Made the decision to grow mid June after spending close to a whole day on 420fied's Hydro journal. Many thanks to you man, you inspired me and anyone who is even ever considered growing hydro should check that journal out 4inch PVC Aero/NFT 4x5 SCROG (1200 Watts) . I am defiantly going that way but not this time.
As the title implies I will be growing with soil, 14 pants with 6 different strains, and will be doing a SCROG towards the end.
Garden Details
Room dimensions 10x11x8
Hardware: 600w and a 1000w Lumatex dimmable digital ballast, HPS, Cool sun reflector, 4ft linear mover, cheap fan.
Soil: multiple brands (can go over in detail if interested) in 5 gal buckets $2.49 at Home Despot
Strains:
6x clones of a Sativa indica hybrid of unknown lineage
2x seeds Iced Grapefruit
2x seeds Kandy Kush
2x seeds White widow x Big Bud
1x seed Motivation (Magnus Gen)
1x seed Warlock (Magnus Gen)
The plan is to veg the bare minimum to get enough viable clones off of the seedlings, (im thinking a month) then flower. My grow is legal but, stealth is always the best practice in my case essential due to occasional visiting in-laws that would not understand. So I will be gradually amping up the bare bones room to include an exhaust fan and duct, carbon filter, scrog cage and clone area . It is a work in progress.
This is just a water proof tarp from Lowes to start off with. Don't want to screw up the carpet
Reflector and the mover. The Ballast and light cost around $420 (coincidence? I think not) with shipping. Mover was $90 14years ago.
The wire routing and blacked out window. You can't see them but the shades were pulled down to make it look like a normal room before the blackout plastic sheeting was installed. Hopefully I wont get any condensation.
These are the six clones that I received on 8 July, photo was taken 10 July. They were in bad shape when I got them. All had roots but just barely. I think they Had been sitting in standing water for too long. Lower right is a seed that hasn't pushed through yet.
This one looks like an ad for cool sun. This is two days later on 12 July. The dead leaves have been cut off and I have been running them on the 360watt setting for 18 on 6 off.
These are the seeds. Paid $90 for six seeds they threw in the Warlock and Motivation for free. The germ method as you can see was wet paper towel. All seeds where advertised as Femenized. Sounded good to me so I bought them but I did very little research on Feminised seeds. Had never even heard of such a thing. All of my previous grows where clone based but I needed more than the one strain that was available to me so hopefully a few or all of these will turn out to be good. All seeds germinated.
As each one cracked its shell it got a nice new home of peat and dirt.
OK I will attempt to get to present day on this post..
So this was taken on 15 July.They are finally all potted and the lamp is up to its full 600watts. At this point only 11 of them are above the soil.
I had to travel for a few days at this point. When I returned, I still had two seeds that had not surfaced. I knew that they had both germinated so I decided to delicately dig them up and see what was going on. One of them, IG1 (Ice Grapefruit 1 of 2) had somehow ended upside down and looked to be pushing the seed cap deeper into the soil instead of growing up and out. Also the root stem was curled around in a coil like it couldn't make up its mind on which way to grow. I intervened at this point and straightened her out as best I could and packing soil around her to hold her upright with the seed cap just above the soil. I then picked the cap off gently and hoped for the best. The other was just slow for one reason or another, so I removed the few millimeters of soil that she was still under and let her go. Those two are doing fine now but I did lose one seedling while I was away though. One of the Kandy Kushes had broken the soil and was about a half an inch out of the dirt with the cap still on when I had left. When I got back two days later she had not moved at all. I removed the seed cap but she just failed to thrive for whatever reason.
I had another problem I had been thinking about while I was away. When I had grown previously I had a concrete floor with a drain in the middle to work with. That room had been all but made for growing. This room that I have now unfortunately is not. Watering was a pain due to the runoff. So this was my solution.
This is a drain table constructed with 2x4s, 4x4s, and a sheet of plywood, some edging for the sides and plastic sheeting. Total price was about 60$ but it was well worth it already and if I need to flush it will be soooo much easier.
Here it is before screwing the plywood top on. You can see underneath it that I have painted and set 2 sheets of plywood on the floor so that clean up is easier.
Here is a couple more to get an idea of the size it is 6ft long by 4ft wide and slopes 2in length wise. I will at some point need to stop growing for indefinite periods and pack everything away so this was all built with screws to speed up the inevitable take down and reset.
Next I placed the two layers of plastic sheeting and put the plants back.
This is a picture of the set up prior to rehanging the mylar in a 360. The runoff drains into a Tupperware container at the low end, the near side in this picture. You can also see the cheap fan that I use. It is set on low and is on 24/7. The fan combined with the mover lets me get the light a lot closer to the tops than I would otherwise be able to. This was taken on 22 July, the same day as the table was built. I also on that day switched out the 600w HPS with the 1000w HPS and dimmed it down to 750w.
Not quite the same angle but this is 4 days later was taken 26 july.
July 24 bumped the HPS up to 1000w
That is enough for today. I think I am almost caught up now.
. will be watching for sure... 
