First time grower needs a little help

[purplekush989]

your plants look fine to me, they just need more light, go to a gardening supply store or even a home depot/lowe's/walmart and get a T5 flourescent shoplight with a reflective fixture if possible.

honestly i think people are over-analyzing with this over-fert/wrong ph/overwatering stuff. if you have MG soil with time-released ferts, just dont fertilize with anything else for now, then when you re-pot your plants use an organic soil with maybe some worm castings or compost and mix some organic ferilizer too. That's all you need, and once you decide to flower just change to flowering nutes. When you water, just water until water drains out the bottom and feel the weight of it by picking it up. then wait until the soil dries out and the pot feels light, and water again.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with growing is trying to do too much/over-analyzing and end up fucking up a perfectly healthy plant. Nature knows what it's doing, it will survive.

purplekush989 Reviewed by purplekush989 on 07-30-2009. First time grower needs a little help Hey guys and gals, first time grower here looking for some help/tips. I am not sure what strain i am growing, i am using seeds from a bag of "headies" someone sold me (was some pretty good weed). I have a few questions, first question is....do my plants look like they need some help? Are they struggling? For the most part they seem somewhat healthy to me, only things i notice that may look unhealthy are that the bottom leaves died off, which i kno happens to the non mary j leaves (forget Rating: 5

[Pepdog07]

your plants look fine to me, they just need more light, go to a gardening supply store or even a home depot/lowe's/walmart and get a T5 flourescent shoplight with a reflective fixture if possible.

honestly i think people are over-analyzing with this over-fert/wrong ph/overwatering stuff. if you have MG soil with time-released ferts, just dont fertilize with anything else for now, then when you re-pot your plants use an organic soil with maybe some worm castings or compost and mix some organic ferilizer too. That's all you need, and once you decide to flower just change to flowering nutes. When you water, just water until water drains out the bottom and feel the weight of it by picking it up. then wait until the soil dries out and the pot feels light, and water again.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make with growing is trying to do too much/over-analyzing and end up fucking up a perfectly healthy plant. Nature knows what it's doing, it will survive.

Not always true, different strains demand different feeding schedules. You can feed all your plants the same nutes at the same rate and some will grow better or worse than others. I grew 5 different strains in one room and found one strain doing the canoeing leaves thing and none others did. It started when it was young and only on a couple leaves and slowly got worse. If I was more knowledgable att the time i would have flushed it when it was still young as to never give it a chance to get anymore worse. All Im saying is that whatever is going on with his plants(which i believe is the start of nitrogen toxicity or possible ph issue) now should be taking care of right away to avoid further progression of the problem.

Get yourself some cheap flourescent tube fixtures at wal-mart and put some T5 tube bulbs in em' (probably 2 ft. bulbs would work for ur box). hang the lights about 3-4 inches from the canopy. Flush your plants with about a gal. of ph'd water for each pot (if their still in 1 gal. pots) and dont water/feed for atleast a week unless soil completely drys out. Do the finger and arm technique which works well and perhaps foliar feed with a light solution if plants start looking weak.

[irydyum]

I think your deficiencies would clear up with more light. If you had light, the plant metabolism would go way up, thus using more of those nutes and hopefully avoiding toxicity alltogether. Normally I wouldn't blame it on light, but as I said before you might as well be growing under incandescent. You just don't have enough light to sustain growth. You have maxed out or will soon on what your light can support.

You can speculate and hypothesize all you want now about ph and over/under nute and all that. But the fact of the matter is you don't have enough light to get to a healthy baseline to even diagnose anything further.

Get more light.

My 2 cents

[purplekush989]

well i think we can all agree that he needs some lights, lol

[spfcm17]

yea im gunna get some lights, im tryin to think if i should just get like 4 40+ W CFL's or some fluorescent tubes, im tryin to save as much money as i can, i dont have much money to spend, been a rough month with bills ect. so im tryin to stay as cheap as possible, anyone have any ideas? And ive been looking at walmart online and stuff for the tubes and fixtures but they didn't seem to have any.

[irydyum]

Sunlight. It's the only free light available.

[spfcm17]

Haha very true, im not that cheap, im just tryin to figure out the cheapest yet effective way.

Also the big plant isn't canoeing as much as before, the top leaves are still sort of "stiff" looking pointing up a little bit, but they seem to be settling better

There are a bunch of tiny little fly type of things, i dont kno where they came from, never seen them before, but do i need to worry about that at all? (besides the fact that this is in my room and i sleep in here with bugs apparently hah)

Also, when i get my lighting, how many days should i wait before i begin to flower them? Im thinking of giving them maybe a week to grow a little bit because the new light will most likely cause them to grow, so i want them to get used to the amount of light they should have before i start flowering them.

[irydyum]

Can you describe the fly like things? The most common are fungus gnats and they usually are seen on the top of the soil or in that area. Do a search for fungus gnats on here and see what you find.

Giving ur plants a week or so under the new light is a good idea, if they are too stressed when you start flowering the yield and quality could be greatly diminished.

Cheapest/most effective is really in the eye of the beholder. I know if I invest $400 in an HID it will repay me with $2000 of meds I don't have to buy. Seems pretty cheap to me :thumbsup: CFL will work fine, although it isn't the most effective, but it is the cheapest. You can probably purchase a good amount of CFL lighting for 20 bucks or so. Put some pics up after you get this thing going, we will all be watching.

[spfcm17]

The gnat/fly things are very small, almost unnoticeable, but they seem to hang around the soil level, so maybe they are just soil gnats? Obviously that wouldn't be the word for them, but i don't think they are however much over the plant itself. I am going to work on getting the lights up today, hopefully ill have pictures later.

[justanotherbozo]

yea im gunna get some lights, im tryin to think if i should just get like 4 40+ W CFL's or some fluorescent tubes, im tryin to save as much money as i can, i dont have much money to spend, been a rough month with bills ect. so im tryin to stay as cheap as possible, anyone have any ideas? And ive been looking at walmart online and stuff for the tubes and fixtures but they didn't seem to have any.

high man, good to see another noob climbing the learning curve, and
crabbyback is on the money, the more research you do on your own,
the more control you yourself will have over how things turn out.

if all you do is ask questions and wait for answers, folks will quickly lose
interest, ...most want to see enough motivation to learn enough to ask
good questions.

anyway, not tryin' to beat you up or make you feel bad, just reiterating
what crabbyback already said.

now, as for lights, i'd strongly recommend you go with 23 and 26 watt bulbs,
first because they are so easy to find and second because they are so cheap.
you can often find them in 3 and 4 packs for under $10.00 and often with
a $2.99 coupon sponsored by your local electric company. ...they also make
it easier to control temps and spectra of light.

anyway, here's a couple pics to illustrate along with a few bud shots to
show what you can do with them, lol

good luck grasshopper, lol.