Trying indoor CFL and dirt. Great Googly Moogly. Pics from the first week.

1 week +5 days:

18.5" tall on the mydawg. Damn thing has serious stretch-itis. Figures, bloody sativa dominants.

Mazar is much bushier than the mydawg and not nearly as tall, duh. It's an indica.


I pulled the bin out and inspected the roots through the sides. I have read that roots don't dig on light and so I've been running a sort of background experiment this whole time in a clear bin. 2 sides of the bin have been exposed to relatively high intensity light while the other 2 were pretty heavily shaded. When I looked at all 4 sides last night I could see them showing a preference for the dark. Preference is a mild term though. Think one or two roots visible on the lighted side and a big ass mop of roots on the shaded side.

I've gone ahead and wrapped the whole bin in foil to block any further light pollution and let the plants get back to business. I'm supposed to be getting another 150w HPS today too (freebie) which I'll use over the 2 current plants until the SnS diesels are ready for flower. I also moved the T8's into a better position to stay close to the plants and turned the bin around so the mydawg is in front and the mazar is in back. I wanted to bias the light to the mazar for a little while. It's been fighting for light with the mydawg. Of course everything is still well lit all through the sides with CFL's.

on the SnS diesel subject, let's cover the LST work I've done. Using the image below as an infographic, I've gotten them successfully through step 6 and I'm moving into step 7. They've both got several upward growing stems coming off the stalk that are looking healthy and have a couple branches off each of them. The stem bases on each plant are pretty seriously fattening up. They're about double the diameter of when I got them. and the plants have 3-4x the total leaf area at work.


Question: I'm doing the diesels in coco coir and perlite currently in 8" pots. Right now I just water them with full strength nute water (pH'd, I learned my lesson) a tiny bit each day (maybe 1 fl-oz per plant) and then when there's no water left in their catch pans I water them fully with the same nute water. There's no signs of nutrient burn or deficiency so far but I don't know if I'm feeding them "enough". They're growing so I don't think they're stunting but the crux of the question is, how much and how often? Do I treat it like dirt except for needing to use plenty of full strength nutrient water? I have a lot of perlite in the mix and it tends to feel dryish on top even when my meter says it's wet. It's kinda a bitch to know if I'm giving them enough food. If it matters they're on 24hr light.

moved some pics around in my photobucket.

Here's those moved pics and recent photos. Bottom is most recent.:

grow closet about to be cleaned out.


grow closet prepared


grow closet inhabited.












r3dn3ck butane honey oil extractor. That was 2lbs of leaf stem and VERY little trim and a half ounce of the shittiest weed evar. Netted 8 grams of some pretty stompin good oil.











I need to find another light. My SnS diesels are officially too big for my micro veg cabinet. Time for flowering. Need to find another 150w HPS to hang over them. All the local hydro shops that have one in stock don't take the card I want to use and those that do take it don't stock Sun Systems.

Bought another Sun System 150W HPS light. As soon as that comes in I'm taking the SnS Diesels to flower. I'll run out later this week and buy the new set of clones. I'd like to find a strain that's known for really sugary appearance, maybe white widow or something similar.

Gunna run out today and see about getting a few more fixtures and some 300-400w equiv CFL's. Eventually I'll have all the area that can be dedicated to lights done up with them. I figure 2 150w HPS and 500-1000 real watts of CFL should keep everything plenty bright.

SnS diesels have doubled in size in the past couple days. I'm going to have to take them to flower sooner than I planned. Damn. Hope that 2nd HPS light gets here soon.

BTW, I went out and got another light but it needed repair. It's a 400W HPS. I'm pretty sure the ignitor is fried though. The transformer hums but the bulb never gets the ignitor pulse. I doubt it's the capacitor but in any case, all that crap is cheap. I already ordered a replacement ignitor for it. I got the whole ballast assembly with the socket for 20 bucks and a new bulb for 20 bucks and all the chains and such for 10 so I'm now 65 bucks into a 400W light. Even if I have to replace every stinking component in it I'll still come out way ahead.

