New Grower First Grow Got Serious!

[MC5789]

Whats Up AFN! I thought I'd share my journey with you guys over the past few weeks. This is my first grow ever! and Im extremely pleased with the steps I've taken. I've been following AFN for a while now as a spectator just reading and learning and I have to start by thanking a lot of you for all the good info, some of you really paved the way for me! But thats enough of that, lets see what we got!

First go at things I decided to get a water pump, some sprayers, and cheap net pots. Using stuff I had already. Keeping it cheap... which wouldn't last for long.

This is a Diesel Automatic from Royal Queen Seeds. And I have no idea why my pictures are rotated so sorry about that. This is my second post ever on the forum I'll try and fix that later.

Heres a good shot of my room. Growing with T5 5k and 6500k. Veg was perfect with these lights.

So after saying fuck that gigantic container full of water I got online and decided to go with this set up. Self contained, easy to switch nutrients, fresh bubbles

More to come I'm going to post this and eat some food real quick! I got the munchies!

 

[MC5789]

Sorry that my pictures got F'd up^ still trying to figure that out. Anyway PART 2

So once my Diesel started flowering I just knew that the Florescent lights were not cutting it. The plant was extremely healthy but I wanted more power on this thing asap. I mean why not! So I got a really good deal on a HPS 1000 system and that quickly turned into a nightmare. I knew that thing got hot but holy shit! Also my closet which had a nice backlight to it was now glowing like the fucking sun. If you went outside and looked at my upstairs window you would swear there was a portal into another dimension it was so bright. Not exactly stealthy. I was also in the process of out growing my current closet and moved all of things into my bigger walk in closet. I added good ventilation and luckily, my environment is absolutely rock solid.
cut a hole in the wall
cool air baby
and just by sheer dumb luck, my environment is perfect.

 

[MC5789]

Cool air coming in! I also had to bite the bullet on a 400w ballast and bulb. I have the 1k as a backup or for the future.

3 weeks into flowering



Im extremely happy with how she's been doing. Im running 400w HPS 18/6 and I figured why not, I'm also running both of my t5's on the bottom of the plant and damn are the colas rising up quick! I know a few of you are reading this probably thinking, damn your spending a lot of money for 1 plant. I wanted to focus on 1 plant and 1 only. First I grew a plant in soil, cropped, topped, lolly popped, cloned, let it get deficient, over fed it... learning. Then decided to do an Auto in Hydro w/ HPS. Getting a well rounded understanding of all aspects of growing with focus on 1 plant has been really really nice. I have seeds on the way so as soon as I get those bad boys were really gonna be growing some Hydro!

 

[MC5789]

Nutrients: 5 gallon buckets using 2.5 gallons of distilled water. I've used Veg +Bloom this entire time and if it ain't broke don't fix it! Healthy plant is healthy! 1/2 nutes for the first 2 weeks of life. Then I've been using what the container says, like 1teaspoon/gallon. 2.5 gallon=2.5 ts. Once the plant started flowering I added Liquid cool bloom 0-10-10 and followed the instructions on the bottle again. I feel like maybe the plant was overfed a little due to some minimal bottom droop, but the plant consumed about half the water in the bucket! so I just topped it off to normal levels with distilled water and she's doing fine. When I do another round of nutes in a few days I'm going to back off of the Veg+Bloom 1 teaspoon.

 

[Woolly]

Good looks here, keep us updated and make an intro in the introductions section !

 

[MC5789]

Good looks here, keep us updated and make an intro in the introductions section !

I wasn't sure where to post this. I figured this is good since I'm new. Im in the intro page too but this is where I'm gonna keep everyone posted!

 

[briman]

Great looking setup MC! Lovely ladies to boot! I am on a growing hiatus for now, but after a much needed vacation, I will take a stab at the 5 gallon DWC buckets! Any Tips or tricks you can offer a noob to DWC? Pm me, if you have any words of wisdom for me. I'll take all I can get!:Sharing One:

 

[MC5789]

Great looking setup MC! Lovely ladies to boot! I am on a growing hiatus for now, but after a much needed vacation, I will take a stab at the 5 gallon DWC buckets! Any Tips or tricks you can offer a noob to DWC? Pm me, if you have any words of wisdom for me. I'll take all I can get!:Sharing One:

Of course brother! Ill shoot ya a PM!

 

[MC5789]

Heres what I've come to learn about this DWC set up.
1. EASY! I can move the buckets anywhere.
2. Fill another bucket with nutrients, pop the lid off which contains the plant and roots. Boom transplanted to new nutrients. I could dump the nutrients down the bathtub but I dump them on the neighbors plants when she's not looking. Her garden is big as fuck and she has no idea why lol garden troll
3. Black bucket insures no light gets in and the roots stay healthy
4. Water stone ($1.95) inside the bucket is fed by surgical tubing via ECO AIR 2 pump. Pumps fresh oxygen in constantly and churns the nutrients. ROOTS LOVE IT!
5. CHEAP! I think each bucket cost me $8 bucks total, but the dudes at the hydroponics shop are cool and give me crazy discounts so IDK.
6. My air pump has 2 ports but will feed 4 buckets if you "Y" the lines with connectors. Saving you money on a lesser pump. 4 plants is optimal for my space and lighting too!
7. If my plants grow at different rates, its easy to just put a table or some books under the buckets if you cant afford to move your lights around. Again this is a really flexible set up.

 

[MC5789]

Big Update!

Today I decided to build a scrog and stretch this baby out. So far its been working really nicely. Cost me $10 to make plus stuff I had laying around the house. I also dumped a gallon of fresh worm tea from the local Hydro shop. I let that churn for 4 hours before changing my water.


I've backed off the veg+bloom 5ml. I added 10ml CalMag and 8ml of Sweet Raw





So far the plant is healthy as ever. The scrog has already helped out a ton from all the growth I've seen today. More updates coming soon. Both of my water meters are on the way too so those will help keep things accurate. (more accurate)