Quote Originally Posted by Splifted
I'm a noob too, btw. First grow

During veg, we watered about twice a week, and and fed once with both grow big and big bloom, and watered with just water and super thrive once. We used superthrive with the ferts too. We started off with about 1/4 strength fertilizer and worked up to full doseage, but found out that you don't necessarily have to feed every week. The leaves got really really dark green for awhile almost on the verge of a nitrogen overdose, but we never burned them.

Btw, big bloom isn't a fertilizer so much as it has a lot of a supplement, if you look at the N-P-K values they're all really low.

I still need to pick up some tiger bloom, haven't fed yet and they've been flowering for 17 days but showing no signs of deficiency yet.

As far as the hps, we had it on 24/7 at first then switched to 18/6 but just to save money cause a 1kw hps chews through power. If you can afford it, run it 24/7, cannabis doesn't need a rest period, all you do is waste 6 hours of growth a day. Plus 24/7 promotes denser growth on plants, which you want, don't worry it will stretch out quite a bit once you start flowering.


Also, I recommend LST'ing them. That allows more of the plant to get light as well, increasing how fast it grows in my opinion. We started LST'ing at the same time we transplanted them to 5gallon pots and put them under the 1kw hps. You can see what it did for my girls. What gets the most even canopy in my opinion is topping the plant once when it is about 4 to 6 nodes high, then LST'ing it over and then tying all the resulting tops back away from the main branch. Should give you something like this, with a few large colas instead of the 45+ small ones like on a couple of mine.
Thanks again for all this info on the ferts etc! Makes sense. Wow good job for being a n00b. I Will def. start to LST and see what happens.

I added some mylar in my grow room, and some black mesh screen on the door of my closet to keep the light out of my room at night (so i can sleep!), I have to keep the door open to keep the air flow from the window in there so it doesn't get too hot, and so far I think the black mesh screen is working well. I also added some CFLs for some extra light, esp. for the smaller palnts, and I think that I will move my HPS closer to the plants tomorrow.

What temperature do you keep your girls at ? Do you do anything special to keep the temp down? I want to grow year round and I'm thinking come summer time its going to be hot as fuck out here in the desert, and I may need some type of cool air humidifier

Another thing that concerns me about my grow is that my 400 HPS + 2 fluros + 4 cfls is not enough light, I'm thinking I may need another HPS ballast for 8 plants, what do you think?