Wow you are reading my grow journal front to back? That will take you a bit of time I hope you enjoy the read =) lots of Hydro in there. Go Big or Go Home!! =) Honestly I started doing Hydro because as a kid I went to Disney World and they have this ride where they take you through a hydro lab. I was so impressed that when I decided to grow my mind went right back to that ride and I had to learn the secrets =D
Nice looking grow crashed. I'm looking forward to seeing how things look in a month! The first month is one of my favorite parts of the grow cycle for sure. All that explosive growth and such! Good luck my friend and I hope the branches of your plants sag from the weight of the fruit.
Thanks everyone! I'm glad my grow has sparked some interest. Kitsune, I have a bunch of nutrients that came with my Stealth Hydro Bubbleponics kit. According to http://www.growweedeasy.com, these nutrients work just as well. But I also bought General Hydroponics FloraGrow FloraMicro and FloraBloom nutes just in case. I figure I'll hold off on adding any nutrients for another couple of days (as per Kitsune's advice) and after that, add in 1/4 strength nutes with a water change out. I was planning on doing weekly water changes, but since I'm using Hygrozym (exactly like Cannazym) to prevent root rot, and Kitsune only changes his water ONCE (!!! ) I might only change water every 3 weeks depending on how the plant is doing. I'm still waiting on the NL to spring out, but if she hasn't shown her face by tomorrow night, I'm going to start over and germ another seed. Thanks again for all the advice and comments everyone! Keep 'em coming!
I use the Flora series from General Hydro as well and it has treated me really good. I have even been using it differently I have been using it as a 2 Part instead of a 3 part with great success. So just the Grow/Micro, or Bloom/Micro. Remember how fragile the plants are in the beginning and you will do fine. Once they are hardened up a bit and used to nutes throw em at em full force! Yes I get yelled at all the time to change my water but at the same time as long as there is no algae, and no fungus growing in there I don't see the harm. Those nutes in the water are still good and until the plants are done with em I don't see a reason to be flushing my money away by changing the res all the time. That might just be me but it's how I see it. Most of the people telling you to change so often are the nute companies themselves, and of course they want you to buy more nutes =D. Give the NL some time it may still pop it can take a bit for some seeds to pop, but also remember if you pop more. You might wanna pop them out of the system so they don't get too much water. Just moisten the rock wool and put it in a dish with some clear wrap and put it in the window sill or something like that. Or heating mat or whatever you got. Remember seeds and clones like to have nice temps. Always happy to help a fellow Hydro enthusiast!
Funny you should mention that, Kits, I can see the NL starting to peak out of the rockwool now. I think we have a successful (albeit long lasting) germination process! I think a 3 week water change schedule is a nice medium between the crazy weekly changes and the once-per-grow. I guess I have to feel it out for myself. Of course, if I spot algae or smell something funny, I'll do a change out. Also, it seems like the PH in my tank is still flying all over the place. I just tested it out and it was 7.3!!! It's been 5 days since I put this water into the basin, so any residual metals should already be done fuckin' with the pH, right? I put some PH down in and am waiting for it to disseminate. How long do you usually wait before retesting your pH after adjusting? Is there anything that I can do to control the pH?
Here's a quick updated status of the sprouts & pics. The Royal Haze is looking great and the NL has stood up on her own, but the leaves seem to be curling downwards already (as you can see in the pic). Is there any way to fix this or is nothing really wrong and I just have to wait? Thanks ahead. Royal Haze Northern Lights
Week 2 UPDATE Well, it seems that the Royal Haze is looking pretty good. Second set of leaves coming in now and she's standing tall. I decided it was time to add in the 1/4 strength nutrients and turn on the hose for the Royal Haze. I'm following the General Hydroponics feeding schedule which already figures in the 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, full strength scheduling. I just have to do the calculations for # of gallons. In my case, I have 6 gallons of water so I multiplied the measurements provided by 6. So, essentially, I added 15 mL each of FloraGrow, FloraBloom, and FloraMicro to 6 gallons of water. I turned on the pump, but not for the NL. I'm going to give her another 3 or 4 days before putting her on the hose . I did, however, give the NL rockwool a fresh dosage of the nute water drawn from the tank for pH testing (but only a little bit as I didn't want to drown her but the rockwool was getting a bit dry). 1/4 strength nutes shouldn't hurt her (from all that I've read). Maybe it'll help her leaves straighten out (although I'm worried they are like that from opening up underneath the rockwool). Perhaps I buried her seed a little too deep? Well, anyway, here's some pics and hoping that Vision's NL can pull through all the abuse that little seed underwent during germination. Royal Haze Northern Lights
Lots of things can affect your PH, it can be a pain in the ass figuring out what is causing the flux too. I am lucky in my current tap water that it stays as stable as it does. Nutes can be what fluxes your ph up and down, any additives, envronmental factors can also do things. Since mine is stable I only check about once a week to make sure the PH is where it's susposed to be. Only things I know to combat the PH balance is PH up, and PH down and I personally use the Gen Hydro brand. I am gonna do some digging see if I can't find you an answer to help the PH will report back when I find something for you.
