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username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

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username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja username » 12.9.2017 20:21

You are going to need a few basic things before you start throwing plants around.
It depends on what kind of quality of items you wish to have, but all this should not cost you more than 1000€, and should be easily much cheaper than 1000€ if you just shop around.



Equipment list:

--The first thing you need is a one meter squared place to grow your plants without showing anybody. If it is in your kerrostalo bedroom for 2½ months, you can keep people out of there, otherwise they will say wtf is THAT!? You can buy a 1m2 tent for growing in that is 300€ or less that can make life easier, otherwise you need to make yourself a lightproof box with circular holes for ducting and electrical wires. These tents are having white plastic on the inside to make it light proof and more reflective. They have some holes with a drawstring to pull tightly around vents and cords.

--Something to grow them in, either pots or a hydroponics system. While hydroponics may seem complicated to the beginner, it is very simple, and easy to use, and produces better results in both health\vitality and yield.
Let us assume you are not ready to take the leap to hydroponics yet.

Get some ~5 liter pots to start off with, and some 15-30L pots to transplant your plants in when they get root bound. I measured my 1m2 into 4X4 sections and determined what size pots I should buy at the store, so that I could buy 16 square shaped pots, and fill the whole space. I grew in smaller pots until they were ready to transplant into the 16 pots. The reason you do not start the plants off in the big pots is because their roots need to fully take over a small area first, otherwise if you put them straight into the big pots, the root runners go straight down and all over the pot, and it stays too wet for too long, and then you can likely get root rot, retarding growth. Get some saucers to put underneath your pots so that when you water, the water does not spill all over the floor into your grow space.

--You need dirt, get big bags of mustamulta from your local big grocery store, especially if they have an outdoor plant section, or a local nursery.

--Some lamps\lights to make your plants grow. At minimum, get a 400w HPS lamp, at maximum 600w HPS. You need a ballast, socket, wires, and a light bulb.

--As part of the temperature and odor control, you also need a glass cooltube(including a socket, it is a basic reflector with a glass tube for putting the bulb in so the heat does not radiate all over your plants), some ducting that fits to your cooltube, and a fan that also fits the same size(120mm, 160mm or whatever the exact measurements are, get something like that). Get a carbon filter that fits to the same size as your cooltube, ducting, and fan.

--Some fertilizer. Special fertilizer designed for your needs like plagron, canna, biobizz, etc.

--a 10 or 20liter jug with a lid for mixing fertilizer and watering your plants.

-- some electrical gear: wires for wiring up the lamp to plug it in and maybe for your fan also if it did not come with wires, extension cords for running the electricity into your one meter grow space, and a timer. Don't be surprised if you have to return timers to the stores you got them from, they commonly break, and there are bigger things called switches that never break, but they are 300€, not 3€. Just check frequently to see if your timer is still working, otherwise if it breaks and the light stays on all the time, in about a week and a half you see new leaves, not more bud.

--some plants

Assembling Your Growspace:

So you need to put your grow space together safely..
If you did not get a tent, the cheapest way to go about this is to mark from the corner a one meter square. Put a mark on the floor and the ceiling so that you have marked out your square up and down. Then take a drill and make a hole on each mark, the floor and ceiling. Put one of those little plastic pieces in the holes so screws can go inside and expand. Drill holes into two little blocks of wood, and attach them to the places you marked. From here, you can simply buy some velcro adhesive stickers from Beeltema and stick them on the blocks of wood along with some double or triple sided opaque plastic from the growshop. This lets you open and gets inside, but keeps light from getting in or out, along with the air flow working as it should be. Cut X's in your plastic to insert ducting\wiring and tape them shut again.

