Try to buy as much stuff as possible person to person.
Ok, now I'm going to get a little Macgyver here, if you have a spare lid lying around or some sort of kitchenware tray grab that. It's going to be the reservoir and floor beneath your
What you are growing will be alive for at least five months.
The plant's roots will only support something as high as the pot is deep. It should also have 1 or a few holes in the bottom for the excess water to leak out.
You should have a sponge on hand to soak up residual water on the bottom of the pot and throw away dead leaves on the soil to keep gnats away.
First you want to pick up some soil, this is found in flower stores and specialty shops usually.
You probably won't find this without calling the store before hand;
- Fox Farm organic Soil
- vermiculite
Rich in nutrients, light, fluffy and you don't have to worry about chemically manufactured contaminants in your vicinity.
This should come with a dropper, you don't need anything else besides a basic ph test kit.
Also buy
- Fox Farm Big Grow For Veg hydroponic fertilizer
- Fox Farm Tiger Bloom for flowering hydroponic fertilizer
Once you have that you're ready to grow, but I'm an advanced grower so also order yourself:
(These things seem expensive, but it's worth it. Note they have tons of settings. Do not just expect to walk away and think the timer is functioning properly, even when you know how to use it!)
- titanium window shielding
- mylar
(Fun to block light out from your windows, but I'm not suggesting you do that or hook up vents to your window, with CO2 filters blowing on them, even computer fans aren't recommended...)
No, I want you to put that stuff in your grow area, since it recycles light.
Deep into flowering the plant is going to lose leaves and you're going to want that extra light on the bottom. You can do fun stuff like cover walls with it.
A lot of people just cover the floor and walls with mylar. using it as a light/heat shield/reflector.
You'll also need some string for tying, scissors and water containers.
You can also buy noise reduction blankets to mask the white noise from fans, but it makes it so you have to water the plant more since it encloses the space.
It's also likely to be the most flammable thing in the area.
Also be wary of power extension cables, they aren't meant to be used for longer then 3 hours a day.
Where to begin???
Now that you have all your supplies, fill the pot with soil, up until about two inches from the rim, the soil will eventually settle and be lower then that.
You can mix in two cups vermiculite. The vermiculite has shrinking and absorption properties for preferable moisture levels.
Put the seed about 1/2 of an inch deep, lightly cover, moisten the area.
This area can have more vermiculite then the other parts of the soil, just enough to keep it wet when you aren't around.
Next I put a cup over it, a see through one should fog up, that's good. Wipe it a little if you see dripping.
Now lower your light.
It should be close enough to the soil to be a little warm, 6 inches away is usually best.
It should sprout in 14 to 18 hours typically.
Sometimes you want to wait a few extra days just to make sure.
Germination
Once it sprouts, raise your light a little.
Every day check your light, your light can cook your plant, it can set fires, it can do whatever awful stuff you can imagine with ease, like say for example being chewed on or being on the wrong setting.
If you don't know how to tell a male plant from a female plant then you should go look that up right now.
Your light should be secure on a pulley system. Anything other then that has no business holding up your light, which I assume to be very expensive. Ther are good grow lights that provide full spectrum and ventilation, but they are expensive.
During the first two months you have it at about 45% for 14 hours a day, same time every day leaning towards blue light, but mostly equal parts red and blue light.
After the first two months you dial back the amount of time the light is on 10 minutes each day until it's on for only 12 hours leaning towards mostly red light. At this point the light should be at 90% power.
Most plants jump into flowering around two months and the light cycle is mandatory to keep it that way.
The spacing between the light and plant should be about six inches, you won't get closer until there's substantial growth and it's canopied and even then you can only be about 3-4 inches away. The plant will fry itself if you leave it unattended for days and it gets too close to the light.
Nurture
My water is ph'd at 8.5 normally, so I fill a 16 fl oz bottle with water then I drop two drops of ph down in it, as if I was using an eye dropper.
Another thing to make this easier is to let the water sit out for a day before you ph it so it de-chloronates itself.
