2nd Indoor Grow: Auto Cab Grow - CFL

dank86

dank86

New Member
Hey everybody, this is my second indoor grow. I want to share this journal with you guys, but I don't have enough posts to apply attachments to my posts. I'll list my grow info, and hopefully you guys can ask me enough questions/prompt enough responses from me to get his going with pics. In the meantime I'll be replying to everyone elses' journals. Wish me luck...

I'm growing in DIY cabinet that took approximately two weeks to build. The set up is as follows:

30"x20"x54" (LxWxH). I have 6-23W CFL's, with 2 of them being 2700K soft whites. Inside is painted flat white for reflection diffusion.

Ventilation: 2 active intake fans (light proofed) that are 92mm silenX pc fans, moving about 36cfm each. 2 exhaust fans of the same type, with carbon screens for odor control. One of the intake fans has duct work running to AC vent for additional cooling. Temps are 78-85 with lights on, and 68-75 with lights off.

Plants: 5 pack of mixed fems from lowlife. The pack includes ak47, blueberry, white russian, lemon skunk, and hindu kush (or so sensibleseeds.com claims). All the other sites selling this same pack claim that the mix is of these five strains crossed randomly, without the breeders knowing what they are.

I plan to grow two at a time for now due to inadequate lighting. I will be upgrading the lighting after this grow and adding better ventilation, possible mh/hps with cooling system and tempered glass.

This is a soil grow, FFOF with FF nutes. 3 gallon pots ready to rock. One out of 5 seeds has germed and just popped the soil, 2 more are in soil awaiting their fate (the 3rd is just in case one doesn't come through; autos are notorious for germination problems). One seed got smashed, and the 5th is still in storage for back up. BTW, sensibleseeds.com sent me 3 free Royal Queen Kush #1 fems. Thought that was pretty cool.

Any interest...?
 
growbox4.jpg

https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/829/growbox7.jpg
seeds2

Here she is at 3 days old. Roots are already coming through the bottom of the peat pot! Still waiting on the FFOF, of course, to transplant, but she's ready!
plantday3.jpg

plantda
 
I now have two plants growing from the mixed pack of auto fems. Unfortunately, the first and oldest plant has taken a turn for the worst. Growth is EXTREMELY stunted and new growth is showing severe sign of deformity. One of the leaves is very skinny (1/8 of an inch wide) and growing out in a shriveled manner. The older fan leaves have cupped down and become stiff. All signs point to a viral infection, probably TMV. The plant is already showing signs of flowering and is only 3 inches tall and 2-3 inches wide. It looks like she'll make it, but will produce very little, maybe only a gram or 2. The tips of all the new, deformed growth is bleached and twisting in strange directions.

Second plant is about a 8 days old and very healthy, aside from nute burn that I caused while trying to diagnose some pale coloration. I added micro-nutes, which were way too strong. She seems to be recovering nicely and is on her second set of true leave. Plant 2 is growing much faster than plant one and is already as tall and wide.

Will post pics of the damage soon.
 
Here are a few up-to-date pictures of the first plant. She is now19 days old, and only about 3 inches tall, 4-5 inches wide. As you can see, the growth is severely deformed. I've tried practically every solution from insecticide to fungicide, to PH testing. The soil PH is around 6, which would never cause such deformed growth. The second plant (which there is no picture of) is starting to do the exact same thing as seen in the pictures. All new growth is brown, and barely growing. If anyone has ever seen a problem like this, advice would be appreciated.

Important note: The problem started for both plants once they were transplanted into Fox Farms Ocean forest soil, which came with every pest you can think of. The only explanation I can think of for this is pest damage to the roots. I examined with a micro scope and see no sign of mites and treat every few days with pyrethrin and fungicide.

deformed_2.jpg


deformed_1.jpg
 
Well, unfortunately I'm going to have scrap this grow. With the oldest plant being 20 days old and an autoflowering strain, 3 inches tall at this age just won't do. The second plant is exhibiting the exact same growth deformities, and even worse in some areas. All new growth is dying as grows. After trying pretty much everything to get rid of the problem, I uprooted the older plant and took a microscope to the roots. Sure enough aphids in the root stage were munchin on the roots.

NOTE FOR ANYONE CONSIDERING FOX FARM'S OCEAN FOREST SOIL: As far as organic is concerned, this soil is wonderful. Because they have such a high demand for compost (which takes up to a year to create properly), it often contains mite and aphid eggs. This is due to rich nature of compost, including manure and other organic material that pests love to nest in. With that being said, I highly recommend pasteurizing the soil before use (Heat in the oven at around 180F for 30 minutes to kill insect eggs and larvea, which will not destroy the beneficial flora), or you will probably experience something similar to what I did. This soil is almost guaranteed to come with pests!

