Tent, Single Site ScrOG, 400W CMH, Waterfarm, (yup Scottyballs, lol) Aurora Indica...

amax420 said:

How will you be changing your water? I just bought a drain valve and will be installing it soon. Just cant imaging changing the water with everything growing through the scrog screen. My buddy mineralz has a similar setup and installed a drain has a fill hole in the rez lid. Not sure if I am going to scrog or just LST.. Decisions decisions...

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There's a drain level tube on the Waterfarms. The Scrog is a must in my setup, it will double the yield of that plant.

Added a weak nutrient solution at about 175 ppm this time when I changed the reservoir. She's had nothing but straight distilled from day 1, so I'm going to give her a little taste of something.

Here's a sample of the nutrient solution before I put it in:

pH: 4.94
Temp: 65F
TDS: 174 ppm
EC: 349

The pH is a little low but I left it alone because I know the hydroton will even things out.

Here's a sample an hour later after circulating thru the system:

pH: 6.47
Temp: 67F
TDS: 143ppm
EC: 283

Right on the money. The TDS went down I think because the other gallon I mixed was a slightly weaker solution. I'm going to leave her alone now and see how she takes to the food. Will be headed to hydro store tomorrow for Cal/Mag.

blaze13 said:

There's a drain level tube on the Waterfarms. The Scrog is a must in my setup, it will double the yield of that plant.



View attachment 2053771

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So it is actually a drip system? Thought it was a DWC at first.

amax420 said:

So it is actually a drip system? Thought it was a DWC at first.

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Ya it drips/bubbles water out of that little ring constantly around the plant. I leave it running 24/7. You can add an airstone to the bottom bucket and you'd have a DWC too. Was looking at buckets like you have, Bubble Boys I think they're called, they had them at the hydro place I went to, but went with the Waterfarm instead.

Not looking good at all today, in fact I'm wondering if this one will make it now. I had been noticing its growth slowing down after day 8. It looked great in those day 8 pics and I really expected it to start taking off, and it didn't so I figured it was time for nutes. I went by Scotty's thread where he gave the PE seedling 350 ppm at day 7, so I figured half that strength at day 9 and I'd be safe. Well this morning there's white deposits on the tips of the leaves, I'm guessing it's the plant rejecting the nutrients. The plant looks dry and the leaves have stopped growing. My air temps are in the low to mid 70's, I can go lower if I need to. The humidity has been worrying me, its under 20% most the time when the light is on. I've added a couple bowls of water, not sure what to do about it other than that.

Don't know where to go at this point. Everything keeps leading me back to the high pH, maybe that stunted the growth. My water is always going in at like a 5.5 pH and a day later its always up over 7, so frustrating. Maybe I got the shitty batch of hydroton. Who knows but I would love any advice on this so I can learn for experience. Hopefully this one can be saved though, I really need her to survive! Help!

Fresh distilled going in and hoping for the best.

blaze13 said:

Not looking good at all today, in fact I'm wondering if this one will make it now. I had been noticing its growth slowing down after day 8. It looked great in those day 8 pics and I really expected it to start taking off, and it didn't so I figured it was time for nutes. I went by Scotty's thread where he gave the PE seedling 350 ppm at day 7, so I figured half that strength at day 9 and I'd be safe. Well this morning there's white deposits on the tips of the leaves, I'm guessing it's the plant rejecting the nutrients. The plant looks dry and the leaves have stopped growing. My air temps are in the low to mid 70's, I can go lower if I need to. The humidity has been worrying me, its under 20% most the time when the light is on. I've added a couple bowls of water, not sure what to do about it other than that.

Don't know where to go at this point. Everything keeps leading me back to the high pH, maybe that stunted the growth. My water is always going in at like a 5.5 pH and a day later its always up over 7, so frustrating. Maybe I got the shitty batch of hydroton. Who knows but I would love any advice on this so I can learn for experience. Hopefully this one can be saved though, I really need her to survive! Help!

Fresh distilled going in and hoping for the best.

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This is one of those areas where I wouldn't advise following Scotty that closely. Depending on your meter, 350 ppm is probably really high for a plant of that size. There are a couple growers on here who are doing really well with DWC kits keeping the ppm's down in the 400-450 range through the entire grow. That said, it's much better to talk in terms of EC since ppm is dependent on the scale you're using (.5 or .7 makes a big diff.) And you're probably right about the hydroton. If you've never worked with it before, you have to wash the fuck out of it. When you think it's finally all clean, wash it again for just as long, seriously.

Thanks Kriznarf for the post. Ya I think the hydroton was my major problem all along. I did the first washing the fuck out of it, but never did the second or let it soak. It would spike my water over 7 and sometimes up to 8 every time. I was always scared to keep adjusting the pH so instead I just flushed with fresh distilled. But then within 12 hours the pH would be jacked up there again, it probably shocked the hell out of the poor thing. Adding the nutes was a newb mistake thinking the plant needed a boost. But I think the plant was already in trouble before that.

My other grey area is with my Hanna meter. You talked about scale, I'm not sure what I should be on. I'm on the 0.5 scale. I just did a quick read on EC vs PPM and yes I will go with EC now in the future. I just want to get the thing reading right. The back of my nute bottle said .5 EC for my concentration, but my meter was reading 384 or something so its definitely not on the right scale for EC. It was reading somewhat accurately for ppms though. I have all the calibration solutions and have calibrated it. Very confused right now, and the main thing is the plant is doing shitty.

