2 amateurs armed with bag seed and a closet

[canuck grower]

Hi guys & girls! First I want to thank everyone who posts questions, answers, and logs on this message board. You have been an excellent source of knowledge and experience for an amateur like myself. Okay now on to the growing... and please excuse me when I ramble like I tend to do.

My friend and I just started growing one day. We had talked about it a little bit and then one day he shows up and says "Let's go buy a light". So we go get a 250W HPS bulb & ballast, some soil and small pots in a tray from Home Depot and get started. Actually he had a plant that he started at home in his room, in a shot glass so while we germinated and waited for sprouts we already had something to watch, which was nice for impatient people like us. The seeds are just bag seed so we don't know what to expect, though my friend talked to who he got the bag from and it's a strain he's been growing for a while so we're hoping for some good smoke.

We decided to set this up in my closet, so we cleared it out, hung the light, and then germinated the seeds. I won't post all the early photos because well they're pretty boring. Right now we are on Day #13 of flowering so this log is going to move through the first month pretty quick (the first month isn't exciting anyway). For now I'll post a few pics showing our progress and then maybe go into some more detail about the set up and what he have done to the plants so far.

We didn't have a clue what we were doing at first and made some amateur mistakes. But this was ultimately supposed to be a learning experience and we have learned very much. It looks like we'll get to smoke some buds as well so that's a nice bonus!

Here is a list of mistakes we made that I can think of off the top of my head:

• Planted seedlings too deep, and not necessarily with the root pointing downwards
• HPS is not the best lighting for seedlings and veg (but it did work well enough)
• Light was too far from seedlings
• Over watered them the first 1-2 weeks (I watered them daily, oops!)
• Ventilation is far from optimal, bordering on downright lousy

Luckily none of those were fatal mistakes, and despite our best efforts to hurt these things they have done nothing but flourish and prosper! What an amazing plant.

This is long enough for a first post, so here are a few pics to whet your appetite and I'll be back with more, probably later today after some lunch.

Thanks again to the people in this community. You're helpful and friendly and this grow would be pretty terrible without all the wisdom you've shared here.

canuck grower Reviewed by canuck grower on 12-27-2006. 2 amateurs armed with bag seed and a closet Hi guys & girls! First I want to thank everyone who posts questions, answers, and logs on this message board. You have been an excellent source of knowledge and experience for an amateur like myself. Okay now on to the growing... and please excuse me when I ramble like I tend to do. My friend and I just started growing one day. We had talked about it a little bit and then one day he shows up and says "Let's go buy a light". So we go get a 250W HPS bulb & ballast, some soil and small pots in Rating: 5

[canuck grower]

ok, I guess because I'm new I can't post any photos yet, but rest assured I will post them. for now here are a couple of photos on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-grower/

the first pic there has been my wallpaper for a while now. they are shown from newest to oldest, so you might want to start at the bottom and go up. i hope you enjoy those till I can figure out how to attach photos here.

[canuck grower]

ok, i'm a little confused. does anyone know the rules about attaching files to posts? i can do it in some forums or threads, but not this one.

i'd like to post some pics here instead of flickr, but i might just keep them on flickr if i don't figure it out in a couple of days so i can keep the log going.

[TheGreenFog]

Hey, Canuck!

Glad you got the log up. Too bad that you wont be posting the earlier pics. I like them, and they contribute to 'thoroughness'...but I know what you mean. Most of the people on here perk up only for nice flower shots.

Anyway, I'm also very happy that there is someone on here who takes as much pride in his grammar, spelling and punctuation as I do. Honestly, I've slacked off here or there recently due to how frequently I post.

In any case, I will be following your log so keep it up! :thumbsup:

Regarding the file uploading...I dont know what problem you are having, but I know the files can't be larger than 1.9mb or so, but you will get an error message to that effect if that is your problem. The other problem you might be having is if you are using a proxy server or anonymous proxy. A lot of them give you problems with uploading files.

Hope that helps.