Let's assume you went the tent route, because it is easy as setting up a tent in 30minutes or less, and going right to work. After setting up your tent, you should use the straps it came with for hanging things. First, attach your carbon filter to your fan, and duct tape around it so it doesnt just fall apart and is airtight, and make sure your wiring is correct if you needed to do wiring, by plugging it in and testing it. Then hang the carbon filter and fan inside the tent. Let's set up your light. You need a cord long enough to get to your ballast. The ballast can be hanging inside the top of your tent, or to make it cooler, outside the tent on a stone or some place that is not a fire hazard. The instructions on the ballast should be simple, but if not you can take a picture of it and post it here and ask somebody if it looks right. If it is not right, your bulb can explode, but it isn't a big deal, just buy a new one for 50e if this happens. From the cooltube, you have positive(blue) and negative(black or brown) wires, and a little screw to ground the lamp(green wire goes here). Don't touch the HPS bulb with your fingers; wipe it off thoroughly in case you got some finger oils on it, or else it could explode(again buy a new bulb for 50€). From the ballast, another wire goes to plug into the wall socket. These wires might require you to strip some wires to get some metal exposed for going into the holes at the lamp or ballast, and wire cutters come in handy here.

Hang your lamp at least one meter from the plants; your new small plants are sensitive! Attach the air ducting from the cooltube, and lead it outside of your tent. Attach another piece of the ducting to the fan which sucks air from the carbon filter, and attach it to the entrance hole of the cooltube. You can also have your fan and filter on the outside of the tent and have it sucking air from the tent, then scrubbing it on the outside, but I think it works better to pull air inside the filter, and push it out somewhere from there. Now you should have your lights plugged in with the wires running out of your grow space, and the air coming in from a bottom vent hole of your tent, up into the carbon filter, through the fan, then through ducting into the cooltube, then out the other side of the cooltube through more ducting, and out through the upper part of your tent into your living space. As a rule of thumb, keep your electric work above your waist, and water works below the waist. Is everything working? Good; now you are ready to grow something. Keep your fan and filter on 24/7, all the way til the end of harvest. It is especially important that you have constantly flowing air through your grow space near the end, when humidity levels should be very low, because you risk bud rot(your bud will just rot on the plant).

Gardening time:

You need to fill up all your small pots with mustamulta\black dirt. If your are looking through seeds to find a good one, this part is important: You should mix up the dirt so it is even, all the same consistency. Pour all the dirt into a bathtub or something, then mix it all up. This way you will not have some patches of dirt that are rich, and some parts that are poor, ensuring you the ability to properly decide which plants have done better. Otherwise you can not know why one did much better than the others. The bags of dirt come from all over the place at the distributor, and were probably not laying side by side. I have also had great results not mixing the soil, and just pouring them into pots, but just make sure the dirt has no big clods and clumps in it so that the roots can easily get through. This also means don't press on the dirt, leave it loose enough so the roots don't have to fight as hard.

So all your small pots are filled with dirt, and you need some plants to put in them. You could go the seed route, but that is always a crapshoot, no matter who you get your seeds from. My quota of approximately 400grams depends on the plants you put in your growspace. With a known cut you will get ~400g, but with seeds you will likely get 200-300g. If you are going the seed route it does matter a great deal who you get your seeds from. If you get them from some guy here on the forum, he probably just chucked pollen from his best male to his best female out of his 25 plants. He likely did not cross the children back to his mother and finish working the line until it was inbred, boxed in genetics to get a more or less similar result from every seed. This means that if you grow his seeds, out of 25 seeds, one plant will likely be beautiful, while the rest are very fluffy with very small pods, and look very wild. The effects are similar. For these reasons, I urge you when planting seeds to buy them from a known breeder that has an excellent reputation. I can personally recommend Barney's Farm, Rare Dankness, Reserva Privada, Bushy Old Grower, and Archive. There are so many I recommend you do not buy from, I would have to open another thread for that, so don't just go buying random seeds unless you are sure the breeder knows what he is doing, and has the dankest of nugs. That being said, you still need to take a clone of your best plant at some time during the grow if you plan on keeping it to get a better harvest next season; even if you must cut the clone on harvest day, it is possible to make it root. This allows you to have a full square meter of maximum yield and the maximum quality you have available to you. Now after all this, I highly urge you to use a known clone. People did not keep them for no reason, and they have done all the work for you, saving you time and money of having to go through all these seeds to find a winner. You will know what you are going to expect this way. Second of all, you do not need to vegetate using clones, because the sexual maturity timer in the plant has already gone off, making it think it is old enough to bloom. If you just put a seed under 12\12 lighting, it will vegetate until it realizes it is sexually mature, then starts to bloom. In contrast, a clone will immediately start blooming. The time it takes to finish blooming is determined by genetics, and should go from 8 weeks to 13 weeks. There are some I have grown up to 16 weeks, but was of very special quality and high yielding, and yet still does not justify the electricity used. You can find specimens in nature that take six months to bloom, but haze hybrids are the only ones bred with these to make seeds worthy of growing indoors. I advise you not to keep plants that go longer than 13 weeks.

