First Grow

On the first day of week 1, I went to pick up nutrients, and the hydro store had all kinds of clones on display. Like a kid who sees the puppy in the window, I couldn't just leave those poor babies there, knowing I had a nice spot for one... so the replacement for JD is Permanent Marker. I'm debating doing a single strain diary for that one (and future grows generally) because it seems like this site incentivizes those types of diaries. The seedlings seem to be doing fine and are growing real leaves instead of just cotyledons . I have eased all the way into 100% power on the light. No signs of stress, and the extra heat is helping, since the heater isn't scheduled to arrive until nearly week 3. Once veg is fully underway and the plants are bigger, I have a second light to add, similar in power to the TS600 but not dimmable. It seems one of the hardest parts of starting to grow is doing nothing. I just want to check on them and water them and feed them and love them when I should really just LITFA. Brewing my first compost tea, excited to give it a try. I'm hoping to see the effect on growth and supercharge these things into veg. Fed the tea on day 3, it was about 400ppm and 6.3ph. Gave the seedlings 12-16oz and the potted OC about 24-30oz. I also watered the empty pots, both to feed the microbes and to test how much water can go through until runoff. After about 3l there was a bit of runoff, ph was about the same 6.3 but ppm seemed high at over 4k. I think it's just because the soil is still untouched and full of the starting nutrients. A small disaster, when I poured some tea into the Chocolate Mint OG, the poor little thing fell over. I gently propped it back up with some garden wire, hoping for the best. Since it was probably stretching a bit too much, I moved the light down to about 30 inches instead of 36. I'll see how the plants like it, but maybe it will be time to add my second light... A bigger disaster was discovering what appeared to be powdery mildew on the Orangecello... the grow space historically had a high chance of mold/mildew, so I've been half dreading and half expecting this. I'm still getting the hang of dialing in the environment, so I'm guessing this is a result of all that. I blasted the leaves with neem and cut off a couple spots. The neem seemed to do the trick for now but I'll need to be extra careful and get everything in line before flower. The heater finally arrived and now temps are around 80° so with 65% RH I'm around 1.2 vpd. Hopefully fewer horror stories in future updates. Update: I'm pretty sure I burned them on day 5 of this week...