Looking forward to the pics. Hope you can get some up tonight. :smokin:


:rastasmoke:

The Fog (TGF)

[canuck grower]

Hey TGF,

It is difficult to read some of posts here, but for the most part I only have to read things once or twice. Some of them are just terrible though and I give up. What can you do eh? We are a bunch of stoners after all. :rastasmoke:

I'll post some earlier pics for sure, not to worry! I should have said that the earlier PHOTOS weren't always exciting. It was really exciting to watch them grow from the beginning. Right now we are on Day #40/13 (13 of flower), so it was just under 4 weeks of veg and now it's been almost 2 weeks of flower and the number of pics we have reflects that. What I don't have are pics of is the setup itself. That's because the setup is pretty ghetto. The light is hanging on a coat hanger tied to shoelaces which are screwed into the supporting boards on the sides of the shelf at the top of the closet. It's a little more complicated than that (it can't fall, don't worry), you have to see a pic so I will take one tomorrow when the light's on and post it. I'm not joking... love, light, tap water, good soil, and some ferts from Home Depot will go a long way. We haven't measured temps, humidity, pH'd our water or any of those things you're supposed to do because we don't have the equipment or the money to buy it.


Ok the file uploading thing is just strange. Here are pics so I don't have to explain it.

When I reply to a thread in the intro forum I see this: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/125/3...074effef_o.png

When I reply to this thread I see this: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/126/3...e26c8c88_o.png

I don't have any clue why that happens. Strange eh?

We didn't start taking photos until we had some sprouts and the date on my camera was wrong, so we can't rightly say when any of these photos are from up until Dec 11. We started on Nov 17... but Betty, the biggest one, had that head start in a shot glass for a week so she took off under the HPS and mode the rest look small.

Anyway I have 191 photos here and I don't know how many I will upload tonight. Check my flickr page later if you want, I've already started uploading pics. I'm tagging them sort of like I have them in iPhoto. Veg, everything (all the plants, or as many as fit in one photo), flower, and I'm tagging the month nov or dec as well. In iPhoto I tag them as Birds eye, side shot, and close up as well but I don't know if I'll get that much into the flickr photos or not.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-grower/

Till I figure out how to attach file in this thread I'll link to flickr images once they're uploaded. Anyhow that's it for tonight. I'll post more tomorrow.

Did I mention I tend to ramble? :weedpoke:

edit: here's that wallpaper-worthy photo I mentioned before... it's not the first one anymore! http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-grower/335430150/

[canuck grower]

i've hit flickr's upload limit of 100MB a month, so the rest of the pics will have to wait until next year! ha ha. :jointsmile: :yippee:

they're tagged well enough that you can see what's what. next month i'll be more careful about what I do and don't upload so I can catch up... and hopefully i'll figure out this board soon so I can just post the photos here.

betty's definitely a girl though. these are a few days old, and my camera sucks, but she's got pistils at the top 4-5 nodes now.

flickr's down for maintenance so I can't get a link, but i think this will work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-grower/tags/pistils ... that is, it'll work when flickr's back up.

[canuck grower]

last post today... this was just too cool to wait: http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-...6/12/calendar/

flickr shows you a calendar view with photos taken on each day. i wish i set my camera's date earlier!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canuck-...3/03/calendar/ (it thought it was 2003 for almost 4 weeks, nov 17 - dec 10)

[invision]

hey canuck!

when you post dont use the quick reply go advanced, then you will see a small tab below where you type that says "manage attachments" that is the upload utility for the boards.

they look really good so far

[canuck grower]

Hey invision,

Thanks for checking out my/our log! They are looking good so far, and today I think I can see some trichs on Betty! I'll have to get my ass down to the mall and grab a microscope soon to be sure. Eventually what I want is a flowering cab like yours with one nicely trained plant and a small HID light. I have a veg cab w/ CFLs in the works and right now I'm experimenting with some clones in soil in it. Cuttings, soil, water, and a ziplock bag over the top under 2 daylight CFLs on 18/6. I hope they take root! I digress...

if you check out these photos you'll see that for some reason I can't attach files to this thread. I can when I reply to other threads. I changed my default reply to advanced already, and I'm not using quick reply.

What I see for other threads: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/125/3...074effef_o.png
When I reply to this thread: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/126/3...e26c8c88_o.png

For some reason I just don't have the permission to attach files to this thread. I'll have to find the board admin and see what's up since it's not because I'm a new member like I thought.


