“I’m gonna put a sign up: no sunglasses, no hoodies!” spat the cashier in the crowded hydroponics store.
Opposite him, Shirley cringed under her cowl and stylish Ray Bans. In disbelief, I watched the encounter from across the store, sheepishly pulling my own sunglasses and hood off. I guess my wife and I weren’t the only home growers who felt the need for stealth. Thus began our adventure down the yellow brick road of beginner cannabis-growing mistakes.
Leif Goodman is a long-time ILGM forum veteran with multiple grows under his belt. He and his wife may be successful cannabis growers now, but this wasn’t always the case. They have made many mistakes along the way.
We’ve asked Leif to tell the story of his (and his wife’s) first grow attempts so that our readers and beginner growers can learn from their mistakes. (and their hilarious hijinks and shenanigans)
Keep an eye out for more of these entertaining accounts of inaugural goofs in our ongoing series: “Mistakes I made with….” Embarking on My Journey as an Amateur Cannabis Grower
We liked the idea of hydroponics since there was no soil involved—soil harbored mold, which was my wife’s kryptonite. After a year or so of incognito online research, Shirley and I finally decided to grow marijuana at home. We began collecting the necessary buckets, nutes, and gizmos. We were nervous about this, as pot was still illegal where we lived. And we feared most of our friends and family would take a dim view of our shenanigans, should they find out.
But we felt the need to take matters into our own hands. Because even though med weed was legal, finding a doctor who would write you a script for it was problematic. There weren’t any medical marijuana stores around us to take the script to anyway.
You see, cannabis helped Shirley with her various health issues way more than regular medicines. And being able to cultivate our own strains versus our risky midnight runs across town to score a half ounce of unknown made sense.
So, when a proposed start date for legal home growing hit the local news—four cannabis plants per household—we resolved to be ready on day one! Hence our embarrassing visit to the hydroponics store.
First Up, Indoor or Outdoor Weed?
To limit the possibility of making common mistakes, we weighed the options for indoor versus outdoor cultivation. Living cheek-to-jowl with our many urban neighbors quickly made indoor cannabis cultivation an obvious choice. We had two possible locations: the small water closet (WC) part of our master bathroom or our non-climate-controlled detached garage. We went with the water closet.
Shirley took the role of the brains and crash-coursed the interweb for the botanical end of things, like:
Selecting & starting auto and/or photo cannabis seeds
pH-ology
the smorgasbord of hydroponic nutrients (NPK, baby!)
light requirements
I took the role of engineer and got busy rigging out the WC with:
screw-in power outlet for the overhead light (the only power source in the WC)
into which were plugged two power strips (& bolted into the wall)
into which were plugged water pumps, air bubblers, and clip-on CFL lights
that rested on the newly installed wall track shelving above the
buckets and baskets (alive alive, oh) on the floor
Hepa air filter canister crammed in next to the toilet, with exhaust vent hose running up into the ceiling fan grill (modified with a receiving hole)
Shirley commandeered the linen closet for starting the seeds she chose:
auto Bubble Gum (medical cannabis fave)
auto Northern Lights & auto Girl Scout Cookies (both ranked high for stress & pain relief)
photoperiod Blue Dream (originated from the California medical marijuana scene)
Poppin’ My First Ever Marijuana Seed
Shirley chose small rock wool blocks to place the seeds in, rounded end down. Placing the little buggers thusly proved to be a bit challenging. There was more than one episode of searching the floor on hands and knees after an expletive-laced tweezer fumble.
I now know it’s best to put something under the rock wool to catch the seed. But, really, is it even necessary to have the rounded end down? I mean, in nature, I’m thinking the seed is gonna sprout regardless of how it lands. I say, plug the little gomers in the rock wool with your (surgical-gloved) fingers and get up off the floor already.
Be Aware of “Damping off”
We lost a couple of seeds to damping off disease, a weird little disorder that we had never heard of and, I’m willing to bet, a common cannabis conundrum for noob growers everywhere.
Not long after the excitement of our first seeds sprouting, we were horrified one morning to find a couple of seedlings toppled over like a tiny lumberjack had chopped them down. Upon close inspection, the stalks were really thin where they came out of the rock wool and couldn’t support the weight of the cannabis plant above.
Shirley and I thought maybe the seeds were defective, which is possible if you get them from a dodgy seed source, but that wasn’t the case with us. It was definitely self-inflicted damping off disease. Per Mr. Google’s advice, we got the healthy-looking seedlings away from the scene of the crime toot sweet. Fortunately, they were unaffected.
We learned there are a lot of conditions that can lead to this damping-off thing. You need to plant the seed at the right depth (a quarter inch down is good), get the watering right, and have a small fan going—basically, avoid harboring fungi.