Sorry to anyone who was interested in this grow...I hope in can provide a lesson learned for someone beside myself. We'll just have to chalk this one up to time and money wasted, and a valuable lesson learned. Don't be afraid of sterile soil! It's better than dealing with this. Good luck fellow growers, and don't make the same mistake that I did. Prevent those pests before they destroy your precious, expensive babies!

P.S. I'll be starting over now and I will start a new journal. This time, I'll be using food grade diatomaceous earth as a soil conditioner to prevent pests and I will pasteurize my soil first.
 
OK, so I decided not to scrap the grow, and instead transplanted my babies into some much less potent, sterile potting soil. If they recover, and new growth gets going again, then we know that FFOF caused the problems. If not, then its probably a save bet that aphids did it. Root burn is a definite possibility here, so I'm keeping my finger's crossed. At this point, if I get any thing from these girls, I'll be happy with it.
 
OK, so now that I've transplanted out of the FFOF (after being stunted and burned for two weeks straight) my little autoflowers have resumed new growth. Since they were so badly damaged from the FFOF, it doesn't look like they'll yield more than a few grams. The damaged caused rosetting so badly that all new growth is literally touching. At least now I know the cause of the problem, and I know better than to sow directly into FFOF, or use it for autos. I'll post pictures shortly.
 
Here's a quick update on my grow. I just received and installed a 250 watt, air-cooled HPS to replace my low watt CFL's. I was previously running 6 23 watt CFL's, so this HPS should help pump these babies up a bit. I wanted to give them some extra wattage due to the severe stunting they went through, and the fact that they are autos, so life span is short anyway.
upgrade_.jpg


I'll try to get some new plant pics up tomorrow of the new growth. They are starting to take off now, and despite their ridiculously small size, I'm pretty excited to see what the HPS can do.
 
Here is plant 1 (the older plant, 29 days old)
HPS_new_growth_plant_1.jpg

https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/504/HPS_new_growth_plant_1_2_.jpg

And here is plant 2 (the younger plant, 18 days old)
https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/504/HPS_new_growth_plant_2.jpg
https://www.420magazine.com/gallery/data/504/HPS_new_growth_plant_2_2_.jpg

These girls have been under the new 250 watt HPS for less than one cycle and are already exploding with new growth! Temps are still a little high, even with the air cooled tube. Its hooked up to a 36CFM PC fan right now, but I have an 80CFM inline fan on the way, which should make a big difference. I'm also going to add a big more intake (passive), due to the increase in exhaust from the new fan.

Right now I'm leaving the door open to keep temps around 82-86F, but I would like to be able to close the door at night while I sleep...its bright as hell in my room with that door open! Temps with the door closed get over 100F, so that's not an option right now. Even with the CFLs I had temp problems with the door closed. Apparently I went a little overboard with the silicon.

Can anyone tell me why only the first picture I post comes up as a thumbnail? They are uploaded to the site the exact same way, and saved the exact same way to my computer.
 
Updates! Plants are growing very fast now that they're under the 250 watt HPS. My last update was only two days ago, and look at the difference!

Plant one (31 days old: almost half way done)
plant_one_day_31.jpg

plant_one_day_31_2_.jpg


Plant two (20 days old)
plant_two_day_20.jpg
plant_two_day_20_2_.jpg


They are recovering great since the transplant into MG, and are now being fed a low dose of flowering and micro nutes (Tiger Bloom and Genesis micronutrients). they are both starting to stretch a little, which is great, because the previous stunting caused serious rosetting. Plant two (the younger plant) has a good change at actually yielding something worthwhile, because she was only stunted for half the time of the older plant, and is already getting much bigger. Plant two is 20 days old, but hasn't yet started to flower, so hopefully the auto pheno will show soon.
 
k-wyld said:
Hey man, sorry to hear about the FFOF...did you mix any Perlite in with it or was it just straight soil?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the condolences. I mixed about 35% perlite, and lined the bottom of the pots with river pebbles, so drainage was excellent. Now that the plants are in MC soil, they are growing quite well. I transplanted them into FFOF while they were only about 7-10 days old, so it was just too strong for them. In fact, I don't recommend it for autos at all, they are very sensitive, especially in the first few weeks. As much as people say that autos don't like transplants, I didn't get any shock, even after unearthing them to examine the roots with a 30X microscope ( I started to get really paranoid when I couldn't figure out what was wrong). But either way, things are back to normal, and growth is exploding with this new 250 HPS.

Thanks for the reply, you are the first! Keep watching, things are going to get interesting soon.
 
I'm definantley on board for the ride. I hope that I didn't make a horrible mistake by planting into FFOF but we will see...You should check out my journal and let me know what you think, its lonely not having people post on your thread hahaha
 
Way ahead of you bro, I already checked it out. I subbed, BTW, even though I didn't mention it. I know I said to PM me in my response in your thread, but I'm not sure if I have enough posts to respond. I don't know how it works, yet. I'm usually on a different forum. Anyway, I'll be updating in a few days, usually every other day.:grinjoint:
 

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