How often to feed

Since you water 3 times per day I would think this is sufficient. I normally do feed , feed and then water.

 

never mind i over read coco and pearlite.
Sounds like you got your routine down already

 

Coco should be fed daily - never plain water. I use a 70/30 coco/perlite mix in air pots and I feed once a day to run off from sprout, and twice a day in flower. Always to run off and never plain water.

Good luck.

Love those airpots.

 

When I used to grow in coco I saw no difference feeding every day or feeding when dry.

Grand master level is growing better weed than everyone in this forum and he isn’t feeding on a schedule, but feeding when the plants get dry. So idk why people keep up with the myth that you have to water coco every day/multiple times a day ‍♂️

 

You can get away with alot with coco..... sometimes. It's best to follow the rules letting your coco dry is gambling with nutrient burn or lockout. (Check your runoff ec after a couple dry cycles you'll see what I mean)
Watering coco with plain water is stripping the buffer off of the medium. If this goes on long enough your coco will spiral out of control until it locks up.
Because of this I'm of the opinion that coco should be feed daily .
Why chance it?
Here's a good site for coco
Cannabis Grow Guide

 

Depends how you set it up. If you multifeed in rootbound one gallon pots, you will yield more in less time than if using larger pots and feeding every few days. It’s the difference between a passive hydro grow and treating it like soil.


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Because Coco doesn't break anything down like soil does. When you let it dry out the liquid nutes turn back into salts and build up in the media. Not only does this mean the ppm level rises but that in turns knocks the pH out of range.
Giving it a wet dry cycle can literally cause any possible lock out, deficit or toxicity to happen and unless someone spots it's from the wet dry cycle you'll never be able to fix any of it.
If your feed is absolutely spot on and you wrongly feed it nutes then water like soil growers do then you can get lucky and have a perfect grow but the yield will be nowhere near as much as it would be had you treated it properly.
Coco is hydro growing and for best results should be treated as such.

 

for more info, there is a thoughtful youtube video, "How often to water drain to waste". I started incorporating drain to waste in my bucket bags, and the main thing is getting the runoff, 25% or so, to get the ppm reading for the next feed. I'm pretty good at reading plants, but I see now I was about 3 days late, and now, I can see before any visable signs if the plant is not drinking what I am giving, and it is a no brainer to cut the strength next feed, but always feed, and to enough runoff once a day to get a ppm reading. I don't bother with ph because everything going in is correct and I am not going to change anything because of a ph crash. Because I am not going to have one. But I also bottom feed, not sure if that is a good idea for coco, but it paces out the hydration needs, and some say provides a benefit to some roots IDK. But the old school textbook ppm read on the runoff will spare your plants the stress of a watering with no feed, since you will have no need to flush any excess out.
hydro select youtube

 

How can you say any of that when there are so many growers that use coco the same way they do soil and have the same exact results and are yielding just as much as anyone else. And you can’t say it’s because they got lucky. It doesn’t matter what medium you’re using, you’re still limited to your grow space and lighting.

 

Your telling me you know people that can grow 20-25oz autos by giving Coco a wet dry cycle? That's how big they get in hydro mate. My profile pic was 22oz. If you can show me an auto that size that's been given a wet dry cycle in Coco I'll eat my own shoe.
I can show you plenty guys that can outyield me in Coco. 15L autopots on a 24/7 feed dropping 800g autos.go Google @rambogarden. He gets em 600-800g every time and he's got half a house full of them.
He doesn't touch em. Just plants a seed then keeps a massive bucket of nutes filled. Done.
You'll never see that weight indoors from Coco on a wet dry cycle though. It's literally impossible as far as i know.
Mostly due to the lack of oxygen. That's the key factor to get big yields.
Don't need top of the range lights, perfect VPD control, added co2 or any of that jazz.
Just 45w per square foot of any old lighting other than CFL (although I do use that the first 2 weeks) lots of oxygen to the roots and you're good.
Also the clue is in the title. Coco is "hydro" growing. That literally means water.
Not wet/dry. Just wet.

 

Oh, and also. Check the ppm and pH of the run off after a wet dry cycle.
My run off is almost identical to what goes in.
In Wet/dry cycle run off you'll see that the ppm is through the roof and most likely that your pH swing is going in the wrong direction. And that should hopefully be enough proof of my explanation as to why you shouldn't do it.