Any advice you could shoot my way man would be killer.

Ok I see now there's millisiemens and microsiemens. Mine reads in microsiemens so when I was getting 384 EC for my nute mix it was right on. They were calling for .5 which would be 500 and I wanted to go weaker than that, so the meter is reading right. Learn something new every day.

I'm almost wondering if it's getting too much light too early. Growth was fine when the seedling was shielded by the foil, but after it exposed itself over top of the foil it really started to dry out and back off from the light. I will probably start my next one out under a smaller fluorescent for the first couple weeks then switch to the CMH, all in the same cab with the same setup. It just never got a chance to establish a good set of leaves before it got pounded with light.

On the .5 scale, an EC of .5 = 250 ppm. Take a gander at the attached chart. At the stage you're at, 200-250 ppm sounds about right, but even that might be pushing it depending on your strain. Better to under-do it than to over-do it and burn out your plant(s) at such an early stage.

Thanks for the chart. Ya I was at 384 microsiemens which would be .384 so around 175ppm right around where I wanted to be. That was probably even too high though considering it had basically stopped growing a couple days back probably due to high pH and too much light intensity.

blaze13 said:

Thanks Kriznarf for the post. Ya I think the hydroton was my major problem all along. I did the first washing the fuck out of it, but never did the second or let it soak. It would spike my water over 7 and sometimes up to 8 every time. I was always scared to keep adjusting the pH so instead I just flushed with fresh distilled. But then within 12 hours the pH would be jacked up there again, it probably shocked the hell out of the poor thing. Adding the nutes was a newb mistake thinking the plant needed a boost. But I think the plant was already in trouble before that.

My other grey area is with my Hanna meter. You talked about scale, I'm not sure what I should be on. I'm on the 0.5 scale. I just did a quick read on EC vs PPM and yes I will go with EC now in the future. I just want to get the thing reading right. The back of my nute bottle said .5 EC for my concentration, but my meter was reading 384 or something so its definitely not on the right scale for EC. It was reading somewhat accurately for ppms though. I have all the calibration solutions and have calibrated it. Very confused right now, and the main thing is the plant is doing shitty.

Any advice you could shoot my way man would be killer.

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Hey guy on day 7 scotty was only 35ppm which was his "pure" water level.. On day 14 he went to 400ppm.

link for the Scotty Manual

http://viewer.zoho.com/getContent.do?genurl=rZH0i&newpdf=true

No doubt. Ya I got the Scotty manual. I was going by the original PE thread that Scotty wrote, check it out, first page, second post.

Pineapple Express G13 Lab's Seed to Harvest

Either way, I was at 175 ppm, half that strength, and on day 9.

For the nutes I've heard one week, 10 days, 2 weeks, basically everything so I just went by feel. I knew the plant wasn't taking off but it was for reasons other than lack of nutrients.

Well I'm sticking with this one to the end. It actually looks a lot better today compared to yesterday morning. The plant is perkier again and not so crispy lol. Yesterday I drained a gallon of the nute solution and added a fresh gallon of distilled, then kept an eye on the pH and adjusted when necessary. So it's still getting a tiny bit of nutes.

I came to the conclusion today that it was my humidity that burned me, not temps or nutes. After the plant grew up and over the hole in the foil, growth stopped altogether because it was so dry in there, like a fricken desert dude. I have a humidity meter in there, and its always under 20% with the light on. So.... I have a small humidifier coming the end of this week that will sit in the corner and hopefully get it up to a reasonable level.

Till then I have a foil dome over the plant with a light hole in the top. Its keeping the plant moist and it still gets some light. I've probably stunted it back a week or two but I still might get something out of it. Its definitely not dead yet and I'm not giving up. Peace

I kept it on life support all weekend but it was just beyond recovery, had to pull the plug last night. The hydroton finally stabilized though, I left it alone for over 24 hours and it only drifted like .3. I washed out all the buckets, cleaned out the whole system really well. There was a layer of dust in the bottom bucket from the fricken hydroton. I've got the system back together now and running for a few days. Humidifier comes today and I'll be working on dialing in the atmosphere in there before the next seed goes in. The next grow will be exactly the same idea, minus the pH fluctuations and desert-like humidity level. Already learned a lot from the first fuck up lol.

Why did the last 2 or 3 pages of my journal just disappear?

RIU was hacked and the last backup they restored to was almost a month old

These are my bagseed experiments

This one is turning out pretty interesting. Check out the seedling pic above. The one on the left was more sativa like and turned out to be a dude (the pic below on the left). The other one is more indica and is female. She has hairs popping up everywhere but her preflowers are still small. I'm not sure why I ever started two in one pot like this but I'm glad I did it now as it was a good practice run. Will I do it again, no. As for now though the one on the right is quite an animal all things considered, and I'm going to take her as long as I can, hopefully to harvest. My only worries now are root rot and hermie. I'll put up a couple pics of her one of these days and maybe start a journal if she deserves it. There's probably 6-8 tops above the screen and at least that many more on the way, not bad for the short veg period. The pic on the right is the female preflowers.