First Grow, CFL w/ bagseed.

I've been having alot of problems that I've been posting in this thread under plant problems.

I finally decided that it's probably best just to start a grow log. Here is the room setup.

Room Dimensions: 2.2' x 12' x 9' (maybe 10).

Shelving system: 2 shelves. First shelf is 18" tall, Second shelf can run up to the ceiling. Both shelves are slightly more than 4' wide.

Lighting: These are all daylight CFLs. Should be 6000k-6500k on the color temperature scale. I have 8 27watt bulbs (1300 Lumens, 100 watt comparable) and 4 14 watt bulbs (640 Lumens, 60 watt comparable). The lights are sitting about 2-3 inches away from the plant tops. Total lumen out put is about 13000 over a very small area. Lights are currently on 24/7, but I may change this to 18/6 due to some heat issues I've recently encountered since switching to CFL.

Plants: Plants are bagseed. Been having some major issues with growing which I'll get into later. Currently because I changed my lighting setup over to CFL's once I learned T12's were crap, the plants are in a smaller space. Approximately 15"x15"x18" (I've actually widened the area a little bit than it probably actually is).

Temperature/Humidity: Temperature stays between 75F-83F degrees. Since switching to CFL temps get up into the 90's unless I leave the closet door open. If I leave it open temps drop to about 80-82. Humidity stays about 35-40% regardless of the temperature.

Soil: Currently using soil with a PH of 6.8. Name Brand is Calloways. I bought this from a fairly good nursery/garden center and was told by the owner there are no nutes in it. Previously I was using something called Landscapers potting mix, which I was also told by another garden center that it had no nutes. Turned out it did. 2 of my plants are in this new soil, and 5-6 of my plants are in the old soil (I tried flushing the soil to save them, I think the added shock just hurt them more).

Water: I water about every other day. So I guess that's 2 days? My drainage is really good. Too good in some of my pots, I think I used too much perlite in some of the pots. I just have to stay on top of it to make sure it never gets too dry. I use super thrive in my water. I try to use just a drop but honestly it's more like a quick spill. Maybe 1/4 of a teaspoon per gallon. I've been using it with each watering since I flushed the plants about a week ago. Water PH is also 6.8

Ventilation: This is a closet grow so ventilation is especially hard since I live in an apartment. Currently ventilation is very poor. With the doors closed and just a fan on inside to circulate the air flow and bring temps down slightly. Last night and today have been better as I've been forced to leave the doors open so that the room will stay below 85 degrees. (get's up to 90 now with the CFL's on). I have an idea that came to me in my sleep last night I'll tell in the next post.

Nutes: Not using any nutes yet, except for the bastard nutes that were in my first bag of soil.

Germination: I use seed starting medium in a seedling tray (well now I do). I had tried the paper bag method and the ziplock bag method. Even trying using my back heating pad under the plate they were sitting on to try to stimulate faster root growth. I've had mild success at both. Germinating 2 seeds out of 6-9 each time. I'm trying this new method to see if I can germinate more. I've got about 30 seedlings currently in this tray. Reason for this is that I figured most of my current plants will probably just die out soon. I honestly don't have too much hope for them. With my current track record of about 20-30% germination success. I figured 30 seeds would give me 10 good seedlings that I can keep in these containters for the first 2 weeks of their life before transplanting into soil. Hopefully if there is a soil issue these plants will be bigger and can handle the stress a little better than if I were to plant them directly into the soil after sprouting a root.

I tend to be a little impatient, but I've gotten better about only glancing at the plants to make sure they're not stressing (really I can only do this with the 2 new plants in the new soil. The other plants are totally freaked out and I don't think will recover.). I'm going to try to be patient with my posting as well, trying to post only at every couple of waterings (1-2 times a week) or if something bad looks like it's happening to the plants.

Let me know if I've missed any decent information from this first post.

As for my idea about the ventilation. Well here it goes.

Currently my plants are all crammed in a 15"x15" space. Because I moved to CFL's and they just don't light a WIDE area like the t12 tubes did (albeit not that well). I obviously have heat issues since this is in a closet and I can't get fresh air in unless I leave the doors open. Which I prefer not to do (I have pets).

So here's my idea. Go down to the local office supply shop and buy a box that is 18"x18"x18".

Cut out one side of the box big enough for a box fan, cut out another small part of the box on the other side for another smaller fan.

