Haha!"green" challenge
Looks like you turned the Chiquita Banana around!
I thought I had the slowest seedlings going! It may be perception? Your seedlings never stand out as slow to me.Hello again growers.
I grow weary of how slowly my seedlings get started. It seems that compared to almost everyone else I follow on this site, my seedlings get off to the most pathetic, unenthusiastic starts. They stay small for quite a while and develop very slowly. I've let it go for the most part because I know that a slow start for a photo is no big deal (unlike most autos). But it's really starting to eat at me now and I'd like to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
After much thought and much reading about what others do, I've narrowed my mistakes down to 3 main ones.
#1
I underwater my seedlings. I'm so wary about giving them too much water I end up giving them too little.
#2
I leave them under 24/0 for too long. I usually run the seedling under a 24/0 light cycle for at least 10 days before changing them to 18/6. I'm thinking that the extended lack of a dark period is stunting their growth due to no night-time stretch.
#3
All my grow lights now have dimmers and I keep them too dim over my seedlings. With this group, the light had been running at 25% until this morning when I upped it to 50%. (They're under a @ViparSpectra XS1500 - 150 watts in a 2x2 tent.) Dimmers are not for the dim.
So I am going to try to correct these mistakes. I will cross my fingers, hoping I don't have to come back and report about a bunch of drowned, light-burned seedlings!
This is how they look today on day "2".
That sad looking plant on the right is a Chiquita Banana clone. I believe (and hope) that she looks a lot worse off than she actually is.
Thanks for peeking in.
Peace.