The cold weather had set in, and the four small cannabis seedlings in their new fabric pots huddled together on my garage workbench, teeth chattering. Well, if they had teeth…
Overhead, an array of incandescent, halogen, CFL, and LED lights clung exploitatively onto the tools protruding off the pegboard. But they didn’t produce enough heat to keep the chill off when the sun went down. And what the heck was that white, powdery stuff on my Critical Mass?
Why Don’t we do it in the Dirt?
Flashback six months. Shirley, my lovely and talented wife, and I had decided to move our first-ever cannabis grow, using hydroponics, from our master bedroom’s water closet to our detached garage. We also decided to change from hydro to dirt for our second grow. See my previous story if you’re curious why.
Anyway, here’s the dirt on the world of dirt: you don’t want to plop your precious little cannabis darlings down into just any ol’ kind. The soil in my yard was not a choice to put in the pots, as it was mostly sand, and what dirt content it did have was, well, dirty dirt.
But not Just Any Dirt is Suited for Growing Indoors
So off we went to our local big-box home store’s garden department. Of course, there was more than one choice, and we opted for the organic dirt, as they didn’t have gluten-free dirt (sorry, Shirley).
Part of this decision was because we’d be putting our own nutrients into the soil, so we didn’t want the kind that already had stuff added to it; thank you very much. Not to mention, “organic” just sounded right. I imagined myself at a gathering with my neighbor growers, “Yes. I only use organic soil,” pinkie raised on my hookah stem. “It’s the only soil that will do.”
The problem was that mushrooms started sprouting up in the organic soil, along with my newly planted girls.
Now, ‘shrooms may sound like an added value. But Mr. Google told me that unless you’re an expert musher—which I am not—it was best to remove them, as some can be quite dangerous, even deadly. So, ix-nay on the ushroom-mays.
I know enough to know I don’t know enough (about most things), so I decided to ditch the relatively inexpensive big-box home-store dirt altogether and begrudgingly transplanted my sweet baboos into the most expensive dirt option preferred by many cannabis growers, Fox Farm Happy Frog ready-to-use potting soil. (You can usually tell a product like Fox Farm’s is made for herb cultivators by the psychedelic artwork on the packaging.)
So, with Happy Frog, there were no more ‘shrooms and no need to pH test the soil, which is a real plus in my book. Guess you get what you pay for. You can learn a ton more about indoor plant care with the free Plant Care Guide e-book—download it here!
Climate Crisis is Real
Now, I knew going in that my garage was a hostile climate for my girls, as it had no heat and no AC. But it did have electric service. As it turned out, though, it was just enough to power some grow lights and a small fan but not the electric heater I bought for the girls’ new space. It tripped the circuit breaker every time it kicked on. Geeze.
My quick climate fix idea was to huddle the seedlings together and enclose them, the lights, and the fan with a plastic tarp that would trap the heat from the lights, making the small space comfy cozy. My garage workbench seemed the perfect location, as I described before.
But it wasn’t long before the fuzz showed up. Not the cops, Powdery Mildew. A quick troubleshooting check with ILGM.com revealed that I needed to act fast.
One Grow Room is Often not Enough.
I learned from this unpleasant pestilence that one does not simply have but one grow space. I needed to quickly set up a second indoor area to quarantine my infested girl.
As far from my healthy plants as possible, I stacked two cinder blocks to put Miss Mildew on; two more cinder blocks next to that to insert my partially opened 10-foot deck umbrella (it was too big to open all the way without knocking all kinds of my garage crap over); from the umbrella’s rafters, I clamped on a properly distanced CFL grow light. Using clothes pins, I enclosed the area with a couple of white plastic tablecloths (the dollar store strikes again) to keep the powdery mildew spores from wafting about. Needless to say, I turned off the fan, and it would stay off until the coast was clear.
After removing as many affected leaves as possible, early treatment with a home remedy from ilgm.com worked well—a spray made from one cup of hydrogen peroxide (3% concentration) in a gallon of water. Three weeks later, Critical Mass rejoined her sisters back on the workbench. This time, I spaced the girls further apart to increase the airflow between them from the little fan.
Close, but not Quite
But that was a short-term solution; I needed to get to the root of the problem by controlling the climate in my garage. Or, better yet, by picking the best mold-resistant cannabis strains to grow in the first place, then checking if they’re available as Cheap Weed Seed Deals!
Shirl suggested calling an electrician to beef up the garage’s electric service. It had a circuit breaker panel with lots of empty slots. It’s tooo bad the empty slots weren’t juiced with the significant currency needed to pay for the electrician, the city permit, and the city inspection. But I got an idea for a much less expensive, temporary fix: an extension cord.
Now, Hold on There, Sparky!
I know, I know. You’re probably thinking, “An extension cord? Are you crazy?” But, after a little research, I hooked one up, and it’s been working fine for two winters and one summer and still going strong. 10-amp, single-strand, outdoor-rated, used on construction sites in extreme weather, 100 feet long, and 125 USD.
I plugged it into an outdoor outlet on my deck. As luck would have it, the covered outlet has Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) protection. I drilled a hole in the deck below the outlet to drop the extension cord down to the sand under the deck and straight-lined it across the yard to the garage window, about 50 feet away. It powers a heater for the cold and a window AC unit for the hot. It’s a three-plugger, so I have 2 inputs left over.
I give the unused, coiled-up part of the extension cord a feel occasionally to see if it’s hot, which would be a warning sign. It never is, not even warm. The only time the GFCI circuit breaker tripped was during a heavy fog, but a press of the reset button on the related circuit inside the house restored the power. Good to know the GFCI works!