Flip the little box flappy things up top (I guess the opening). Straight up. Make this very rigid and strength it by joint them all together with tape. (plenty of it).

Slightly below one of the flaps. Cut with a box cutter in the shape of two backwards brackets. It should look like the following: ][. Kind of like a hinged door. This is so I can work in the area.

Line the entire inside with mylar. Plants will have to be watered outside the box to ensure the mylar stays clean and the box doesn't get wet.

Get a piece of plywood that is just slightly larger than the 18"x18" area of the box. Maybe 20"x20" or 22"x22". You get the point. Place it ontop of the flappy things that we taped up earlier.. This is for mounting my lights. Line the plywood with Mylar as well

All of this is so I can take it out of my closet and put it in my actual bedroom where it usually remain much cooler due to the central A/C ventilation, but yet it still gives me room to grow the plants 12-14" tall and still takes up a very small space. I imagine if I get a 2'x2' box I could comfortably grow 6-7 plants if I did LST (this is assuming I can get the most out of a 1 gallon pot/bag and only grew them to 1ft.).

I want to go HPS for flowering, but I'm having heat issues with CFL's and I'm really concerned now with going HPS.

What do you guys think of this grow box setup. It's pretty cheap to create since all it requires me to do is buy a cardboard box from an office supply store. Approximate cost not including the mylar or any of my existing setup: $3-4 for a good strong cardboard box.

Here are pictures of the Cardboard box setup. I decided to go ahead and make it since it cost less than $10 to make.

Parts:

Cardboard box: 23"x23"x20" - $4.00
Emergency Solar blanket(Mylar) - $1.96
Scrap Plywood: Sweet Talked a hot Home Depot rep - Free


Parts I already had:
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Fans
Lights
Tape
staples
power strips


Total height with the box flaps pointed up is 30 inches (2.5ft).

Here are a description of the pictures.

Picture 1: Box complete constructed. This view is looking at the exhaust fan hole which is 15" x 12". I left 4" in each direction of the card board to make sure that I didn't sacrafice any unecessary support. You might notice some cuts are uneven. I didn't have a box cutter. I ended up using a steak knife to make all my cuts on the cardboard. oops. Not optimal, but considering what my previous setup was.. it's not horrible either.

Picture 2: Close up of the exhaust hole. The hole no the other side is the intake hole. You might notice the mylar is a little wrinkled. I have a pretty bad back and it was ALOT harder than what I anticipated to hang the sheets inside a completely enclosed area. If I had a second set of hands I'm confident I could've gotten everything smooth. I may go back and do this later. Or I might just say screw it and paint everything flat white.

Picture 3: This is a picture of the doors I said I was going to cut into the shape of brackets so they would fold out. The doors are closed at the moment. You see mylar wrapping around the front. Some of my sheets were much too long. Back started hurting very badly at this point so I just did the best I could.

Picture 4: Picture of the doors open. No the flash is not on. I had one light that is pretty dim on. Looks like the light reflection is fairly decent even though I didn't get to get it all nice and stretched and tight. Other objects you see is my wide screen tv, part of a plant. A red ball chair which is pretty cool, a piece of art, and my lovely shoes I got in Amsterdam. lol.

Picture 5: Picture of the intake hole looking to the exhaust. If you look to the upper left you'll see a poor plant dying. My cat pee'd on it :(. And to the right are bags of potting soil and perlite. YAY

Picture 6: Top view of the box. You'll notice that two of the flaps are at an angle. I did this for 2 reasons. To strengthen the maximum weight support of the top, and secondly, to act as a sort of reflector.

Picture 7: This is a picture of the underside of the piece of plywood. I just about ran out of mylar here and pretty much pieced it together using scrap pieces. Do what you gotta do.

Picture 8: This is everything setup and lit up. No plants in there yet. Currently (not shown in the pic). I have my thermometer/humidity meter gauge in there for the next 30 minutes to an hour to see what the peak temperature is with the new setup before I put plants in there.

I'm anticipating at least DECENT results. There was alot of great airflow moving through the box.

All in all total time of making this box was about an hour or 2. Which 90% of that time comprised of me trying to hang mylar with my bad back.

What do you guys think? Any input?