So hopefully by the end of the week I'll have 700W of HPS in play along with all the CFL and florescent tube lights.

MyDawg is 20" tall as of this morning and the Mazar is still lagging behind at about 18". Both have continued bushing out heavily and the flowers are starting to put on some bulk now.

post whoring?

Got home too late to take pics of the big ones. They're doing ok though.

The little ones really like 30% Perrier sparkling water with their nute solution. I've also found a source of semi-free carbonated water. Welcome to CO2 enrichment.
For reference, this was when I first got them 3 weeks ago:


and this is now. It's hard to see but they're both spiraled halfway around their pots and all the vertical growth is from side branches that have shot upward. I wanted to put them in flower over the weekend but have to wait till this coming weekend so my lights will be here.

my cfls are about an inch away from my plants..but a leaf got burnt...so it will burn your plants..you just gotta be easy with the distance away from the bulb.

I adjust my lights daily while I'm feeding. I try to keep them as close as possible, sometimes under an inch which often ends up with the odd fan leaf getting scorched. Normally I'll just trim those that get badly damaged anyway. There's plenty more leaf area under them. I don't consider minor burning to be a big issue yet but I'm something of a noob yet. It seems to me though that the minor stress of a part of a leaf burning here and there is nothing compared to what deer inflict on them outdoors and they still seem to get plenty big. In my veg cabinet where those small ones are I'm also using the light to try and coax them into growing the way I want so there's daily rotation to deal with too. My big ones are much harder to deal with in that they grow amazingly fast some days and just a little on others.

I'll try and get some better quality pics tonight. I found my digital camera so I won't have to use my cell phone.

SnS Diesels are definitely going to have to go into the flower room this weekend. Pics below. I got really nice pics of the Mazar and MyDawg but I need to get those off the SD media which has turned into an adventure. The buds have tripled in size over the last week. Definitely hard into flowering now. Yay!





My new 150W hps and the replacement ignitor for my 400W HPS should be here today or tomorrow. As soon as those are in I'll put the diesels into flower. Hopefully the extra light from the new ones will help my already flowering plants do better. I'll get the nice pics of the big ones up asap.

My new 150W HPS came in so the 2 SnS diesels are in the flower room now. I transplanted them to a shared bin and got all the lights set up for now. There'll be a light-layout redesign when I get the 400W ignitor replaced. I'm also still working on several more T8 fixtures. Those are so cheap and eat so little wattage it can't hurt, besides, the plants really seem to like them.

Here's pics of the new layout and all the plants. I'm still trying to get my high quality pics off my SD card. Probably today. In the meantime, enjoy:

The big ones from the left. Nice and bushy.


SnS Diesels. LST'd, topped and super cropped till hell won't have it. Hard to believe that's 2 3 week old clones.


Top down view of the big ones. Flower development continues to be impressive.


Light layout for now.


Better view of the whole flower room.

Total area in play is about 8sqft of my 13sqft flower room. Lumen count is around 55K right now but I'm not getting anywhere near that to the plants... the T8's are giving most of their light to the room in general. My light meter says it's 9/10 of full sun pretty much anywhere near the leaves but I think I'll take the T8's and mount them horizontally now that there's a nice long line of foliage for them to illuminate.

