not first, but hopefully first success (many ????'s)

First of all, a little history.

This will be, I believe, my fourth home-growing attempt. All my previous attempts have fallen victim to my lack of knowledge and experience, coupled with my somewhat reckless adventurism. Such as seeing the "spot-gro" incandesants and assuming they would be adequate .

I would like to thank all the contributors to this site immensely. The only thing I had read before was the greenman article (if I'm not supposed to reffrence other sites on here, I apologize, just let me know) and in 2 weeks i have learned easily 100 times as much useful information. That information is what has led me to what is looking like my first succesful grow, and I really can't thank everybody at rollitup enough.

Okay a little info about this grow. I am growing from some pretty decent bagweed that i got. I tried a couple of germination methods and long story short, I currently have 2 plants growing. I have them growing in miracle grow moisture control soil (hopefully to help defend them against my watering adventures). They are growing in my closet under (2) 40 watt floros (3150 lumens each) for a total of 6300 lumens. Obviously as the plants are still small they do not cover a four foot long area, so they are not receiving the full effect. I also have a 1700 lumen cfl which is not hooked up currently (I'll explain why later). I did not keep an accurate log from the begging so i cannot give an exact age (due to my history, I was not completely confident that they would even survive this long) but I estimate them at being 14 days from sprout. I do not have a proper grow box but am planning on constructing one soon. Earlier today I transplanted them into large 15" diameter by about 12" deep pots (I am not sure exactly how many gallons these hold but I belive it will be more than adequate for a 3'-4' plant (and yes, they are in seperate containers). I had to transplant them because I had previously transplanted them into a cut-off 2 liter bottle (one each) and I could see the roots after 4-5 days, so I transplanted. I have a box fan set about 2 feet away and it blows them around quite a bit (after one night of the fan gently blowing on them, I noticed the stem looked about twice as thick! Which I am very glad about because that has been one of my main problems before) althoug I've been turning it off so it doesn't mess up my suger-yeast co2 set-up which I also put together today.

First, why I expect success:
1) My plants are not stretching at all, in fact quite the opposite. So far I have 3 nodes with 1/2 - 1 cm in between so they may even be a little too close.
2) I set up my ghetto co2 system, I didn't have alot of sugar on hand so i used a bit of molasses and some yeast, i wasn't sure if it would work but the little bastard is bubbling away.
3) They have a real nice color, not as green as i would hope but i haven't really been adding nutes, I will probably start tonight or more likely tommorow. I also have some questions about that.
4) A week or so ago I kind of Nute-burned one of the plants and was a little worried but it is showing new vibrant green growth.

Now to the questions:
1) I currently have 3 fertilizers. A) MG Liquid plant food (12-4- B) MG pellet plant food (24-8-16) and C) "Espoma" Urea pellets (45-0-0) *note - espoma also makes a potash mix (0-0-60) and a triple phosphate mix (0-46-0). I am planning on buying those in a couple weeks, they're very cheap $5 for a 5 pound bag of each*. I am planning on having 3 seperate gallon containers and having a concentrated mix of each chemical. Then when it is time to feed, i will mix them in a garden spray bottle that i have which has lines on the side to tell you how much youve added, so that each feeding i can adjust the concentrations. My question is, because 2 of my ferts are solids, how can I tell the percentage of each after I mix it with water? I could do it easily by weight, except that I don't have a scale, so if anybody perhaps remembers a little more of their chemistry than me,maybe than can give some tips.
2) Will the mollasses in my co2 system have any adverse effects?
3) The 2 floros i have are GE Ecolux, 3150 lumens, 40w, and 4100K. If I remmber what I read correctly, That is pretty close to what i need (however i could be wrong) for the veg. stage.
4) I have looked on the package and the internet about my cfl and cannot find the color temp anywhere, it is a GE soft white 100 spiral cfl. 26w, 1700 lumens. When placed next to the floros it visibly appears much more orange in color. I was wondering if anybody knew what the kelvins are for this bulb, or where i could find that info. On that note, at wal-mart the other day, i was perusing the light section and noticed a number of cfl's at 6500k, is that the spectrum i need for flowering ( I think I read somewhere that it was) or if not, what kind of spectrum and/or bulb should i use for flowering (and right now I'm not really able to pick up an HID system, althoug believe me I KNOW they're so much better, I truly do, it's just not in the cards, atleast not for this grow. Maybe once I have one grow success, I can justify some added expense to my GF).
5) Finally, I have yellowpage.com'd hydroponics supply stores and what-not for my area and came up with nada, is there any listing anywhere that has a list by area of hydro stores, so maybe for this or the next grow I can pick up some better supplies.

