1st Grow Journal: White Widow fem. in 4x4 tent with 240w qb

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Hello, I recently decided to invest almost $1k on a setup and I was hoping to get some guidance along the way while I share my experience. I got 20 white widow fem. seeds from ILGM and I just placed 4 germinated seeds into soil/perlite. I used the paper towel method for 4 days. I had 5 seeds but only 4 germinated. I saved the other and will try again next grow around. If anyone would like to follow, I plan to update this at least once a week, more if I run into any problems.

Supplies:
4x4 ac infinity tent
6" ac infinity ventilation w/carbon filter
240w EnFun EF-2000 LM301B diodes w/meanwell driver
10 liters organic coarse perlite
24 quarts FoxFarm Happy Frog soil
FoxFarm Trio Soil Formula: Big Bloom, Grow Big, Tiger Bloom
Botanicare Cal-Mag Plus
Digital PH Meter
Scrog net kit
Humidifier and Dehumidifier
Hygrometer
5-pack 3 gallon fabric pots
Digital Programmable Timer with backup battery
25.8 OZ Ona
20 White Widow Feminized Seeds from ILGM.com

I didn’t get enough soil, but I just ordered some more. I didn’t want to have to transplant any of them but it is what it is. I put about 1"-2" of perlite at the bottom of the pots then mixed about 30% perlite with the soil. I didn’t know the soil already had some perlite in it so I probably wont even mix it next time.

I plan on topping each plant at least once and utilizing LST with lollipopping to optimize the yield. I’ve done my research as best I can and it seems pretty straightforward, but now I’m ready to get my hands dirty and try it out. Hopefully some more experienced users can help guide me along the way as I’m sure I will have questions. For the rest of this week I’m going to keep a close eye on the seedlings and try to wait for the soil to dry out, but not get too dry meanwhile doing my best not to drown the little ones.

As for the more advanced users, is there anything that you would change or have done differently? The only thing I’m worried about is not having enough light, on the amazon page it says veg footprint is 4x4ft but flowering is only 4x3.5ft. However it also says the line between the boards is 70cm, enough to illuminate more plants. Footprint can be greater than 4FT. Link to LED light: Amazon.com

[CMichGrower]

No reply’s after 5 hours? Where’s randy?

I think you’ve got a great setup but agree that the light won’t be enough to flower a 4x4 tent. In general it’s suggested that you need 35-50 watts per square foot. At 16 square foot that would suggest that you need 560 watts minimum. 16x35=560.

You’ll need another one of those lights for a 4x4 to flower your plants.

[Mark0427]

My 240w enfun setup says flowers a 2x4 but id say be better for a 2x2 maybe 3x3. Mine dont have a meanwell driver tho said meanwell on the site but came with something other than. Hlg loghts make a whole difference over them lights so u know. I did a grow with all enfuns on autos they seemed hard and nice on the plant growing. Dry and cure and they got way soft and airy like. Figured ok maybe its the seeds so i did the same seeds same room same all but light i used 2x 260xls and 2x hlg 30uva bars and got some hard buds. Not quite as hard and dense as photos bring but way harder than the enfun boards brought. Here is my boards i used. And driver

[Mark0427]

Does the uv chips work on your boards???

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

The UV lights turn on when I flip the switch over to flower mode. I’m under the impression that the lights I got have really good diodes from Samsung. They are the LM301B version which provides 2.7 umol/J efficiency and max yield claims to be 2.5g/watt. so 240w x 2.5g = 600g which would suggest that it is about equivalent to a 600w HPS light. I guess time will tell in the end.

I see one has turned bright green so far

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

After the first week plant #2 has a clear lead over the other 3. I went ahead and played with getting 1 gallon of water at ph 6.0 and then I added 15ml of big grow and 2ml of Cal-Mag plus. I started using that mix today and gave each plant about 2oz of it and will continue to do so for the next week.