Weird news: A buddy of mine (how about loose acquaintance that I'm working with to breed some seed stock) calls me and tells me that one of his family member/housemates and him got into a tiff and he needed to ask me to finish his flowering plants for him before the troublemaker trashed them as promised (he'd managed to destroy another clone I'd given him already). He had a chem-4 and a hindu-skunk and 2 sativa dominant hybrids from unnamed seed stock he'd bred some years back from some favorite smoke of his. The chem-4 broke in half during transport (jack hole bay area drivers, how about turn signals folks) so I took the main stem with a few leaves attached and the root ball and dropped it into some coco/perlite along with 2 clones from the bottom most stems below the main stalk break. Last night one of the clones we'll call chem-4LC1 was looking pretty bad, layed completely over. This morning it was at least standing up. The main stalk and root section we'll call chem-4LS1, last night the leaves were drooped bad. This morning they're pretty perky. The final one is a clone we'll call chem-4RC1 was a pretty woody branch for as slender as it was. It stayed looking nice overnight. I didn't plan on snapping the chem-4 so I lacked some supplies like rock wool or cloning gel so (now comes the just asking for trouble part) I stuck them in 3"x3"x1" blocks of open cell (very open) foam that I had left over from a hot rod gas tank and down just into the coco. Hit them with nute water right away, and then waited an hour and did another feeding. Then fed them this morning.

The other's are doing just fine. The hindu-skunk is about 5 weeks into flowering. Looks like a christmas tree. The 2 sativas are 1 week flowering. So now I've got a 1 day, 1 week, 3 weeks and 5 weeks flowering set. I think I'm going to do a pictorial showing the week by week changes. Thoughts?

Camera issues solved. I'm taking more pics and we'll have good color quality shortly. In the meantime, here's yesterday's cell phone shots:

Clockwise from top right, mazar & mydawg, hindu skunk, LH1, LH2 (latino hybrid1,2), SnS diesel. The clones aren't pictured but are doing ok still.



Mazar flower development after 3 weeks.


MyDawg flowers after 3 weeks.


Hindu Skunk, 5 weeks. This plant has problems. Deformed leaves and they're only forming 3 leaves on each leaf tip. The prior owner of this girl was not doing anything about it... I think I will.


Close up of LH1,2. There's a really small one that will probably not be able to even form 1/8 of bud... it's screwed up. Been hacked at but otherwise healthy. Maybe I'll take it out of the flower room and try re-vegging it. The other one (visible) is doing ok. Might yield 1/8 to 1/4.



SnS Diesels. They're growing fast. Coco rocks for root ball development.


top down pic of the SnS Diesels.

Ok... uncrappinated pics:

MyDawg week 3 day 6


Mazar week 3 day 6


Hindu Skunk week 5 day?


LH (latino hybrid) 1 week flowering.

Nobody that I've been able to find record of has shown us a good breakdown week by week of what to expect from our flowering plants. Doing my homework and watching my own plants has given me the following as an initial expectation. Hope this helps someone else

Stages of growth observed so far in cannabis/marijuana flowering:

Week 1: Sex is definitely shown, the pair of pistils at each bud site begin to multiply. 2,3,4 sets of pistils stacked vertically by the end of the week. You can see that something is happening easily and daily, the changes are that dramatic. This is also the period of the beginning of the stretch. Plants will begin to bush out leaf production and grow vertically quite a bit.

Week 2: The stretch really kicks in and you'll approach the full height of the plant if your lights are close enough. Flower sites are rounding out and pistils are in notable clusters.

Week 3: The stretch finishes up and your plant is pretty much full size. It may get a little bigger but if your lights are close enough it should be pretty stable now. Flower development kicks into high gear. By the end of week 3 you should see trichome formation on leaves and have nice round bud heads forming at each bud site. This is where you'll start wondering if you could get more yield. It's a bit late for those thoughts.

Week 4: This is the money shot week. The small individual bud sites begin to merge together as the flowers put on more calyxes and begin to build mass. This is also another time when you'll wonder if you're on schedule and if your flowers are developing normally. You may or may not get an indication of progress. Look for small leaves inside the flowers. As they build layers the bud is getting taller.

Week 5: It's all about mass now. All the bud merging that happened in week 4 has nothing on week 5. The first signs of cola shape are here but may be hard to recognize.

Week 6: An extension of week 5. The big change should be notable cola formation. You should see instantly recognizable bud shape to the flowers and they should be getting girthy.