 

Spanish, are you getting runoff? at all? a little? or do you only water/feed to optimum hydration?

 

Just to be clear before I answer mate.
I don't grow pounders in Coco. I used @rambogarden as my example for the mad Coco yields because he's the most consistently impressive auto/Coco grower I've met in 4 years of foruming.
He uses 15L autopots with coco and airdomes.
Vary basic nutes and an oldschool 600W HPS per square meter.

I use NFT for my big ones. Nothing but a 4inch rockwool cube and fresh air.
I start off in 4inch rockwools so I've gotta be extremely careful to only get them moist at best for the first 2 weeks and also can't let them go dry.
After that though I literally feed them upto 40 litres per hour from a recirc pump from a Res underneath the grow shelf.

My Coco plants i keep to 4-5oz as Ive got too many plugs running from an extension in my bedroom already lol.
and ended up with way too many free seeds so I just smash out wee ones to try everything.
Soon as the rockwools are plugged into the Coco pots, when I feed them I put them 2 at a time over a 20 litre tub and feed a full 20L.
Then chuck the leftovers through the next set of 2 etc.
I'll do that for 7 days with the same batch if it doesn't run out before hand.
The run off is almost exactly the same as what went in due to the volume. Works the same way as a Wilma system or any other sort of recirc system.
pH it once a week and it's sweet.
Also means you can use the ppm meter to tell you how strong to feed it by checking which way the pH and ppm swings are going.
Turns out it isn't much. Usually about 10% of what the manufacturers recommend over the entire grow ')

Once the roots are well established after 3-4 weeks of that. I sit my 10L fabric pots of Coco/peri into a 4" tall tub which holds about 4L.
I water them till it's full and do that every day. By the time they hit bloom they'll finish it every day.
By the time theyre mid bloom I could fill it again if I had the possibility to do it manually as can't use a pump. No drip tray.
It's my own unique method of little to zero waste growing.
This works the same as a hempy system.
Could probably get 10oz at best doing it this way but I try to keep them 4-5.

The bottom line though is that all hydro methods are equal.
There are things you can do to each method to make it better.
Main one for those growing in pots is airdomes and autofeed.
Doesn't matter if you feed 24/7 from the bottom or drench feed 3 times a day from the top.
If you automate everything you'll get maximum results.
A 15L autopot with an airdome filled with 70/30 Coco/peri can easily match the best of the best of the best in the right hands no matter what the competition has spent on their set ups.

I'm using autoflowers as my point aswell because you can't tell them when to flower. Many guys struggle to get 4-5oz autos because they just aren't following a few simple rules.
In Coco that means.
Feed weak!
Try to drown them 1-2 times per day for early-late veg.
Then 2-4 times per day for early - late bloom.
Can reuse the nutes as long as you feed enough volume and pH balance them when it's needed.
Costs 50 quid for a pH pen and 30 for a ppm meter but they'll save you 90% on your nutes bill if you learn how to use them properly.
Which is basically just following numbers on sticks like a monkey. Easy man

 

I hear ya on the pumpless lifestyle. I quit dipping my bags and replaced that with pure drain to waste, but in all perlite I need to also bottom feed or I would be a spraying fool. So I have been experimenting with the grodan delta cubes. Both 4 inch and 2.5 inch in either the bottom or on the top of my one gallon perlite bags to act as a moisture buffer. So I finally have the option of watering if it is good or not watering if it is good. Just curious if anyone grows zero runoff (except for testing.) I will say this, the plants in wool are twice as big, but it is not a good big, more like a growing disorder where all they do is grow massive even though they are only in a little 4 inch cube, which is in a one gallon bag of perlite.

 

You lost all credibility talking about 800 gram autos.

 

How? One in my profile pic was over 600. Piece of piss mate. £30 grow tank and some old blurples. It's honestly not hard like. Just gotta follow a few simple rules.

IMG_20190918_195524 by Spanish@rcher posted Sep 19, 2019 at 8:27 PM

IMG_20190918_223702 by Spanish@rcher posted Sep 19, 2019 at 8:27 PM

There's some harvest pics from the other day. That's from a 10L pot of Coco fed how I described using a model 1, 240w mars blurple. Big branch snapped off 2 weeks ago too and that filled a mayo jar.
Don't hate me cos you ain't me bro
And I'm not being smug. It genuinely is just that easy. Feed weak nutes, try to drown them. All there is to it really.