Yet Another First Grow...

[grassott]

...I'll have to check out hempy buckets for sure, heard a lot of great stuff about them on the forums...

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=98419

The above link's a good place to start. Hempy grows plants like this...

Believe it or not, this is just one plant grown in a 2 gallon hempy bucket by the man himself. He used 3:1 perlite/vermiculite for his medium. You like?

 

[greengringo]

You like?

¡Me gusta!

What strain is that, grassott? Those are amazing!

 

[budman678]

i use root riots to germinate beans. then, i bury in a beer cup of cooked soil...up pot after about 2 weeks...veg in 2galls...up ppt to 5galls two weeks before flower

 

[grassott]

¡Me gusta!

What strain is that, grassott? Those are amazing!

lol it's Mango Haze. Pricey seeds, about £100 for a 5 pack of seeds or summat. It was hempy's grow. The guy seriously knows his shit and he's very helpful. I'm trying to track him down to get his method of leaf removal.

 

[Timmy123]

Can anybody help me with info about the best lighting. I am a new grower, I just resently got my medical certificate... Yah!! What is the best lights to use. A friend of mine uses 100w cfl lighting, lots of them about 8-10. does this work or would I just be waisting money in electricity. My grow box is 4' x 4'... Help please

 

[greengringo]

Can anybody help me with info about the best lighting. I am a new grower, I just resently got my medical certificate... Yah!! What is the best lights to use. A friend of mine uses 100w cfl lighting, lots of them about 8-10. does this work or would I just be waisting money in electricity. My grow box is 4' x 4'... Help please

Hey Timmy, I'm a novice grower myself (if you read the first post) so I'm not the best guy to ask on the subject. From my personal experience though, this is what I've found out:

-Lots of people will advise you to spend the extra money on a HID light because it will repay you in the results (yield)
-Lots of people will advise you to stick with CFLs if you have literally no budget or factors like heat force you to use them.
-Some people will advise you that CFLs are "good enough" and usually what they mean is, good for a beginner, or that they will physically make the plant grow but haven't seen the difference that a HID will make in the yield to know what they're missing

This is compiled from many people I have met face-to-face that have learned from the time, effort and money they spent in the past, but it generally reflects what you'll read in forums online.
Don't just read a couple threads on the specific subject you're researching: look up more general terms like "lighting" "ventilation" "nutrients" and you will find a larger wealth of info on the net than you thought possible.

Here's my personal theory - replicate nature as lifelike as possible. So look at a CFL bulb on with no shade and then go stand in a room with a HPS and tell me which looks and feels like the sun. If it can't fool you, it won't fool a plant.

Good luck!

 

[greengringo]

Another quick update: as this crop has been harvested, I will bring this thread to a close (after I post some final pictures, that is). All the comments have been quite interesting and helpful, thanks to everyone again! I am quite lucky to say that the harvest was successful, nothing disastrous happened from start to finish and I obtained a respectable first batch. I'm lucky to have gotten anything besides a bunch of dead plants since it's my first attempt, but after chopping, deleafing, drying, trimming, curing and weighing, I ended up with just barely the legal 2 ounces of medicine. Woohoo! I'm officially a legal cannabis farmer!

It wasn't actually too much work to harvest everything, I was expecting a lot more but the work that I did do made the time just fly by. It requires much more patience to undergo the waiting between each step of the process. I harvested two of the three 10 days apart to let the smaller flowers develop more, and by the time I harvested the blue diesel, everything seemed evenly ripe so I harvested the entire thing at once, only plucking larger fan leaves from the stems. I let everything hang to dry slowly in a closet at around 60-65 F, trying to keep the humidity less than 60%. It took about 5-6 days until the flowers were crispy to the touch and not soft and squeezable. I put them in paper bags with the tops folded over for another couple days, then cut the buds from the stems and put them into glass jars. I rolled the jars to mix up the buds and opened the lids daily for a couple weeks. Finally the hygrometers I put inside the jars read under 60% humidity and so I trimmed the sugar leaves off the buds, trying to pluck them from the main stem by their little branch when possible, but otherwise simply snipping the leaf off at the bud as not to disturb or break up the buds. Now I'm only going to open the jars once a week to air them out and wait as long as possible to smoke it. It took about a month after harvest before the flowers are starting to regain their original scent, they had been smelling quite grassy and haylike. They still don't qute smell exactly like they did near the end of their flowering cycle though, especially the G13 haze.

This entire growing project has been a priceless experience, it has been wonderful being able to watch the growth of these beautiful flowers, seeing and smelling how they change throughout their life cycle, something the average medical patient doesn't get to experience even in the day and age that dispensaries are common. It has given me much more respect for the growers and caretakers of these plants and also for the plant and medicine itself.

Onto the next project! See you guys around!

 

[greengringo]

One more quick update for anyone who may stumble across this thread in the future... Since I asked a related question before and it wasn't really cleared up for me, a friend had told me not to connect a fan to air intake because it will create positive pressure which is bad. Later, Raedwulf said that pressure probably wouldn't build up too much and affect the plants in any way, and in reading another thread I finally figured out why positive pressure is "bad"...it causes odor to leak out and defeat the purpose of using any odor control like a carbon scrubber.

Positive pressure isn't harmful to the plants, it's inadvisable because it will cause your grow to reek, which may or may not be good depending on your situation.

That's what forums like this are for, to help put the pieces of the puzzle together...

 

[budman678]

the only thing i would like to add is that you might want to burp the jars more than once a week. initally it is going to be important to really let the moisture naturally escape.

 

[greengringo]

I totally agree with you budman, and that's why I think you must have missed this little bit:

I put them in paper bags with the tops folded over for another couple days, then cut the buds from the stems and put them into glass jars. I rolled the jars to mix up the buds and opened the lids daily for a couple weeks.

So I did burp them twice a day for the first week, once a day for the second week, for progressively shorter periods. I don't think it matters exactly too much, just make sure the moisture doesn't build up.

And I would not put the buds in the paper bags if I could go back and do it over again, the buds that I did that with dried a little too fast methinks and now they're the ones that smell the most "haylike" (or paperbag-like) although they are getting recognizably better each few days with the curing. Curing definitely something that needs frequent attention and a lot of personal experience to get a feel, literally, for how the buds should be. You can start to recognize bad smells when you do something like let too much humidity build or let it dry too much. Sometimes you gotta call it a loss but you can still learn from it and use it to make every one of your next batches even better.

 

[Whipit]

That being said, any cities where you can smoke a joint on your front doorstep and wave to the neighbors without fear is a place I'd like to move to. Any suggestions anyone?

Iran? - Growing cannabis is legal if planted for food purposes as the seeds are eaten by the Iranian people, and companies often draw oil from the seeds which is sold legally. A person is allowed to carry up to 15g of cannabis legally; for every gram above they will be charged 10000 Rials.

You may find other things a bit undesirable.

Nepal? - Technically illegal, but not enforced.

In Peru you can have 8 grams, but they better not catch you with anything else, or you get charged.

Uruguay would be your best choice. Here is the list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis_by_country