jigfresh
- 65
- 33
- Hello everyone,
My name is jigfresh and I love growing marijuana. I also love the online experience of sharing my grows (and life) with you all. I started researching how to grow at the beginning of 2009, ended up joining a forum and buying some clones. The rest is history. I have made tons of friends from the forums, and not just online friends, but some we’ve taken to the real world. Hopefully I’ll make some more friends throughout this journal.
I’ve had a bunch of different set ups in my little closet. It is 2’ x 3’ (~0.7 sq.m). I live in the mountains so the air is cool all year round helping with temps in the grow space. I also live in southern california, so the air is dry helping a lot with humidity. You should all live up here… ideal growing conditions. We even have amazingly clear tap water. I have tried both hydro and soil now, and I am definitely meant to do hydro. Soil was a horrible disaster. We won’t go there.
So hydro, I have done a 30 gal DWC with 6 plants. I have done 5 gallon buckets. And now I am onto flooded tubes or NFT, whatever you would like to call it. I took the idea from Heath Robinson and made it work for me. There is a brand spankin’ new 27 gallon tank in the closet, and I’ll be using my old 4” soil pipe covered in aluminum tape. The only part to the system aside from the tank and tubes is the water pump/ hose. Gravity handles oxygenation of the water.
I am starting from clones this round. They are supposedly Headband, but things aren’t 100% for sure. Potheads. :/ They were started in soil, so I washed them off when I got them home and put them in netpots. I used hyrdoton to hold them snugly in there. There will be 6 plants, 3 for each of the two levels. I’m thinking I’ll veg for about a month, depending on how fast they grow.
So after all that talk I am finally to the exciting part. I’m trying LED’s !!! In the past I have used MH, HPS, and CMH bulbs. 250w, 400w, 1000w and many combinations of those. This is my first try with LED technology. I have been wanting to try it for a long time, but was hesitant to shell out the money for something I didn’t trust. As luck would have it I got an opportunity to test some lights for a company to see how well they work. I’m really hoping these things work out well… my wife doesn’t smoke and is not a big fan of the huge electricity bills. http://asset2.invalid.com/smilies/icon_smile.gif
The lights are from GrowEvolution.com and are 150w each. I’m going to mount them vertically on the door of the closet to blast the plants against the other 3 walls. I have 3 of the 150w panels. They are truly bright bright bright. I bought welders goggles to wear around them. I’ve run 1000w hortilux eye’s before and they don’t touch how bright one of these panels are to the human eye. I think you could go blind real quick with these things not protecting yourself. Be careful out there kids.
Because of the temperature difference with the LED’s vs the 1000w things are a little different in my closet than they are usually. I took out the 435 cfm and put in a 50 cfm fan. The thinking was too much air movement would keep the closet too cool… however I don’t like that the plants don’t have as much fresh air as before, and I’m also worried there will be humidity issues later in the grow when there’s a lot of vegetation. That bridge will get crossed when we get to it.
Not sure what else to say at this point. I’m sure you guys will have some questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. All input is welcome, I appreciate advice although I’m not quick at taking it always. Be patient with me and we’ll figure this out together.
Thanks for checking things out and let me know what you think.
Peace
I keep the clones in the small DWC to grow their roots long enough to reach the bottoms of the tubes. They are long enough now, so I have to get to work putting the tubes back in the closet. Here is a video from yesterday. The only difference today is I added a second light to the mix.
