My first grow!!!!!!!

@Jwjoh,yes i have about 10 holes at the bottom of the cup but i never thought about adding the rocks i'm going to try that on my next plant thank you so much for that! 😁🌱🙏

@Nellafarm_1, yup! I'm still a total noob as well but have invested about 150 hours in reading and studying cannabis growing, beginning like a year before I even started growing. If I were to give you one more chunk of advice, it'd be re: watering and flushing. Everyone says "don't over-water your plants", but no one seems to take the time to explain what that means. So I'm going to write you a wall of text about it (LOL) and then I'll leave you alone. I wish I had read it presented this way during my info gathering phase, and even if you already know all this, it might help someone else who stumbles across it some day. I wouldn't try this in a solo cup with a seedling. But with proper drainage in a 1 gallon pot or larger, once your plants are established you can and will flush them out with water at times. You can actually pour 5 gallons of water through a 5 gallon pot to flush it out, and with good drainage and making sure you lean it from side to side to get all the excess out etc (stuff you should always do), the soil retains a certain maximum and the rest flows out the drain holes. :) With good drainage, problems more come in when you water too OFTEN (like if you do it every day for example) so that the roots are constantly drenched in pooled water. In fact, once your plants are established, every time you water you will want to water until a decent amount comes out the bottom, then let the pot drain well. In a 5 gallon pot, I normally give 1 full gallon of water (20% pot volume) with my nutrient mix when I feed, and I get probably 500ml of runoff out the bottom. So if I flush out the pot with a bunch of correct pH water and immediately follow up with nutrients, it'll be a gallon jug of water with nutrients at the correct pH level after the big flushing, then don't give any more water for several days or up to a week depending on how fast the plant drinks. You can always solve underwatering by adding more water later, but you let your roots rot soaking in pools of water and your grow is likely ruined! Examples of flushing: 1. You realize that your plant has stunted, or is showing signs of nutrient deficiencies even though you've been watering and feeding it nutrients. This likely means you have a pH problem. So you flush the soil out real good, which removes most of the soluble nutrients in it (like your N-P-K fertilizers), then immediately after the flush you dump in the normal amount of water for a feeding with a balance of nutrients. Sometimes when I've done this, I've noticed a change in the plants within a matter of HOURS where their colour starts coming back or they perk up and already have new growth. 2. You fertilized a few days ago and now you have nitrogen toxicity, your leaf tips are curling and burning especially the more your soil dries out because the fertilizer then starts to crystallize into concentrated salts. So you flush really well and do NOT add more nutrients after. Let the plants drink the normal pH water to recover until the pot dries out enough for the next feeding, then reconsider adding nutrients. In fact, if the plant is younger and smaller, it might be fine with just plain old pH-proper water with nothing in it for a couple weeks after flushing out a nutrient overload. 3. Many people say 2 weeks before a harvest you should flush and then stop giving nutrients. I haven't gotten that far yet but I will likely attempt that in the final week or two depending on plant health. After a few weeks, my plants were needing water more often than once per week. So what I would do, is feed a gallon of nutrient solution at 6.2pH to each one on Friday, then flush out on Tuesday with 6.2pH water and just let them drink from the flushed out soil for a few days until Friday nutrient day again. I found that this keeps a nice balance, and I've found that many others on here will do a weekly flushing (though everyone has different patterns and rituals around it). I still keep my Friday nutrients / Tuesday flush pattern now during flowering as well.