Thanks

edit: Just wanted to note that My camera in the last picture had the shutter speed set as fast as it could go and the aperture almost completely down. Basically I told my camera to let in as little light as possible so the image would come out clear. The actual Light that comes out of that box is BLINDING!. 13000 Lumens Spread out over a 23"x23" area, a total of 8 1300 Lumen 6500k spectrum bulbs and 4 640 Lumen 6500k Specturm bulbs. They are 27watt (100 watt equiv) and 14watt (60watt equiv) respectively.. That's about 6500 Lumens per sq ft. Which is, from everything I've read, Pretty good?

So I've had the thermometer 1" away from the lights and the Temp is 79F degrees. The humidty is 29% (with nothing in there, it will probably be 35-40% with the plants in there and some moisture.)

The only downside is that now the lights are a little too high. I'll have to boost the pots onto something to get them closer to the lights.

The upside is that if I wanted to I could put some more lights in there and have the temp probably only rise 1-2 degree's.

This is awesome news. A relatively cheap grow box to Veg in. Now I'll have to figure out something for Flowering. Luckily or unluckily for me that's still a ways off.

Interesting, personally I think that's WAY to much air power for small plants. Whats the total wattage?

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Originally Posted by DurbanStone

Interesting, personally I think that's WAY to much air power for small plants. Whats the total wattage?

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I have both fans set on low. the air flow isn't hard/fast persay.. but more of a constant flow that fills the entire area.

Total wattage is 272 Actual Watts, Comparable to 1040 Watts.

Here are some pictures of my very sick plants. Most of them are actually alot older than they look. For some reason they won't recover and grow.

Picture 1: Group shot of the plants. 7 total, as you can see they pretty much all look sick. The soil I was originally using had nutes in it and I suspect burnt the plants and stunted them. Not really sure what happened. I then flushed them and I think that it's possible it may have done more harm than good. Shocking an already shocked plant. Individual shots below.

Picture 2: This is just a seedling in the new soil I got that has no nutes in it. It's really moving slow to come out of it's hull, I'm hoping it doesn't dud out on me, really this and another plant are my current hopes of survival because I think my original plants are pretty much doomed.

Picture 3: This is the other little plant that I have my hopes on. It was also planted in the new soil I got. I'd say it's about Day 5 or 6 since it's lost it's hull. It's always had that deformed shape to it and that odd discoloration on its rounded leaves.Not sure why. It otherwise looks healthy.

Picture 4: This was my first plant that sprouted that I originally posted about in my "stunted growth" thread in the Plant Problems forum. I tried to flush it to save it, but it looks like it's too late. Honestly it looks dead to me.. how can I tell if a plant is completely dead? Honestly even if it's not dead I don't know if it's even worth saving. This was the first plant that showed signs of nute burn.

Picture 5: This is pictures of the youngest of the plants in the old soil. You can see here that it's got some burn going on. This is after I've flushed the soil in this pot as well. Just can't seem to get it out It's a shame.

Nice job, Good luck.

Picture 6: I'm not sure what to think of this plant. It's very short. VERY short, I'm talking like maybe 1".. 1-5"... if that. I counted it for gone but it seems to be sprouting new leaves in the middle and it's younger leaves are showing growth. However the original set of leaves still seem to be drooping, they won't perk up. I've let the soil dry out completely before watering again to try to bring them back but I've had no luck. I can only hope that they start vegging better now under this light.

Picture 7: Same situation as above. The two plants look very similar actually. I'm hoping this one recovers as well.

Picture 8: I have no idea what is going on with this plant. At first it was a little yellow, I thought it was just the soil again, then it started turning brown. I'm not quite sure what's going on here. I'm pretty positive it's a gonner, but I'd at least like to learn from what happened here.


Can anyone shed any light on any of my plants. Majority of these plants are... yes.... probably about 21 days.. maybe 28 days

I know, they shouldn't be this small, it's ridiculous. I'm going to blame it on bad soil and the crappy t12 lighting I was using. The tubes I was using weren't even in the right color spectrum, my T12 tubes were 4100K. My new CFL's should be better at 6500K. I'm hoping new soil and the CFL's prove to solve my problem.


In the mean time. I found a Hydro shop here in town and they carry fox farms ocean forest. Which I heard is excellent. My concern is that it does have bat guano and worm castings, which are nutes I believe right? I've read alot of threads of people just using ocean forest from start to harvest. Can anyone else give me insight on how they feel about Fox Farms Ocean forest?