[CMichGrower]

@iGrowWeAllGrow Don’t adjust the pH until you finish adding things. Some things you add can be extremely acidic and you can do damage if you don’t pH water before feeding.

Happy Frog soil has plenty of nutrients for first month or so. You need to get your girls established before pushing Grow Big.

Cal-mag isn’t needed yet either. I find it a good practice once they start flowering to avoid late flower die off of leaves. You can wait on the cal-mag until you see the first flowers forming.

Print off a copy of the Fox Farms Feeding Schedule for yourself, you can get it from their web site. When you do start feeding you need to keep the ratios of the various products within a certain range. Here is a picture of mine for reference.

You’ll see that when you get to flower you’ll be using all three products at the same time. You mix the various products in the ratio shown in your water, and adjust pH before feeding the plants.

Once you start feeding you’ll have to flush every 3-4 weeks or so to eliminate buildup of salts. A shortcoming of Fox Farms nutrients. The flushing is represented by the light blue vertical bars that say Sledgehammer. You can flush with many gallons of clean water if you’d rather not buy another product.

As you see in the narrative at the top, the pH of the feeding should be in the 6.3-6.8 range. You should let that range vary from feeding to feeding since different nutrients are utilized better by the plant at different pH levels. If you feed at exactly the same pH every time you’ll give preference to certain elements over others.

At the top of the chart, in dark blue bars, are the EC and PPM. These are the same thing, just different ways to measure it. The EC is an universally accepted measurement and if your pen uses an EC scale then you can use that. The PPM is NOT a universally accepted number and can actually be one of three accepted standards. The PPM on the chart is based on a 700 scale which is more common in Europe then a 500 scale used in the United States. If you don’t know what scale your meter is in ask, it’s easy to figure out.

I’ll use week 3 as an example, If you were to mix 6 teaspoons of Big Bloom and 2 tsp of Grow Big in 1 gallon of water with low ppm such as distilled water or RO (reverse osmosis), then your EC reading should fall in the range shown at the top of the feeding schedule, or between 1.8-2.1.

This only works until week 4 because the EC readings at that point onward include the products in the purple section of the chart. Open Sesame, Beastie Bloomz and Cha Ching. They are used for building buds.

If you have questions I’d be more then happy to help but you’ll have to put the @ sign before my name for me to see it. If you type the @ sign you’ll see a list of people who have responded to this thread so you can just select the name rather then trying to remember exactly what it is.

I’m in the minority here I’m sure, but I believe in giving large pots of soil a good soaking every 7-10 days. I feel the soil needs to be wetted throughout to establish good healthy roots. If you have dry potting soil and only water a tiny bit a day the roots will never grow beyond your little puddle of water because when they reach the dry soil they will just die off. I always give my pots a good soaking before putting the seed in, the just keep an eye on it so that the top of the pot doesn’t dry out before the roots get established. After roots established I’ll just give another good watering every 4-5 days so the roots keep growing. I think the little bit of water in a circle around the plant every day doesn’t cut it, but again, I’m probably in the minority on that so do what you want. If you have more then one plant maybe you’ll want to experiment for yourself and see what works best.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

@CMichGrower Thanks for taking the time to read my journal and help. I checked the ph after I read your response and it definitely changed. Yes, I still had the feeding mixture saved sitting out at room temperature. Which was my biggest mistake so far. I didn’t realize that it was only good for a couple of hours. Could this be why plant #3 (Pic below) looks like it has wrinkles? Also I just have a really cheap digital PH meter from amazon that doesn’t say anything about EC/PPM so how bad will it be for me to completely ignore it?

I took your advice and decided to give them more water and that made it easier because I only had to water them about every 3 days. When it does come time to flush them do I literally pour about 2-3 gallons of regular tap water over each one all at once?

Thanks!

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Here they are at the end of week 2. Why does plant #4 have a really small 2nd leaf on the left side?

