Happy belated birthday db003, I am watching carefully to see how your seedlings, and you, manage that huge container of soil with these tiny little plants. A couple of questions please. You said this was your first watering... do you mean since soaking the soil when you planted the seeds? So, 1/2 gallon looks like it soaked the soil pretty good and probably produced run off. When do you anticipate watering again? I ask, because I am curious, because you have obviously done this before and had good luck with it, yet it is antithetical to the common advice on the need to successively up-pot to larger containers so as to build up a root ball. What I am watching for here, is how you are starting in your final container and what is going to make you have great results from it. If there is something that you are doing that is so incredibly right, that it blows away my theories on the need for up-potting, I want to figure out what it is. Could it be the smart pots? I doubt it. It might be something you are doing. Something I want to learn.
Or, is this just how you grew out your auto on the last grow because that was how everyone said to do it, and you are now doing this one the same way? I am curious if the same skills that worked with an auto will translate to a non auto Bubba's gift. I have a couple of Bubba's gift here too... so I am also curious how she turns out, but truth be told, I am mostly curious watching how an auto grower adjusts to trying to grow a regular for the first time.