Thanks.

you going to need more room prolly.

i have about the same size box. However i useing different lights. 150watt hps, and 85 watt cfl (true watts) .

My cab is made out of cardboard as well. Figures it beats buying a 200$ storage cabient. for venting i use dual 4" inline fans, don't know the cfm but its pretty high.

i would suggest building a second cab for when you have to upgrade cab size. I have mine just chillen waiting for it. At least i HOPE i need it :rasta:

as far as your problems, stick your finger in the soil, if its wet, stop watering your plants. moist stop watering them, for at least 2-3 days. if it is BONE dry then add just a tiny bit of water.

first plant looks like it was over watered. the second and third picture looks like either nute burn, or heat stress.

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Originally Posted by ebsters

you going to need more room prolly.

i have about the same size box. However i useing different lights. 150watt hps, and 85 watt cfl (true watts) .

My cab is made out of cardboard as well. Figures it beats buying a 200$ storage cabient. for venting i use dual 4" inline fans, don't know the cfm but its pretty high.

i would suggest building a second cab for when you have to upgrade cab size. I have mine just chillen waiting for it. At least i HOPE i need it :rasta:

as far as your problems, stick your finger in the soil, if its wet, stop watering your plants. moist stop watering them, for at least 2-3 days. if it is BONE dry then add just a tiny bit of water.

first plant looks like it was over watered. the second and third picture looks like either nute burn, or heat stress.

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I think I could grown 7-8 plants in that room if I had square containers. If I kept them under 15" till the end of vegging. I should be able to utilize the entire space. It's alot bigger than what the picture would have you believe.

As far as the problems, yeah definitely either over watering or nute burn. I flushed the plants to try to get rid of the nutes so really it could be either problem.

Right now all I can do is hope my plants pull out of it. I can't flush them again, and I can't rip them out of their current soil. I was told that would kill them.

In the mean time I'm trying to germinate a mass quantity of other seeds. In a way I'm hoping all these plants do die. It would be kind of like a do over for me with all the CORRECT materials this time. Eliminates all the other variables.

How many plants do you have in your cardboard box. Do you have any pictures of your design?

i have 5 in mine, all seedlings.

reason i say mine will not be big enough is cause i have a hps, and the plants cannot get all that close to it.

i will take some pictures, prolly tomorrow, look in my grow log for them.

Went ahead and watered last night. 2 of the plants look like they're showing some growth. I can't be certain. I'm debating going ahead and just tossing 2 of the other plants (the two that look the most dead. lol. The brown one and the other pathetic looking one with dehydrated yellow first set of serrated leaves. Looks like it's been sitting in a desert).

Really I'd like to transfer them into square pots so I can make complete use of my space. but they aren't strong enough for a soil transfer. Hopefully over the next 2-3 weeks they'll come out of shock and start growing. Either that or I'll have my new crop germinated and I'll just start over from scratch.

New pictures will be posted next week. Hopefully I can clean the lens and get rid of the blur that was on most of the images too.

Holy crap, I think my plants are starting to recover. It's been 3 days and 2 of the plants have shown pretty incredible growth. Even one of the plants I counted for dead might make it.

On the downside though, I don't think that little seedling is going to sprout out of it's shell. I dug around it a little and all that stalk, was pretty much root. It has tap roots but that main root turned into a stalk. I reburied and watered with superthrive hoping to get it to sprout. If I don't see anything from this in a few days I'm going to count this as a botched seedling.

The ups definitely outweight the downs. All my plants are showing growth. I'm still waiting for those seeds I set to germinate to sprout. It's been 3-4 days now and I still don't see anything I'm using these weird seed germination pods. Has anyone used these before? I attached some images. I pushed the seeds down into the pot with a nail head.. gently pushed them down so they would be buried a bit. I'm wondering if I should cut one of these pods open to see if a root has sprouted or not

Suggestions about the germination pods?

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Originally Posted by teamgreentg

o ya im goin to go get that mylar blanket right now. thanks but when i go there what do i look for?

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You can find it in the camping section of Walmart, Target, or some other similar department store. It will be called Emergency solar blanket. Or Thermal Blanket. Something along those lines.

Sorry I wasn't able to get back to you sooner.

Tossed out all 30 of the seeds I was germinating. None of them were good. I suspect the Rapid Rooters were staying too wet to allow them to germinate properly.

