Dream Queen Glue

6/10/20 (8 days from seed): Just finished culling duds and potting up the seedlings into Solo cups. Roots had worked down and out of the rooting plugs in a number of the first sprouters, so it seemed like it was time. I used a mix of 70% Fox Farm Happy Frog and 30% perlite. Gave them a nice, thorough watering (with no nutrients, as everything I've read says no nutrients for the first several weeks of growth). There are a total of 16 definitely viable plants, with 2 plants on the bubble. I plan on potting up to 1-gallon fabric pots (probably into an Ocean Forest/Happy Frog/perlite mix), then to 3-gallon. After sexing, I'll grow the three hardiest plants indoors in 3-gallon pots and the remainder outdoors in 5-gallon and 25-gallon pots. I'm going to go with Dyna-Gro "Grow" nutes for the vegetative stage and DG "Bloom" nutes for the flowering stage. 6/11/20: Day 9. One of the strongest-looking seedlings was keeled over on its side this morning. It didn't look like a resurrection was possible, so I autopsied it. Turned out the root was a stunted little nub! It never really worked its way down the germination medium and didn't develop. It's weird that that seedling got to look so robust with a tiny little malformed root. It's got me keeping a close eye on the others, that's for sure. 6/12/20: Day 10. Eventful day. Lost another bubble seedling, an RG. I didn't think it would make it when I transplanted it; it was undersized and its fan leaves were kind of shriveled, both pointed straight up. It also had a small, single root, a bit more developed than the one from yesterday. (These were both germinated in peat pellets, fwiw.) There are a few more runty-looking seedlings yet, but we're getting down to mostly healthy-looking plants now. The Mars Hydro SP 250 came today. I got it up and running and when I plugged it into the timer the surge of white light was so violent it almost scared me. It's like flashbang-bright! I was like, see ya later Yintatech blurples ... and then the SP 250 kicked the temperature of my tent up about six degrees over the rest of the night. I killed the lights an hour early because the temp was at 86 and it was starting to make me nervous. I'm running a 4" 150 CFM exhaust fan, no filter, two clip-on 6" fans, and I added a Vornado tilt fan on the floor pointed up at the light. Barely able to keep the heat from running away, and I wouldn't call it in check. I'm going to add a humidifier tomorrow and see if that helps. I may consider going to a "lights at night" schedule, too, for the triple whammy of electricity cost savings, lower nighttime temps, and not being able to obsessively peek my head into the tent all day and not get anything productive done. If all that fails, I've already set up another, smaller tent -- a 2x2x4 -- that now houses the 600w LED, so that just may be the "juniors" tent. Then I'll shift them to the larger "seniors" tent a bit later in the vegetative stage when they're hardier. Once the 2x2x4 is vacant, I can then start germinating in it all over again. Perpetual grow! 6/15/20: Day 13. Since the last post, I followed through with the plan to move the babies to the smaller tent. I'm also running an off-peak light schedule of a 4PM-10PM dark period. The big tent is dark for now; as the babies get bigger, some will move into it (and under the Mars Hydro SP 250) and the others outside, freeing up space in the "juniors" tent for a new round of germination. The plants are responding well to the changes, although there may be one more bubble seedling; one DQG's fan leaves are looking weirdly twisted. A couple of the later germinators are growing a bit on the slow side. Other than that, plants are coming along quite nicely. I watered the day before yesterday on Day 11 after having corrected the water's pH to the appropriate range and chilling it to 69 degrees F. I've been wanting to boost the humidity in the tent, since seedlings need higher humidity, and I had been having trouble getting it above 40% (although it briefly hovered around 44% after watering). So I ordered a TaoTronics 5L humidifier, set it up inside the tent, and fired it up (after having pH-corrected the filtered tapwater I filled it with, which is a bit basic). I'm playing with it to try to get a good balance between humidifier output and exhaust fan speed/cycling in order to maintain about 60%. So far, so good, although I may end up needing to cycle the fan on/off in increments using a mechanical timer. 6/16/20: Day 14. Last day of Week 2! The humidifier is working perfectly. I woke up to plants that had grown noticeably since yesterday. The morning's routine: pH corrected my water, refilled the humi reservoir and emptied the base, wiped down the walls and floor of the tent as well as the light to get rid of excess condensation, and let the tent stand open for a bit to air out and get some good oxygen exchange while I did that stuff and got the plants' water ready. Chilled the water to 64.6 degrees, pH corrected it, watered everyone, did two rounds of "drain the bottom cups," rotated the plants' positions under the light, restarted the humi, and zipped up. A quick check of the hygrometer shows 55% RH and 73.2 degrees temp. Feels like I might have hit the glide path for this particular growth stage ...