New indoor gardening beginnings are starting up for me now, and I’m excited to put into practice things I learned from a cycle I completed a few weeks ago. It was a blessed harvest that came with gifts that kept on giving (and will continue to give). Thank you, Lord! To get to that harvest, I encountered some real difficulties that made me want to quit. I almost did for a few hours one time but here we are, a blessed harvest.
In this new season I will be growing indoors a variety of flowers, vegetables and of course cannabis. I am using a 3×3 space for this grow. I have an LED light capable of 480 watts output. I will be re-using Fox Farms Ocean forest soil for this grow. I will be using a variety of pot sizes from 3 inches to 6 inches to 1 gallon to 3 gallon pots. Depending on outcomes I will utilize the Autopots USA watering system eventually.
The Autopots last cycle were absolutely amazing to me. My plants really grew in the manner that I thought myself capable. They were tall, wide and hearty. I loved to admire every day but eventually they turned into a spacing nightmare. My space limitations became clear to me last season so this season I am planning to be more strategic in how I use the Autopots. I learned a lot about pot sizes in relation to maneuverability with the Autopots system. Some of the problems I ran into could have been less damaging if I could get to the plants how I needed to. I am considering additional investment in smaller pots and the tray solution.
This run I am going to improve my plant training discipline. The last run I let my plants do their thing for the most part. This was my first time using clones so I was a bit lax with training. My mind was also in a delusion of sorts, believing I had the same amount of space as I’d had in a previous season. In actuality I had less than a third of the space from my previous grow area. This run I am going to be topping plants, pruning – all that good stuff to help the plants be comfortable in a 3×3 space. Training the plants to not be so tall this go round I think will help me avoid the spacing problems that I encountered.
This new season I am going to also be moving to organic top feed. In the previous season, I was using the Fox Farms line of nutrients. I think they do a mighty fine job, but I am seeking organic inputs sourced by me so that I can understand their impact on the plants better. I popped some seeds around the last week of May that I’ve been feeding chicken poop, and they’re some of the best results I’ve achieved from seed in less than a month, that’s for sure.
Some of the early results are because I have become more disciplined in my water and feed cycles. I have been completing my to-do tasks that are setup for water and feed days more consistently. Before I implemented the to-do list process, I would skip days because the plants met the eye test. What I’ve learned, though, is that consistency gets results, and you don’t have to wonder about them. I learned early last season the power of consistent watering when I was trial-and-erroring with some plants I planned on breeding. It was a fantastic learning experience, but every last one of those plants ended up getting the chop because the space lack was real.
This season my mantra is going to be less is more. At one point last season I had like 20 plants going indoors that I cut down to 4. This time I am going to not start so many plants indoors. I am going to be very selective because my space is even smaller this season. I’ve also got about 20-something plants in my outdoor garden that I’ll have to look after for a couple of months. Indoors I really want to focus on quality and understanding growth cycles of the varieties I will be growing out. I want to use the Autopots to water them too but I have got to figure out the proper configuration so until then I need to not have a ton of plants to water.
I think this is good for this first post. What about you? Let me know; send me a message.
