Completely new

[Areyes]

Hi I just wanted to post this pic and see what I'm doing wrong.
I read the website to my best abilities and searched the forum for anything that looks like mine but im uninformed and confused. Any help would be great. They seem to have stretched out and are going to maybe fall over and die. I planted two weeks ago. Went to home depot and got a blue plant light after the first week. The first week I just used a regular curly light bulb (I know that's not what it's called). They are too tall and seems like it's going to bend and die. I planted 5 and got 3 sprouts.
also it's in my closet. I put a cut water bottle on top but its too tall now. The light is only 5in away and I leave it on all the time.

 

[zeke]

hmm look on your cfl bulb box if its warm white,cool white for veg basically look at a kelvin scale it will help

 

[D.A.A.S.69]

Hey Areyes, with those cfl, lights you have got to put it no further away from your plants than 2-3 inches, they want stretch then. Plus you need a good many more bulbs.

 

[JohnC]

Areyes - As has been mentioned, the problem you encountered was "stretch" during the seedling phase. This usually results from having your lights too far away from the plant so in response the plant tries to "reach" the light. Since you are using CFL bulbs, you want to get those bulbs right down above the lights with maybe no more than 2 or 3 inches clearance. As zeke mentioned, you also want to make sure your bulbs are of the correct temperature. You want "Daylight" for vegetative growth (5000 to 6500 kelvin) and "warm white" for flowering (2700 to 3500 kelvin).

In addition to the correct light spectrum, you also need to make sure you have enough "intensity," measured in lumens. Generally, each plant should be covered by around 10,000 lumens. So if a standard CFL bulb gives off 2,500 lumens, you’d need 4 or more of those, until you reach the desirable levels.

 

[MadMike]

I've started seeds on cfls and I had the lights as close the plants as possible without them touching. If they touch the bulb they'll burn but otherwise it's perfectly safe to snug them right up since they don't produce any heat. You don't mention the wattage of the bulb(s)? In my experience, with cfls, you can't have too many lights - well, theoretically you could but you're not likely to hit that limit.. Their output is much less than other grow lights.

 

[ALASKAGREEN]

In the Short term you can also add soil to support the seedlings that have stretched so much.... you can also use twisty ties to stake them.

 

[Potted]

I think u left the humidity dome ( soda bottle ) on to long and the lights to far away at the same time causing to much stretch and week stems, chalk it up to lack of experience. We all had to start somewhere,don’t let this denture u from growing it’s a steep curve to master,I’m still learning and have been growing for years. Good luck and welcome to the show