G
Guest
I recently got my medical card in Oregon for Degenerative Disk Disease (I've had pain and muscle spasm cycles for ten years or more). My wife and I have been thinking about growing for some time but until we moved to Oregon earlier this summer it wasn't really an option without a medical program.
We live in an apartment and we decided to convert a deep closet (42" deep, 27" wide, 65" to the shelf that forms the top of the cabinet, 9 foot ceiling above) into a grow room. We talked at one point about buying a BloomBox, but decided we could acheive the same thing for much less money ourselves in the closet space. Four hundred watts seemed like a nice neat number - I knew it would definitely produce plenty of bud if other conditions were good,
and anything larger seemed problematic for such a small space.
One of the local grow shops had digi ballasts in stock. I got a 400w Future Brite. It runs quiet and very cool. It turns out that the Sun Tube has built-in socket and wiring assembly, which is GREAT if you have a regular coil ballast, because you don't have to deal with any socket issues and you can just plug it in and in the wiring is beefy as hell. But it SUCKS if you have a digi ballast, because they have a plug pattern that's different from standard ballasts, which means you have to re-wire the reflector. Yes, I'll say that again, if you get a Sun Tube, be prepared to rewire it to work with a digital ballast (you have to cut the male end off the cord build into the reflector, and splice on a male end from the socket that comes with your ballast). In the photo of the space above the cabinet you can see the electrical tape on the wire to the lamp - that's where I worked my magic. It was a little bit fucked up, honestly, and I felt like the grow shop should have given me some heads up instead of leaving me to figure it out for myself and then being like, "Oh, it's a simple wiring issue". I still wasn't sure when I was first setting all the shit up if all of the stuff was going to end up working in that space or not, so cutting the wiring on the $200 reflector was something of a gamble. But I'm stubborn and generally don't hesitate to go hardcore in such a situation, and so the gamble seems to have paid off.
The hood is cooled with a 180cfm CanFan inline blower. I bought the smallest Can Filter I could get which is still way more than I need, but overkill in that department is probably good. For main ventilation I ran about two inches of ducting from the carbon filter to a 30cfm Radio Shack fan in the wall of the cab. The space is 40 cubic feet, so 30cfm yeilds an air exchage every 1.33 minutes, which is pretty good. The temperatures stay 80-82 with the light on, now that the weather is cooling down here. For a few days recently it didn't get below 80 degrees ambient in the apartment (it felt fine because it's not humid here, but it meant the chamber couldn't get below 85 with the light on). That's maybe a little bit high, but I'm planning to add CO2 soon, so that will raise the temperature ceiling by a degree or two.
Air is drawn from the space above the top of the grow chamber inside the closet, and expelled out the door. Cool air comes in the lower part of the chamber (I'm going to add an intake fan at the bottom soon, but it's currently just passive intake) and is pulled through the filter and exhausted at the top.
Top of the cabinet (intake for the reflector hood) and ballast.
Underside of the light. It just fits in the closet.
The closet is to the left of the open door. The light on the right is the T5 CFL, which is only there because we don't have anywhere else to put it since my slow ass hasn't built the veg box yet.
I don't have any indoor grow experience so I wasn't exactly sure how best to approach the ventilation issue. I decided to go with an air-cooled hood. The best thing around here in the shops seemed to be the Sun System Sun Tube. I purchased a 2' T5 CFL made by Sun System and and have been really happy with it, so I decided to go with their stuff again. The Sun Tube is a 6" tube, and as it turns out it's the perfect size for our space. The wing reflectors make it the needed width, and it fits perfectly lengthwise with the ducting in place.
Right now the light is just hung on chains from the rod in the closet. Fortunately, the rod is about an inch off-center, which means I can install a light yo-yo in the center to hang the light and not have to remove the rod. With the light at the top of the cabinet, it's a little under 6 feet off the floor. Even though the height is somewhat limited, the air-cooled hood should allow the light to be closer to the plants than it otherwise could be. The fact that it's a 400 as well should let me use most of the vertical space up to the light without burning the plants. Hopefully I'll be able to work with some sativas and not just have to grow short indica stuff.
