Alright, time for a little update.

Did my first transplant today, and goddamn what a disaster that was.

So ever since I put the additional lights on my plants they became droopy and the leaves curled... since I also watered on that same day, I'm pretty sure it was overwatering. I've been letting them dry out over the past few days (last time I watered was Sunday - today is Thursday), and, well, they haven't really started recuperating at all, even though the soil is pretty damn dry... even put the guys on 24/7 lights to speed up the drying process. Digging my finger in soil down an inch or so it's still vaguely moist but it's kind of like "is this dry or moist?"

In any event, since I got these plants in clear cut-off plastic bottles (wanting to be thrifty), I thought, hey, maybe the roots are being exposed to light and aren't liking it. Since these plants are kind of "throw-away" anyway - they're bag seeds after all - and more for experimentation, I figured I'd transplant one of the really droopy ones into a simple red party cup with hole in the bottom.

Well the plastic bottles they're in were coke bottles, so the shape was pretty crappy for trying to the root ball out - impossible in fact. So I took my razor blade and started cutting the wall off basically, and slid right into my left palm... ouch. Some Hyrdrogen Peroxide and a taped hand later, I continued my quest. Got the wall off, and basically the root "ball" just completely disintegrated when I tried to pull it out. A couple of unsmooth operations later, and I'm looking at the plant and all of what's left of the root system - the tap root and some offshoots. Oh well, lesson learned. I put some Hummus & Compost at the bottom of one of those red cups and topped it off with Miracle Gro Seed Starter, dug a deep whole, and put the plant back in... let's see what happens, maybe it makes it. Growth will be stunted for sure.

The updside of today was that I got 2 Thermometers/Hydrometers and 1 Hanna pH Checker in the mail today so I can finally get some better visibility into what's going on. Temps are around 72F and Humidity at around 45%. pH is definitely a problem right now: the Miracle Gro Seed Starter mix has no lime to offset the acidity of the peat moss, and doing run-off pH water testing shows pH at about 5.4! Now the compost and hummus are, interestingly, alkalic (any idea why btw?) and so offset the acidity a bit, but I'm going to a proper garden center this weekend to get some good shit.

Been reading a shit ton of material online - @bigsby, in addition to the Basic Growing room there's the "Cannabis FAQs" link at the very top of the page, what a wealth of information. Started a "MarijuanaWiki" on my desktop server to take notes and am slowly mapping the knowledge terrain. Now gotta dive into to soil and nutrients for this weekend's garden trip. After all, wanna start things right for the new seed that just popped

Btw @bigsby, in regards to the LED's, interesting considerations. The more I read the more this really seems brand-new, since there's little information in any of the guides and whatnot. I think I'll give it a go with some of these prototype plants to see what happens, and switch over to HPS if needed and once I got some free cash again.

For right now, I'll just be trying to keep the plants alive, harder than I thought.

Alright y'all, happy growing.
- pph4ntom