Jarhed's First Grow-Indoor-Come Visit My Garden - Opinions & Advice Welcomed

[grogreen]

Hey there friends and fellow bud burners, follow me and I'll show you around my first indoor grow garden of love. First of all I'd like to say I'm happy to find a place where everyone loves this precious plant as much as me now I'll start off by mentioning the basics. I basically started my 3 plants just for shits and giggles, I've always been an avid pot smoker, helps with my anxiety, and I realized one day "holy shit I spend a lot of money on weed" so I did some research online and found a few select strains/seeds that tickled my pickle. I ordered 4 seeds for about $40 bucks, one feminized and 3 regular, I figured what the hell I have a 1 in 4 chance of having a female i ordered: 1 regular big bud, 1 regular jock horror, 1 regular space queen/space jill and 1 feminized white widow x big bud. Anyways I did not germ any of the seeds I was so anxious I just plopped them in a little one cup planting cup with my sunshine mix 1 grow medium and hoped for the best. At this point I had no idea what I was doing, I bought a little 24 watt halogen lamp and mounted it about 8 inches above the pots. I would sit out there and babysit my little unsprouted plants waiting for the day to see them pop through the soil.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

 

[OG1969]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Switch over to a couple CFL'S it will put out more of the right light and keep them from stretching so much.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Eureka! Unfortunately only 3 of the 4 sprouted but in my logic, 3 is better than none so I was left with my white widow, jock horror, and space queen. Now I'm crossing my fingers for females. But as you can see in the photo the crazy stretch toward the light I'm running out of room for these things to grow, and me being a procrastinator I asked myself what am I going to do now, this was when I made most of my rookie mistakes as I was sort of reading and researching as I went. I transplanted these babies into one gallon containers, lol no root structure or anything, just kinda winged it. I read a lot about root bound plants, and I made it my mission to make sure my plants would never get root bound by transplanting early. Any who, I'm a very indecisive person, in the beginning I had every intention of growing out door. So here they are perfectly camouflaged in my garden in my front yard.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Switch over to a couple CFL'S it will put out more of the right light and keep them from stretching so much.

or I could have propped them up closer to the light so they didn't need to stretch so far, but I knew nothing other than plants like light at that point, but good idea, thanks for the advice

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

 

[OG1969]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Outdoors will work too, the halogen light doesn't have the right light spectrum for the plant either CFL, T5 or hid look at all the grows under cfl they are pretty dam good. Feeding them yet.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So they grew in the garden for a couple weeks, and were literally growing like weeds (no pun intended) I was using no ferts. at this point just letting nature take it course. Well these plants blew up and out grew my tomatoes and everything I had been using to hide them, so I got 3 weed plants sticking up out of my garden like a sore thumb. So I had an Epiphany, "I should just grow in my garage!" Lol was a good idea at the time, I live in a pretty low key neighbourhood surrounded by retirees, and my garage door opens toward the street and I didn't want my neighbours seeing my business, so what do I do? I call my brother to come help me build a partitioning wall in my garage lmao, my wife thought this was nuts, but I'm the type of person when I get an idea there's no stopping me. So about 2 days and $400 dollars later I have a wall separating my garage in half. So I have like an 8 x 8 ft grow space, but the wall lèft me short on cash, so I go online to order a grow tent and all I can afford is a measly 2ft x 2 ft tent.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

You can see the wall I built behind the tent, not bad for someone who's never really built anything before ha ha ha

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So I'm all prepared, I got my plants in bigger pots and plenty of room for roots to spread out, I got a wall to keep eyes out of my grow room, I have a tent, ready to go! Not quite I realized I don't have any lights, how the hell do you over look lights (stoner moment) well in the meantime I'll put my plants in the back yard until I get some lights, well I had tried putting some tomato plants back there with the new addition to our back yard, a boxer Rottweiler mix 7 month old puppy, turns out she has a things for plants and tore up my tomato plants like nobodies business. So I knew I couldn't put them on the ground. So I used good old ingenuity and came up with this little contraption.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

