Fatcats 1st grow

Hello all and welcome to my 1st grow diary. I wouldn't say I am a complete rookie but this is my first serious grow cab. My number one goal for this grow is to keep it simple and try not to complicate things to much and in the end hope to have some decent smoke for my troubles and to have learned quite a bit . I am sure that I will have some questions along the way and appreciate any comments and suggestions along the way.

Let me show and tell you a little about the cab I built. I built it in the garage under my work bench. Not 100% complete but almost.




The cabinet is 36" w 33" deep and 40" tall
It has a 4 inch fan and 4 inch Phat filter
Light hood is custom made with 8 55w pll bulbs(only 4 are on at the moment, waiting on lamp sockets from amazon)
Will probably add some side lighting to it also as I go.
Air and light tight, most important...lockable( nosey kids lol)

Hope everyone enjoys the reads...since you can only post a couple of pics per post....next post coming soon.

In the hopes of keeping it simple I choose to grow with soil. I am using Happy Frog with about 30% perlite from start to finish and hoping to not have to get into using nutes this time out with the exception of something to help in flowering. I guess the plants will let me know. If not i'm sure you guys will help me out.

I started with some reg bag seed and a sour diesel seed I just pulled from a bag. The bag seed is stuff I have collected over the years...some going back 20 + yrs, not very hope full for those. germinated about 30 seeds from some really old stuff but nothing ever cracked....the pretty old stuff I had two seeds pop and in the more recent stuff I had about twenty pop. Of course the sour diesel was the first to crack at about 10 hrs...the others took a few days.



The one on the left in the solo cup is the diesel. Wonder what this seed came from( regular, auto, maybe a missed fem seed ) this pic is 5 days from placing sprouts about a quarter inch in the soil and lightly covering.


about 5 days from breaking ground. Notice the new edition to the left...managed to pull a seed from a fresh bag of birthday cake kush (such a nice smoke) it also cracked in under twelve hrs...awesome

At about seven days from breaking ground I transplanted most to 22 oz solocups



close up of the diesel



So far I think they are doing pretty good...what do you guys think?

Not seeing pics, but good luck!

Fatcat72 said:

Hello all and welcome to my 1st grow diary. I wouldn't say I am a complete rookie but this is my first serious grow cab. My number one goal for this grow is to keep it simple and try not to complicate things to much and in the end hope to have some decent smoke for my troubles and to have learned quite a bit . I am sure that I will have some questions along the way and appreciate any comments and suggestions along the way.

Let me show and tell you a little about the cab I built. I built it in the garage under my work bench. Not 100% complete but almost.
[URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=70592&pictureid=1679699&thumb=1]View Image[/url]

[URL=https://www.icmag.com/ic/picture.php?albumid=70592&pictureid=1679676&thumb=1]View Image[/url]

The cabinet is 36" w 33" deep and 40" tall
It has a 4 inch fan and 4 inch Phat filter
Light hood is custom made with 8 55w pll bulbs(only 4 are on at the moment, waiting on lamp sockets from amazon)
Will probably add some side lighting to it also as I go.
Air and light tight, most important...lockable( nosey kids lol)

Hope everyone enjoys the reads...since you can only post a couple of pics per post....next post coming soon.

Click to expand...

I applaud your efforts in trying to keep it simple and discreet. But, I want to stress one thing...You're going to be doing this for approximately 4 months (I veg for 2 months, flower for approximately the same, usually a week or two over). With that being said, you want to make it worth your while...you're going to be sorely disappointed if you put that much work into it and render a half o. I might suggest, since you're trying to keep it simple, to invest in a 250w HPS light. This'll keep your electricity and heat down, while still allowing you to get some dense nugs.

Orangutrump....not sure why you cant see my pics..im new maybe i did something wrong,,,I can see them though.....Thank you for your well wishes.


Hoopla...Thanks for the advice and that may be a future upgrade but for now I have what I have....I have no real expectations out of this grow but to gain some hands on experience and knowledge and maybe along the way make a friend or two. The bag seed is more of a shake down for now... I have some autos coming in a few days and most will be culled to make room for 2 or 3 of them. It is what it is and I have to roll with what I have for now. Stick around though I'm sure I can get alot more advice from you in the future....what do you have to loose, besides you might be surprised

Are the pics being seen now? Anyone

Yes I can see them now.

Nice cab!

Good luck with your grow!

Thank you sir....going quite well so far.

2 weeks in

2 weeks in

So I am now two weeks into my grow, things have been pretty uneventful thus far. Cab temps are staying between 62 and 82 with rh between 30% and 65%. I have been watering with 6.5 ph water with runoff coming in at 6.8...is this good or should it be a little lower?

I have learned some things about the cab in the two weeks though, I am pulling intake air from outside and have been able to stay within a few degrees of ambient, we had a couple of chilly days here and I was struggling to keep cab temps above about 60 so I put in some reflectix and saw about 5 degree uprise in my cab temps which was great until the 50 degree days shot up to mid 80's for a couple days, ambient was 87 cab temps was 92, I had to remove the reflectix to lower temps some. Question, is mylar insulating like reflectix or is it just reflective? I may have to switch to mylar in the spring.

I finally received my lamp sockets so I hope to have the hood fully lit by the weekend but I really may need to switch to mylar after that, I guess I need to what that does to cab temps. I have thought about remote mounting the ballast outside the cab to save a little on heat build up but im not sure how effective that will be as they dont seem to be to hot. I guess taking any heat out the cab would be good.

enough for now here are some recent pics, these were takin last night, 2 weeks after turning the lights on. I think they look pretty good.







Thanks all and any advice would be appreciated

Well, here we are near the end of February. How did it go?