I am going to go back to the paper towel/zip lock bag method. I stuck about 20 seeds in a cup last night and all but 2 of them sank. I will go ahead and be putting all 20 onto paper towels and check back on them in about 2 days. Once a large enough tap root shows I will be putting them into the rapid rooters and making sure each rapid rooter is neither dry nor overly saturated.

In the mean time I've bought some ph down and an actual digital PH tester. It looks like the soil test kit I bought may have given me inaccurate readings (it leaves too much powder from the capsules and thus makes it difficult to read). Currently I have the ph pen sitting in water for about an hour to help activate the sensors and disolve some sort of crystals as per the instructions, but an intial read of my tap water puts it at 7.7-7.9. Quite a BIG jump from the 6.8 I believed it to be.

I will start flushing one of my plants I believe trying to make a come back with 6.4 - 6.5ph water at it's next scheduled watering date and see if it's health improves over the course of a week..

In the mean time I am going to use a neutral PH to germinate the seedlings.

I'll report back as soon as I see results. In the mean time I will have new pictures coming Monday. I've also decided I may scrap about 3-4 of my current plants. They just might be too far gone and with this new found water PH problem (like everyone told me I had but I refused to be 100% open minded about it like an idiot) I may decide to scrap the entire crop and start over with these 20 seeds I have now.

Dude.....They are weeds, they want to grow. Put them in some dirt, give em air and light, they will grow.....I think you are just messing with them too much and you are killing them. You should try not disturbing them so much, just sprout a seed, throw it in the medium, water it, don't water again till dirt is very dry, repeat.

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Originally Posted by Nog

Dude.....They are weeds, they want to grow. Put them in some dirt, give em air and light, they will grow.....I think you are just messing with them too much and you are killing them. You should try not disturbing them so much, just sprout a seed, throw it in the medium, water it, don't water again till dirt is very dry, repeat.

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What do you think I did the first time around. I obviously had a NUMBER of issues that needed to be remedied. First I had nuted soil, now I'm finding out the PH of my water is near 8. PH for this should be between 6.4-6.8 PH, my water is very Alkaline. Lighting wasn't horrible before, but it definitely wasn't adequate as I'm seeing now with the improved growth rate of the plants that do have problems even with the high Alkaline water.

I'm not sure if you've even read this entire thread, but the plants themselves have not had anything done to them that didn't need to be done. The only place I've been changing things up at is in the germination process. Which I could care less about since I have plenty of bag seeds.

I've had problems pretty much since my seeds have sprouted and all I did was water them, wait till they were dry, water them again.

Thanks for your input but I feel you're off the mark here. I definitely have a number of issues I wasn't aware of when I first started growing that I have evidence for. It's not just a simple issue of water, let dry, and give it air/light. If that's all it was then my plants would be flourishing.

I've seen your grow and it looks good, but try throwing a newly germinated seed into some nuted soil, water it with water that's been PH'd to about 7.9, and then stick it under some T12 lighting that is in the wrong color spectrum (3500K) and let's see exactly how well it grows. I bet your plants end up looking like mine ;). Yes I screwed up alot, but at least I know what I've done wrong for future reference.

So I decided to just go ahead and flush one of the better looking plants (if there is such a thing) with water that was PH'd to 6.4. I flushed the pot with about 3 16 oz cups of the new water. The final run off ph of the soil was 6.6.

Just for comparison I ran the soil run off on the pot that had the failed seedling in it using the water I normally used. The soil run off ph on this was 7.8.

I decided to flush one of the plants now because if it shows improvement fairly quickly then I can possibly save the other plants just as fast. Or at least I'll know how. There's still high probability that I'm going to kill this entire batch once I determine all the problems I've brought upon myself.

Forgot to mention, I decided to do this because I finally bought a decent digital PH pen (instead of the soil chemical kit I had been using inaccurately). I also bought ph down and about 30 square pots just to have.

It's amazing what a sense of relief the digital read out gives me over trying to read the color of the chemical/powder kits.

so far 14 out of 17 of the new seeds germinated. I think I finally have the hang of this germination thing (sound stupid I know, but obviously as many of you can probably tell I don't have a green thumb at all. Trying to get one).

I placed all 14 of them in rapid rooters and covered them with dirt. The reason I covered with dirt was so the roots would remain protected from the light (a few of them grew curly tap roots. Hoping this remedies itself) and so that way when they sprout the dirt will fall in and still protect the root from light.

