100 Watt CFL Grow / Update#2: What Should A Marijuana Plant Look Like At 2 Weeks Old?
One of the most common questions asked by novice growers is “What should my plants look like at x days/weeks old?”
Naturally, anyone putting their time and effort into a project wants to have a point of reference against which to judge their own progress (or that of their pants, in this case). The answer is:
Plants will vary in size and appearance depending on a variety of factors: Genetics, soil, lighting, nutrients, temperature, handling, and the elusive “green thumb” factor. As you can imagine, a plant growing outdoors under full sun in June (northern hemisphere) will be a lot bigger at 2 weeks old than a plant growing in a converted computer case running 50 watts of lighting!
In any case, cannabis plants do tend to develop certain physical characteristics at certain times in their life span (first true leaves after 3 – 4 days, alternating nodes after 30+ days of vegetative growth, calyxes and pistils after a week of flowering light schedule, for example). Barring any problems, after two weeks of vegetative growth, you can expect to see a plant with several sets of leaves, and are likely to be able to smell that characteristic “mary jane” smell on your fingers after gently rubbing the leaves.
Don’t be surprised if your plants leaves alternate between “reaching up” towards the light and “sloping downwards” towards the ground – this is normal. Leaf color will range from an intense, deep green to a light yellow-green or “lime” color. What isn’t normal is yellow leaves with stunted-looking new growth, patches of brown or browned edges, dark spots or a mottled look to the leaves, or leaves curling up into a sort of “taco” shape.
Here are some shots from our current 100 Watt CFL grow. A two-week old Dinafem Critical + plant. She’s (yes, “she” – this is the only feminized seed in this grow) looking quite healthy and of good size for the humble 100Watt grow. She’s ready for transplantation into the larger final grow pot.
Next is a picture of a 10-day-old “Royal Queen Seeds Automatic x Double Gum” cross Read More…
100 Watt CFL Grow / Update #1: In The Nursery – Marijuana Seeding Care
[Note: This post is a part of our 100 watt grow journal. See the first post here. Subscribe to follow this grow step-by-step, with tips and tricks along the way. The varieties growing are Dinafem Critical+, and our own house-bred crosses; AK x DG, and RQSAuto x DG. For details on their heritage, see the first post.]
In The Nursery / Under 6500k CFL Bulbs
Just two days after the previous post, the then-sprouting hybrid seeds are enjoying a “sun”bath in 6500k CFL lighting and are now showing their first true leaves. Three 25watt 6500k CFL bulbs are shown in the picture, and one more was moved out of the way for the picture – in total they will be under 100 watts for this grow.
This is a good chance to give you a few more seedling care tips that have occurred to me since the previous post on the topic. I like to start seedlings in soil, rather than in rockwool, special sponge pads, etc. I have had better luck in the past transplanting them into soil when they were started in soil.
In this case, I used some flower potting soil I had handy – which is usually a no-no! Read More…
100 Watt CFL Grow / Dinafem Critical+ And Our Own Hybrids!
(NOTE: This post is the beginning of a series following our 100 Watt CFL demonstration grow from start to finish – seed to harvest. Bookmark or subscribe, and check back for weekly updates. This post is stickied to the home page for the time being, and each update will appear right below this introduction. Thanks for joining us!)
It’s time to show you some step-by-step results from one of the techniques I recommend to home growers in our “How To Grow Cannabis At Home: A Guide To Indoor Medical Marijuana Growing” eBook – a 100 Watt grow using CFL bulbs on just two plants to keep the grow size manageable yet produce enough cannabis for personal use.
Cadets In Training For A 100W CFL Grow.
Growing with 100 Watts of CFL (Compact Florescent Lighting) may not provide you with heaps of buds at the end of the grow, but should be more than enough for your own use for quite some time. Beyond that Read More…
Wild Ruderalis Marijuana Plants Grown Indoors – Cannabis Ruderalis
- Wild Cannabis Ruderalis Plant Grown Indoors
[Writer Glenn Panik’s “How To Grow Cannabis At Home: A Guide To Indoor Medical Marijuana Growing”, is available on iBooks here, for the Amazon Kindle or via Smashwords here. You can also order the ‘stealth title’ of our information-packed ebook for the Kindle here.]
Last fall, we collected seeds from wild C. Ruderalis marijuana plants growing along roadsides and in fallow land (see the post here). We planted them early last month, Read More…
Are There Male Autoflowering Marijuana Plants? Can I Make Autoflowering Seeds?
