Winter is coming? Bugger me it’s already here duck; Winter is here and up in the North we’re freezing our tits off. I’m back with another hair brained auto-grow; Some Dinafem seeds, a bollock-freezing outbuilding in January and a funky @DiyLedUk light for good measure. As I write this intro post in late January the new year hangover is well in effect. This grow goes out especially for @Dinafem-Mark, @JJJ, @diyledukand others who helped me out last time with support or advice by pm/post. Sorry, can't tag-in everybody who helped me out, that would be silly. But I fucking love you all. -[BEANS]- Dinamed CBD Kush Auto; Thanks to Mark I've got some spanky-new Dinamed Kush CBD seeds to try out, so it would be rude of me not to show them off. He sent these out last year and I promised to do a diary with them - it took me a while but here we are! I was really impressed by the Dinamed CBD plant I grew on my first run - I won't repeat my opinions of the original Dinamed plant here for the sake of keeping things short, it’s all in my first diary, but it was very positive. This isn’t actually my first grow with this strain however; I did a cheeky secret grow over autumn, finishing just after Christmas which gave me 2 decent sized jars from one plant. With the relatively cold air-temps I saw some real deep purples coming out, all the sugar leaves and all the buds were/are a solid purple by the end - like proper Jimi Hendrix purple.. So I’m expecting that for sure this time, I’m only planting two of these seeds this time as I don’t need quite so much crop from the CBD-only plants. Dinafem White Cheese Auto; I’m also growing out 3x White Cheese autos, also Dinafem. I bought a f**king shit-tonne of various autoflowering cheese strains from Dinafem during the black Friday sale (yellow-sticker heroics!) and of them, these are the ones I’m looking forward to the most, I think! Backup; Dinafem Cheese XXL Auto. This freebie from the above order will be my backup bean, in case any of the 5 ladies above decide to stay at home. -[AREA/ENVIRO]- I'm making some modifications to the bat-cave for this run. I’m in an outdoor, un-heated and only partially insulated outhouse. Can’t get around that. I love my LED too, that’s just a thing. However this is not the time of year to be running LED in an outbuilding without some serious assistance. Therefore air temps will PLUMMET in this space during winter, so my setup and expectations of yield have to take this into account. The outhouse is too big to heat the room my tent is in, so I will have to rely on heating inside the tent, or pre-heat the incoming air - it’s just simple common sense; If I’m growing with outdoor temps during winter and I’m maintaining good extraction, then I will be effectively pumping-in a constant supply of FREEZING COLD AIR into the tent at all times. I still need to keep things collapsible in a rented property, but I can afford to add a small additional tent, and use it to pre-warm air for my main tent by running an HPS lamp in it. The bonus being if I’m going to the bother of burning watts heating air, I may as well use that space to grow some more plants in! First things first on the heating front, get the roots warm. I dismantled a pair of old wooden pallets, sanded & rebuilt them to the specs of my 70x70 and 60x60 tents, and then mounted a number of tube heaters inside them. These heaters are wired-in to a junction box with a single lead out, to a regular 3-pin plug, giving me two small pre-built heated floors that I can drop into my tents as a single item of heating equipment. The heated pallets will each be controlled by an inkbird temp controller, it’s probe inserted through the side of one of my pots giving me the soil temp of my pots as the control mechanism for flicking the under-floor heating on/off… Actually, the larger pallet was built for the previous grow, the one I didn’t document, so I only had to build the smaller pallet for this grow. I’ll take air into the small tent passively, and then warmed by the tube-heaters and HPS, it can be drawn through ducting into the larger tent where the main crop will benefit from the warmer intake air. In summer grows, this extra tent will give me other options too. Lighting; For the first week or two I'll be germing with the Scope 275. This light is gloriously over-powered for my space; I can't remember exactly but iirc it’s rated for something like 1.2x1.2 meters, not a mere 70x70cm space like I’m using. I wanted a light that I will still want to use if I increase my tent size later, and the frame gives almost perfect wall-to-wall coverage against the tent sides so it made sense to up-rate once I was already crow-barring my fusty old wallet out. Haha fun times! In the photo below you can see the wall to wall coverage during an earlier grow. However for germing it’ll be dimmed way down, and I’m using the bigger light mainly because it is already set up in the correct tent, and because it dims down lower (75w) than my other light. After the plants are ready to pot up, they’ll go in separate tents, the cheeses in the larger 70x70 tent under the Scope 275 and the two Kush will go in the 60 tent, under HPS. Rather than use another LED, this time I’m using a 600w digi ballast switched down to 250w. I’m a big believer in LED, I think it is a far superior technology all round, and that there are only very minor edge cases where LED isn’t superior to all other forms of lighting we have currently. Unfortunately, when your light doubles-up as your interior heater, this is one of them. So in the smaller tent I won’t be using my funky little blurple Kingbo this time, but I’ll be using HID for the first time. But that doesn’t worry me unduly, I’ll have a bit of time to read up on the dos and don'ts of dirty hot bulbs & ballasts while I source a suitable ballast, reflector & bulb... Extraction; An RVK125 L1, 5 inch fan, mounted to mdf board sat on top of the large tent, and controlled with a simple speed controller provides the suction. Air is drawn passively into the small 60-tent, up into the roof where ducting carries it back down into the bottom of the large 70-tent from where it is then extracted outside. This thing sucks the shit out out of my 70x70 tent even on low, I have no doubt it will move enough air for both tents at winter-low extraction speeds. Air is cleaned by… A Rhino Hobby filter. I know some people knock these rhino filters saying the quality isn’t what it used to be. I have no idea what they were like before tbh, but this one has just finished my first two grows with no probs so I’m just going to leave it all in place as it’s a faff to move. I’ll take it all down & clean it up before I run it again after this though, and I will budget for a new filter to arrive by the time we get this grow into flower. If I can stick with the current filter for the whole grow then all I’ve done is pre-buy something I’ll need soon enough anyway, and if push comes to shove, I’ll have a filter ready to go at a moment’s notice.. Humidity; Other than at the seedling stage where I have a lot of control over humidity due to being in a propagator, I won't try & exert any control over the humidity for most of the grow, because I don't really have any - other than lower/increase fan speeds, or re position air-circulation fans if necessary.

Looks like I might have a stroke of luck with a friend in need that will be living in one of my spare rooms temporarily. Just had my annual gas check done and signed off, so should be safe to get a grow on. My friend has a 7 ft x 7 ft tent and some experience growing. I know that it's in his interests to keep things quiet. He is a very private person with a healthy amount of paranoia, for a good reason. I was originally wanting to set up inside the house, but my friend noticed I have a large garage that was bricked up years ago (now basically a large outbuilding) He seems to think this would be a better idea. I'm not so sure, it would mean having to have electricity and sockets wired in there, so there are extra costs straight away. I know there are fans that run almost silently, but I'm worried about my neighbours noticing anything suspicious. I used to let them use my garden as a way through when they were doing some work in their own garden and also to let them in my shed to borrow the odd gardening tool. I've started locking my shed door now and want to cool things off with them a bit as they have pissed me off a bit lately. Won't bore you all with the reasons why Wanting to grow in as natural medium as possible and was wondering what the optimum number of plants would be in the 7 x 7? Also what lighting, extractor and fan size I would need? Many thanks in advance. I would take the time to read up more, but have an illness which has got worse over the years that leaves me easily fatigued and causes problems with my vision when reading/trying to concentrate