# Tell us about YOUR first grow setup



## Reverend Willis (Jun 21, 2006)

In 1977, I was working part-time at a Rent-a-Car joint at the airport while going to college in San Luis Obispo, CA. The boss lady told me to take down the old sign above the counter and throw it away to make room for the new one. I took it home and dismantled it. It was a 4' x 4' square of white plexiglass with (3) 4' fluorescents (for backlighting behind the sign). I drilled some holes so I could hang it in my spare bedroom. The new wife wasn't too keen on this new contraption but it managed to stay up. (The marriage didn't). Doh!

I took a trip to the local head shop (that smelled like patchouli oil) and in the tiny library room behind the beaded curtain, I found a book on "How to Grow Marijuana." The author suggested going to a bakery and asking for 5-gallon buckets. They have lots of them (all those gooey creme fillings for doughnuts come in the buckets). Sure enough they gave me a tall stack of them for free. To thank them, I bought a bagful of munchie delights for the ride home.

Anyway, to shorten the story, I made all the newbie mistakes and some that hadn't been invented yet. I also stripped most of the leaves and smoked them cause I was anxious for weed. I smoked every little scrap of green leaves and coughed up green shit for a week. What the hell is this curing myth. I believed pot was meant to go from the plant into the pipe  

As I look back on it, the author of the book was still learning 'how-to-grow' too. Anyway, it was fun doing all that experimenting long ago. I still make ******* mistakes once in awhile but it's all good. 
Peace - love - dope
Rev


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## JerryG1989 (Jun 21, 2006)

dude u smoked the leaves?
u need to wait for the bud to come in


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## JerryG1989 (Jun 21, 2006)

i have a 3x3 space with 3 plants that i fully jog(jungle of green) due to height restrictions and jus use fluros


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## ReeferMadness (Jun 21, 2006)

Now i'm hungry for some gooey creme filled donuts, thanks.


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## GanjaGuru (Jun 21, 2006)

My first _indoor_ set-up was a phototron.
I paid about $400.00 for it.
I grew a "crop" religiously following instructions and grew about a total of about an oz. of small, airy buds that weren't very good.
It took like 4 months and I was _very _diaappointed.  As an outdoor grower I was used to lot lot more than that.  Sh!t, 4 months for 1 measly oz?  Screw that.
I basically gave up indoor growing.  I didn't want that damn phototron around and I didn't have the heart to sell that worthless piece of crap to any of my friends so I gave it away.  The person I gave it to did 1 crop with the same results and opinion as me, and he gave it away to someone else.  Last time I heard it was sitting in the corner of someone's garage.
Then about 2 years later, a friend of mine showed me his ultra-cool 400-watt HPS closet hydro grow.  It cost him about 1/2 of what I had paid for the tron and he was getting about 12 oz. of big dense buds out of that closet every 3.5 months.
Now that was more like it!
A few weeks later I bought an HPS light and was off n running.


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## Reverend Willis (Jun 21, 2006)

JerryG1989 said:
			
		

> dude u smoked the leaves?
> u need to wait for the bud to come in


 
You've led a charmed life if you've never smoked leaf. You ain't a real doper until you've been to the bottom of a schwag bag many times. It's sure nice to have buds after all those "hard times."


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## Biffdoggie (Jun 21, 2006)

I tried to do some hydro in a big plastic silverware tray with a plant in each of the compartments and some gravel. I had some of those incandescent plant lights and used no nutes. After about two months I could take it no longer and pulled down the three or four grams that were on the things and ditched it.
Then I tried getting some sections of stove pipe, putting the plants in pots in the bottom with a piece of wood on the top with a bulb and computer fan in it. Talk about hot spots, well, mainly one, right on the side, didn't work either.

As far as smoking leaves, once when we were youngsters we acquired a garbage bag full of shake from someones outdoor grow. We were happier than pigs in *hit, smoked way too much of it for an entire summer. A couple of my friends actually got busted with like seven ounces of the stuff in eastern Tn. and were charged just like if it was chron.


