Planning for first grow.

[Orzy]

I've been thinking about doing a stealth grow in my apartment and I need lots of help. I'm trying to keep this as cheap as possible, as stealth as possible, and as effective as possible. Due to the place where I live it's so rare to find good weed for cheap prices. So why not just make my own?

I have a ton of questions because I want to make this perfect and I it will be terrible if my money goes to waste, so please bare with me.

1) How big should my grow box be for 1 plant?

Really, you'd want something that can hold about 2 small/medium plants. The smallest I'd go is something like 3 feet tall, 2 feet long, and about 16 inches wide.

2) What are the best lights that won't cost much to buy and will be cheap on the electric bill?

Compact fluorescent lights, commonly referred to as CFLs, are your best bet when growing in small areas. They're low energy and fairly efficient as long as you're not running more than 200 or so watts of them. More than that and it's more efficient/effective to just buy a small high intensity discharge light, commonly referred to as HID. CFLs also run a lot cooler than HID lighting. Plus, they're cheap. A 6 pack of 26w CFLs is around $20.

You'll want "daylight" bulbs for your vegetative time and "warm white" bulbs for your flowering period. On the kelvin scale daylight bulbs are 6500k and warm white bulbs are around 2700k. Daylight give the bluer/whiter spectrum of light and warm white give a yellow light similar to traditional incandescents.

3) I want to get feminized lowryders. What is a good cheap website to buy them from?

We can't post links to seed distributors on this site. I'm not 100% on why that is, but I think it has something to do with some sponsors of the site being seed distributors themselves. Just look around the forum and see where people get their seeds and google the name. Some cannabis sites have reviews of seed boutiques, but as always be critical of anything you read from an unreliable source.

Another piece of advice on your seed choice: Auto-flowering strains, like lowryder, can't be cloned. That means if you buy 10 feminized lowryder seeds you'll only be able to grow 10 plants before you have to get new seeds. If you for sure want lowryders then get unfeminized and do a small breeding project so that you can get a bunch of seeds. Though that would require an additional cab/room to house a male in and it doesn't seem like you have a whole lot of room. I'd suggest getting a regular, non auto-flowering, strain that you can clone.

4) Will filtered water from my refrigerator be fine for the plants or should I find something else?

I believe in one of the grow FAQs Stinkyattic says something like "if you can drink it, it should be okay for a plant". Though you should purchase a ph kit and perform regular checks of the ph.

5) It's humid where I live, will this be bad for plants?

Humidity is generally a good thing. You'll just need to make sure you have good airflow so you don't have mold problems.

6) This might sound stupid but, will the AeroGrow AeroGarden be good for planting?

Nah, that wont really work. For a beginner I'd suggest just doing a simple soil setup to get the hang of things.


The rubbermaid design that Texasgrass mentioned is a good option. It's pretty popular and results are proven. Like he said, search the site and even search google for "rubbermaid grow" and see what people have done with the idea.

For all the specific growing questions refer to the FAQs that are all over the internet.