Hopefully I am still track with my first DWC hydro grow. I shifted to 12/12 lighting the 3rd week of August. This particular plant grew and spread so rapidly that I had to move the othe 2 plants of the grow outside and as you can see this rascal takes up the entirity of the enclosure. It literally has a flower at almost every node on the plant. What I take to be colas from 6 to 14 - 15 inches long on almost every limb.
What has me wondering is the load of fan leaves the plant has shed even during veg state. Now the larger fan leaves are yellowing rapidly and shedding as well today there were at least 3 times as many as yesterday. I know some of that goes along with along with advanced flowering and maturity but how much? My son says he saw a seed pod at the end of one branch although I couldn’t locate any, could that be possible? Hopefully the pics will help in determining the state of the plant. Can under feeding cause any of this? I laid off feeding for almost 2 weeks because the TDS of the solution hung around 1000 - 1100 and wouldn’t go down even with a change of solution. This is one big beautiful plant and I hate to think of not getting it to finish up to potential. Trichomes have tripled in both size and number over the past 2 - 3 days. Only day before yesterday there was some on the water leaves but almost zilch on/in the flowers. It’s Jamacian Pearl and I haven’t found much in the way of grower input on the strain.
Hopefully the well-versed growers can/will lend some aid.
Hey mc, from what it looks to me is lack of nitrogen, BUT I’m not sure, you need to get Mac or latewood on it. They will know for sure. I don’t do hydro.
Good luck plant has great potential.
Tom
I’ve got only 1 plant that I’m growing trying to learn the ins and outs of growing. You know, the science of it. I don’t really know how I’m doing because I don’t have anything to compare it to. It’s about 2ft tall and flowering. Heres a photo. I don’t even know what kind it is. Please let me know how I’m doing as I look to move forward and purchase seeds.
Thanks for the reply, man. But it may turn out to be a moot point all around. We snipped a small dying limb this AM and sure as hell there was a seed pod and a nearly mature seed amonst the flowers. That poses the next head scrather. There was a male plant amongst the 4 I started in this grow. It was very immature when I was finally able to sex it and get it out and the plant in question was barely showing pistils at all. The remaining 2 plants had to transfer to soil after this plant started choke them out are not showing any sign of being pollinated. It all leads me to think that the big plant self pollinated especially with sparsity of seed pods and the amount of trichomes it is putting on.
It would be a real pisser to have grown such a huge plant and have nothing but crap in the end.
The paleness of the whole plant definite supports your thinking it is a nitrogen deficiency, Based on that I’m going to throw a conserative urea boost in today’s feeding and see if that helps.One of the best points about hydro is that I;ll know the results by tomorrow morning. As you said maybe MacG and/or latewood will come on line with an opinion. That will be by chance as I’m too stupid to remember how to private message them.
Again thanks for the reply and stay cool, man. Peace and happy toking.
Mark
That would help everyone to see the condition of your plant which is essential. Throwing in the age of the plant would also help the smart guys to tell when you should transition to flowering stage unless you started with an autoflower seed. (I’m assuming that your plant is still in vege stage.)
Are you not covering the empty holes to keep light out of the reservoir?
What has the pH been? It is just as important as the TDS.
Assuming your TDS is 0.5 mS/cm NaCl conversion, I find as low as 600 ppms to do wonders in DWC. It is 1.2 EC.
Lower nutrients actually helps with dissolved oxygen levels, the higher the nutrients in the water, the less room for dissolved oxygen.
It does look like the plant is possibly suffering from various nutrient deficiencies, and I have to assume it is because of conditions contributing to nutrient lockout, not that you don’t have enough in the reservoir, because you probably have more than plenty, and adding more is not going to be absorbed if the lockout condition is not fixed.
I’ve kept the pH at 5.8 the whole grow. Actually I’ve had to grow the plant with the tent open because of tep problems. The inside temp was jumping to 82+ during the late summer and the solution temp to 78+/- depiitie a 4in. inline fan, a 6in. centrifigul fan and a 6in. circulating fan. That being said,damn if I can resolve the source of a lockout giveen the phenominal plant growth up until a week ago. It’s getting plenty of oxygenation, solution change every 10 days. I always stert with zero ppm rain water, 5.8 pH and 600 - 800 target TDS. But, poof, by 3 days after solution change TDS will be 1000 - 1100 without fail. I grew up on a farm and live on one now and I never could imagine it beikng so hard to grow a damn weed given all of the wild ones we try to keep killed out.