Once I got my medical card I started buying the equipment and putting things together, and then about a week later some plants fell into my lap. I met another patient that is growing Dynamite, which won the Oregon Medical Cannabis awards here last year. It's a mostly sativa plant - tall and spindly, thin long leaves, lighter in color. It grows almost like a vine, meaning it's great for SCROG. The patient I got the plants from grows them in a very short (40 vertical inches or so) cabinet with a 400-watt light and trains them on a trellis. He keeps them short and contained and still gets plenty of bud.
As a side note the Dynamite really is aptly named. Dried bud is so sweet it just reeks - the smell is almost fuelly. It has a nice clean motivational high that lasts a while, and still has a relaxing body component as well so it's a good medicinal choice. The plant produces long straight swollen trichomes that cover even much of the leaves. I'm sure it would make excellent hash, although this particular grower hasn't tried making hash out of it.
He gave me three plants that are about a foot tall. They're all somewhat rootbound, and when I got them they were yellow and droopy as you can see in the first picture. In the few days they've been under MH light they've started to perk up and grow. I have improvised some training ties in lieu of fashioning the proper screen for SCROGing. The plants were in small (maybe 3") square pots, and I transplanted them into 5-gallon growbags that are about 2/3 full (so around 3 gallons of soil). Here's a pic the day I got them. They were under HPS light for a couple of days because I hadn't had a chance to get a MH bulb.
Our cabinet is the perfect size for three 1X2 flats with a little room to spare all around. Two plants in 5 gallon bags fit nicely into one of those flats, so that means the closet is well-suited to hold six flowering plants, which is our legal limit. Most of the time it will be exclusively a flowering chamber - I'm planning to build a separate veg box with CFL lights and its own carbon filter.
Rather than build a single screen for the whole closet, I'd like to have each flat have its own screen, so only two plants are fixed to the same screen. This way plants can be taken out two at a time, and also means that multiple strains can be grown.
Which brings me to the other part of the story: some very beautiful and interesting seedlings (plants now) that are unidentified. The week we found out we could start growing we got a bag of bud from someone that normally doesn't ever get seeded bud. It was limey green (a color I have only seen a couple of times) bud that tasted excellent and had a nice balanced high that tended towards the stone. Even though some of the buds were more than lightly seeded, they were still covered in crystals. The buds didn't look like anything I could remember in my direct experience, so I went online and also checked out the Cannabible to see if I could find something that looked similar. The only thing I could find with a color anywhere close to what we had was Northern Lights, but I still wasn't exactly sure.
We also had a few seeds from some good Humboldt bud we had smoked not too long before. It was some airy sativa bood, clearly one of the excellent old-school sativa varities bred for that specific growing climate.
There were about 25 seeds total. We put them between paper towels to germinate and only 2 failed to germ. They were planted in Ocean Forest potting soil in solo cups. Once they sprouted they were placed under an 8000 lumen T5 floro light. They all grew vigorously.
Strain X, the unidentified (non-Humboldt seeds) are now showing strong indica characteristics. They are dark green, and have BROAD leaves and short internode spacing. They seem almost totally indica, so the possibilities are narrowed to something like Afghani, Kush, Northern Lights, Hash Plant, and a few others. It wasn't like any of the Afghani I've smoked in terms of appearance. It looked closer to Kush than almost anything else I can think of, but the distinctive Kush taste wasn't very apparent. It had a totally different calyx structure than Hash Plant, so I think I'm ruling that out. I smoked Northern Lights a couple of times in NYC from one of the delivery services and I remember it being somewhat different, but that was a while ago so it doesn't mean much. It's probably too soon to be able to tell what they are but if anyone has any ideas let me know.
The local shop has SubCulture from General Hydro, so I bought it on a whim. Actually, the idea of using benficial micro-organisms and fungi was not a whim, but I had planned to order some Advanced Nutrients stuff and decided to use something else that was more available for the time being. SubCulture (like Tarantula from Advanced Nutrients) is a powdered mix of micro-organisms that colonize the root area and stimulate root development and nutrient uptake.
