First Time Growing Anything

A good week in the grow room. Photo #1 shows my original four plants (I've started 8 more since then) - all four started as germinated seeds on the same day (4 Nov), but a good bit of variety between them. A bit of a side note here, but I'll wanted to put in a good word for ILGM's White Widow autoflowers - Since early Nov my successful germination rate for these seeds (in water) is 12 for 12. Other than having killed one seedling (through my own stupidity) all the seeds have grown into thriving plants in various stages of development. All this in spite of the fact this is my first grow and I really don't know what the hell I'm doing! I couldn't be happier with the seeds I purchased. The two on the left are in 5 gal buckets growing in Fox Farms Coco Loco. The two on the right are in 3 gallon pots and growing in a mixture consisting of equal parts of "big box store" bag soil, coco coir, and perlite. So far I haven't used nutrients on any of them, but I'll probably be easing into doing so as things progress. The largest of these four was starting to cause me some concern as it had so many large fan leaves that they were blocking all light from anything beneath them. So there I sat, holding a pair of shears, trying to talk myself into removing some fan leaves, even though I could think of a number of reasons why I shouldn't. Then, inspiration struck as I said to myself, "maybe I could just try pushing some of the bigger leaves underneath the stems and leaves below them and that way I could expose some potential bud sites to the light." So, I gave that a try and was pleased with the results and tried some more of it. Photo #2 and #3 are the "before and after" on that. Needless to say, I felt like the smartest guy who ever put a cannabis seed into soil- I had really discovered something cool, this idea of tucking big fan leaves under smaller leaves below them. I couldn't wait to get online and share the results of my newfound genius with the entire internet. Still, I hesitated for a second and thought to type the phrase "tucking cannabis leaves" into google. And I'm glad I did, because it turns out I was probably the only guy out there who wasn't aware of this technique called "leaf tucking". Once again, what seemed to to me to be a stroke of genius was actually more a matter of my failing to do better research to begin with :)