Light is the most important food you feed your plants. The Weed plant experiences two different life stages, each one best fueled by a particular type of light. The first life phase is the vegetative or growth phase. During this phase, the plant is constantly getting taller, like a teenager in puberty. It feeds on lights at the cooler, bluer end of the visible spectrum, and is able to grown continuously under 24-hour-a-day light provided the temperatures are low enough. There should be no respiration time required at all if you are using a pure strain of Weed Sativa from the original mother crop. If you are experimenting with strains that have some Indica spliced into them, or a pure Indica genome, should you be that lucky, two or there hours of darkness a day might help them growth more. You can keep your plants in vegetative growth as long as you like. While it is impossible to sex them as they are in vegetative state, it is possible to switch them into the second state, flowering, and then back again. I will speak more on this procedure in the section on sexing. The longer you leave your pants in vegetative growth, the larger they will become, and the more bud you will be able to harvest at the end.
Convincing the plant to mature out of vegetative growth and into the flowering stage is accomplished by changing its diet of light. When the plants receive only twelve hours worth of light per day, the will transition from the first life stage into the flowering stage. In the flowering stage, they enjoy eating more red light from the warmer end of the spectrum. It takes about two weeks of either light diet to push all the plants into whichever mode you assign.
As you will be cultivating in a closet, manyof the lighting setups traditionally associated with Weed cultivation will be unusable. There is one reason for this: heat. The traditional paradigm for large-scale clandestine cultivation consists of Metal Halide (MH) lights for the twenty-four hour cycle, because they give off lots of cool blue tones, and High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights for the twelve-hour cycle, as they produce a very hot, red light. Unfortunately, both of the lighting systems are completely untenable in small-scale residential cultivation operations. They both draw so much power and put out so much heat that you will either be investigated for suspicious power consumption or indicted for reckless endangerment when your house burns down.
The solution for closet growers has always been florescent. Florescent tube lighting is cheap, readily available under a wide variety of pretences, takes (comparatively) little energy to power, and, most importantly, will not make your grow closet so hot that it stick out like a sore thumb whenever the police helicopter scans over your neighborhood with it’s FLIR target acquisition sensors package.
Now, many seasoned growers will argue that florescent are no good for grow ops, and to a certain extent that’s true. If you are attempting to create a large-scale criminal organization that produces weed for a profit, you can only be as marginally successful as you are going to get at that by investing a lot of money in some serious space and lighting. However, many of those who object are simply trying to dissuade Young smokers from becoming self sufficient, as recent developments in florescent technology, combined with a pair of low-cost LED panels, can make cool, clandestine home closet cultivation of quality bud a reality.
The key to creating a decent setup is understanding and using the benefits that florescent offer. These bulbs run so cold that plants can grow right up against them without sustaining serious damage or becoming a fire hazard. This means that the traditional design of a grow floor – large lights overhead, kept several feet away from the plants – isn’t needed. Instead, once can simply build a “wall” of light by stacking four-foot fluorescent ballasts next to one another, against which the plants can rest and soak up light food. With as few as four four-foot double-bulb fluorescent light ballasts you can create an operable, sustainable closet grow operation. Any additional blasts you can acquire will increase your yield, but there are two other simple solutions you can use to increase the usability of this setup. We will begin by discussion the setup using only four ballasts, and then add further details on how to improve the setup if you have the funds.
You need four ballasts because you have to construct two different chambers. They are both fairly simple to assemble. One is your vegetating chamber. It needs to have one fluorescent ballast hanging overhead, ideally on some sort of adjustable winch or pulley system so you can easily adjust its height. When you purchase bulbs for your setup, you should purchase four regular bright-white bulbs, and four “reptile & aquarium” bulbs – most hardware stores will have both, and by mixing the bulbs in the ballasts, you ensure that each ballast puts out a good amount of light in a variety of different wavelengths the plants enjoy.
The single ballast in your vegetation chamber will be powerful enough to grow your plants to the stage where they are large enough to transplant, as long as your closet is reasonably close to room temperature. When you first put your freshly germinated & potted seeds under it, it should be as low as possible, ideally less than an inch from the top of the pots. As the plants start to grow, be sure to raise the ballast whenever any of the growth tips (the “tops” of the plants) grow up close enough to touch the light bulbs. They will dry out if exposed directly to the bulb for too long.
Once you’ve raised the ballast in the vegetation chamber up about a foot, your seedlings are probably ready to transplant. If you used see-through containers for planting, there should be thin, white tendrils of root visible, snaking around the inside of the pot. If you used opaque containers, you can guesstimate how well the roots have developed based on the size of the plant. The old mystical adage “As above, so below” holds true here: There are likely as many roots below as there are branches above. Use this as your guide when determining how delicate to be in your transplanting.
The second chamber you need to construct is a fruiting chamber. This uses the three remaining ballasts, and they are placed vertically, either against one wall or surrounding the plants to fruit, as opposed to the vegetating light, which is hung horizontally over the vegetating chamber. Any plant places in the middle of this chamber under 24-hour light will stay in vegetative growth and continue to get bigger until you switch it to 12-hour light (usually accomplished with a power bar and an electronic light timer from a hardware store,) at which point it will start to produce THC (provided it’s a female) and continue to do so until you decide to harvest it.
We are getting a little bit ahead of ourselves, at this juncture, so in the interest in finishing out the chapter on lights, I will introduce the two additions you can add to the flowering chamber that are not just additional banks of mixed fluorescent.
One is a SAD fluorescent light. These “full spectrum” florescent are higher-powered lights designed for treating winter-time depression. Having had experience with the lights from many places we have discovered that they provide improved growth with little increase in power consumption and heat output. They are, however, fairly expensive and hard to find bulbs for & purchase anonymously, at least when compared to regular fluorescent. If you can afford one SAD, it can significantly boost the output of a regular three-ballast fruiting chamber, especially if suspended overhead so that it can be raised as the plants get bigger, much like the regular ballast in the vegetative chamber. SAD boosting can be used for both vegetative growth and flowering growth phases in the flowering chamber.
The other optional accelerator you can introduce to your lighting system with little worry about heat and energy constraints is an LED panel. These panels can be build by hand, but you can also purchase them online from sellers on eBay and elsewhere. Each panel has an array of small LEDs on it, in various combinations of white, red and blue. We find little use for the mixed, white and blue panels in closet fluorescent cultivation, but to recommend at least one all-red LED panel in the flowering chamber to provide some of the very red wavelengths that make for plump, juicy buds. Beyond one SAD light and one red LED panel, you can expand your flowering chamber to include as many standard double-bulb fluorescent ballasts as you can fit. That’ll give you the best bang per dollar spent. If you have a large amount of capital up front, you can also replace all the standard ballasts except the one in the vegetating chamber, with SAD lights. Your initial capital expenditure will be high, but over the long term you we get significantly more Weed per dollar of input costs.
Standard four-foot fluorescent ballasts are a closet grower’s best friend.
Full-spectrum SAD lights and LED panel lights provided more lumens and a better color balance, but are not required if you can’t afford them.
A simple vegetating chamber constructed from a four-foot fluorescent ballast and some shelving made of PVC pipe. The ballast and any shelves can be easily raised or lowered by sliding them out and then sliding them back in at a different height.
The image depicts a plant inside a simple flowering chamber. Note the three four-foot ballasts arranged vertically, as well as a SAD light mounted overhead and a red LCD panel on the floor providing warmer wavelengths to encourage more THC and CBD production.
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