First Indoor Grow - 6 Strains

My first indoor grow! Been doing a ton of research and I'm super stoked. My buddy and I have been watching a kabillion videos, and like a lot of people we're pretty big fans of Mr. Canuck. So we're both utilizing a lot of his techniques, with some individual tweaks ofc. I'm planning on growing all Veganic, and as such the amendments I'll be using are a bit different than the Gaia Green that he tends to use. Aside from that though, I'm going to be doing this batch using his coco plus dry amendments and perlite blend. The other half will be using the potting blend that I have been mixing up for most of my life for use in general gardening, featuring a huge amount of screened homemade compost and sphagnum peat moss instead of coco. (Yes, I am aware of the reasons people say coco is superior, especially sustainability, but they were selling 2.5 cu ft BALES of it for $1.97 on clearance so... yeah, doing that.) I have planted 2 seeds each of 4 different strains: 1) Juicy Fruit 2) Raskals OG Kush 3) Purple Headband 4) Orange Daiquiri All are photoperiod seeds; I believe they pretty much all came from plants that hermed to some degree. Unknown if they are feminized, however so far all of the other seeds obtained in this manner have been female, and have grown very well. The Juicy Fruit as well as the Raskals OG were already grown over the summer outdoors, using an earlier batch of the same potting blend described here. All plants have done very well, and have been 100% healthy the entire time. 🌳 Sept 15 - Seeds in Soil Today I mixed up a batch of custom potting mix, using about 45% homemade compost, 45% sphagnum peat moss, and 10% or less of humus and manure. The compost was made from my organic gardening efforts throughout this summer plus composting all my food scraps. Every kind of vegetable imaginable plus lots of yard waste, grass clippings, and other good stuff. The pile cooked all summer, stirring it up a couple times. I screened the entire pile and made a huge pile of nice light compost that smells great. To this I added the peat moss and humus/manure, and then stirred the pile up well, ultimately screening it all one more time for maximum siftage before packing up 3 big tubs of it to take inside. I tested the pH of the soil with my Apera pH meter. I tested distilled water at 6.5, and tap water at 7.6. After blending with the soil, both glasses of mud read 6.5; when used as a dilutant the pH of water has negligible effect on the pH of the solution being diluted. So the compost blend mix itself is a perfect 6.5 pH. I filled regular seed starting trays with this mixture, and then placed one seed in each compartment, lightly pressing it into the soil and covering with a minimal amount of dirt. I watered using a spray bottle just enough to wet the top of the soil, as the mixture already had a decent amount of moisture to begin with. Covered the tray and placed it on my seed starting shelves on a Vivosun 3" x 20" heat mat, under a CXhome LED light strip; I'm excited to find out how it performs. As of now the plan is for the seedlings to stay here on this shelf for the next 1-2 weeks depending on how they grow. I'm currently planning on vegging these new plants in a closet somewhere for the next few weeks. The indoor grow tent is almost set up, but I'm planning on using it to dry the outdoor crop, which should be harvesting in a little over 2 weeks! I fucking love growing Marijuana! It's honestly probably as much fun as smoking it... maybe more? We'll see! 🌳 9/18 - Day 1 - All emerging already! Dang that was fast. 🌳 9/19 - All helmets off. I checked the light levels and thought I had 5000 lux. Apparently that was not enough. But looking at the pics they're literally already too tall. They needed more light (and perhaps no cover? Probably just light though?) right from the start. 🌳 9/21 - Already 3-4 inches tall! No bueno! Won't make this mistake again. Josh did tell me it wasn't enough light, and he was definitely right. 🌳 9/22- I put them in the tent under the Spider Farmer to try to stop the stretch, but it was already too late. It was also way too dry in the tent, and I unsuccessfully tried a lot of things to raise the humidity. 🌳 9/23 - After much debate and research, I decided to try a delicate procedure. I transplanted the tiny seedlings, and buried the stem, covering 2 or more inches of growth on each one in an effort to make them "shorter" and sturdier. This was a pretty nerve-wracking thing, but I figured if I was gonna fuck these up, I might as well do it early on in the game. Stated differently, I wanted these to have as many advantages and desirable characteristics as possible, and starting off tall and leggy is not one of them for me. Fingers crossed! I did, however, figure out how to solve my low humidity issue. I had read people suggesting to put other mature plants in the tent with the seedlings, and that has really done the trick! Plus it looks nice in there now too. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Vivosun 3" x 20" Heat Mat: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B073PTZCJ4/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 CXhome LED Light Strip: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B086R14MFW/ref=ppx_od_dt_b_asin_title_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Apera Instruments AI209 pH Tester: https://smile.amazon.com/Apera-Instruments-AI209-Waterproof-Accuracy/dp/B01ENFOHN8