here is my plant

[Nochowderforyou]

Growing outside has it's ups and downs.

For one, it's free electricity. But, bad weather can kill your plant (eg. hail, freezing temps, hard rain, snow, even scorching temps), and you have to be patient when the plant actually finishes flowering. The sunlight towards the end of the season naturally turns to 12 sun 12 dark, which forces flowering. When outdoors and you want your crop to hurry up, you have no choice but to wait.

When growing indoors, you have control over the lighting. You can flower whenever you want, and you can control temps.

The thing about the sun and a CFL bulb for example, is the sun is much, much more intense than any bulb in the world, so that's why only 4-6hours of direct sunlight is needed, compared to to 18 or 24hrs of an indoors bulb because of the less intense light. Too much sun=too much heat, just like us humans, the plants leaves will burn.

So it's all a personal pref., but if you have the nice weather, then grow the plant outside all year, but don't move it back and forth from sun to indoors lighting as that stresses it out BIG time, and stress =males or hermies, which are no good, so if you're going to grow, do it either inside or outside.

To make a better choice, read up on the Outdoors growing forum on this site and the Indoor growing forum on this site.

I grow indoors always, because outdoors you have thieves to worry about, animals eating your plants, and weather ruining everything, so I keep things inside where I can control stealth and temps and such.

There are 3 stages in growth development: Germination, Vegetative, and Flowering. You skipped the germination process and went straight to clone, that's fine, but now you're in the Veg. stage.

2 types of lights are best for growing. One for the veg. stage, one for the flowering. CFL's are fine for vegging, but for best results, get a Metal Halide (MH) bulb, but that requires a ballast, which can be expensive. CFL's can be used and I use them all the time. They are cheap, require no ballast, screw into a regular socket, are low on heat and electricity.

When you hit flowering though, CFL's can be used, but you will need to at least double the wattage to get anything worthwhile, so if you vegged with 100W, you need at least 200W of CFL's for flowering.

For best results, use an Hps (High Pressure Sodium) bulb for flowering, but again, these require a ballast and can be expensive.

For best results throughout the life cycle, use a Mh for vegging, and a Hps for flowering.

In your case though, you are a starter and I would keep things simple until you get a good handle on things. I suggest for that one plant get at least 100W of CFL's for vegging, and when you decide to force flowering (12/12), then get at least 200W of CFL's.

[hudson88]

Yeah get rid of the halogen like nochowder says, they're useless for growing. If you wanna grow outdoors, you've got to plan ahead, taking into account how many hours sun you get so it gets enough hours sun to veg for a few weeks before the days get shorter and you enter the flowering stage. It's also got to be finished before the weather gets too cold. Growing indoors as already mentioned cfls are a good option especially as your just starting, the best lights are hid's, metal halides (mh) for vegging and high pressure sodium (hps) for flowering. But they give out a lot of heat so you've got to counter that by cooling them, usually with a cooltube and high powered exhaust fan. You can get the cfl bulbs, fittings and wire for around $50 i would guess but for a hid system, one bulb for vegging another for flowering, a cool tube and good fan your looking at over $400 (These figures are pretty rough, i'm in the uk so you may get it a bit cheaper but i don't think i'm too far out)