Assuming you went the better way, just stick your clones in the dirt, and water them.
If you went the 'lets play the slot machine' route, you need to germinate your seeds before growing them. There are very many ways to do this. One way is wrapping each seed in cotton, and just sticking it 1 or 2cm into the dirt, and water it once. The lamp's light should be warm enough to make them sprout. Water again in 4 days if the dirt is drying up. Another method is to take a small plastic container, and wet some paper towel, and wrap the seeds in the wet paper towel(not sopping dripping wet, just wet). Cover the plastic container with plastic wrap, and poke a few holes in it and put it it a warm place. Once the seeds have sprouted(this takes two to fourteen days), take them out very carefully and bury them 1cm under the dirt and then water them using a spray bottle. It will take ~1week to germinate, and ~two weeks to vegetate before you can bloom.

Great! Now you are growing plants! Raise your light so it is shining on your plants from at least one meter away. You can gradually move the lamp closer to the plants everyday until you see they are getting too hot(the outer serrated edges of the leaf will curl upwards, or the leaves will burn looking bleached). Once you get to that height, start raising your lamps everyday so they are not too close. If you want, you can improve the grow by adding a small or medium sized oscillating fan to distribute the heat more evenly, and give more wind to the plants. The more wind they have, they stronger they will be, and able to hold themselves up. If you do not give them any wind, they will be spindly little houseplants that you need to spend more time tying up to the roof of the tent with strings and such.

Make sure nighttime is dark:
So now you are growing plants. What now? You need to get inside your grow space and wait five whole minutes as if you were in a cave, that way your eyes can fully adjust to the darkness. Figure out where the little cracks are that light is shining in, and seal them up. It is necessary to have a high quality of darkness so you can get great bud, and without hermaphroditic growth. They can be stressed out if one part of light is hitting them during the dark period and they can start to grow pollen on some small place of the plant before you notice, destroying your dreams of a sinsimella harvest. If you do not want light shining into the air intake duct near the bottom of your growspace, insert some ducting and make it tight, then twist one end so it curls up like a loopty loop snake wrapped around a tree. The light should not be able to bounce off of 4 sides of the ducting and into the garden. It does not need to be perfectly dark, as I see many guys having small amounts of light coming in and say it's fine if they are used to it. However, the more dark, the better.

It is okay for the light to be shining 24 hours out of the day, but to save electricity, or cool off your apartment at night while you sleep, you can turn the light off for 6 hours out of the day.

Transplanting with no shock:
After about 3 weeks, your plants should be rootbound, meaning they have no place to grow their roots and are getting too tight. Prepare their new pots by filling them up with dirt and leaving a hole in the middle to put them in. Flip your plants upside down while covering the top of the pot with your hand, the plant's stem in-between your fingers, give it a good shake downwards. if the plant does not come out, give it a few good whacks on the bottom of the pot. If possible, do not try to rip the plant out by the stem; disturbing the roots will retard growth. Bury the plant, and give it a good watering. Always give them a good watering after a transplant to get them more settled and relaxed to their new environment.