No doubt the local authorities would come down hard on this solution of mine, which is one reason I buried the extension cord in a V-shaped trench, 18 inches deep, using my straight-edged snow shovel (fortunately, my yard is very sandy). I didn’t have a conduit for extra protection, but I did have a long coil of tough plastic garden edging I wasn’t using, so I placed it over the cord before covering the trench back up.
Room to Grow Indoors
Seeing the growing girls on the workbench needed more elbow room, I moved them, along with their lights and fan, over to an adjustable steel shelving rack that was home to some miscellaneous garage stuff. Once I found a new indoor spot for it (what—you thought I was gonna throw it away?), there was plenty of room for my little darlings to branch out and up. I could also adjust the shelf above them to keep the lights at the right distance. The shelves are constructed of steel grids, which conveniently allows me to place the lights on top of one to shine through the grid on the plants below. I clamped the small fan in place. The grid shelf design also allows me to put trays under the cloth pots to catch water drippage.
The strength of the steel rack also enabled me to turn the whole situation into a grow tent. I wrapped it in new, disposable white plastic tablecloths from the dollar store for a clean, light-reflective interior. When it was time for lights out, the outside was wrapped with a big black tarp. A few clamps, a little plastic clothesline, bada bing, a DIY grow tent!
Helpful tip: Don’t attract local law enforcement to your reefer madness like I did. While unfurling the windshield reflector that was about to become my new grow tent’s roof, I was standing right next to the garage’s sunlit window. After wrestling with the shiny cardboard for a while to get it unfolded, I looked up to see the rather large, uniformed cop I was blinding with my misdirected sun rays. He had stealthily responded to my next-door neighbor’s silent burglar alarm that had gone off. Now, he had two things to check out.
Cannabis Leaf Reading. Your Guide to Watering Just Right
Watering was a different situation now that we’d moved from hydroponics to soil growing. It was one of the most puzzling changes I had to adapt to. I was never quite sure if I was over-watering or under-watering.
Learning to read the leaves became an essential skill for Shirley and me. Leaves can tell you if your plant needs more or less water and more or less of a particular nutrient. Your babies’ leaves will also alert you to any pests, diseases, and/or stresses they’re suffering from. I’m a fan of fan leaves. They are how my girls talk to me!
We were always reacting to leaves that would start curling or turning yellow. Fortunately, we talked to the girls daily and could nip problems in the bud with the help of ILGM’s leaf diagnosis chart. We bookmarked it on our computer.
You Can Call Me Al(gae)
Since it was kind of a pain to drag my garden hose into the garage when my babies were thirsty, I started filling my impressive collection of empty, 1-gallon plastic water jugs from the hose, let them sit overnight to de-gas, and then adjusted the pH. I knew they’d come in handy one day!
My hose water is consistently 7.0, so I quickly learned how much pH-down stuff to squirt in each jug to reach my desired 5.5-6.5 pH level. That way, I didn’t have to use my pH meter so much. I didn’t worry about the pH of the soil since it had already been adjusted by the fine folks at Fox Farm.
The problem was, the water that sat around in the jugs the longest started to turn green with algae. It was just ever-so-slightly green at first, so I didn’t really pay it much mind. But, of course, it got greener the longer it sat. I didn’t know that the light was causing the algae to form in my white jugs. Besides this, I was algae ignorant, and I didn’t realize it would harm my girls if left unchecked.
I tried cleaning the jugs with the usual home remedy stuff—bleach, peroxide, vinegar—but nothing solved the problem. So, I had to replace them more frequently, filling just a few at a time and storing them in the dark.
It Was a Sunny Day
Shirley and I like to think we’re benevolent pot parents. We enjoy getting the girls out from under the grow room’s unnatural lights and into the great outdoors whenever possible. Ah, fresh air, sunlight, gentle breezes – and spider mites! Yep, the Borg. They found one of the girls during a happy outing, sneaked onboard, and hitched a ride back into the grow room.
Fortunately, one morning, with a coffee mug in hand as I was misting the girls, the water drops revealed a web strand between the uppermost leaves of one plant. Not that I knew about spider mites yet, but I did know that webbing couldn’t be good. I was able to ID the little critters with the help of this handy cannabis pests identification guide.
I zoomed into the webbed area with my magnifying glass. Then I switched to the jeweller’s loupe I normally use for trichome inspection. And there were the mites, like little army tanks rolling along between stops to suck some green chlorophyll out of the leaf, leaving tell-tale white spots.
Off to the quarantine umbrella, it went for treatment with Bergman’s Bug Blaster! It really does the trick if you follow the instructions carefully. It’s supposed to eliminate other pests, too, but fortunately, I’ve only had to test it on spider mites.
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
A Web of Opportunity
I have the spider mites to thank for getting me into the happy habit of routine leaf inspection. Seeing that horror was enough to make me hover over my girls’ leaves with the magnifying glass like Sherlock Holmes every day. It’s kinda fun, though, and now I look forward to having a closer look at the other-worldly cannabis landscape. While I’m at it, I’m also on the lookout for milky and amber trichomes so I know when to prepare for harvest.
Every (indoor) grow is an exciting adventure! Of our four plants, one was harvest-ready at 11 weeks, one at 12 weeks, and two at 21 weeks. Shirley and I dried and cured many ounces of tasty cannabis buds from our Cherry Pie, Gelato, Critical Mass, and Crystal plants. Try your hand at harvesting your very own magnificent, home-grown marijuana. But first get the free Grow Bible—sign up here!
