Old Dude Newbie - Looking for knowledge My First Post

Hi my first post here.
Been reading a lot here there and everywhere on grows, watched my share of vids and I thought I would dig out some seeds I had from around 30 years ago. I am 50 now been smoking since middle school as a way to recover from being sent to Catholic Parochial School and I have never looked back.

I live in the pacific northwest and in the 80's most of the weed was from BC or north counties near the BC border. But we did have our share of stuff from Mexico and Central America so I have no idea what these seeds were from but I decided to plant a couple and see what happens.

I don't have the ideal place to grow but I setup a closet with fan and some lights. I am limited on resources so I am sorta seeing what comes with what I have to work with. I know I don't have ideal lights for example but it what I have to work with at the moment. Weed is legal where I live and I can buy at any one of a dozen places from 9am to 9pm so I am not expecting some big yield or depending on this for my stash but it would be nice if it did work out that way.

Here is what I have:
2x of Horticulture E27 5W LED Plant Grow Light Bulb 5-LED (3 Red & 2 Blue) in clamp on reflectors
1x 23 Watt Full Spectrum Spiral CFL Bulb
1x 20 led generic desklamp

1x 8": fan

My soil was 1/2 some generic potting and 1/2 organic mix with vermiculite

I planted both seeds 6 weeks ago and have kept these about 6" from lights that stay on 24 hours a day. I am kinda stumped why one has grown bigger than the other and why both seem sorta small to me for 6 weeks. I have not fertilized yet.

I took some pics today and I am wondering if it is just new shoots I am seeing or am I seeing signs of a sex?
Still learning I just got "Cannabis Success" to read .

Any opinions? What do I have going on here? Thanks All!

Welcome to RIU, and the wonderful world of cultivating the world's most misunderstood and feared medicines!!!

The only 'advice' I can give you or anyone is to read and learn and then apply what you have read and learned to your garden and you cannot fail. Anyways, remember the search tool is your friend...Lots of folks here willing to help a new farmer get up and growing. But at the end of the day your grow will be only as good as the knowledge and work you put into it.

It is always great to ask questions but do not take anyone's advice or opinions and follow blindly. Do your own research, you will be much happier knowing you have done it for yourself and by yourself. The first buzz you get from your own budz...is by far the BEST high you will ever have!

Do a search using your current question as the keyword(s) and ZOOOM!! Like Wonka's Great Glass Elevator…off you go to tons of threads answering all your questions. Read all the Newbie Central stickies and learn…

Soaking up all that information and sifting through it, is going to take time. You will likely finish your first grow by then. Viola! grow complete and education well under way.

You can do just fine with a LOT of CFL's... I went that route 6 years ago... Moved on to a better system... Have fun growing!

Considering I have no idea what these seeds are Is this close to normal growth for 6 weeks? I tried to plant seeds both at same depth.

I have seen many successful cfl growz on RIU....conversely I have also seen multiple failures with HID and big$$$ growz. The difference in quality cannabis cultivation and growing some weed is all about the learning process.

Magnetoman said:

Considering I have no idea what these seeds are Is this close to normal growth for 6 weeks? I tried to plant seeds both at same depth.

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A direct question deserves a direct question...Those plants are undeveloped for 6 weeks old. But, the plants themselves look healthy. As for M or F...too early in growth and/or not in flowering cycle.

$bkbbudz$ said:

I have seen many successful cfl growz on RIU....conversely I have also seen multiple failures with HID and big$$$ growz. The difference in quality cannabis cultivation and growing some weed is all about the learning process.

Click to expand...

Gotcha, sorta why I wanted to just start with 2 plants I got a big bag of seeds so I figure why and try and manage a bunch of plants when I know fuck all about growing lol. Figure I will learn better this way.

Just curious...if you live in a legal state...why not take it outdoors? Sunlight does a whole lot better than any artificial light.

Magnetoman said:

Gotcha, sorta why I wanted to just start with 2 plants I got a big bag of seeds so I figure why and try and manage a bunch of plants when I know fuck all about growing lol. Figure I will learn better this way.

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All well and good for this grow my friend...but you have the grow bug big time if you are investing time and money into cultivation. Remember how cool it was 6 weeks ago when you saw the 1st fan leaf?? Multiply that BY 1,000 and that is almost as happy as you will be when you see bud...now multiply that by 1,000 and that is how you will feel smoking your first harvest.

When all is said and done...if you truly have a love cultivation of quality medicine you will surely want a better grow area, light, medium, genetics the whole bit! So, hold on to your ass...this can be one crazy ride. But, IMHO there is no more rewarding hobby...and I can help others ease their suffering as well...truly awesome!

$bkbbudz$ said:

Just curious...if you live in a legal state...why not take it outdoors? Sunlight does a whole lot better than any artificial light.

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Legal to buy not yet legal for Joe citizen to grow yet all growers are licensed by state liquor board no recreational grows allowed yet and where I am it would last 10 minutes outside before it was someone else's plant. I don't have any tall obscuring fences and about 150-200 people a day walk down my side walk lol.

