2021 Season Chilli Growing

Griffo said:
Ah I was thinking to try this to get them started too.

Is this a rubbish buy? I like it has the e27 is it, thread, so if the LEDs start failing there are other options. It then becomes a not badly priced set of flex arms!
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dunno if I would risk them tbh likely cheap made stuff from china that could fail in a fire.

personally I'd get a cheapo shelving unit and some 8500k t5 bulbs/ballast from a diy store.

they don't have penetration though so restrict how tall a plant you can really grow with them , but if it's just to give your plant 1-3months before full sun is here then it's fine.
LEDs don't really penetrate beyond the canopy either.

maybe your local police sell growlights from raids ;) give them a call lol
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/police-equipment-cannabis-farms-17227525
 
Hi guys - I am growing Chillis for the first time. I am using a heating mat however I do not have grow lights. My chilli's look quite a bit leggy. I am growing it by the window sill in London. Should I be worried?
 
Maxyboy123 said:
Hi guys - I am growing Chillis for the first time. I am using a heating mat however I do not have grow lights. My chilli's look quite a bit leggy. I am growing it by the window sill in London. Should I be worried?
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Light would be better obviously but as long as they stay green and are growing a bit of legginess isn't the end of the world, you can just bury them a bit deeper when you pot them on.
 
Here's some progress on my grow. These guys in the red cups are destined for the outside.

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Some of my tiny scale hydro breeding projects.
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Everyone happily in their tiny home :)
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Maxyboy123 said:
Hi guys - I am growing Chillis for the first time. I am using a heating mat however I do not have grow lights. My chilli's look quite a bit leggy. I am growing it by the window sill in London. Should I be worried?
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you don't need a special grow light and people over estimate massively how much light a seedling or small plant needs.

just use a regular CFL/LED house bulb with the daylight colour temperature, highest lumens you can find

which is probably like 1500lumens it will be far better than the sunlight at this time of year, you will get 0 stretch and tight nodes, you just need to keep the bulb like 5-6 inches away

IKEA do a grow bulb btw for £5(until march28) https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/vaexer-led-bulb-for-cultivation-par30-e27-60317483/

Heatmat imo is a waste, it's just to speed up germination really, you can also just stick them on top of a router or whatever an get the same thing for no added electric costs :p

BTW if your PC has powered bookshelf style speakers the one that plugs in to the power probably gets nice and warm on top
 
So I've not grown chilli outdoors before. No greenhouse or poly tunnel.
As the weather improves do I just give them more and more time outside each day, bringing them in overnight, until the weather gets better?
 
Here's some destined for the outdoors soon:
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Skunk Chocolate, Pink Habanero, CGN 21500. All 44 days old.
 
Hi guys, just read through the old 2020 thread after I went off the radar. Sorry life got complicated with the pandemic :(
Top effort by everyone and so cool to see such epic results from different ways of growing.

I had a pretty good year managing to grow some super hots for the first time alongside some other standard varieties too.
Experimented with a small DIY light box for my seedlings / young plants which worked great. I also tried my hand at homemade self watering pots which worked amazingly well for me and made looking after more plants than I intended nice and easy.

Growing again this year and planning to stay active on the forum. Re-engineered the light box and growing a bunch of random varieties kindly gifted to me :) from a member at the Chillisgalore forum (RIP). Seeds are in small plastic pots filled with coir sat in a cheap heated propagator. I tried to over winter a handful of my best plants from last year but all died bar one. It is a super hot though and is showing new growth so great to have that off to a head start.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone else is up to and learning more again this year. Peace.
 
I tried the damp kitchen towel approach to germinating some seeds from those mild sainsburys chillies. Two of four seeds have set off nicely so I potted them today, then into a zip lock bag and grow light.

I've got 4 plugs from that chillies4u place coming soon hopefully. I'm intending to try DWC hydroponics with those. Currently 3d printing some custom plant pot net things to fit my IKEA bin/hydro reservoir!

I'm hoping my cheapo 100w amazon thing (mentioned above, I caved into being cheap and got it) will be sufficient for them. If not it'll have to go outside mid summer.
 
Sounds like a very cool setup @Griffo
How does DWC work exactly, do the roots not just rot in the water?
Gonna be interesting to see how the 100w light performs.
 
Thanks, all experimentation at this stage!

As I understand it, the water level is let's say half way up the holy-pot, and so some of the roots get air, some get water. Also, I need to buy/build a fish tank air bubbler thing which oxygenates the water and so also helps with breathy plant stuff.
If the bubbler and some nutrient stuff is all I need... and maybe a pH meter and appropriate pH adjusters... Hopefully it's a cheap experiment!
 
Having the reservoir part full makes sense and I have heard before of plants having air vs water roots to give them what they need.

I keep tropical fish and small pump with a couple of air stones to oxegenate the water won’t cost you much. Lots of people start keeping fish then get bored so there is always loads of cheap stuff going on eBay


pH control I think you right is important because if it is off even if the reservoir contains the right even of nutrients the pH can block the plant from taking them up.

Can’t wait to see your setup in action! Those lights look half decent to me but you can’t beat good old sunshine in my experience!
 
In traditional DWC you want to keep the roots fully submerged all the time for maximum nutrient uptake. Airstone takes care of oxygen in the solution. I have a few kratky method plants and they just sit in still nutrient solution with no airstone so they require a bit of breathing roots but not much. Change out the solution every 6 weeks and haven't had any root issues at all with plants happily in there for the full lifecycle. Some people add a small amount of hydrogen peroxide to mitigate root rot but I've not needed to so far.
 
Ah thanks pooey! :)

In my random internets so far I've failed to find an authoritative source for the 'hobby-level'.

I did read a little about the krabsticks method somewhere too and might try that with one of my seed chillies :).
 
Griffo said:
Ah thanks pooey! :)

In my random internets so far I've failed to find an authoritative source for the 'hobby-level'.

I did read a little about the krabsticks method somewhere too and might try that with one of my seed chillies :).
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No worries :)

Kratky is really very easy and cheap. You can always add an airstone down the line if you want to upgrade to DWC too :D
 
Oh! And on the subject of pH testing... Unless you're willing to shell out a couple of hundred quid or are happy to buy/make calibration solution and recalibrate every second use, I'd stick to test paper. It's done me fine :)
 
Double thanks! I was looking at that stuff and getting annoyed as my price list kept getting longer.

It seems then that DWC and kratky are just slightly different approaches to the same thing. And I'll land somewhere between the two more or less!

Would/could you name a brand for the nutrients etc? I've been looking at VitaLink yesterday.
 
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