I bought extra totes identical to the ones in my grow space to use for holding plants for maintenance. It’s a pretty easy evolution to lift out the one plant (my wife holding the gigantic root ball haha) and setting it into the extra tote. I left them in those without any liquid for 2 hours and other than a little wilting several hours later, it was perfect. The lids are available to do other things with like Al suggested.
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I use rapid rooters myself to start seeds, so all of my current plants still have them connected to them, buried in the 4" netpots of hydroton.
My flood tray floods about 3" up from the bottom of the net pots - so a good portion of the hydroton is flooded each time. It sorta sounds like you are describing a DWC type system to me? Am I understanding this correctly?
You will have a small tote.
On that tote you will hang a net pot / basket off of the lid.
You will have air stones bubbling water up from the bottom “splashing on the net pot.”
Deep water culture?
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If you are just going to hang a net pot off the lid on your 30 gallon tote, you could just grow DWC… put like 4-6 air stones in that beast. Heh.
A 30 gallon tote you could run 2 or 4 plants as well if you wanted to reduce veg time some. I suppose you could put a bunch of 2" holes in a lid for the tote and do a SOG with it too… in this case I would only do it from clone, though.
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Well yes and no…lol Yes my 30 gal will be DWC and maybe even my seed starter…lol Soooo undecided. Trying to get ideas of how to do my seeds and then be able to easily drop into my 30 gal tote. I didn’t want to use 30 gal for seeds and small veg but I may have to. I didn’t know if I could make a small ebb & flow for my seed and small veg plant and then drop into big tote. I hope that makes sense.
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So… I start seeds by germinating in a glass with a little H2O2. Once they have tails, etc. I put them in rapid rooters. I pre-soak the rapid rooters (I personally use around 250ppm of GH Flora trio nutes for this purpose).
I put them in standard seedling tray until they get roots out the bottom that are a few inches long.
I then put them in to a 4" or 6" net pot surrounded with hydroton, and then I top feed them by foliar spraying the plant twice per day until the roots emerge from the bottom of the net pot. Once the roots touch the water I stop top feeding entirely and generally at that point we’re off to the races.
Now… if I can’t spray them twice a day for some reason, or don’t think I will be able to - which is most of the time because I travel for work - I use an intermediary step.
The over worked and under paid almighty bubble cloner. Basically just a small DWC system for clones. Mine is using a low, wide Sterlite tote with a bunch of 2" holes in it for netpots and cloning collars:
Usually I have to foliar feed the seedlings when I put them in the cloner for a little while, but not nearly as long as it takes if I go directly to their final home. Once they get roots down into this tote, then I am pretty maintenance free until I move them to their final home.
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So with 30 gal doing it like you said, how often do you think I’ll need to change the water?
Also, do you use hydrguard? And for what do you use it for or do others use it for?
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Just make a 3 hole bubble bucket to fit your 5" pots
I never touch the seed, soak 24 hours then into rookwool into a netpot
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I do use Hydroguard. I don’t use a water chiller so I keep Hydroguard in my res to help stave off root rot - so far so good.
As for how often you’ll need to change water… well…
A couple grows ago I grew a single plant in a 4x4 tent over a 17 gallon tote. I did a complete water change on that plant every three weeks of the grow during veg, then at the flip to 12/12, the end of transition period, and a couple of weeks prior to expected harvest.
It depends on how big the plant is, but in general the recommendation is to do a complete water change once your top offs have equaled the volume of the starting water. So if you have a 30 gallon tote and fill it with 20 gallons of water, after you’ve had to add 20 gallons of water to the tote to maintain the water level, change it completely.
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I noticed there are two different typs of Hydroguard
Do you know which one I would need? @Myfriendis410 @Bogleg
I think they are the same - just listed twice under different labels? Front of bottle looks the same.
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That’s what I was going to say.
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Trees, LOL
If I do an auto again I will be cutting and topping like there is no tomorrow. Those plants were healthy.