The seedlings were all planted between September 13 and Sept. 15, so they are around day 27. They were in the solo cups until about three days ago, and for several days the growth visibly slowed down. They weren't root bound but were getting close to the limits of the volume they had. We transplanted the best-looking twelve into larger pots (all of them were strain X). Since doing that, three of the Humbolt plants have shown female preflowers. Well fuck. We're trying to decide if we should transplant those also (we don't really have room, and they seem stretchy and delicate and not well suited to our purposes) or not. I think out of 12 of the X plants, I should get at least a few females, so I'm willing to take the chance just using them. I don't think the Humbolt plants would really work in our garden.
Even though the females I got from this other guy were a foot tall, they were spindly and starting to yellow. They had also been overpruned, so they only have a couple of top branches which will need to be trained sideways to maximize budsites. So given the few days it took for them to recover from being rootbound, and the time they need to develop more rootmass and vegetation, I think they're roughly on the same schedule as the X plants even though the X plants are much younger. I'm think that roughly another two weeks of vegetation are in order. That should give the Dynamite plants time to branch more, and at the rate the X plants are growing they will be too big if I let them go any longer than that. I'm planning on keeping pruning to a minumum with the X plants, since they're short and compact anyway. I'm waiting to see preflowers. None have shown up yet, but if they show sex before flowering I'll know which ones to transplant and that will save some trouble. Once they are sexed I will probably take a couple of cuttings from each in order to preserve anything choice we might get.
I'm very excited about Strain X. The seeds came from high quality smoke (much better bud than usually contains seeds), and they sprouted and are growing quickly. They're pretty uniform. As you can see in the pictures, there is a little bit of variation between them - some are a little taller and the leaves a little narrower. They are growing into strong plants. Since they are mostly indica, they are suited to our growing needs. Out of the plants we have we should be able to find at least one or two oustanding specimens.
Right now we are mostly just waiting to see what the plants tell us. Hopefully the X plants will show preflowers soon and can then be transplanted again before flowering. The Dynamite plants are perking up and with a little bit of training will be fine plants. I won't get a huge amount of bud off of them but it will be good. The Xs are drinking water pretty fast. I think in the next couple of days I'm going to start giving all of the plants a small amount of Fox Farm Grow Big.
Here's a pic of all of them (12 X, 3 Dynamite) a couple of days ago.
I will keep taking pics and updating. It won't be long at all before these plants are all ready to flower. Yay!
Best of all, this grow is legal. Give praises to the people in the medical cannabis community because they are doing hard but important work.
We live in an apartment and we decided to convert a deep closet (42" deep, 27" wide, 65" to the shelf that forms the top of the cabinet, 9 foot ceiling above) into a grow room. We talked at one point about buying a BloomBox, but decided we could acheive the same thing for much less money ourselves in the closet space. Four hundred watts seemed like a nice neat number - I knew it would definitely produce plenty of bud if other conditions were good,
and anything larger seemed problematic for such a small space.
One of the local grow shops had digi ballasts in stock. I got a 400w Future Brite. It runs quiet and very cool. It turns out that the Sun Tube has built-in socket and wiring assembly, which is GREAT if you have a regular coil ballast, because you don't have to deal with any socket issues and you can just plug it in and in the wiring is beefy as hell. But it SUCKS if you have a digi ballast, because they have a plug pattern that's different from standard ballasts, which means you have to re-wire the reflector. Yes, I'll say that again, if you get a Sun Tube, be prepared to rewire it to work with a digital ballast (you have to cut the male end off the cord build into the reflector, and splice on a male end from the socket that comes with your ballast). In the photo of the space above the cabinet you can see the electrical tape on the wire to the lamp - that's where I worked my magic. It was a little bit fucked up, honestly, and I felt like the grow shop should have given me some heads up instead of leaving me to figure it out for myself and then being like, "Oh, it's a simple wiring issue". I still wasn't sure when I was first setting all the shit up if all of the stuff was going to end up working in that space or not, so cutting the wiring on the $200 reflector was something of a gamble. But I'm stubborn and generally don't hesitate to go hardcore in such a situation, and so the gamble seems to have paid off.
The hood is cooled with a 180cfm CanFan inline blower. I bought the smallest Can Filter I could get which is still way more than I need, but overkill in that department is probably good. For main ventilation I ran about two inches of ducting from the carbon filter to a 30cfm Radio Shack fan in the wall of the cab. The space is 40 cubic feet, so 30cfm yeilds an air exchage every 1.33 minutes, which is pretty good. The temperatures stay 80-82 with the light on, now that the weather is cooling down here. For a few days recently it didn't get below 80 degrees ambient in the apartment (it felt fine because it's not humid here, but it meant the chamber couldn't get below 85 with the light on). That's maybe a little bit high, but I'm planning to add CO2 soon, so that will raise the temperature ceiling by a degree or two.