Thanks, Kits. Actually, about 15 minutes after I added the nutes, I pH tested the water before turning on the hoses and the pH was right in the sweet spot 5.9 - 6.0. I've read that nutes are pretty good at balancing the pH and it seems like that claim is (at least partially) correct. Actually, I'm a little more curious about cloudiness in my tank water. I just drew some tank water out to feed to the NL and saw that it was a bit cloudy. I've read some places that the nutes can do this and I'm hoping this is so. The water doesn't smell at all, so I seriously doubt that it's algae. If the water starts to smell, I'll do a tank change out this week. Any more experienced thoughts on the cloudy water? Thanks in advance!
OK, major update today. I walked into the room where the grow closet is after being out for a little over 3 hours and the place was wreaking! And not like bud. It was wreaking like mold/moss/algae. I was all "oh shit" and "oh wtf" and what not. So I performed my first water change out and holy fuck is it a pain in the ass. I really hope the ladies made it through this change. I have to replace my closet doors b/c as of right now, they are sliding panel doors and cannot be taken off their track easily. This made the change out really tough on my back. I think we're going to replace them with louvered (for air flow) bifold doors. Anyway, I'm a little confused about the algae growth. Just how much light can cause algae to grow? The only time light should have been hitting the water was when I would add in pH adjusters and when I added in the nutrients. Maybe the hydroton is letting too much light get through the empty slots in the bubbleponics system lid? I covered the empty slots with paper plates just in case. But if this is the cause, then wouldn't light be getting through the hydroton that is in the slots with my plants? How does one prevent light from getting down there? As I'm thinking about it, it is very possible that some of the hydroton fell in there when I was all lit up and adding in pH adjuster. From now on, I'm going to mix the pH adjusters in with the sample water and dump it back in to the tank without taking the actual basket out of it's slot. Is there anything else that could have caused my algae problem? What steps do you guys take to prevent light from getting through to the tank? Dirty Tank Pics Here's one of the tank wall, lots of buildup there. No good! I hope I caught it all in time. This hydro shit is more difficult than I thought!
Wow wtf, I haven't had any kind of problems with algae and my lid's are yellow and let light through them. I'm not sure where the problem is here. What are the temps in the room? Also what do you have in the res? Is it just plain standing water in there with the pump that pulls water up to the hydroton? If this is the case I would invest in an air pump, line, and air stones. Aggitated water will not allow algae to form on the sides of the res tank. I am using a single 14" air stone in each of my resevoirs and the extra air in the water makes the plants super happy when they get their roots down in there. Only thing that I can think of that could cause the water to do what you saw is standing water. I will try to check in more so I can reply faster but the weekends usually keep me away from the computer. You have a serious problem you need immediate responce to shoot me a private message on the site. I always check my private messages even when away from the site.
Interesting. Can you see any drop off of bud production when you drop down to 2 parts only? That would save a lot of nutes...
I have not seen any kind of a drop in performance (check my grow journal in my sig if you wanna see). This is my second grow doing it and I have encountered no deficiency issues at all. They have stayed healthy to the very end. Even strains that are susposed to change color have stayed perfectly green, I am told this is because they have the perfect amount of nutes all the way through. I only add the recommended amount to the water that I refill the res with Sometimes will add just a little extra. I have all 3 parts but don't use them all together. I plan to keep running this way until I encounter a problem. I even have a couple nute hogs in this grow, Chemdawg, C99, and OG Kush are all in there and have not run into any issue
I run (per gallon) 5ml Micro/Bloom/Gro for veg right now. You think it would be safe to drop the Bloom and go 5ml Micro/Grow? Or do I need to increase the amounts?