If you are interested in autoflowering marijuana varieties, you have probably noticed that all commercially available seeds are not only autoflowering, but feminized as well. Often referred to as “autofem” varieties, these fast-flowering plants not only provide an easy grow for beginning green-thumbs; they are fast flowering, there’s no danger of messing up Read More…
The 10 Best Cheap Good Marijuana Seeds – Inexpensive Growing Tips
Our Cheap Image For Our Cheap Seeds Review!
If you are looking for a good choice of seeds for your first medical marijuana grow, you’re likely to be overwhelmed by the choices available.
In this post, we’d like to narrow down the choices for you by presenting the seeds we think are a great choice for the first-time grower. To come up with “best of” list out of the many, many marijuana strains available, we factored in a few criteria:
- The seeds could be standard, feminized, or autoflowering. Although a first time grower may want the “sure shot” at a female plant that fem/autofem seeds provide, there are simply too many good standard seeds available. See our other post on “Getting more female plants from standard seeds” in order to improve your odds of growing a female plant if you choose to go with standard seeds.
- The strain must have a relatively short flowering time. We don’t want to suggest that first time growers choose a tall growing sativa strain that takes 12 weeks to finish flowering. Your first grow always seems to take forever to finish anyway, so let’s keep it reasonable.
- The strain should be relatively tolerant of grower error. Some cannabis strains are especially sensitive to nutrient levels, light schedule interruptions, and other newbie mistakes. The strains we picked for this list should be good for beginning growers using soil.
- The strain should be suited to an indoor growing environment. Considering that many newbie growers may not have their own garden to help them produce their medicine, the plant should be tolerant of indoor growing conditions, and maintain a reasonable height.
- The cost should be under $10/seed. There are varieties of cannabis out there that can cost $50.00+ per seed. Although these may be of interest to breeders, commercial producers, and collectors of cannabis genetics, we want this list to represent seeds that will give a newbie grower a easy-to-grow plant that also won’t break the bank. Don’t let price fool you – many seed banks offer some of their best strains (that were formerly more expensive) at lower prices as they develop new “flagship” seed varieties. Offering a great Skunk or Kush strain at a good price helps them maintain a customer base and draw in new customers with a great deal. These “cheap” seeds are usually just as potent and pleasant to consume as varieties costing many times more.
OK, let’s cut to the chase, here is the list of our favorite “cheap seeds”, starting at number 10: Read More…
Royal Queen Seeds “Royal Medic” Bud Pictures And Grow Report
Writer Glenn Panik’s “How To Grow Cannabis At Home: A Guide To Indoor Medical Marijuana Growing”, is available on iTunes here, for the Amazon Kindle or via Smashwords here. You can also order the ‘stealth title’ of our information-packed ebook for the Kindle here. All of the grows pictured on this blog have followed the techniques in the book – so the proof is in the results. If you’ve had problems with weak, spindly plants, pale leaves, insect pests, or low yielding marijuana plants, then pick up our book – it will pay for itself in results at your next harvest.
This post is about the surprisingly robust and heavy-yielding “Royal Medic” plant from Royal Queens Seeds. I was very, very hard on this plant, and it proved to be amazingly resilient and productive.
What did I do to be so cruel? Read More…
Make Your Own Autoflowering Seeds – Royal Queen Seeds “Royal Automatic” Autoflowering x White Label “Double Gum”
I’ve been curious as to what kind of plants we’ll get if we cross an autoflowering strain with one of my favorite standard plant, White Label’s “Double Gum” (see our earlier posts for Double Gum info).We had an extra “Royal Automatic” seed from Royal Queen Seeds that we started on a windowsill, just to see how it would turn out without extra lighting.
The plant flowered after about 3 1/2 weeks, and after flowering was underway for 2-3 weeks, I simply sprinkled the flowers with pollen from a male “Double Gum” plant using a dry paintbrush dipped into the pollen. It’s really easy to make your own seeds. Here’s a picture of the plant after about 5 weeks of flowering:
The plant is a mere 15 inches tall, due to the relatively meager light that it received during vegetation on a simple windowsill. These plants can grow quite a bit larger if you give ’em full sun, but we wanted just a small plant for trying out a homespun autoflower strain. I’m expecting that the offspring from this cross may not all be 100% autoflowering, but we’ll try them outdoors in the spring and see what happens.
