Little plants are shriveling

Hey I am having some difficulty I am using a 400 watt Ballast and MH bulb, with barbecued soil, Pete Moss, Perlite, and Kow Composte. When they were well they are still small I am using 24/0 is that too much light and on 100% dim. The light is 4 feet away from the plant and was using 13/11 but I was told or suggested to use the 24/0. I got some 13-13-13 but was told to put that in after they got a little bit bigger. It only appears to have one of the plants to be rooting with the fibers some leaves look like they are burnt or something like chlorine splashes. So I took them out of the fertilizer a few minutes ago and the plants are about a week old and still only one has rooted. What should I do?

I don’t know about a lot of the other stuff you are talking about, the 400 watt with very small plants could be not very good and I don’t know about your soil mixture. Barbecued soil? Do you mean heat sanitized soil?

But I do know you seem to be a bit confused about your light schedules. Long light periods are for the early growth or vegetative growth, to develop the plant’s structure, size and shape. 24/0 can work but is usually only used for autoflowering genetics that don’t need a long dark period to cause them to flower. About 12 hours of solid uninterrupted darkness is what gets most strains to start to flower/bud.

In general the long light periods are 18 hours or 16 hours of light a day for vegetative development/growth and for flowering/budding you drop to only 13 or 12 hours of light a day. So for vegetative growth it would be 18/6 or 16/8 and for flower it would be 13/11 or more commonly 12/12 or for some difficult strains maybe even 11/13 to even 10/14 towards the end of flowering.

Why or what is the reason for them to be wilting though at an early stage? The leaves look somewhat grey or black even except for one.

As I said, I’m not sure what is going on with your soil mixture. Too much/too intense of light will cause small plants to shrivel up but the soil itself could be the cause, too much nutrients in the soil can do the same thing to young seedlings, but grey or black with the shriveling up sounds like the symptom called “damping off” which can be caused by too wet of soil and/or soil with an imbalance of microorganisms from the compost. keeping the soil too wet for too long or too often can throw the microorganisms out of balance, allowing the bad anaerobic microorganisms to grow out of control. this is one of the reasons cannabis needs a lot of air or oxygen at the roots, as anaerobic microorganisms do not like rich oxygen environments. Damping off is basically a reaction to bad microorganisms, mold/fungi or bacteria. Not all mold/fungi or bacteria is bad, just like for humans there are beneficial bacteria and fungi and other beneficial microbes.