I transitioned eight seeds from germination/seedling into Deep Water Culture (DWC) buckets on January One, 2019.
I have seeds from several different vendors, Acapulco Gold, White Widow Extreme, LSD and Ice (two of each species)
My first indoor modern grow was last spring/summer I tried a Nutrient Film Technique grow and it had a massive fail just after the plants went into flower. This was entirely my fault and had to do with the way the set up was (poorly) engineered.
I managed to save one plant from that experimental grow and I tranferred it to DWC set up. That plant lived on my deck until it died of old age (it was a cheap non-feminzed seed that grew up male).
So for this grow I decided on DWC.
Below you’ll see the day they went into pots (Jan 1 of this year).
The plants were started in that dark brown material that resembles a natural sponge.
I placed the sponge in the hydrotin pellets then surrounded the sponge with a little coco coir to hold water until their roots could reach the reservoir or at least pick up the ambient moisture the airstones create.
This is one of my taller plants one week later:
With 8 buckets I’d wind up with slightly different PH and TDS in each bucket.
In general I started out with Ph’s ranging from 5.5 -6.5, TDS as low as 530 up to 710.
I ran one bucket at 980 that first week (way too high but that particular plant developed the most awesome roots system of all my plants.
Still I had leaf burning and other problems from too much nutes, so in that vein I’ve gotten more conservative with my nutes.
If you’re interested in problems tied to things other than nutes, lighting or plants, you can check out my grow room post.
I’m aiming to dispense usable data so if I mess up I’ll tell you, and try to tell you specifically how I erred.
By my second week I noticed an algae problem in my reservoirs.
The primary cause for this was the view tubes I installed on all my buckets (for more on this see my grow room post).
Beyond addressing the view tubes, I bought a product called hydrogard and put 2ml/gal in each of my buckets with each weekly water change.
I saw definite uptick in root health after applying the hydrogard.
Week 2 Jan 14
This next plant (from week 2) is the one that was over fertilized:
Note the tip burning on the leaf edges.
Here is Acapulco Gold #1 at week 3:
Here is the over fertilized plant at week 3:
This is week 5 and the plants are getting ready to go into flower:
This was the week when the over fertilization was really showing up in leaf damage
All the buckets had a TDS of over 900PPM.
More to follow.
