First is always the worst

This was my first grow. Started a seed of Afghan Skunk and two seeds of Galaxy in paper towels, and when tap root popped out they went into Rapid Rooter. *Tent Setup* 5gal DWC buckets with 6inch net pot lids 4x4x7 tent 1000watt Quantum digital ballast Hydrocrunch XXL 6inch Air Cooled Hood Active Air 6inch centrifugal fan 6inch carbon scrubber VIVOSUN 6inch mixed flow fan 1035 GPh commercial airpump 2x 4inch air stones per bucket 2x circulation fans 1 small clip type fan I'm just making this diary for reference purposes. And so I have somewhere I have a backup of my pictures. Everything went very well until I flipped them to 12/12 and all hell broke loose. First thing that went to shit was the cheap ballast that I was originally using decided to almost catch fire. Good thing I was around when lights came on or else it could have been a terrible disaster. After that happened, I had to get every and any light that I had and get it in there, also borrowed friends cheap Led. I ordered a replacement ballast and it took a week to get here. During this time they continued to get bigger, alot bigger then I wanted to go in to flower. Going into 12/12 the 2 galaxy had N tox, and I didn't realize it, and when I finally caught it and corrected it one pulled through and the other one did not. The galaxy continued to be smaller, slower growing, and stunted the whole rest of the grow, and the yield suffered tremendously. The other two plants did fine, even with all the problems I had.

Here I was waiting for the roots to hit the water. It took about 2 weeks. I should have put them lower in the net pot.

Still waiting on the roots to hit water, I think I let ph drift too high at some point too

Here they finally hit water and they start to grow very fast. Still they are in just ph'ed water

Here they are going good, no issues yet

Here I started giving them nutes. I havent had any major problems yet, wasn't going too bad for my first time.

This is where the ballast failed and almost set everything on fire. For being under a bunch of random lights, they went into flower WAY to big and with some problems, but they did fine, until the next set of issues showed their head.

The next week is the after math of the ballast failure. Then after that there's a gap in pictures because my phone that I had been taking pictures with ended up getting messed up and I couldn't recover some of the pictures

The next week is the end of the grow,

With all the problems that this new grower had, firstly starting to grow in dwc, probably should have chosen an easier starting point but I loved the challenge and also with the ballast failure and over feeding of the little runt plant. I learned ALOT, no doubt and i think it actually sped along the learning curve /process.