I haven't played with the veg nutes too much yet was using up the rest of my old nutes first, but looking at the feeding schedule for the Veg period this is how I would personally do it. Week - Stage - FloraGro - Flora Micro - FloraBloom Week 1 - Seedling - 2.5ml (FG) - 2.5 (FM) Week 2 - Early Veg - 10ml (FG) - 7.5 (FM) Week 3 - Late Veg - 10ml (FG) - 10ml (FM) ---Repeat this until you are ready to switch to Bloom Week 5 - Transition - 7.5ml (FG) - 7.5ml (MG) - 7.5 (FB) Week 6-7 - Early Bloom - 7.5ml (FM) - 10ml (FB) Week 8-9 - Late Bloom - 7.5ml (FM) - 12.5ml (FB) Week 9-10 - Later Bloom) - 7.5ml (FM) - 15ml (FB) I think their tables are a little off but that is straight from the Gen Hydro feeding schedule I use. Only thing I do is take off the FG during Bloom and the FB during Veg. As I said their time scales are a little off, I would do the transition as you switch the lights to 12/12, and then amp up the nutes as the table says. It says to use the 15ml in late bloom but I never get that far I generally stay on the 12.5ml through to the end to save nutes. I think plenty of nutes are still in there at the end. Also for my flush what I do is 2 weeks before harvest, I start my flush. I start adding a gallon of water to the res every day or every other day if I am being lazy. This dilutes the nute solution by not adding nutes to the water. It signals to the plant that the end is coming up and it uses up the rest of the nutes in the res. (I am in 1.5 weeks into my flush right now and the plants are showing no signs of nute deficiency) Then the week of harvest I do my full flush. I drain the resevoirs completely and then add fresh water to them, making sure the aero system is drained too. From then on out it is pure water to feed the plants. Until you are ready to harvest. To empty my res I bought a small pump like 65gph and I put that in the bottom of the res and let it pump out the water til the res is empty, throw in clean water and let it sit for a bit and then drain that again before adding the fresh water. I always have air pumps pumping in the water so the roots never drown the plants love that air! and it keeps your water fresh. Also how I add nutes to the solution, I usually have to add water to the res once a week to keep it at the full level.. I add the nutes to that water for that amount of water. That's it, don't add too much more unless you see a problem developing.
The setup that I have included a weighted airstone. Since it was a smaller one, I bought a larger weighted airstone and it works just fine (tested it out before putting the plants in). All I know is that I changed water on Monday with distilled water and today, I think I'm starting to smell the beginnings of an algae problem again in the tent. Perhaps I need more than 1 airstone? I don't really understand why it would be happening again so quickly. I cleaned the tank out and made sure none of the hydroton fell into the tank. I've kept the vacant slots covered with paper plates, so no light should be getting through and I also made sure to add the Hygrozym to prevent root rot. As for the temperatures, it was a steady 75deg all throughout the last 2 days maybe going up to 80 for brief periods at night and RH has held steady at 45-50% since I made the water changeout. The sprouts have really started to develop over the last couple days and I thought everything was going well. But this morning a bit of that smell has crept back into the tent! Do you think anything else could be causing the algae? I really hope I don't have to change out the water multiple times a week, I can't afford that much distilled water! UPDATE: As a quick update to this subject, I spoke to my guy at my hydro shop who is extremely cool and helpful, too. He says that the hydroton that fell into the tank during my first week probably caused a great deal of bacteria to start growing and when I added the nutes, the bacteria went into full growth. Now, I changed that water on Monday, but I failed to use peroxide to clean the pump and airstone. This allowed the bacteria to continue to grow in the new water. So, even though I've changed water 2 times already this week, you better believe I'll be changing it again tomorrow and using peroxide to clean the parts and even putting some peroxide in the tank with the nutes. Then, I can wait a good 3 weeks before I change the water again (thank GOD). But I'm still getting some good growth and hopefully the bacteria didn't fuck up my girls too much. Hopefully, this thread will serve as a good guide to hydro newbies as I seem to be having a good number of problems that are being resolved before the plants are getting affected too badly.
I was wondering if it was the hydroton. It was the only other thing that it might have been. Did you wash the hydroton out very good before use? I always treat mine to a peroxide water bath and leave them in the scalding water until the water starts to cool. Which is also how I treat hydroton between uses. Really hope that this was the issue and you can get it solved. Hydro really isn't that hard to get into there are just more trouble shooting steps if something goes wrong. I hope my posts have been helpful =). Our group of growers that frequent our threads need more hydro experts =D
You have been greatly helpful, Kitsune! It's just extra helpful to be able to talk on the phone with someone. Regarding the hydroton, I did wash it before my grow, but I didn't use peroxide. I followed the steps from growweedeasy.com's entry on Bubbleponics and they mentioned to wash the hydroton but didn't mention peroxide. I will most certainly be using liberal amounts of peroxide from now on! The hydroton that fell into the water (I fished out over 5 when I changed water on Monday) was probably the primary cause of the bacteria. And when I changed out water again today, I saw another 2 pieces! How they got in, I don't know but I will be sure to be much more careful when transplanting the lid from tank to tank. The one good piece of news is that I'm getting a lot of practice doing water changes
Lol good to hear =) just remember once you wash with the peroxide to give it a really good rinse to get the peroxide out of the hydroton. I have always had little pieces fall into my res and haven't really had much of a problem with it. However if there was something on the hydroton to begin with that could make the res a giant petri dish. Only other place I could think of the problem coming from might have been the container it's self for the res, because I can't see distilled water being the source of the problem.