I started my first grow before I found this site with all its info, so my plants are in Miracle Grow Potting Soil with time release nutrients. 7 gallon pots and they are doing fine, thank you very much. Just about ready to harvest. I’ve been giving them a little bloom fertilizer since they started to flower to bump the P and K up, but it’s still in the same soil. Zero grow nutrients ever added.
Your real problem is photo-period. If these are autoflower seeds then you should be fine, but if not then you really need to give them supplemental light so they get more like 18 hours a day for a couple of months. Then you can stop and let the short winter days throw them into flower. If frost is forecast, bring them inside. You probably have to bring them inside anyway to give them more light. Once you do go to flowering mode, give them 12 hour nights with total darkness or you will screw them up.
In terms of sprouting: I would give them a few more days to see if they come up. If not you might have to go seed hunting and germinate them with a wet paper towel like most people here. Can’t help you on this, mine are all from clones.
Not trying to tell anyone what to do, but, FoxFarms nutes are the absolute best i have used. I start with FoxFarms Happy Frog soil. I use BigGrow in veg state and go to BigBloom when it sexes. Then i start using Open Sesame with the BigBloom weekly. Half way thru flower cycle i change to Beasty Bloom along with the BigBloom weekly. As the plant gets toward the last weeks i add ChaChing and stop all other nutes. Then i flush with clear water for 1 week before harvest. I hope this helps.
I totally agree @Fepony FF makes great products for plants. I use the 3-pack (BigBloom, GrowBig, Tiger Bloom). Never thought about mixing blooms at veg & flower stages. Makes sense though.
I compared the NPK numbers with a fertilizer that a friend with a massive outdoor grow uses and the FoxFarms fertilizers seem to be way more toned down. The other fertilizer had an NPK of something like 10-50-20 or something while FF is more like 2-8-6
It’s the ratio that matters. High numbers just mean its more concentrated so you dilute it more before application. The numbers that matter are in the final solution, including the water.
Other topic: Autoflowers should grow and bloom anytime of year, as long as they don’t freeze. They just will get bigger (and better yield) if you grow them with long hours of summer sun. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try for multiple crops per year.