I didn't pack it down, just gently through it over top of the current holes in the rapid rooter.

4 of them sprouted yesterday and I put them in the RR's. 2 of them have their first set of leaves (baby leaves, not serrated ). So I am fairly confident that these are going to all sprout just fine. Once they sprout under my T12's I'm going to move them to my grow box and slowly start getting them closer and closer to the lights. I figure over the course of a 3-5 days they'll be about 1-2" away from the CFL's.

I am going to toss all the other plants except 1. The one I flushed with the proper PH water. It has shown tremendous improvement and I'll take pictures today of all the plants so you can see how much this one has improved by simply switching the water. Really the only reason I'll be keeping it is to validate that the water PH was indeed my final problem. Also it will serve as my "test" plant.

beyond that I'll be starting over, but continuing in this thread. I think I've resolved majority of my issues

Well my new plants look great so far. They are about 1-2 days old. 14 out of 17 germinated and 14 out of 14 have sprouted leaves. So it looks like I'll have my work cut out. Any extra plants I don't have room for I'll be giving to friends to look after.

Here are some pics of the new seedlings and of the plant I changed the ph water on.

Keep your water pH about 5,9 or 5.8 at the age they are now untill about week 2 when you start using your nuets, Then raise it to 6.2 to 6.6

Day 3:

Wow, a few of them already have some pretty sexy roots showing. My biggest one has probably come close to consuming the rapid rooter and will probably have to be transferred in a day or two.

I want to try to transfer them all at the same time. Hopefully this will be Sunday but a few of them might need to be put into their new semi permanent homes before then.

Until now they all look great. My biggest plant is beautiful, even for a little seedling. It looks like it has some massive wingspan happening. Then I have another plant that has some droopage but it's the only one and they are all getting the same PH water and I'm not overwatering. I'm going to pull back watering on this one **just** incase. I'm overly paranoid about letting the rapid rooters dry out.

Let's hope that I can keep them healthy this time.

Also I was wondering if I should start watering with super thrive once a week at this stage? Currently I am just using tap water ph'd to 5.9 to get the ph of the Rapid Rooters to about 6.3. I'd like to use the super thrive if I can, but will hold off if my plants are to sensitive for it.

Thanks

Plants are getting really big really fast. Two of my plants look weird though. Their serrated leaves have moved this morning. Instead of being directly across from each other in a straight line they are more in a V shape now. This is the first set of serrated leaves.

Yesterday these looked like all the other normal plants. I've gone ahead and turned off one of the intake fan just incase that was doing it. The weird thing is this:

1 plant is pretty much directly in front of the intake. I could understand that being a problem but none of the other plants exhibit this problem that are in front of the intake.

2. The other is further toward the back where the intake air flow doesn't directly touch the plant. So it's even gentler than the already gently air going through the box.

Anyone have any ideas. I think I'm going to lower them down from the lights a little bit too, just incase. I'll try to get pictures up but any input/advice would be appreciated.

Daihashi, how far down did you place your seeds in the soil? It could be you planted them too deep and they expended a lot of energy stored in the seed to push itself out. That energy is required to sustain the plant for the first few weeks, and now that it's already been tapped into, it will take a long time to recover. Most will recommend only placing your beans 1/4 inch deep. I made the mistake of planting my seeds too deep, and had to remove about an inch of dirt from each pot. My plants were very stunted in the beginning, and are just now recovering fully, so that shows you the difference depth can make.

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Originally Posted by CultureCherryPopper

Daihashi, how far down did you place your seeds in the soil? It could be you planted them too deep and they expended a lot of energy stored in the seed to push itself out. That energy is required to sustain the plant for the first few weeks, and now that it's already been tapped into, it will take a long time to recover. Most will recommend only placing your beans 1/4 inch deep. I made the mistake of planting my seeds too deep, and had to remove about an inch of dirt from each pot. My plants were very stunted in the beginning, and are just now recovering fully, so that shows you the difference depth can make.

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Ok, this is stupid. I just watered the rapid rooters, and they perked up within 20 minutes. Weird.

I'll tried to get pictures but my camera is screwed. I guess I'll be buying a new one tomorrow. Excuse for a new toy. :jointsmile:

Get yourself the "toy" For the money they cost now days it's really a worth while expense to have one around.