Thanks in advance for all the advice, I've already learned so much and hopefully with your help I can be well on my way to garden bliss.

ps. sorry for such the long opening, i just had quite a bit to get out there. No camera right now but hopefully soon I will pick one up so you can see what I'm talking bout.

I am still trying to decide when to start flowring ( I know I'm a ways away). I heard that they get 3 times as lerge while flwering so I don't want to veg them too long and then run out of space. Is that fairly accurate?

Yeah I am curious about the CFL's also I have 3.
I noticed the 1st 2 had a blue emblem on them and the 3rd had a red.
They are all 42 watt.
I lost the packs for the ones I think are blue.
The one I think is red is a GE Cfl 47452.
I looked it up on the ge website and the Ge Cfl 47452 has:

Initial Lumens2700Nominal Initial Lumens per Watt 64Color Temperature2700 KColor Rendering Index (CRI)82

I am trying to relate this to a light spectrum color chart.

If I have 2700 lumens what is that in K. i think k=lumens not sure though.

Since I am using these for veg do I need to keep them further away?

lumens is the intensity of the light (and i believe how far it can penetrate) while kelvins is (I belive) the wavelength of the light which is what gives it a different color. You want to find the bulb with the correct wavelength/color for what stage of growth you're in (i.e. blue for veg, red for flowering there's more detailed articles on this all of the site) and then choose the one whith the highest lumens or lumens/watt.

just a little update.

I have started them on 1/3 - 1/2 strength nutes (just the MG, not the urea, I kinda burned em when i added that the first time) and they are a real nice color. Only working with the floro's however I am planning on picking up some more lights.

the growth is a little slow, but still looks very healthy so I am not that worried, hopefully will pick up the pace after i get some new lights.

Now on my fourth set of leaves (7 point woot-woot).

Anyway, i guess thats it for now so happy growing, thanks for the replies.

Okay, so I took the plunge today and spent my entire grow budget (I save a little from my check each week, so hopefully friday I'll have some more, although prob. kinda tight this week)

I bought (8 26 watt, 1600 lumen, 6500K(daylight) spiral design cfl's. Total 12800 lumens. I have 1 Y-socket w/ 2 more Y-sockets atached for a total of four light sockets over each plant, that's 6400 lumens per plant and i have some pretty high hopes, especially reading some others results when switching from the four foot flourescents that I had to cfl's part way through vegetative state.

Will let everyone know about how it goes?

I have some bad (or maybe not so bad, depending on your opinion) news. My grow log has not been getting very many replies, and i am a bit sorry to say i have decided to close the thread. It's not that i have bad feelings about it,it's just that I've had better responses when posting individual threads about specific questions when they come up.

Maybe I will reopen the journal when I have some better progress. Or when I have the funds to get a digi camera ( I know that helps tremendously)

If someone has been following this and would like me to keep it open, I wouldn't mind that at all. But if not I think I'm going to shut it down. That way I don't have to keep double-posting questions in different threads.

p.s. Once I have this grow down succesfully, I have some big plans on future grows (new method where you get SOG-like growth and results from a single plant) but that's all in the future and I need to worry about getting this first grow under my belt first. Thanks for the responses, sorry if anybody is going to be pissed that I shut the thread down.

Oh, btw, I will be closing it down in a couple days, if you would like to see it kept open, just post a response saying so. If not good luck to all, and hopefully you shall see a new journal from me soon

The journel is more of a log to show your actual grow not so much for questions but you can add them or sometimes you do something people havent seen and they ask you questions on what your doing. Like for instance I would have said "Hope its going good but why did you blow your money on the cfls when for the cost of like $50 you could have gotten a used 400 watt hps light from ebay?" Anyways hopefully you ll keep the journel going on the side for info purposes rather then for concerns which can be posted in the other forums also..Good luck on the grow

yeah, i know it would be better to buy an hps, but i currently have no credit card or checking account (bad credit ). I don't know, it just didn't seem very productive, but then again I'm writing it not reading it, maybe I wont close it after all. Still pretty undecided (a big part of me would hate to see it closed). Thanks for the reply

well, I think I've decided to keep it open. I got thinking about all the threads that I had read and learned so much from and the fact that I didn't post in most of them. I'm not really sure what some one could learn from my journal, but I know nobody will learn anythiing if it's not here.
On another note, my plants are looking wonderful, the best (jessica) has the starts of her 7th node very visible, and is still short and stocky, only 5 inches tall. I will be taking pictures with my girlfriends cell phone and post them up tommorow (in honor of 4/20) and you will get to see a bit of the undergrowth (which I am very excited about)
Guess thats it for now, more tommorow.

well, I finally have a pic to put up, sure, it's crappy and low quality but it does give some idea about what the plant looks like, hopefully soon i can get an actually digi and stop take phone pics. Not really sure how to post pics so hope it works.

