1st time grow-Leaves curling under & sick-looking on top-Please help

[skeevywonder]

Hi, I'm a newb on a first time grow and looking for a little insight. I'll describe it to you because I'm not in a 420 friendly location and I was warned against continuing to take and post pics. I have 3 plants all flowering, the oldest has been for a little over 2 months. Its been slow I'm told because theres not enough light (forced to use CFLs and grow right in a closet due to budget constraints) but its budding ok under the circumstances.

Problem is, at the top of all three plants the leaves are looking almost dead, very dry, thin and curled under, even the buds look like theyre affected, very sparse. I've always been under the impression the top cola is where the biggest, densest buds should be on the plant but I have fuller, definitely healthier looking buds going down the plants and the leaves start looking healthy again maybe 1 quarter of the way down each plant. Whats wrong??

Common sense says the light and heat is damaging the top of the plant but I've been told over and over CFLs must be kept close & dont generate a lot of heat, and I've already seen what happens when i kept the lights too far away. Help if you can, thanks in advance.

 

[The Hemp Goddess]

We need pictures. It is safe to post your pics directly here. The servers are in Amsterdam.

 

[Hushpuppy]

I hate to sound like a CFL hater as I have never used them b4, but that sounds like yer problem. They are probably not as much the problem as the heat they generate drying out the top of the plant rather than burning it from being too close. If yu don't have any kind of air circulation and air exchange system then the plants will definitely overheat and dry out. It's hard to say tho without pics (And yeah don't worry about posting pics here, just don't use a cell phone as there is some issue with cell phones)....BTW Welcome to MP, yu will find a lot of help from peeps who have lots of experience and knowledge.

 

[Belloc]

I've been told over and over CFLs must be kept close & dont generate a lot of heat, you are wrong, only led grow light could be close to plants, more info could be found at www.[COLOR="Red"]removed[/COLOR].com

 

[The Hemp Goddess]

I've been told over and over CFLs must be kept close & dont generate a lot of heat, you are wrong, only led grow light could be close to plants, more info could be found at www.removed.com

YOU have been told wrong. While CFLs do need to be kept close as they lose intensity fast over distance, they DO generate a lot of heat. Lumen for lumen, they generate more heat than a HPS. I have air cooled HPS lights and can keep them quite close to the canopy without burning.

IMO, LEDs have not proven themselves to be adequate for flowering (we are going to pretend that you were not trying to SPAM us).

 

[MrBobMarleyJr]

I grow with cfls right now...... im starting to think HPS is the way to go, The cfl's i use work extremely well but untill i try hps i dont kno what im missing but i do kno for sure u need atleast 2 fans blowing towards the cfl's (IMO) just to keep them cool, like THG said they need to b close but always have a fan blowing on them moving the heat away

 

[Hushpuppy]

Yu say that you're growing in a closet. How is the environment in there and in the rooms adjacent to that closet? Yu say yu have fans blowing on them, but are the fans extracting the air within the closet and replacing it with new fresh air from outside? or is it just creating a warm wind within the closet that isn't being replaced very efficiently? Another grower here who is top notch had a similar problem and couldn't figure it out (and was using different lights), but finally figured out that there was dry air blowing on the tops of some of his plants, and they were getting windburn. I think that may be what is happening to yu, especially if, like I said earlier, yer fans aren't extracting and replacing air, but rather just creating a hot dry wind within the growspace.