Magnetoman said:

Legal to buy not yet legal for Joe citizen to grow yet all growers are licensed by state liquor board no recreational grows allowed yet and where I am it would last 10 minutes outside before it was someone else's plant. I don't have any tall obscuring fences and about 150-200 people a day walk down my side walk lol.

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Well, that clears that up...

Before watering are you picking up the planter to determine if it is really light? It is important that the soil is allowed to become very dry with only a tini tiny bit of weight left to the planter. The runt plant can be hungry for Cal Mag, it can be bugs from your soil mix and probably other things I can think of right now. Can you post a photo with just the cfl light on it so we can see it clearly?

Well I'm just damn excited to see something grown from seeds 30years old. What could it be... What could it be..
Good luck Magnetoman !

I am also fairly new but I have read my ass off and still learning. What is the total amount of wattage being used by your lights. From my understanding 150 watts is a good starting point if you are using less you may want to add more bulbs. I am still struggling with diagnosing plants but from what I read the best place to start looking for answers is the pH of your rootzone. I learned most of my info from a site called growweedeasy.com. Information seems based on facts and easy to understand. They also have tutorials for a lot of setups. I would highly recommend starting with beginner guide for the basics. Take your time to get info from more than one place. I threw away a lot of money from bad or partial advice that was useless or harmful. Double check what people tell you. Still have much to learn but can probably point you in the right direction just get ahold of me. There is a lot of people here with 20 plus years experience. I usually read their replies carefully for info I didn't know. Good luck with the mystery seeds hope all finishes well. This is moonshine's og ghost train haze at weekunder. Having issues but when I resolve them I will be putting it under scrog. Will update to show you or you can Google cannabis training techniques after you get the basics.

Sorry that was so long and I meant the ghosttrain is 4 weeks old in dwc. Wish you the best bro.

MeJuana said:

Before watering are you picking up the planter to determine if it is really light? It is important that the soil is allowed to become very dry with only a tini tiny bit of weight left to the planter. The runt plant can be hungry for Cal Mag, it can be bugs from your soil mix and probably other things I can think of right now. Can you post a photo with just the cfl light on it so we can see it clearly?

Click to expand...

Yes one thing I had tried to be really careful of was over watering and was still surprised how long the soil stayed moist. I keep my house around 50% humidity to keep my acoustic guitars happy so I attribute my moist soil partly to that. It has been working out to a watering about once a week. No signs of bugs and my soil was out of bags so I am fairly confident there it is not working against me but I do have a soil testing kit on the way to me. One thing that isn't so great is my temperature. I now know I am fluctuating between 62-68f so I am going to address that issue in the next few days. Some of the pics above are just cfl light, I had taken some just on my workbench. I will post new ones here soon. I did test my light output and and I get anywhere from 8000-12000 lumens around and on top of each plant.

coreywebster said:

Well I'm just damn excited to see something grown from seeds 30years old. What could it be... What could it be..
Good luck Magnetoman !

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Thanks !

I know I remember getting seeds from lots of Acapulco Gold, Thai Stick, Panama Red and lots of local stuff that was just refered to as Sensimilla which ironically had seeds and I don't believe was any certain strain it was just weed lol so we will see

jj2012 said:

I am also fairly new but I have read my ass off and still learning. What is the total amount of wattage being used by your lights. From my understanding 150 watts is a good starting point if you are using less you may want to add more bulbs. I am still struggling with diagnosing plants but from what I read the best place to start looking for answers is the pH of your rootzone. I learned most of my info from a site called growweedeasy.com. Information seems based on facts and easy to understand. They also have tutorials for a lot of setups. I would highly recommend starting with beginner guide for the basics. Take your time to get info from more than one place. I threw away a lot of money from bad or partial advice that was useless or harmful. Double check what people tell you. Still have much to learn but can probably point you in the right direction just get ahold of me. There is a lot of people here with 20 plus years experience. I usually read their replies carefully for info I didn't know. Good luck with the mystery seeds hope all finishes well. This is moonshine's og ghost train haze at weekunder. Having issues but when I resolve them I will be putting it under scrog. Will update to show you or you can Google cannabis training techniques after you get the basics.

Click to expand...

I have a combo of led and cfl lights so what I did was measure the output using a light meter I am getting 8000-12000 luemens per plant.
I tend to try and read many angles to something and cultivate the info and keep reading and watching, now I have the time to try it first hand, albeit not the best scenario on knowing what seeds I have, lights, temp etc. but we will see how it goes.
If I get these to grow I was planning on training them and using the scrog method to save space and get a better yield.

7 weeks "The Tortoise and The Slower Tortoise" I pulled these out of the closet and took pics on my workbench so they did'nt look all pink:



Wonder when it will lose it's baby leaves?


The 2 leaves came out of the dirt twisted at ends and has those odd 2 spots right at each twist, leaves are starting to straighten out

Well yer doing better than me.....I have been trying to get some 7-10 year old seeds to grow and not one of them has and I am down to my last few at this point...Looks like Big fluffy leaves on those it'll be interesting to see what happens.