Week 7: You won't probably see much. They're putting on mass still though so leave them be. They're not ready yet unless it's an early finishing strain which it probably isn't. You started the flush at the beginning of week 7 for a nice clean tasty smoke and you might see some leaf yellowing as a result.

Week 8: Probably some bad appearance. You've started the flush at the beginning of week 7 so they're going to yellow by now and generally look like they're in distress. It's cool. You should pretty much know what the harvest will look like but still have no idea of weight until you've done this a couple times.

Week 9: Day 1 you're harvesting your 8 week strains and have begun drying. By the end of the week they're probably dry. You're waiting impatiently as hell for your 9-11 week (or 17-20 week if you're growing jack's old time haze) finishing sativa dominant strains to ripen.

Week 10: Harvested plants are curing gently and otherwise not being messed with.

Week 11: Call that cure done or don't. It's your call. I'd start smoking my harvest by now.

Mazar and MyDawg are 20" and 21.5" tall now. They're really putting on some mass to the flowers. I'm hoping to see the buds start merging together to form a big cola or 5 here pretty soon. Once that starts to happen I'll have a better idea of what to expect from them yield wise.

Bought another clone, got another SnS diesel. It's in the veg cabinet undergoing LST. I'll start the super cropping and topping later on as the beastie grows. One of my chem-4 clone attempts died. The other has rooted and the main root ball appears to be alive but I think I'm going to kill it and focus on the 2 that are doing the best.

SnS Diesels are still making huge amounts of new growth. The coco is awesome for root building.

First things first...great job, man - you know how to treat your ladies well (at least the ones that are green and get you high). They look lush and I'm sure you'll get a lot of good smoke off 'em. I only read through the first 2-3 pages and last 2-3 pages so this might be a repeat question... Did you at anytime during growth have a fan blowing air directly at the plants? A nice gentle breeze is great for helping your plants grow thicker, stronger stems, which would be the only improvement I could really see with yours. Awesome stuff.

Constantly. There's always been relatively strong airflow except during the week or so that I have them in my small veg cabinet while the clones root into the 8" pots. I have a 15" oscillating fan set to high in the flower room and when I use my large veg box I have a 15" fan blowing through on low or medium depending on the plants size.

The hindu skunk was totally traumatized by the previous owner. Jeebus talk about frightful condition. I've given it some nutes and normal leaves are developing now along with properly shaped flower tips instead of the deformed schlitz it had been making. I think I'm going to call this week week-2 for it and sort of wind the clock back. It's finally developing normally so I want to give it the time to try and heal.

I've got my nutrients dialed in for the time being I think. Picked up a bottle of Cal-Mag so now I'm using Botanicare PBPG base + General Hydroponics Flora Bloom + Cal-Mag and I have my prototype CO2 generators running. Got a look at the girls when I went to feed the ones growing in coco. They're getting nice and massive. The coco plants have 2x the canopy space in use that my mazar and mydawg do. LST + Topping + Super-Cropping FTMFW! Bud formation continues. They're getting a little bigger day by day.

The pics above show about where they're at... the buds are a little longer but just a bit. Some of the older pistils are beginning or orange out at the tips. Is all this normal development?

Picture day! These are from last night just before the lights went out. The buds on Mazar and MyDawg are fattening up a bit so I'm not so worried anymore. The SnS Diesels are thick with vegetation. I'm really hoping they double in mass again before they take to full flower production.

Chem-4 (cloned). Looks like it might live. It's been about a week and it's not dead yet. Looking a bit sad though.


SnS Diesel (named Jerry-Can/3rd-tank). LST under way. Super cropping started on the larger branches. Topped 1 time on the main.


Flower Room Family Picture:


MyDawg. One of the big branch tips.


SnS Diesels (right tank and left tank). Only 2 plants there. Looking forward to seeing what all that green mass does for production especially since it'll be under a hell of a lot more light than the set I have in flower (above, mazar etc..)


MyDawg (I think)


Just the Monthers (those that have been in flower for about a month):


Bud Porn: