Good Day to You All;
I used feminized seeds which were purchased online. They were germinated in the prescribed manner. Due to my inexperience I managed to get one seedling planted indoors (the one pictured above) and one outside. I will post about the one girl "indoors" which is actually in my tool shed. I used an 18" potting container which holds about 47 liters of soil so there should be lots of room for roots. I used a 50/50 mixture of Black Earth and Triple-mix because I have had good success with this mixture in my gardens. The pH is neutral and it is good soil to work with.
Unfortunately it was late in the spring when I decided to give this a try, and so it was not until June 25th that my seedling was planted. So now, 4 weeks later, she is about 6" in height and for all intents and purposes seems to be doing fairly well. Probably better than the tomato plants in my outside garden. I water it every second day being careful not to over water. I use distilled water as our well water has a lot of iron. I may decide later to mix distilled and well water, so any advice on this would be appreciated. Recently, within the past few days, I gently dug around the stem and mixed in some worm castings for some basic nutrients. Not big on chemicals and would rather use organics.
My set up is really simple and has cost me practically nothing. I am only interested in growing for personal use and gaining experience. What the heck... it is fun to make things grow and I have always enjoyed doing so. My tool shed is 11' X 9' and 8' in height, so there is ample room for a single plant. Plenty of ventilation and air movement. This is a "Dark Angel" 50% Sativa/Indica blend.
Now I will get to what concerns me the most, and where more experienced growers might impart some helpful knowledge.... lighting. I was lucky enough to have a small LED lighting system from my aquarium days. By small I mean one foot square and houses 48 diodes. It is suspended above the growing area on a simple pulley and I try to maintain approximately 20 inches between the lighting and the top of the plant. Of the 48 diodes, 12 are white and the remaining 36 are actinic blue. This worked well for a 65 gallon marine aquarium, and it seems to be working fine for this application as well. I have one of those 3 in 1 meters which will monitor moisture, pH and light. The light scale goes from 0 to 2000. I am assuming (yes, I know what they say about assuming) this scale represents "lumens" but not absolutely sure. The meter reading is 800. I have researched that the Actinic spectrum of light is very good at the vegetative phase of growing. However, I am concerned this is not proper lighting if and when I can get to the flowering stage. One advantage though, the lighting system has some decent built-in technology. Besides having built-in timing, the actinic blue and white diodes are on separate channels and can be tweaked individually or turned off completely.
I started off giving the growing area 16 hours of lighting, both channels at 100%. A couple of days ago when I fertilized I bumped it up to 18 hours at 100%. I have also pruned some lower fan leaves so the plant is not wasting energy with those. I am being a bit cautious here, as I still want the plant to be able to photosynthisize. I plan to cut the lighting period back to 10 hours mid September or maybe the start of September.
My question. If and when I get to the flowering stage, should I turn off the actinic channel and go strictly with the white channel? Should I remove the lighting system completely and suspend a CFL above the plant? Could I turn off the actinic channel and add a red spotlight (which I have)? I am concerned my girl wont flower properly with the present set up. I would also like to see a little more height before I start the flowering stage.
Any tips or suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this too. Tango.