:thumbsup: Ok back to the plants. When we started them they were on 18/6, and then for the last week or two of veg we put them on 24 hours of light. I was just reading this -> http://www.norml.org.nz/article304.html and it talks about the light and dark processes involved in breaking down CO2 and H2O to form glucose (and water). So can the 24 hour cycle actually harm your plants, rather than help them grow more? I was under the impression that CO2 was used when the light was on to produce plant and flowers, but now I am unsure.

When we look at this process a little closer, it actually involves two different chemical reactions. The first is called photolysis. In photolysis, water is broken down into oxygen (O), and hydrogen (H). Both light and chlorophyll are necessary for photolysis. This is called the light response. The second chemical reaction is called the dark response. As the term suggests, no light is necessary for the dark response. With dark response, carbon dioxide is converted into glucose, with the help of the hydrogen produced during the light response. The distinction between the light- and dark reaction is of interest to the home grower in order to gain insight into the manner in which the plants must be illuminated (and sometimes kept in darkness). The plants grow optimally only when a good balance is found between the light and dark reactions.

So these dark reactions that consume CO2 do not require light, but what I want to know is if the presence of light prevents the dark process from occuring. Anyone? After reading that I would stick to 18/6 in the future.



I'm looking at the photos now and recalling what we've done to these girls so far. We germinated a lot of seeds and planted about 20 that popped. We had 15+ in little square pots (they're not pots, I don't know what they're called) and then 4 in teacups, 3 of which sprouted. The ones in the teacups weren't planted very deep unlike the others and they really took off in comparison.


The teacups were pretty shallow, and they didn't have much soil so we re-potted those into some bigger coffee cans fairly quickly. I know rust is bad, but that's what we had so we used them and they didn't end up rusting like I thought they would. Despite their size the coffee can plants seemed to enjoy the new spcae and took off even more. Now we have 5 plants left and 3 of those are the ones you see in the pic there in the coffee cans, so the extra room may have made a difference. The light was probably a good 2 feet above them at this point.

I'd say about a week after that I started putting up aluminum foil. The day after I finished covering the closet I read how the foil doesn't help, and may burn the plants so I tore it down. I guess that's how it goes, right?


This is where we start doing more for the plants and reading more about caring for them, learning how they grow and use light, water, CO2 and that sort of thing. The best ones were transplanted into cheap 2 gal pots and put down in trays on the floor of the closet, which is lined with garbage bags. We have had a big fan in there most of the time to circulate air, and as often as I can I leave the window open for fresh outside air to get in. This is in my bedroom though so leaving it open at night isn't much of an option when it's 5-6 C (40 F).


Till now we had heard about topping and super-cropping, but that was about all. When I saw justaseed's SCRoG on here I just about shit myself! I was really eager to try out some LST and started training plants that we thought looked more female. The way these things can bend is just incredible, and the speed that they will turn up to face the light is pretty amazing too. Betty was quite big at this point and we didn't want to do anything that might hurt her, so she is our one naturally-shaped plant left. I ended up cracking the stem of one of them, but it recovered well and is bushier than the others because the top growth was stunted till it healed.

That's all I can think of to say about the pics that have been posted so far. There are 70-something of them on flickr, so the few I posted here are just for context and if you want to see more they are all there. I'm going to have some more coffee and look for pistils. :rastasmoke:

[TheGreenFog]

Awesome pics, man. :greenthumb:

Glad you finally figured out how to post them. NOW you have to tell me how you posted them inside the text. I always knew you could, but I would like to know how. That would be cool... ...Ohh wait, I think I see how you did it...they are linked to the flickr site. I don't have any of my pics on any other site so I can't link them like that...I don't think.

So, like I said, I really like your plants. They look very healthy. Surprising that you don't pH your water or anything, but hey, maybe you got good 'buffer' soil. Plus, I've notice that some nutes tend to bring 7.0 pH water right into the correct range, so you generally don't need to adjust the pH.

Your camera doesn't seem too bad. Looks like good pics to me. Maybe you aren't using your macro function for the closeups? I'm sure you might know this, but maybe not, so just shooting it out there.

One more note, on the first post you mentioned pistils...I honestly could say that I had a hard time seeing any pistils and that they could have very possibly been males......but then you said you are seeing even more pistils now, so hopefully you are right and I was just having a hard time with the blurriness of the pics...and my own color-blindness.

Looking forward to more pics and better closeups! Be cool, canuck.

:rastasmoke: RastafarI

The Fog (TGF)