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## AceT9 (Jun 21, 2006)

ooooo


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## AceT9 (Jun 21, 2006)

*Well my frist "grow" wasnt really a grow because i didnt get any bud  . But my set up was a empty room and a 15 watt black light and a normal 65 watt lightbulb . At that time i didnt do any research on MJ growing so i thought i could use those lights. After about 5 weeks or something the plant was like 3 inchs tall....So i was f*** dat...So i ended up throwing it out.
*


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## Reverend Willis (Jun 21, 2006)

GanjaGuru said:
			
		

> My first _indoor_ set-up was a phototron.
> I paid about $400.00 for it.
> I grew a "crop" religiously following instructions and grew about a total of about an oz. of small, airy buds that weren't very good.


 
GG, how long ago are we talking about here? Believe it or not, I saw one of those things in a thread earlier this week on MP. If I remember correctly, it looked like a space ship had been crossed with a small gazebo. Those will probably go into the Smithsonian one day with the Commodore 64 computers.
way cool


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## 85cannabliss (Oct 30, 2007)

im on my first grow now, and i built my veg box (pc case) _and_ bud room (freezer) for less than 100 GBPound. i use a total of 8 x 20w cfl's for this micro grow, but im hoping for an oz or 2. here;














i just thought it would be a good idea to get this thread off the ground again


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## DLtoker (Oct 30, 2007)

Ugh... I got suckered into buying one of those damn prefab hydro "stealth" cabs.  Thing worked well, but it in no way was worth 1,800.


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## SFC (Oct 30, 2007)

I was lucky that I started hanging on a grow site before I started growing indoors.  I copied another grower who I respected as a growers set up. I took a 430 ballast/hotilux eye bulb, and an elicent fan, coupled that to a home made carbon scrubber,and the rest is history.  

600 now, and hydro.


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## moses781 (May 4, 2008)

quick question for a first time like me i am doing hydro and i was wondering is the rock wool cubes supposed to  be in direct contact with the water in the pots and then the clay pebbles on top??? or pebbles then cubes of love???


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## bud.uncle (May 4, 2008)

In my cellar 1998, 
600hps, big pots, big ideas, very big, too many big plants and the smell. 
Omg it was on the street.
In every room. 
What a nightmare. 
What fun.
I quickly refined operations, got the layout straight. Separate veg and flowering room, 3 trays of 10 on cycle. Cutting/cloning station. Decent ventilation, with filters. Decent intake. Decent results.

Now in a new country, outside growing for the 1st time in over 10yrs.

@+


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## Growdude (May 4, 2008)

My first grow room was made by hanging aluminum foil from the ceiling to divide it off.


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## AlienBait (May 5, 2008)

moses781 said:
			
		

> quick question for a first time like me i am doing hydro and i was wondering is the rock wool cubes supposed to be in direct contact with the water in the pots and then the clay pebbles on top??? or pebbles then cubes of love???


 
Depends on your system. Please describe your set up.

.....

As to my first "grow," if you want to call it that....I was in High School some time in the early 80's. My parents had a vegetable garden in the back yard, so I thought it would be fun to grow some of my own plants so I dropped a couple MJ seeds in the ground. A week later a few of them popped through the surface and I thought, "This is going to be fun!" The week after that it rained non-stop and killed all my seedlings. 

Fast forward 10 years....

2nd try: My roomate found a seed and we thought it would be fun to try to grow it out. We got a little flower pot and some dirt from the apt. garden. The growing area was in a cardboard box under the dining table and the light we used was an incandecent "Plant Light." It grew to about 12" with only 4 leaves. To make matters worse, it was a male!  Of course, we smoked it anyway...every little bit of it, stem and all. Did not get high, but it was still fun.

Fast forward 15 years after that....

It had been about 10 years since I smoked any weed, so I felt it was time. I did not know any dealers (and honestly, did not want to know any) and none of my friends who smoked would help me out (can you believe that?!). They would share a joint with me, but would not let me buy any from them. Some friends, eh? :hitchair: 

The next day, I saw a story on "60 Minutes" and the story was about how easy it was to buy MJ seeds online (what timing!), :hubba: . You know what? They were right. 

This time I was going to do it right! I bought a book on growing and studied everything I could find on the Internet. I got some "EarthBoxes," 2-ft fluorescent tubes for veg, and a 400 Watt HPS for flowering. Cleaned out a closet and painted the walls flat white. Home Depot was having a sale on flat-white paint that week, (another co-incidence?). The Ganja Gods were smiling on me.  

