The most basic and effective growing techniques and setup.

I found two seeds in some pot I bought the other day. I let them germinate to see if I could get them to, and one of them seems to be. It has a tiny, white sprout starting to break through. I think I might try to grow them just to experiment with it and see how it turns out.

A while back, I found a series of pretty good, in depth videos on youtube explaining a lot of stuff, but it was for a setup a little larger and more complicated than what I'm looking to do. Does anyone have any suggestions, ideas or know on a really minimal, basic, cheap and effective way to grow?

I was thinking of maybe just planting in a simple pot with some good soil or maybe using some rockwool and devising a really simple and crude hydroponics system for only a couple plants out of hardware store parts. I was going to put the plants on one half of my closet, probably a 72 square foot area (4L x 3D x 6H). I could use the rail to hang clothes for hanging lights as well and there should be room for a little fan.

Any suggestions on this idea? What would be the simplest route? Good, effective cheap lights? And when do I know the sprout is ready to plant? I'm going to do some research on the forums, but just wanted to get this out there first.

 

the seed is ready to plant as soon as the root breaks out of the seed, but you can germinate it for a couple more days if you want a strong root.

id go with some florescent tubes to hang from the rail, cheap and effective

if this is your first time growing, might as well get some potting soil, dont need to go all out with a hydro system for a couple plants - just an opinion, you can if you want to obviously lol

Any type of fan will work and since its in a closet you can set it practically anywhere and air will circulate

Try to get a couple more seeds, you wouldn't want to do all this work to find out you have a male plant.. i think its 60% chance of female and 40% chance of male.. even with one female plant you can still clone her and have as many as you want

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I might just stick with soil. Tomorrow I'll go out to the gardening center and try to get some top notch soil. If I get good soil, should I have to worry about adding nutrients to the water? If so, what? I'm having a hard time finding straight forward a good, basic soil/mixture to use. With the lighting, would those small coiled florescent tubes work? I don't want to spend loads of money getting fixtures and on different red and blue spectrum bulbs or what not.

 

You might want to get some soil without fertilizers in it so you can add the right stuff at the right time. The soil im using has only "natural" stuff like worm castings, bone meal, blood meal, seaweed extract and some other things

For fertilizer you want to use something high in Nitrogen during the Vegetative state and something high in Potassium during the Flowering state. Pretty much the opposite of what you use in the Veg state..

(N-P-K) example
Vegetative: 30-20-10 fert
Flowering: 10-20-30 fert

CFL's work, though you might need a few of them depending on how large of a plant you want to grow. Fluorescent Tube Fixtures are fairly cheap, around $25 or $35 with bulbs around $5 - compared to the $50+ for a HID Metal Halide fixture and $20+ for a MH bulb

But I have seen some nice grows with CFL's

 

Quick note. Since you dont know the age of the seed i would of advise you to rest it in a paper bag in a cool dark place first for a few months before planting it. This will improve the germination rate and will grow healthier plants. Mj seeds and most other plants come to that really dont grow well if ya plant then straight after being produced by the plant. In the wild they would hang around in the soil waiting for the next season to grow. But ya never know you might get lucky.

 

So here is a picture of my small setup. I spent about $40 overall. I went off basic instructions. I bought some good potting soil, some perlite and bought some dried blood just because I thought it would be cool to have a bag of dried blood. lol

I bought the cheapest fixtures I could find at walmart and just hung them from an extra bit of plank in the garage and used my middle school science fair skills to wire them. I plan on making another one and maybe adding two more fixtures to the existing just to be certain I have good lighting coverage in the space. I don't know if I can really overkill with the lights, I know it could effect temperature, but not too much, plus I can always turn one or two lights on off as needed.

I had a giant roll of industrial shrink wrap in the garage, so I used that to line the closet and floor and sprayed tons of disinfectant before putting the pots in. I was going to go out and buy some really nice reflective stuff, but I think this will work for my budget, at least for now.

I don't know if I've really done anything wrong. I really struggled at the gardening center on what I should get when it comes to soils and nutrients.
If they don't grow it's no biggie. I was mostly doing it just out of fun. I'm not adding anything to the water right now because I'm not exactly certain on what I should add and how much and don't want to spend the money until I am. Right now I'm just watering enough to keep the soil damp all the time and the lights are about 2 inches above the top of the soil.

My friends dad grew some really nice plants out in his garden last year for the hell of it. He just planted some seeds and didn't pay them any mind and they grew nice and tall and had big, fat sticky buds. You could smell them as soon as you pulled in the driveway, and the plants were probably 50 yards from the driveway. Him and his girlfriend are talking about growing in the attic and have a few plants in the garden again this year.

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looks great!

 

Thanks man. I already see a little green sprout starting to pop through from one of the seeds I planted yesterday morning. So far I have 4 seeds planted in 4 pots and plan on adding at least two more. I'm going to try to get around to adding the extra lights today or tomorrow. I'm really eager to get that done.

Last night before going to bed, I put some clear plastic around the pots to try to get a greenhouse affect to see how that would do for the seeds. I'm not sure if it promoted the sprout to pop through or not. It kept the soil nice and moist, but the temperature got to around 90 degrees, maybe a little more, so I took it off in fear of the heat.