you with pics. If you have any more troubles, just pm one of the mods to help you. Photo Gallery Guide - How to Resize, Upload & Post Photos

[budhisattva]

Here is a link to my Grow Journal Photo Album which contains today's pics.

[Harry Red]

I'm liking the detail in the journal so far budhisattva.

Your handle reminds me of the Steely Dan tune.

To insert an image using BBcodes (in here), you wrap the URL with img tags.

Here's an example.

URL to one of your gallery pix is below.

http://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/1149/IMG_1035.JPG

http://www.420magazine.com/gallery/d...9/IMG_1035.JPG

Just wrap the URL between img tags like this..

[img]hxxp://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/1149/IMG_1035.JPG[/img]

(ignore the hxxp and use http instead - Had to do that to demonstrate)

Which will embed the full size image into your post, like this...



Hope that helps!! (maybe a moderator will see this and fix your post)

Harry

[budhisattva]

Thanks Harry. The name is indeed a play on the Steely Dan tune :) Thanks also for the posting suggestion. That is in fact what I had done, but the img tags got stripped out of my post for some reason. I've msg'd a moderator and hopefully they will help or I'll get it working before too long.

For today's update, I did a good watering with some very light nutes. The plant that was droopy there was starting to perk up last time I checked.

Budhisattva

[budhisattva]

Ok I think I've figured out what I was doing wrong (I was linking to the images 'link location' instead of 'image location')...lets see!

The Room:












Yesterdays Group Pictures:

[CharlieMopps]

Looks great. Keep up the good work.

[Harry Red]

Looking good. Very stealthy!!

+rep for luck!!

Harry

[budhisattva]

Harry, Charlie, Thanks!

Today's updates...Things are looking good. They seem to be growing well now. I think they have grown 1-2 inches in the past few days. They all have 6 or more internodes and I expect them to reach around 10" in the next week. I will likely start 12/12 then. It seems that most people just go to 12/12 immediately from what I can tell, though I've read somewhere that an abrupt change like this can freak them out and maybe cause them to go all Hermy on me? Is this true? Should I move from 18/6 to 12/12 one hour per day over the next week?

Is there anything else I should be sure to do before hand like pruning or other such good practices?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Here are the pictures from my update for today:

[Medical Marijuana]

Don't worry about pruning just yet. Grow them out a bit.

[Ganjarden]

Nice plants!! I love the stealth door.

You might want to move the lights a little closer. Light fades the sqaure of the distance I believe. So a foot away they're getting 4x as less light then being directly under it.
With cfls you can get pretty close. I have a 100watt cfl grow light that I put right on top of my plants to keep them from reaching for the light. Keeps em short and stacked.

I've always have gone straight from 18/6 to 12/12 without any problems. Well my first grow hermied but that was from my power strip light. didn't even think of that little light D'oh.

[budhisattva]

Here are my latest updates. I did a good watering a couple days ago with 1/2 strength nutes (fish ferts). Since being in the new containers, getting better water, etc, they have been growing quickly. One was all up in the light over night. The lights are generally about 3-4" away from the plants on average. The tallest plan is a little over 10" now, the shortest is around 7" though much bushier.

I saw initial signs and had preferable conditions for spider mites. I haven't seen any signs that there is a significant infestation (though I guess you could argue that any would be signficant since they can quickly take over. I have lowered the temperature, increased the humitidity. And for several days did foliar misting (plain water only) to keep the plants themselves damp. I have not seen any signs of any spiders and have been regularly sampling with a microscope to see if that changes. I have some anti-mite stuff on hand in case I need to use it, though I would of course prefer to avoid that.

Finally here are a few pictures. I suck at photography and the light is not realistic in these photos making them look much yellower and pale then they are. The are a fairly dark shade of green in actuality. The water you see on some of the leaves is from one of my water mistings.

[Herb Fellow]

Plants are looking great. I think I would consider the twelve/twelve with your limited space.