Since seeds ain’t cheap, I recommend you avoid killing your germinating beans with a little foreknowledge like you can find in ILGM’s germination guide. I wish I had read this stuff before Shirl and I started out. Coulda’ saved us a few bucks and some distress. You really get attached to these little guys, uh, girls.
Seedlings Stretching to a Light Far, Far Away
Okay, a light bulb two inches from my precious planted baby seed seems too dang close to me. So, I convinced Shirley we should move that thing higher, despite what our research said. We ended up with seedlings that looked like the palm trees on Rodeo Drive. Yet another beginner cannabis grow blunder I could have avoided.
As I discovered, the seedling stretches to a light that’s too far away and develops a crazy tall stalk that you must somehow support to keep from falling over.
I tried a miniature fence made of toothpicks and string, a Y-shaped twig prop, and a collar made from a plastic straw. Nothing seemed to work very well.
After our babies had sprouted a few sets of true leaves up from their rock wool cubes, we placed them in their hydro baskets—very carefully—as low as we could so we could pile the clay pellets around the stalks for extra support. Much like my first child, the seedlings somehow managed to survive.
Once you have the plants ready to go, don’t forget to get the proper items to protect the little ones against the elements, pests or diseases. Find our recommended plant protector below.
Bergman’s Plant Protector
Protect your plants from diseases and harmful pests.
Consists of three 20 ml bottles
Enough plant protection system supplies for up to 20 plants
Suitable for soil, hydroponic and all other grow mediums
Lights, Bubblers, Action!
We moved the planted baskets like crowns to our noisy, equipment-packed water closet to commence with a better life through chemistry, aka hydroponics. We could barely squeeze past the cracked door to the four hydro pots that occupied most of the available floor space and completed the coronation ceremony in front of the porcelain throne.
I confess some concern came to mind from a book I had read years ago (The Secret Life of Plants, maybe?) that plants grow better in an environment filled with sounds from natural instruments, like pan flutes, guitars, and violins. The music from the HEPA filter, oscillating fan, bubblers, and water pumps would have to do right now for my growing cannabis plants.
Vegetatin’ Headaches
Shirley, bless her heart, has a thing with math. Numerical “cackalation” causes her eyes to glaze over and her ears to ring. She’ll tell you, “Numbers just aren’t my thing.” So, there was a little problem with setting the light timer for the vegetative stage of our first grow.
There was also trouble with the timer even before we got to the numbers, which was on me.
It was a fancy digital unit that a neighbor had given us, probably because he couldn’t figure it out either. So, we got one of those mechanical timers with the dip switches you pull up or press down to turn the lights on or off. That right there can be challenging enough, “Do you pull ‘em up to make the lights come on, or do you push ‘em down?”
Once we got that aced, it was time for Shirley to bring her brains to bear. She had learned about the vegetation stage and flowering stages; you know, setting lights for 18 hours on/6 off for the veg stage and 12 hours on/12 hours off for flowering – unless you’re growing autos like we were, where the light numbers seem to be a matter of debate among the online experts. Keep in mind, we’re still talking numbers (in Shirley’s head) and a bunch of numbers in the same thought at that.
So, for our momentous voyage into our very first vegetation light cycle, Shirl set the timer to 12 hours on/12 off – the flowering light cycle.
Flowering, in Record Time, but not Intended
I suppose the 12-hour goof wasn’t as bad as it could have been had all the weed plants been photos. As I said before, we had three autoflowers, which will flower whenever they feel like it, timer be damned.
Our one photo went into their flowering cycle pretty darn quick, of course. And it turned out the autos weren’t far behind.
But even though the yield wasn’t what we had dreamed of—after all, we only had several CFLs maxing out the available power strip plugs—we were pretty excited to have a yield at all.
Let’s Have a Smoke and Talk This Over
For several reasons, we decided our next grow would move to our detached garage.
Even with the ventilation I set up in the upstairs grow space, the tell-tale smell of marijuana plants still wafted its way down to the first floor of our house. Any visitor would immediately know what we were up to, and we were uncomfortable with that.
Also, we found the hydroponic approach to be labor intensive: lots of heavy buckets of water to deal with, nutrients to manage, and pH readings to take with numbers (again) for Shirley to figure out.
So, she looked into doing a soil grow (reluctantly, but since the dirt would not be in our living area, she was okay with it) while I tackled how to climate control an appropriate space in the garage. At least we’d have more room this time.
.
Six months later…
The cold weather had set in, and the four small cannabis seedlings in their new fabric pots were huddled together on my garage workbench, teeth chattering. Well, if they had teeth…
Overhead, an array of various lights clamped exploitatively onto the tools protruding off the pegboard the bench butted up to—a combo of incandescent, halogen, CFL, and LED. But they didn’t produce enough heat to keep the chill off when the sun went down. And what was that white, powdery stuff on the leaves?
I guess it’s a learning process…
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