I’m going to change solution and feed today using ILGM nutes, it’s time. Hopefully, that and flushing out the root system (it’s huge on this plant) will break up any lockout. Beyond that I need some serious help knowing what else to do. Remember this is my first hydro grow.
Many, many thanks for the help, I just I can get more input.
If the plant is using more water than food, then the jump in PPM makes sense. But I assume you are adding zero ppm water to keep the reservoir level up, and so even if the plant is not using the nutrients, the ppm should stay the same with the same amount of water in the mix and not adding additional nutrients.
Again, are you letting light into the reservoir from the empty net pots? This may or may not be a contributor if it is allowing algae and stuff to damage your roots. It might even possibly explain the PPM rise, if the pathogens being stimulated by too much light getting in the reservoir and decomposing the roots back into the water and into something that could raise the ppm. However, I think this might be less likely.
There is a possibility that just the high temps are contributing to lockout and root damage, maybe creating some of the same things described above with the pathogens from light, but in this case pathogens from anaerobic water and heat problems.
Also, the heat and lack of dissolved oxygen can be the main contributor to a nutrient lockout, just as in soil – over-watering can cause an anaerobic condition at the roots zone that then will also show as nutrient deficiencies in the leaves and petioles, and you do have red petioles like crazy! Sometime a little adjustment to your nutrient mix and adding a little more cal.mag will help with this type of condition.
You’d think Jamaica gets pretty hot, lol, and maybe a strain called Jamaican Pearl might be a little heat tolerant.
Oh, also I know I have told you you can often make do with a reservoir temp up to 78F, and I have had successful grows in DWC at this temp with numerous strains, but just so you know, the ability to hold dissolved O2 drops significantly at above 73F. And most try to keep their DWC reservoirs at about 68*-70* for best results. I understand this is likely not an option in your situation, I just wanted you to have the info.
Hey cat. I guess your picture did not upload. Try it again. COPY/PASTE: This “Support Ticket” into your forum post.
Answer these simple questions the best you can.
If you do not know, or do not use something; Just say so = NA
Strain; Type, Bag seed, or NA
Soil in pots, Hydroponic, or Coco?
System type?
PH of runoff or solution in reservoir?
What is strength of nutrient mix? EC, or TDS
Indoor or Outdoor
Light system, size?
Temps; Day, Night
Humidity; Day, Night
Ventilation system; Yes, No, Size
AC, Humidifier, De-humidifier,
Co2; Yes, No
Add anything else you feel would help us give you a most informed answer. Feel free to elaborate, but short, to the point questions and facts will help us help you smile.
Tom
The plant was/is taking about 1 qt. of water daily. I top it off every 2 days now. And, yes it’s zero ppm rain water that I use just to top off or if I’m mixing nutes, H2O2, microbes, feeding, etc. I never add anything other than Ph adjusters undiluted. Also, it was necessary to “ice” to bring the water temp. on target at 65 - 68F. In the high summer it had to be iced dailyand just before dark period I’d add a 20 oz. cola bottle of frozen water to help hold the solution temp overnight. Now it’s icing every other day and adding the frozen bottles - 1 in the AM and 1 PM. These techniques are giving a 74F +/- (open) enclosure temp and 67 -68F solution temp.
Oxygen doesn’t seem to be any factor at all. I use a Red Frog system with oxygen difussion hose instead of oxygenation stones. With both an inside and outside ring of tubing it provides uniform gentle bubbling throughout the solution Instead of heavy bubbling in the center or a few loci. I don’t have an oxygenation meter but visuals and common sense both tell me the hose system is much better than the stones.
Yeah, light had to be getting in through the empty netty pots, so while I was changing solutioon this evening I took electrians tape to 3 empty pots and filled the 3 empty holes with them. At the same time I set the nutes to a dead on 600ppm of a moderately high nitrogen and potash mix with the highest cal/mag cotent nutes I had on hand (20-8-13 if my calculations were correct). I also thouroughly flushed as much residue out of the huge (it easily reaches the bottom the 3.5 gal. tank) root beard this plant has and untangled, unclogged the beard as much as possible without doing serious damage. The beard was entirely brown but gritty and firm feeling instead of being slimey and "mushy feeling. Part of the root system came was floating on top of the solution, instead of just hanging down in the tank, as it was a week ago…
Hopefully, if this has been “lockout”, what i’ve done tonight will break it. We’ll know, one way or the other, anyway within the next 24 hr. one way or the other and can go ahead and let the plant finish. Maybe it will go ahead and do well. If not it should make some half way decent hash with thuantity blooms and trichomes it has.