Watering and feeding time:

You can begin fertilizing the plants after 2 weeks, or whenever they start to make new growth that is not that perfect shade of green, but rather a lighter shade of green. If you do not fertilize, they will not have enough nutrition in the dirt alone to finish to the end in an optimal way, and the plants would start to suck the green out of the leaves to get more nitrogen to places of priority. Fertilizing is simple if you do not give them too much nutrition. Don't just give them any kind of fertilizer you find from the store; they need proper levels, and proper ratios of N-P-K to make this worth your time and money. Go to the grow store or look on the internet for Bio-Bloom&BioGrow, or Canna Terra vega&canna terra bloom. I suggest BioBloom. The first week that you start to fertilize them, give them 2ml of fertilizer per liter of water(don't forget to shake the watering jug after mixing the nutrients so that they are more dissolved, and the water more aerated). The next week, if you did not burn the plants, you can try 3ml biogrow\l water. This should be quite enough fertilizer in the water until the end, but if you want to, when the plants are very large you can try 4, then 5ml per liter for a very heavy feeding schedule. You should not water your plants too often, or give them too much water in one sitting. Stick your finger inside the dirt 4 centimeters and see if it is moist inside. Pick up one of the pots to feel how heavy it is. Did your finger get moist down in there? Does it feel significantly heavier than when it had only dirt inside? If yes, it has enough water. Let the roots and dirt dry out a bit and get some air, otherwise it starts to grow fungus, or get too much water so the roots can not breath. You can not over-water a plant, but you can starve it of oxygen, and there is no way to oxygenate the water in your dirt, so just let it dry out until it is time to water again. The next day stick your finger in the dirt again, lift up the pot again, and if it is dry and about the same weight as just the dirt, give her some more water. If you have waited too long to water, the leaves start drooping down severely, and you should water immediately. The leaves will perk up again after about an hour. This means that damage was already being done to the plant, and you should water more often before the plant gets to that state. If this happens too frequently, I start thinking about how this crop's growth and yield will be sub-par. Water until you see 10% run off through the holes into the saucer at the bottom of the pot. In the beginning, they can go a longer time, maybe even a week without being watered; near the end, it can become a chore to keep giving them so much water everyday. Near the end, the surface of the soil will become cracked and dry looking, and when you water, the water will just run off to the edges of the pot where a big crack is, and go straight to the bottom and into the saucer. I used a 5L pump spray bottle(usually used for spraying insecticides or antifugal), and mixed fertilizer in there, to spray on top of the dirt, giving it a chance to soak in before it runs off the edge. A company called RAW makes a yucca additive, making the water less runny, allowing it to slowly seep into those deep pockets of the dirt, so it doesn't just go through the main channels it usually does. Basically it makes the water flow through the dirt better.

When you are ready to bloom, change the daylight hours to 12 hours on, 12 hours off, and plug in your timer, and start using blooming fertilizer instead of vegetative fertilizer.

Climax and Conclusion:
Very soon you should be harvesting quality and quantity. You should not have to worry about temperatures getting too high or low, odor, EC, or PH when using this guide. At harvest, cut the plants down, cut the fan leaves into the trash, and the trim leaves to the freezer for cooking butter or bubble bags later, and hang to dry in the tent again with the air on, and the light off. When dry, first smoke some, then cut the rest of the bud from the sticks into jars with a hermetic seal. You need to open the jars and let them get air inside a few times per day for the first week, then once per day during the second week, then once a week until that smell starts to go away and change into something else(the smell of a good cure). There is still water in the bud even if it feels crunchy on the outside during the first week of drying. When you put them in a small sealed jar, that moisture will escape from the inside of the bud making all the plant material in the jar moist again. If you dry them out too much, there will be no water inside to let them cure, but this is perfectly okay for consuming.