Anyway, as for the news, over the weekend a built a gorw box, very cheap and b/c I ran out of duct tape halfway through, not in the best condition, however my plants seem to like it and are growing at a very quick rate now. I built it out of pvc piping, plastic sheeting, and thin mylar sheets from the dollar store. Hopefully soon I'll post pics of that.

Dude you can mail money orders...that's what I do. Keeps you away from a paper trail...I'll tell you though in all honesty and I probably speak for most. My attention span when someone writes a long drawn out message I rarely read it unless some pics are visible.

well, frankly, it's been awhile. Sorry i haven't updated more often, it just gets a little time consuming between working 50 hours a week and having a 3 year old. Most of my "gardening" time is spent on the plants, so not too much left over for writing (most of the net time is spent reading as much as I can). Anyways, some news

- new grow room!!
- clones
- multi-root experiment
- consideration for interesting outdoor grow

I finally built myself a respectable grow room, I built the frame roughly 20-22 inches deep by 3 feet wide by 4 feet high. (this is a rough estimate b/c I had to cut a bit off whenit wouldn't fit in my closet) I used pvc pipe and connectors. Taped plastic sheeting around the sides and taped airtight, taped mylar sheets that i found at the dollar store (i believe their mylar), hooked up a little exhaust fan, made a new hood for my lights, and maybe this weekend I will be light proofing in order to start flowering. I bought a digi thermo/hydro meter, and my temps range between 65 - 85 roughly (usually in the 75 - 80 range) with my humidity between 45% - 60% usually around 50%.
I took two clones (one from each plant) in order to flower and determine sex of mothers but both died and I am planning on just flowering mothers and finding out.
I am currently working on an experiment were I make a cut like a cloning cut on the edge of a branch holding fan leaves (right before the leaf), wrapping it in a papertowel which has been soaked in rooting hormoone, and bending it down to stick in the soil. Important note, I only used the bottom most fan leaves, which were rather small and were quite shaded by the upper fan leaves, I did this with for branches, hoping to end up with four stems and root systems. It has only been two days and so far it hasn't killed my plant (which I was pretty afraid of). I also haven't seen any rapid improvement (which is to be expected).
I am thinking of starting an outdoor grow, hopefully this weekend. I live in a rural area, basically on one of a set of mountains, near the top. It is mostly pine and oak trees in the hills around my house, however, walking in the woods last weekend I discovered a very vibrant green swamp set in a mini-valley inbetween two small hills. It gets quite a bit of sun, is quite secluded (don't know who's property it is, but hadn't seen any signs of human life), the green would help the plants to blend in perfectly (seriously, their is a bright green coating of moss over EVERYTHING) or if I need too, i could plant near some of the pine trees that soround the area, the soil in the swamp, is a very nice rich dark dark brown and therefore probably very full of nutrients, and I figure it must be good for plant life considering, due to our late spring (it has only started in the last week and a half), their was very little green growth on the ground EXCEPT in this one area which was teeming with plants. Any way , I am planning to germinate and start seedling in my house, and then move them out door hopefully this weekend or next, as soon as their ready

Sorry about the long post (I have a habit of doing that) and sorry no pics, hopefully in the next few days (my babies are gorgeous) and maybe some pics of my outdoor location.

Disregard "new" grow room. Forgot I already posted about that.

Well, I finally checked my e-mail and found out that my girlfriend had sent me all the pics that I took some time last week. They are a bit dated, and they plants are MUCH MUCH bigger now, but, I figured I'd post them up anyway, so that yall can get a taste of my babies (not a literal taste, thats reserved for me). I believe there's 2 pics of the undergrowth (man is THAT bigger now) and one just overview. Sorry the pics are so small, I meant to photoshop them larger and clearer, but... I didn't... cuz I'm lazy. So here they are.

p.s. More pics tommorow, I'll have to take them tonight and send them tommorow because I don't get cell service at my house and I have to wait til I go to work in the morning.

well, the GF wants me to go to bed with her so I'll have to keep it short and sweet. Here are some pics... well actually this is just one pic, it is of the both of them. Keep in mind that those pots are 15 inches in diameter.

I started my plants flowering last night, these are the pics from a couple days before. Do you guys think they're ready?

How old are the clones? looking good man, best of luck