I’ve got an 18ft x 32ft metal building going up in Dec. and will move all my grow operation into an 8’x8’x8’ corner room in it with a dedicated 5,999 BTU air conditioning/heat unit. That will give plenty of space for seperate veg and flower “closets” as well as curing the temp problems and giving enough room for individual plant reservoirs. I’m planning on centralized water, electrical switch and outlet banks for each grow “station”, swithable CFL, dimmable HPS/MH with 6in. centrigul fan, and LED light systems at each “station” and a 6in carbon filtered outlet. All that plus a circulating fan large enough for each compartment.
So this should give a final, long term fix to a lot of fluxuation probs.
Gentle bubbling is not necessarily good. I’ve seen systems with heavy bubbling do much better. Even a few without air stones at all. Small or super fine bubbles are nice, uniform even bubbling all over is a good start. However, water movement is as important or maybe even more important than fine bubbles. Yes, a bunch smaller bubbles instead of one big bubble means more air surface is in contact with the water, but there are even better ways to increase the air to water surface ratios.
A lot of the dissolved oxygen comes from the water movement at the surface or the reservoir itself, maybe even more so than from the fine bubbles themselves. In fact a lot of people are creating “water fall” like devices inside their reservoirs, i.e. splashing at the surface is possibly even more effective at getting O2 to dissolve into the water. Also, as the water falls through the air, it is surrounded by the air, much more air to water surface ratio than could ever come from even the smallest bubble rising up through the water.
If you notice, the general hydroponics “waterfarm” doesn’t even use air stones at all and certainly not very small bubbles. It relies on the “air lift” to create that sort of “waterfall” that actually trickles down through the hydroton picking up dissolved oxygen on the way down in a combination of “nutrient film technique” and “bubble aeration” in the air lift column tube – as well as a “waterfall” effect as it drips and falls between the bottom of the net pot and the surface of the water at the reservoir level below.
Also the movement itself again is very important, even the actual movement that doesn’t come in contact with air helps maintain and helps the water hold onto the dissolved oxygen already present in the water.
And so these all can be kept in consideration to try and maximize your dissolved O2 from various sources.
Yeah, I say the same thing over and over again, it gets a little difficult to remember who I’ve told what to, lol
I think I just told someone else about the waterfall thing too, as well as temps, to maybe a couple of other people also, like just today in a couple of other threads, lol.
Big thanks, dude. You are definitely helping me learn a lot more every day, which I definitely need to do.
I guess that my phrasing might have been a little misleading. With the difusser tubing the reservoir you can see small to medium oxygenating bubbles rising throughout the entirity of the solution instead of just having the water at the center of the bucket bubbling large and roiling. Also instead of having the system operating off a single 2 port 7.5 gph Aerator Pump I’ve got a 17 gph 4 port pump with 2 ports going to either side of the circular diffuser set up… The end result is constant flood of of miniture bubbles across and through the entire volume of solution. So I don’t think that either volume or dispersion of oxygen is an isue.
After changing the solution Thursday PM I fed with a nute mix that bolused nitrogen and potash (20-9-13 as nearly as I can calculte) basically trying anything I could think of to break any lockout if one existed. Twenty-four hours later the plant was noticably greener and more turgid. As well the majority of the root systems was now floating at or near the surface of the solution and were much whiter/clearer. Milky trichomes were more numerous and were becoming bulbate at the top.Pistils have now pretty much ambered out and colas seem to be filling out again as well. As well, many of the petiole have gone from red to pale green. Only time , in the long run noow, will tell.
The topic still bouncing around now is seeds. So far we have locateed a total of 10 seeds or seed pods. It just does not seem possible to me given the lateness of seeds appearing and the immaturity of the male plant that showed up in this grow being removed that it pollinated this plant. Would it have gone on to be so absolutely covered with blooms and pistils if it was pollinated so far in past? Self pollination seem most likely too as neither of the 2 plants that I transplanted to soil at the same time I removed the male plant are showing any sign of pollination whatsoever. A lot of trichomes are present and coming on although they are small and without the familiar “mushroom” head.
Can I expect the plant to go ahead and finish out out to amount to anything while making seeds? If it was pollinated so long ago would it have put on so many fem blooms and pistils?
Thanks again for the time and patience you’ve put into helping me. I can’t find a way to really tell you how greatly I appreciate it.