Planted 6 seeds and killed 3 of them from over-watering and over-fertilizing. The good news was that the remaining 3 were females. It was really a big pain and I made a ton of mistakes and had to re-plant the ladies twice. At one point, I even took them out and washed the roots and replanted them in fresh soil because of the over-fert issue.

In the end, I got 6 ounces off of the 3 remaining plants. It was so nice to be smoking my own, especially after not smoking anything (except tobacco) for 10 years.

Now, I grow hydro. So much easier.

By the way, when my friends come over and smoke my stash, they love it are always asking me to hook them up with a 1/4 or an ounce. Guess what I tell them......


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## moses781 (May 5, 2008)

well i have a 2 gallon resavoir and 6 pots  the pots sit right in the res and the water rises in the pots with no pebbles. with pebbles you cant see water? so do i put pebbles half way then the rock wool cube? or the trock wool cube directly in the water then the pebbles on top? half pebbles tthen cube?? please help?


         ps should the cubes ever be tuching water directly


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## AlienBait (May 5, 2008)

moses781 said:
			
		

> well i have a 2 gallon resavoir and 6 pots the pots sit right in the res and the water rises in the pots with no pebbles. with pebbles you cant see water? so do i put pebbles half way then the rock wool cube? or the trock wool cube directly in the water then the pebbles on top? half pebbles tthen cube?? please help?
> 
> 
> ps should the cubes ever be tuching water directly


 
Sounds like an Ebb and Flow (flood and drain) system?  If so, then you should put the pebbles in the bottom.  The top of the Rockwool should be even with the top of the pebbles.

The water should just touch the bottom of the rockwool when it fills.

A picture of your setup would help out a lot.

By the way, it would probably be best to start your own thread on this topic rather than going off topic on this thread.


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## ms_1 (May 6, 2008)

Technically, my first grow was putting a couple bag seeds on the bank of a canal.  They sprouted and grew a couple inches, then died.  Before I started my first real grow, I lurked around here a bunch.  My grow area was an old, enamel shower (painted white) enclosure that had been ripped out and was placed next to the water heater and furnace (hoping to get some CO2)  I used a four foot flourescent fixture with 2 different bulbs for entire vegitative stage and then added several different CFLs during flowering.  I grew in a soil mixture that I mixed from several different commercial mediums including peat, top soil, tomato mix, and sand.  I just mixed different amounts until it "felt right" to me.  I germed the big bud seeds (only 2 from a good bank)  in a moist paper towl in an inflated ziploc on top of my cable box.  Both germed and were transplaned into those "spongy" expanding peat pots.  They were kept adequately watered and I used very little Schultz fert at this stage.  Once they began to outgrow the peat pots, I slit the sides of the peat and transplanted directly into the pots they would live their lives out in with the soil mixture I listed above.  I slowly amped up the fert amount but never exceeded the recommended dosage and never more than 2 days in a row.  I added the CFLs about a week before I changed the light cycle.  I probabaly changed the light cycle about 1 1/2 weeks too early but did OK anyways.  One of my plants was male and I culled it.  The other continued to do well and produced .94 oz cleaned.  I flushed with pure water for a week before harvest.  Anytime something looked wrong to me, I'd come here and search for a solution.  
The shower stall worked well with enough room for the lights and provided easy clean up of any spills.  Some of the funky shower curtains you get in stores are pretty reflectable with light but dont concentrate it enough to cause hot spots.  The enclosure was in the basement which is absolutly dark so the dark hours weren't a problem for me.

This works for me and I haven't changed much.  I'm moving to the country and will have to come up with a new rig.


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## kaotik (May 6, 2008)

haha, my first grow.. started in a little compartment in my tv stand.. tinfoil (lol) and a little desk lamp.
did that for a few weeks. (and it somehow survived)  then my mom found it.. and i found out, that they didn't care.. was great.

i ended up taking it outside, and it grew amzingly, was as wide as i could span my arms, and as tall as me. i remember me and all my little buddys being just mezmorized by it.
didn't produce much though unfortunatly. had to take it down early  but was a great introduction.


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## Runbyhemp (May 6, 2008)

Wow .... old thread.


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