First grow, few questions. The clones are in rockwool, had to buy them that way, I tore off as much as I could without damaging roots then rolled them in great white and put them in 2" net pots. I planted them 4/19, the roots pic is 4/21. Just worried about the two back right plants. I think the first one has great roots for 2 days, the next two are just barely popping out. Two plants are drooping, the rest look fine. What do you think? The rockwool is brown where it was rolled in the great white, is that normal? I had to squish some of the rockwool instead of ripping it off. Root damage maybe? 4x 32w 6500k fluorescent in chrome hoods 24/7 Room temp 78 Humidity 40% Nute res is 72 Plant tops are 77-80 (measured with IR) Drip line at constant slow trickle, res has air bubbler for high tdo. Constant reciprocating fan on low Room air changed out every few hours (11x9x8 room) Nutes are 200ppm over the already 175ppm filtered water Ph about 5.6 or a little more, colored test strips are kinda goofy. When the roots hit the bottom of the 4"PVC I'm taking out the drip line and just running nft.
Have to upload one pic at a time :/ sorry Any other ideas for the grow? The back two plants roots look like this. Thanks!!
So I pull the plants and started taking lots of the rockwool off and all the roots look very healthy, bright white and getting furry. The only problem is they started growing up instead of down, so I redirected them and they should be fine. Now it's just a blob of rockwool about the size of a quarter around the root base that I didn't want to risk damaging. I also mixed some great white with water and soaked the rockwool with it. Now the neoprene plugs fit all the way in correctly and the roots have more space to grow.
looks like it rotted, was light hitting it? i'm not sure what it is but those cubes are soaking wet. they only need to be moist.
It was only in for a day, not long enough to rot. The brown rinsed out just fine, so it was just very concentrated great white powder, and the roots were thriving best in the dark brown parts. There isn't any light getting past the neoprene, it seals well. They're soaking wet because I have it on 24/7 with an air bubbler in the res, so the tdo (total dissolved oxygen) is very high and it's safe to leave roots in that. Same concept as bubble pots and aero. It's sort of a nft, bubble pot, aero hybrid. I hope I'm not off the mark :/ Thanks for your input, it's appreciated.
I'm still learning, I just hope what I read and pieced together turns out to be the magic formula. We'll see in the next few days I guess? How long does it take for nute problems to show in the leaves? Thanks again I hope my previous post didn't seem snarky or discount your help. I checked your grow, looks badass.
Nav imo you need to get ph & ppm pens ..ph strips just aren't going to work for the tolerance perameters you need to keep to for hydro in the long run..save you lots of problems in the future
no not snarky. i mean it. every gro is different. what may work for one doesn't work for another. at the end of the day your plants will let u know what they need. just jeep an eye an em. get those pens Dr. was referring to. they are invaluable essentials.
I absolutely agree. I have a ppm pen, but the damn ph strips and drops are so annoying and inconsistent. Drops read bout 1 ph lower than strips. I have a ph pen I got second hand but it's missing the calibration solution. Milwaukee sms120 What's an estimate on how much GH ph down would I need to change about 13 gal of 400ppm water from lets just say 7 to 5.5? The first time it took about a chug-a-lug (a few tbps) and it was very stable for a few days, today I wanted to drop it about .5 and put in about a tsp and it dropped from 6 to 4!! (According to the drops... the strips went from about 6.5 to 5.) my filtered tap water is about 7 and 175ppm with "value added" crap from the water co. I forgot what it's called but I can get exact levels of everything if need be. My roommate is an absolute genius with all this, college for plants, job in plants, has many fish tanks etc and has their systems dialed in. It's just that my eyes gloss over whenever they talk, but reading it new and at my pace I can usually figure it out. Thanks a bunch!
i use .25ml to bring 1 gallon of ph 7 tap water to 5.5. that's without nutes. with nutes, i'd say .5ml per gallon should do the the trick. your at what,1/4 strength? little less? thought i had it in my log guess i never recorded the exact amount.
That seems about right in line with what I used. How long should the water circ before you test? It's a 300gph pump running at about half that, (main tubes and drip are on) so it seems the whole res would circ and mix pretty fast. I let it sit for a few minutes before testing. Yeah I'm at 1/4 strength nutes, it's about 200ppm above my normal water at 175ppm so it hovers around 400ppm depending how much of the res evaporates. The newish problem is the res temp, the day I set it up the weather was beautiful and was supposed to stay that way as it's spring in Cali, but today got in to the 90s and the res was about 76 arg! I'll start freezing water bottles and that'll get me through veg but I absolutely need some kind of res cooling for flower, sadly I started almost two months late and I'll be finishing up in the summer so yay :/ no central air or anything useful like that here.
So they're recovering well, leaves still a little droopy but roots starting to go crazy. Here's the best looking so far.
One in the back left hasn't dropped roots yet, but it's got the most pistils, hrm... Sorry if I'm flooding your inbox with notifications, I'm just excited that's all! And I can only post one image at a time :/
they make chillers u can buy for ur res. not sure exactly how they work though. the water bottles are a good temporary fix but a pain in the ass for long term. based on ur pics i'd say ph and ppm are fine. just keep upping ppm a bit each res change like we said. gotta get that res to mid 60's. or add some air stones to ur res to increase ur DO.