Best of luck keeping your plants happy too.

Shovelhandle

I need a new camera too.

Keep us updated.

Well I was trying to leave them in the rapid rooters for at least a week or until I saw them all breaking through the rapid rooters with multiple taps. However I've been having some problems. I think the rapid rooters are drying out too fast.

Also for some reason I have 3 plants with extremely droopy leaves. Like they were being overwatered. These 3 plants have been droopy pretty much since they popped out of the ground. I can't figure out what the deal is with them.

The other plants have some *slight* droop. I think this is because of the rapid rooters drying out so fast and stressing the plant.

In order to try to remedy some of the problems I went ahead and just transplanted them into the containers they will be in for the next 3-4 weeks.

Hopefully I find a good deal on a camera today and can post some pics.

Here are some pics of the extremely droopy leaved plants. I will take more pics maybe tomorrow or tuesday. I want to give the plants a chance to perk back up.

edit: this is with my new camera. Nikon Coolpix L5 7.2 megapixel. Bought it for $99 bucks! I had no idea cameras dropped in price so much. I had still been using my canon 3.2megapixel for years.

Well, I've moved to 18/6 lights instead of 24/0. I want to say I've noticed an immediate difference in the health of the plants. My biggest plant grew 4 baby leaves over night after being in the dark for 6 hours.

So I think I'll stick with this. I had been on the fence over this for a while because both sides argue that their light timing is the best, but I think for me I'm going to stick with the 18/6. I think it gives my plants a chance to rest, wastes less electricity, and I don't have to worry about the light leaking out when I'm trying to sleep now <grrrr>.

I was going to post new pics today but now that I have them all transferred into their new pots I'm going to give them until Friday or Saturday without water. See if they perk up. I don't want to show people any busted plants.

On another note, has anyone ever heard of a plant tearing it's own leaf trying to get to the light? Like not tear it off but there's a tear in the actual in the middle going horizontally going across it.

Thanks,.

A picture of my cardboard Grow box filled up.

The blue cups to the right are usually filled with water. Helps to keep the humidity up and the temp down a little bit.

The brown box is to bring them closer to the lights.

Pretty much it. I have 16 plants in there right now. Reason I have so many is because I'll probably be tossing out the small weak ones after I sex them as well as the males.

I want about 6 or so STRONG plants. Considering this is all bag seed I don't mind tossing out the extras or giving them to friends.

Today my plants are officially 1 week old. They are looking a little sad but have definitely perked up over all since putting them into their new potted homes. Hopefully by Saturday they'll have gotten better enough to put some pics of perky happy plants.

The rapid rooters seem to dry out alot. I've covered them with soil but my best plant apparently got uncovered and dried out and is looking droopy. I watered the rapid rooter and threw some soil over top of the rapid rooter again.

Does anyone have a sure fire way to ensure that the rapid rooters can retain their moisture between waterings? I do have them in pots now.

Thanks guys.

Kinda curious, any significant fire risk with that cardboard cab from over heating?

Thinking about putting one of those puppies into a spare closet of mine....

Quote:

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Originally Posted by SurfBud

Kinda curious, any significant fire risk with that cardboard cab from over heating?

Thinking about putting one of those puppies into a spare closet of mine....

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I would say the same or similar risk to having it a built wooden grow cab. My temps are always between 72-80.. Typically it hovers around 77.

This is just for my first grow but the box itself turned out pretty nice. I'm probably going to be building a 3 tier cab soon actually. Clones/germ, Veg, and Flowering.

The cardboard box works very well for what it is.

Here are some pics from day 12. The plants could look better. I've found out that once again I've used nuted soil. I went ahead and bought some promix on Rhizome's suggestion but haven't transplanted any plants (also on Rhizome's suggestion).

Some of my plants look small but I have about 4 decent looking plants (at least I think they're decent considering circumstances).

I've also added a few more lights to my box (6 60watt CFL 6500k lights).

Two of these plants are plants that I tried to salvage from my last grow. I think one of them is pretty much good as dead and the other one is showing new vegetative growth but it pretty much looks like a dwarf plant.

A number of my plants are still looking droopy. I think this is because of the rapid rooters drying out early in their life. I'm hoping to see better growth soon.

All the pictures are the top and side view of the plants. So 2 pictures per plant.

Next 2 plants

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