[CMichGrower]

You won’t have to flush for a while, but when you do, flushing with plain water is one choice. Some say a gallon of water for gallon of soil.

You can also use a product like Sledgehammer that allows for a flush with far less water.

As long as the plants are growing don’t worry so much about every little deformity, happens. You just need to keep them alive until they take off.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 3 is here already. Last week I went ahead and transplanted plant #3 and it seems to be doing just fine. I also increased the light intensity as well as moved them up to 24" from the top of plant #4.

I sacrificed a little shelf I had so I can get a bowl under the plants to make life easier. I think when it comes time to buy soil again I’m going to just put together a DiY DWC system. I spent almost $100 on soil/perlite this go around and just barely have enough, while a whole DWC system only costs a little bit more.

[CMichGrower]

Don’t order soil online, it costs way to much, even with “free” shipping.

I can get 2 cubic feet bags of Fox Farms soil locally for $16.95 a bag. That’s 12 gallons or four 3 gallon pots worth.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

@CMichGrower Unfortunately, the only way I can get anything is if it is shipped to me, but I checked on the plants this morning and noticed light streaking in some of the leaves and on one of them its deteriorating the the leaf near the stem. I’m trying to figure out what it could be, since there is a hole in one of the leaves I’m leaning towards leaf septoria, what do you think? It was very rainy this past week and I turned the lights up so it was wet and hot in there, but it does have really good air flow.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

I decided I am going to try quad lining plant #2. Yesterday I cut nodes 1 and 2 off. Today I just cut the top off and I saved all the cuttings to try to experiment with cloning. I ended up with 14 potential clones, but only a few of them look promising. I just put them in a cup of ph 5.8-6.4 water next to a window sill that gets lots of sun all day and I plan to change the water every day or every other day.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Its week 4 and I just topped plants #3 and #4. Plant #3 has been growing weird and off balance, I trimmed some of the smaller nodes that didn’t look like they were really doing anything. I also tied plant #2 down and no progress on the clones as of yet.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 5

I’m going to flush this week as the tips on the leaves, old and new, are slightly changing to a bright color and some of them are starting to have this weird look in the center that is a lighter color. Hopefully flushing will get things back to normal.

Plant #2

Plant #1

Plant #4

Plant #3

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 6: its hard not to flip now but I’m trying to be patient and get maximum yield. I decided to put the net up and start filling that up. I topped plant #1 and switched the 2 plants on the left. So starting in the top right going clockwise its now 1,2,4,3. Plant #4 has some browning in the older leaves, I think its related to giving too much of the phosphorous nutrients.

This week I plan on trying to dial in the nutrient amounts and spreading the plants out in the net. I turned the lights up all the way, but heat is getting to be a problem. I try to keep it below 84, so far so good. Also the power went out for 3 hours during the evening, I opened the tent and luckily I got a window that shines right on them so hopefully they just thought it was cloudy.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 7: I couldn’t resist lol I gave them 13hours of dark last night and set the timer to 12/12.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 8: I’m running out of net space. I flushed plant #4 with about 1ml of cal mag as I now believe the browning is due to cal mag deficiency, but the rest of the plant looks healthy.

I can see lots of little hairs on plant #3 (back left corner) definitely a female. I can see little hairs like that on all of them just to be clear, no balls as far as I can tell.

Gnats ended up getting to the clones so I came up with a solution to keep the gnats away. I put a glass jar over a yogurt container with an air stone in it. I cut one of the small branches that wasn’t going to make it to the net off plant #2 and a few days before I flipped them I topped plant #1 in an attempt to clone again. The first pic below is the top from plant #1 I think I had it too close to the light bulb but moving it back didn’t stop the leaves from closing up, not sure if this is dead or what, but I’m changing the water every week and checking the ph daily.

[iGrowWeAllGrow]

Week 9: 2 days ago my lights got disconnected during the day for roughly 2 hours, I don’t think it affected anything. I also did some defoliation, if you can even tell.