These are my plants on my garage roof, safe from the terrorist dog below

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So with my plants safe and still growing I focused on lights, went on eBay and found a decently priced MH/HPS combo

now can anybody tell me where I done fucked up on putting these lights together? Look closely at the picture...well if you said not peeling the protective plastic layer off of the reflector you are correct, I thought the reflector was supposed to be blue, I didn't know any better I'm a noob. So needless to say there is a permanent reminder on my reflector above the bulb of how stupid I was to not know that

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Carrying on, I pulled my plants off the roof, and put them in my freshly established make shift garage grow room, inside my newly decked out incredibly undersized grow tent, I bought a hygrometer from Walmart to monitor RH and temp. and I purchased a moisture meter which I haven't used still to this day, a couple 6 inch circulation fans and a bigger fan I already had kicking around the house. So I'm good to go right, yeaaa buddy let operation grow my own stash commence.

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

OK where was I? Oh right so I have these plants vegging in the tent in the garage, at this time I start using all purpose miracle grow (frowned upon I know, but it did the trick) I was experimenting with all different techniques, I topped and fimmed every branch on the plants, they are looking super healthy and lush green at this point took many pics of my fim job, I was so proud of myself LMFAO

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

Now this is where things get dicey....we had a crazy heat wave hit Ontario, about 9 days consecutive in the 100°-115° so I was having a super difficult time maintaining an acceptable temperature, I was using a portable A/C unit pumping directly into the tent, but was needing to empty the reservoir two-three times a day in order for the A/C not to kick off and turn my tent into a "hot box" (again no pun intended) so I made an executive decision to move my operation indoors where central air keeps the house at a constant and consistent temperature. Turns out my furnace room has a little closet almost made for a grow setup, its a space about 4 ft x 2.5 ft, and being in the furnace room right near hot water heater there is constant exchange of fresh Co2 enriched air. It's perfect! So my room in the garage is now a storage space for the items that were in he furnace room, until winter I plan to setup out there again with space heaters and heat from my lights I feel like the temp. will be more easily controllable.

 

[shmokesome]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

I'm in for this. looking good man, apart from i have a crocked neck looking at your pictures

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

I'm in for this. looking good man, apart from i have a crocked neck looking at your pictures

Hahaha sorry dude I have no idea how to rotate the photos, any insight?

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So in case you didn't notice, I have the HPS bulb on these plants now because I felt it was time to try and determine sex to remove males and utilize my closet space for females only. So I ran it on 12/12 for about a week. I already knew I had one female by purchasing a feminized seed, so I was trying to determine the sex of the other two....during this stage I incorporated a net trellis, I was doing some reading about a scrog grow and tried to do a make shift scrog setup to control the height of the plant as my closet only has about 4 ft head room.....

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So after that week during very close observation, I notice what every grower waits months for and anticipates growing from seed...two of my plants showing sexy pre flowers....

The third plant was showing what i assumed was male pre flowers, so I immediately put it outside in the front garden, not sure whether I was going to euthanize it or do some experimenting with breeding, I had read about collecting pollen in a brown paper bag and carefully wrapping it around one of the lower flowering branches as to produce seeds with genetics from both plants. Seemed simple from what I read.......so then there was 2

 

[grogreen]

Re: Jarhed's first grow-indoor-come visit my garden opinions and advice welcomed

So with two plants known to be female I did not want to flower yet because I knew I could bush them up a little more to fill in space from where the 3rd plant used to be. I swapped out the HPS bulb with the MH bulb and in an effort to re-veg quicker changed my light cycle to 20 on, 4 off, I changed nutes to plant prod 20-20-20 using 4 mls per 1.5 litres water, watering once every other day, fert every second watering. I also added 2 more layers of net trellis more or less because I was bored, lol plants seemed to love having more room