McToker's 1st Grow with CFL

The older of the two girls appears to be near ready for harvest. About 10% of the trichomes are cloudy rather than clear. We went ahead and took her off nutes and switched to straight water. It just takes too long to get orders in to bother with a commercial flush product.

This is the plant that started flowering while the rest were still vegging. She started flowering about 2 1/2 weeks before we switched the lights. So, I guess she's actually about Day 64.

The younger girl has a few trichomes starting to cloud up but not enough, yet.

We couldn't wait. We took a sample bud and did a quick dry. NICE!!!:jointsmile::stoned::D

Awesome plant! You're grow makes me feel more comfortable using all cfls in my grow, you have bout 20 days or so left? maybe more? plenty of time for the flowers to plump up.

Keep up the good work

toke on

lookin really good man cant wait to hear about the smoke

We decided to let the girls fatten up a bit more. The sample bud we took was a bit fluffy and light but still providing enough smoke to hold us over. The taste is improving with each day spent in the jar.

new pix please. I wanna see how mich bigger she has gotten.

and good idea on flowering a little longer.:thumbsup:

nice job so far.

Well......... the older girl never really recovered from a Calcium/Magnesium deficiency. She lost almost all her fan leaves so we went ahead and harvested her.

The younger plant (in the photos) seemed ready, as well. The cloudy to clear ratio of the trichomes was about 50/50. It may not show in the pics but almost half of the pistels had changed color. Since we're running up against our deadline, we went ahead and harvested her, too.

I'll post a final weight when they are done drying. Since the tent is the only odor controlled space we have, we're drying the buds in there. It is also easier to control the humidity in the tent.

We'll start our next grow in January or February. Vegging will still be done with CFL's but we'll get either a 250 or 400 watt HPS for flowering. Might even try some "hempy buckets".

We sure learned a WHOLE BUNCH with this grow and really want to say a great big THANK YOU to all of you who provided info on this forum, helped us solve our problems and especially those of you that provided moral support. We couldn't have done it without all of you.

Very nice.... Looks like a healthy Cola.. CFL's rock on my low wattage brothers..:rastasmoke:d Get a 400 MH/HPS and you will be impressed with what you can achieve, I think. :thumbsup:

I liked the CFL's for vegging. Didn't need all that many. But for flowering, it takes too many. It took 483 watts to drive 21 CFL's resulting in 33,600 lumens. That's not including the two 4-foot flouros we had in there. So, a 400 watt HPS would be cheaper to run and a 250 considerably cheaper. We'll probably go for the 400, hoping for even more densly packed buds and better light penetration to the lower levels of the plants.

We'll be shifting our growing season to winter/spring. Having to keep the house A/C set lower than we usually keep it got a tad bit expensive. We'll just have to see if we can grow enough to last a year with just the one growing season.

Here's the final weigh in. The older plant from '07 beans produced 2.565 oz, dried. The smaller plant from '08 beans gave up 2.345 oz, dried.

So, the two girls gave us a total of 4.91 oz of dried bud.

This does not include a couple buds we took as samples. So, I suppose we can call it an even 5 ounces.

We're going to go with bagseed, again, for the next grow after the holidays. We still have some beans left from both the '07 and '08 bags. It will be interesting to see any final weight diference flowering with an HPS as opposed to the CFL's.

Very nice!