If you already have a setup like this and wish to improve in quality and quantity, and\or want to make your life a whole lot easier, consider getting a NFT system from nutriculture. They are 160-210€ shipped to your door. If you are not ready to spend money, work on fixing your temperatures, air flow, and humidity before buying all kinds of bullshit additive products.
If you read through and spot error, please notify me indicating where I am wrong.
If you have questions, please just ask, because I am happy to assist you with your hobby.

I realize the ideas on this page may be all over the place, and the guide could be cleaned up and worded better, but I think this is very straightforward, and includes all the things you should consider to get a cheap, yet serious harvest for personal consumption. If your consumption level is more demanding, double your setup space and consider what you can do to improve.
Viimeksi muokannut username, 5.10.2017 9:47. Yhteensä muokattu 2 kertaa.

Suomies
Viestit: 40
Liittynyt: 27.10.2016

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja Suomies » 25.9.2017 0:15

Nice guide! :)

If you could work out some demonstrating pics along here and there, it could be a little more appealing. I don't mean you have to post pics of your own, but maybe some drawings how things should look when all the gear has been set up ready for plants etc. :)

Suomies
Viestit: 40
Liittynyt: 27.10.2016

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja Suomies » 25.9.2017 0:20

Oh shit, now I realize. You probably can't edit this anymore since moderators moved it here. I'll ask them if there's some point with this non-editing policy in international section.

I was going to edit my post with little addition: If you'd re-structure the text with some titles of each chapter, like "Shopping list" "Setting up growroom" etc., it would be much easier for beginner to approach.

Suomies
Viestit: 40
Liittynyt: 27.10.2016

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja Suomies » 25.9.2017 15:13

Ok, now the editing should be allowed in this section too. Thanks to super-friendly moderators. :)

Afterwards I began to wonder what are strengths of this guide against all the other international sites with beginner's guides. To figure it out I think we should select the focus-group. I'd think this guide is super useful for English-speaking immigrants in Finland who would like to grow their own. I don't mean that there aren't many good points for local Finnish-speaking beginners, but usually, if little stereotyping is allowed, they're not very good with English-language.

Began thinking what an immigrant would want to know and what he/she can't find from international sites. At least few things came to my mind: How to obtain these things in Finland to get things going, if you don't have local contacts? How to obtain local contacts, if needed? Are there some differences on growing in Finland compared to other countries? Like for example: legal status, soft water, different NPK-scale on fertilizers, how to convert ppm values to EC if needed, etc?


username
Viestit: 36
Liittynyt: 3.9.2017

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja username » 28.9.2017 7:27

Thank you kind sirs,
I will work on it if possible.

I made this because a handful of people asked me to make an easy guide. It seems the internet is filled with information that might be confusing.

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growguide
Site Admin
Viestit: 383
Liittynyt: 16.10.2000

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja growguide » 28.9.2017 13:47

This could be like "JTR Helpdesk" but "username's Helpdesk" for our english users. :yes: :wink:
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Ystävällisin terveisin:
Hamppuforum Ylläpitotiimi

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Suomies
Viestit: 40
Liittynyt: 27.10.2016

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja Suomies » 1.10.2017 1:26

username kirjoitti:Thank you kind sirs,
I will work on it if possible.

I made this because a handful of people asked me to make an easy guide. It seems the internet is filled with information that might be confusing.


Yeap, you're right about being short and clear without mixed info is good for beginners. Great work altogether! :)

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Jack The Reaper
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2 tähteä
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Liittynyt: 7.1.2003

Re: username's simplified growguide for ultra-beginners to acheive a ~400g harvest using less than 1000€

ViestiKirjoittaja Jack The Reaper » 10.3.2018 0:48

growguide kirjoitti:This could be like "JTR Helpdesk" but "username's Helpdesk" for our english users. :yes: :wink:


Or it can be JTR's and usernames helpdesk ;)

Too bad there isn't much english-language users here.

-J :mrgreen:
-J :mrgreen:


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