Here’s a photo right before cutting the plant down to dry and harvest the seeds (about 8 weeks of flowering): Read More…
Wild Cannabis Ruderalis Bud And Seeds – A Lucky Find
On an early autumn walk, I found several cannabis ruderalis plants growing wild. To my surprise and delight, I found several seed-bearing plants and even one sinsemilla bud, which must have been upwind of the male plants I saw, already dried and dead, near the seed-carrying females up the road.
The particularly cool part of the story is that the one larger, seedless bud had an amazing orange/pepper/cream aroma that I’d rank up there with some of the better sativa plants I’ve had the pleasure to sniff. Sadly, the whir of weed-whackers was not far behind me; a road crew was out for a late summer cleanup. I would have loved to let the beautiful sinsemilla bud mature, but I decided to pick her now in order to get some better pictures and a chance to sample the immature bud. I hurried ahead of the cutting crew and gathered seeds from the other female plants I could find. Hopefully a few of the couple dozen seeds I gathered will produce a plant with that amazing orange/pepper/cream aroma phenotype. In any case, they will serve as a great breeding platform for some autoflowering hybrids of my own. It will be great to have a ruderalis plant that already produces great aromas as stock to cross with other varieties (like my current favorite “Double Gum”) and see if I can cross-breed some heavier yielding autoflowering stock of my own. Perhaps these will become the “Panik Plants”?
Below is a picture gallery with shots of the wild Cannabis Ruderalis plants growing on a sunny roadside. Notice the very sativa-like thin leaves. These plants were likely hit at least once by mowers, but still managed to put out seeds by early September (some plants I found were already long gone to seed). There are also shots of the typical small, black, and very hard ruderalis seeds, as well as closeups showing the trichomes on the leaves and buds, immature as they unfortunately were. Cool stuff, regardless, and I look forward to growing the gathered seeds in a nurturing environment. Expect more posts about these plants:
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- Foraged C. Ruderalis seeds.
Wild Harvest Cannabis Ruderalis Smoke Report: Well, it isn’t fair to judge these plants based on the few wisps of bud I gathered in a hurry, but the good news is that they do produce a mild sativa-like effect. As is to be expected with a ruderalis (especially one with a few seeds on it) the smoke is a bit on the ropey side, but they do create a mild but pleasant head high. This is a very good start for a wild strain. If I can find that orange creamsicle pheno in the seeds I gathered, we may be onto something here.
Writer Glenn Panik’s “How To Grow Cannabis At Home: A Guide To Indoor Medical Marijuana Growing”, is available on iTunes here, for the Amazon Kindle or via Smashwords here. You can also order the ‘stealth title’ of our information-packed ebook for the Kindle here.
Sensi Seeds Afghan Kush & White Label Double Gum Grow Report – Budget Seeds Comparison
On cannabisgrowing.com, we’re focusing on tips for the budget-conscious grower who would like to still experience the distinctions between cannabis strains. There really are a variety of smells, tastes, and sensations that properly cured marijuana buds of different types have to offer. Here is a direct grow comparison between two inexpensive varieties from the respected cannabis seed bank “Sensi Seeds / White Label Seeds”.
The two strains are Sensi’s “Afghan Kush”, and White Label’s “Double Gum”. At the point of publishing this article, the plants are just starting the 5th week of flowering, and we expect them to be done 3-4 more weeks (perhaps a bit longer for the Double Gum, from the looks of it).
We want to show you how these two “budget” strains compare during the grow. We’ll give a “smoke report” later on. Sensi’s “Afghan Kush” costs $33 for 10 standard seeds, and the White Label Seeds “Double Gum” was just $19 for 10 standard seeds. At just $2-3 per plant (we had 100% germination on these seeds) these are great for a budget grower’s home medicinal marijuana project. I wouldn’t, however, suggest these for your very first grow. The previous post (WSS Skunk Feminized) might be a better choice for a novice grower, and they are in the same price range.
Let’s cut to the chase, and show you how the plants look at this point:
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- Afghan Kush 5 Weeks of Flowering
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- Double Gum 5 Weeks of Flowering
Now if you’re a beginning grower, you may be saying, “Huh? They don’t look different to me!” This is not unusual, so don’t worry. Let me point out a few things, then take a minute and compare them again – you’ll see what I am talking about.
The first image is the Afghan Kush plant. Compared to the second image (Double Gum) there are a few things you should compare and notice: Read More…
Cannabis Growing 