The soil should be wet/soaked dark, if you can stick your finger two inches deep and it's not wet you can water it.
You want to water the entire soil and not the plant itself, as watering the plant could drown it and over saturate the roots leading to root rot.
Two and eventually three 16 fl oz bottles should do the trick.
- I water it every three maybe four days and once I week I use fertilizer.
Do Not Use Fertilizer until the sprout is more plant like, I even wait til it has a trunk sometimes, the chem burn on the leaves isn't worth trying to speed up it's infancy stages.
If you add hydroponic fertilizer drop about 3mL of that in a bottle and add an extra drop of ph down. Water the plant with that an hour or so before first light and flush it down the soil with the other water. You probably should do this at least once a week.
- Each week rotate the plant 180 degrees under the light.
- When the plant has a trunk and is 5 branch levels high I cut the top off.
All of the other branches will now grow bigger and rise just as high as the top branches.The branches at the top I tie back to the pot with string and tape or sometimes I just wrap the string, when you stretch the branches like that.
The lower branches get the idea to come up more, and the tied down branches develop knuckles by the trunk and they get bigger cola's.
The plant is made of fiber so you start off slow and day by day you tighten it or make the string shorter. This is a mixture of super cropping, topping and bending.
Within weeks the top will have a even canopy and the light will spread out evenly.
That's it really. 14 hours of light for two months during vegetation until bud sprouts start forming.
Then you turn the light up to 90% and have it on for only 13, then 12 hours a day for three months.
End Stages
The leaves shouldn't yellow overnight, if they do the ph is off or something. Leaves shouldn't burn from the light. Etc.
Towards the end of flowering it will suck up less water.
The pistols will turn brown and recede.
You can harvest at this point when 80% of the pistols on the buds are receded or wait a few more weeks for the bud to mature, which trades a percent between cannabinoids and gives you an extra one in return. CBD is mostly genetic however.
If you wait til the end of the flowering period the calyx's and weight will build up.
You can see the sugar in this picture here. It goes from clear to white and bendy, then to amber. Once it's bendy that is a pretty good indicator to harvest.
Harvest Time
Once you are prepared to harvest, grab the branch you want. Pull it down and away from the trunk, if it doesn't rip off use a scissor or box cutter.
You want to keep the trunk intact if you're harvesting a little at a time.
Now hang the branch upside down. I like to tie string around it and use that string on the other branches and then I hang it on a hook.
Once it's on that hook upside down for a few days you can rip off a lot of the sugar leaves at the bases of the buds.
I don't use scissors on the leaves because the chlorophyll, bleeding out from the leaf will ruin the smell of the bud.
After about 7- 10 days you can clip the buds and collect them. I like to use window screen to make a bag and then I hang the bud in the window screen to let it air out further. This process shouldn't last more then 10 days if it's humid.
Before Trimming
http://www.mediafire.com/download/n5u5h8c5uodidat/IMG_20160708_003114.jpg
If you still have the trunk in the pot it should just fall out of the pot completely whole.
Sometimes they use the energy of the buds and start over, sometimes they don't.
If you want to keep it alive leave several buds on it, so it has some energy to go back into vegetative.
Dry & Cure
I typically take the dry bud and put it into mason jars, after it's been clipped and the branches make a dry noise when you bend or snap them.
These buds really should be dry, if you sense any sort of wetness and you put them in a jar they could mold up and then your buds would be destroyed.
Once they are in don't screw the top on all the way, give it a little bit of room and open them up for 10 minutes every four hours or for an hour once a day for a few days to a couple weeks then less and less.
Microorganisms should break up the chlorophyll and make the bud more potent during the curing process.
Avoid light and heat when curing.
Using a humidifier in your room is a good idea, but that only works with free hanging air. If it's in a packed condition 60% humidity packs do the trick.
After a couple weeks of that it should be smokable, but it really gets it's flavour and richness after two months. Some people keep it going up to a year.
And that is that I think this was the shortest explanation of something you could do many ways and many many times.
Be Safe