Air is drawn from the space above the top of the grow chamber inside the closet, and expelled out the door. Cool air comes in the lower part of the chamber (I'm going to add an intake fan at the bottom soon, but it's currently just passive intake) and is pulled through the filter and exhausted at the top.
Top of the cabinet (intake for the reflector hood) and ballast.
Underside of the light. It just fits in the closet.
The closet is to the left of the open door. The light on the right is the T5 CFL, which is only there because we don't have anywhere else to put it since my slow ass hasn't built the veg box yet.
I don't have any indoor grow experience so I wasn't exactly sure how best to approach the ventilation issue. I decided to go with an air-cooled hood. The best thing around here in the shops seemed to be the Sun System Sun Tube. I purchased a 2' T5 CFL made by Sun System and and have been really happy with it, so I decided to go with their stuff again. The Sun Tube is a 6" tube, and as it turns out it's the perfect size for our space. The wing reflectors make it the needed width, and it fits perfectly lengthwise with the ducting in place.
Right now the light is just hung on chains from the rod in the closet. Fortunately, the rod is about an inch off-center, which means I can install a light yo-yo in the center to hang the light and not have to remove the rod. With the light at the top of the cabinet, it's a little under 6 feet off the floor. Even though the height is somewhat limited, the air-cooled hood should allow the light to be closer to the plants than it otherwise could be. The fact that it's a 400 as well should let me use most of the vertical space up to the light without burning the plants. Hopefully I'll be able to work with some sativas and not just have to grow short indica stuff.
Once I got my medical card I started buying the equipment and putting things together, and then about a week later some plants fell into my lap. I met another patient that is growing Dynamite, which won the Oregon Medical Cannabis awards here last year. It's a mostly sativa plant - tall and spindly, thin long leaves, lighter in color. It grows almost like a vine, meaning it's great for SCROG. The patient I got the plants from grows them in a very short (40 vertical inches or so) cabinet with a 400-watt light and trains them on a trellis. He keeps them short and contained and still gets plenty of bud.
As a side note the Dynamite really is aptly named. Dried bud is so sweet it just reeks - the smell is almost fuelly. It has a nice clean motivational high that lasts a while, and still has a relaxing body component as well so it's a good medicinal choice. The plant produces long straight swollen trichomes that cover even much of the leaves. I'm sure it would make excellent hash, although this particular grower hasn't tried making hash out of it.
He gave me three plants that are about a foot tall. They're all somewhat rootbound, and when I got them they were yellow and droopy as you can see in the first picture. In the few days they've been under MH light they've started to perk up and grow. I have improvised some training ties in lieu of fashioning the proper screen for SCROGing. The plants were in small (maybe 3") square pots, and I transplanted them into 5-gallon growbags that are about 2/3 full (so around 3 gallons of soil). Here's a pic the day I got them. They were under HPS light for a couple of days because I hadn't had a chance to get a MH bulb.
Our cabinet is the perfect size for three 1X2 flats with a little room to spare all around. Two plants in 5 gallon bags fit nicely into one of those flats, so that means the closet is well-suited to hold six flowering plants, which is our legal limit. Most of the time it will be exclusively a flowering chamber - I'm planning to build a separate veg box with CFL lights and its own carbon filter.
Rather than build a single screen for the whole closet, I'd like to have each flat have its own screen, so only two plants are fixed to the same screen. This way plants can be taken out two at a time, and also means that multiple strains can be grown.
Which brings me to the other part of the story: some very beautiful and interesting seedlings (plants now) that are unidentified. The week we found out we could start growing we got a bag of bud from someone that normally doesn't ever get seeded bud. It was limey green (a color I have only seen a couple of times) bud that tasted excellent and had a nice balanced high that tended towards the stone. Even though some of the buds were more than lightly seeded, they were still covered in crystals. The buds didn't look like anything I could remember in my direct experience, so I went online and also checked out the Cannabible to see if I could find something that looked similar. The only thing I could find with a color anywhere close to what we had was Northern Lights, but I still wasn't exactly sure.
