Hi gang!
I used the word "Grows" in my journal's title because I have several different strains growing at the same time, with all of them at various stages of development. One is just wrapping up, another has just been put under 12/12, a crop of seedlings just barely out of diapers is in the Veg Room and a few assorted clones are quickly nearing outdoor deployment.
This time of year, I split my growing locations between indoors and outdoors. The flowering is all done inside in my permanent "Bloom Room", but the vegging is split between my closet veg room and our back deck. I live up in the Southern Sierra Nevada mountains, so the climate is just perfect for growing excellent cannabis during our lovely but SHORT growing season. The threat of frost lingers into late May/early June and often returns in late September, so I try to take advantage of the sunny and HOT mountain spring/summer while it lasts!
We also grow a host of food crops in the back yard ranging from Tomatoes to Jalapeno Peppers. During the winter my grow rooms will often be a host to not only cannabis, but overwintering mother plants for these food crops as well.
I guess the best way to get things started would be to give you a tour of the grow rooms and the gear I use in them!
Lets start with what I like to call my "Bloom Room". This room is basically a guest bathroom converted into a permanent 12/12 flowering room consisting of two light stations that can handle up to four 30" to 50" tall plants at once or over half a dozen smaller ones. I usually focus on two to four larger plants at a time under the main station and leave the second smaller station for sexing seedlings and stuff like that. I grow for only myself, so my production is on a very small scale, but it works great for me!
The primary light station is in the bathtub/shower and consists of a 20,000 lumen Hydrofarm Designer Series 4' x 4 Tube T5 fixture with Plantmax 2700k bloom bulbs. Having the plants in the tub makes watering a snap! We have a filter screen in the drain to prevent dirt from clogging up the plumbing!
Also at this station is a 8000 lumen side-fill composed of a Sun Systems 125/250 watt CFL fixture with a Feliz 125 watt - 2700k CFL Bloom Bulb.
Here is a shot of the main station with the Sun Systems side-fill out of the way. On the rim of the tub we have yet another side fill in the form of a four foot single tube Hydrofarm T5 fixture taken from a Jump-Start kit and fitted with another Plantmax 2700k bloom bulb. In the tub are our Purple Urkle clones that just went into the Bloom Room yesterday for their 8 week metamorphosis!
To the right of the tub we have our second light station composed of a Hydrofarm Designer Series 2 foot x 4 Tube T5 fixture with two 6500k bulbs and two 2700k bulbs. We use this station for sexing seed raised plants or to begin flowering a new plant a few weeks before the tub becomes available. It can get a bit tight in here when everything is in use, but such is life when you have limited indoor grow space! You gotta use what you have as efficiently as possible!
For timers I use the Intermatic "IM620CL 15 Amp Digital Appliance Timer" with 2 grounded plugs per timer. These things are great for running lights, fans or anything electrical in quantity. Because these are designed to run washing machines, air conditioners and the like, they don't even break a sweat running large daisy chains of T5 grow lights and fans. I use one timer for all the lights in this room and another to run the three Holmes brand 9" clip-on fans we use for air circulation. The light timer is of course set to 12/12 and the fan timer is running in the unit's convenient RANDOM mode which brings the fans on and off randomly throughout the day and night. Kind of like nature does with the wind!
For access to the room after lights out, I have a green CFL fitted to the bathroom's overhead light fixture which allows me to see in the dark without effecting the flowering plants.
So... That is the Bloom Room! In my next post I will give you a quick tour of my indoor Seedling&Clone room, including our brand new TurboKlone T48 clone machine.
Stay tuned!
I used the word "Grows" in my journal's title because I have several different strains growing at the same time, with all of them at various stages of development. One is just wrapping up, another has just been put under 12/12, a crop of seedlings just barely out of diapers is in the Veg Room and a few assorted clones are quickly nearing outdoor deployment.
This time of year, I split my growing locations between indoors and outdoors. The flowering is all done inside in my permanent "Bloom Room", but the vegging is split between my closet veg room and our back deck. I live up in the Southern Sierra Nevada mountains, so the climate is just perfect for growing excellent cannabis during our lovely but SHORT growing season. The threat of frost lingers into late May/early June and often returns in late September, so I try to take advantage of the sunny and HOT mountain spring/summer while it lasts!
We also grow a host of food crops in the back yard ranging from Tomatoes to Jalapeno Peppers. During the winter my grow rooms will often be a host to not only cannabis, but overwintering mother plants for these food crops as well.
I guess the best way to get things started would be to give you a tour of the grow rooms and the gear I use in them!
Lets start with what I like to call my "Bloom Room". This room is basically a guest bathroom converted into a permanent 12/12 flowering room consisting of two light stations that can handle up to four 30" to 50" tall plants at once or over half a dozen smaller ones. I usually focus on two to four larger plants at a time under the main station and leave the second smaller station for sexing seedlings and stuff like that. I grow for only myself, so my production is on a very small scale, but it works great for me!
The primary light station is in the bathtub/shower and consists of a 20,000 lumen Hydrofarm Designer Series 4' x 4 Tube T5 fixture with Plantmax 2700k bloom bulbs. Having the plants in the tub makes watering a snap! We have a filter screen in the drain to prevent dirt from clogging up the plumbing!
Also at this station is a 8000 lumen side-fill composed of a Sun Systems 125/250 watt CFL fixture with a Feliz 125 watt - 2700k CFL Bloom Bulb.
Here is a shot of the main station with the Sun Systems side-fill out of the way. On the rim of the tub we have yet another side fill in the form of a four foot single tube Hydrofarm T5 fixture taken from a Jump-Start kit and fitted with another Plantmax 2700k bloom bulb. In the tub are our Purple Urkle clones that just went into the Bloom Room yesterday for their 8 week metamorphosis!
To the right of the tub we have our second light station composed of a Hydrofarm Designer Series 2 foot x 4 Tube T5 fixture with two 6500k bulbs and two 2700k bulbs. We use this station for sexing seed raised plants or to begin flowering a new plant a few weeks before the tub becomes available. It can get a bit tight in here when everything is in use, but such is life when you have limited indoor grow space! You gotta use what you have as efficiently as possible!
For timers I use the Intermatic "IM620CL 15 Amp Digital Appliance Timer" with 2 grounded plugs per timer. These things are great for running lights, fans or anything electrical in quantity. Because these are designed to run washing machines, air conditioners and the like, they don't even break a sweat running large daisy chains of T5 grow lights and fans. I use one timer for all the lights in this room and another to run the three Holmes brand 9" clip-on fans we use for air circulation. The light timer is of course set to 12/12 and the fan timer is running in the unit's convenient RANDOM mode which brings the fans on and off randomly throughout the day and night. Kind of like nature does with the wind!
For access to the room after lights out, I have a green CFL fitted to the bathroom's overhead light fixture which allows me to see in the dark without effecting the flowering plants.
So... That is the Bloom Room! In my next post I will give you a quick tour of my indoor Seedling&Clone room, including our brand new TurboKlone T48 clone machine.
Stay tuned!
I just realized that I need to take a shot of the 4x6 I am using above the tub to hold the Pro-Grips light hangers that suspend the T5 fixture above the plants! Will do that tomorrow when the lights are back on in there. 
It is starting to look like they are going to "stretch" a little more than I had anticipated. These are my first Urkles, so without any previous experience with this strain, I didn't realize how VERTICAL these things can start heading! I've only got about 7 inches of rope left on my Pro-Grips before my T5 panel is as high as it goes! 
Decisions, Decisions. 
Or just post in his thread. He's one cool old dude.