We also had a few seeds from some good Humboldt bud we had smoked not too long before. It was some airy sativa bood, clearly one of the excellent old-school sativa varities bred for that specific growing climate.
There were about 25 seeds total. We put them between paper towels to germinate and only 2 failed to germ. They were planted in Ocean Forest potting soil in solo cups. Once they sprouted they were placed under an 8000 lumen T5 floro light. They all grew vigorously.
Strain X, the unidentified (non-Humboldt seeds) are now showing strong indica characteristics. They are dark green, and have BROAD leaves and short internode spacing. They seem almost totally indica, so the possibilities are narrowed to something like Afghani, Kush, Northern Lights, Hash Plant, and a few others. It wasn't like any of the Afghani I've smoked in terms of appearance. It looked closer to Kush than almost anything else I can think of, but the distinctive Kush taste wasn't very apparent. It had a totally different calyx structure than Hash Plant, so I think I'm ruling that out. I smoked Northern Lights a couple of times in NYC from one of the delivery services and I remember it being somewhat different, but that was a while ago so it doesn't mean much. It's probably too soon to be able to tell what they are but if anyone has any ideas let me know.
The local shop has SubCulture from General Hydro, so I bought it on a whim. Actually, the idea of using benficial micro-organisms and fungi was not a whim, but I had planned to order some Advanced Nutrients stuff and decided to use something else that was more available for the time being. SubCulture (like Tarantula from Advanced Nutrients) is a powdered mix of micro-organisms that colonize the root area and stimulate root development and nutrient uptake.
The seedlings were all planted between September 13 and Sept. 15, so they are around day 27. They were in the solo cups until about three days ago, and for several days the growth visibly slowed down. They weren't root bound but were getting close to the limits of the volume they had. We transplanted the best-looking twelve into larger pots (all of them were strain X). Since doing that, three of the Humbolt plants have shown female preflowers. Well fuck. We're trying to decide if we should transplant those also (we don't really have room, and they seem stretchy and delicate and not well suited to our purposes) or not. I think out of 12 of the X plants, I should get at least a few females, so I'm willing to take the chance just using them. I don't think the Humbolt plants would really work in our garden.
Even though the females I got from this other guy were a foot tall, they were spindly and starting to yellow. They had also been overpruned, so they only have a couple of top branches which will need to be trained sideways to maximize budsites. So given the few days it took for them to recover from being rootbound, and the time they need to develop more rootmass and vegetation, I think they're roughly on the same schedule as the X plants even though the X plants are much younger. I'm think that roughly another two weeks of vegetation are in order. That should give the Dynamite plants time to branch more, and at the rate the X plants are growing they will be too big if I let them go any longer than that. I'm planning on keeping pruning to a minumum with the X plants, since they're short and compact anyway. I'm waiting to see preflowers. None have shown up yet, but if they show sex before flowering I'll know which ones to transplant and that will save some trouble. Once they are sexed I will probably take a couple of cuttings from each in order to preserve anything choice we might get.
I'm very excited about Strain X. The seeds came from high quality smoke (much better bud than usually contains seeds), and they sprouted and are growing quickly. They're pretty uniform. As you can see in the pictures, there is a little bit of variation between them - some are a little taller and the leaves a little narrower. They are growing into strong plants. Since they are mostly indica, they are suited to our growing needs. Out of the plants we have we should be able to find at least one or two oustanding specimens.
Right now we are mostly just waiting to see what the plants tell us. Hopefully the X plants will show preflowers soon and can then be transplanted again before flowering. The Dynamite plants are perking up and with a little bit of training will be fine plants. I won't get a huge amount of bud off of them but it will be good. The Xs are drinking water pretty fast. I think in the next couple of days I'm going to start giving all of the plants a small amount of Fox Farm Grow Big.
Here's a pic of all of them (12 X, 3 Dynamite) a couple of days ago.
I will keep taking pics and updating. It won't be long at all before these plants are all ready to flower. Yay!
Best of all, this grow is legal. Give praises to the people in the medical cannabis community because they are doing hard but important work.
Last edited:
-ing
then you are doing a great job IMHO..whats you soils ph
