This is the same section of roots on the #1 plant - left side is from this morning and right side is aprox 12 hours later.
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Day 11 since they cracked and things are going well. Not perfect, but good I think. All the roots are growing and showing fuzzy hairs - some more than others. The leaves also look good despite one mishap that chopped off part of one leaf tip.
The #1 (left most) plant continues to out grow the other two. It also has the most fuzzy hairs and the most roots so far.
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The current rez setup is working very well. Ph is very manageable (climbing very slowly) and things are staying fresh. I have been helping the fresh part with 1 PPM of chlorine every few days. Thats 1/2 the usual sterile rez dosage. Im going to stop the chlorine as of today and see how things go. I still think the chlorine is holding back the fuzzy hairs, but we will see.
Im still running things a little on the wet side. Im going to leave it that way until the plants get a bit bigger and the root mass is larger.
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They look very similar to mine that I started two weeks ago. Keep up the good work. 
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Day 13
It occurs to me that this whole ‘growing pot while you’re stoned’ thing is just asking for trouble. Thats especially true if you have serious CRS syndrome like I seem to have.
Aaarrrggg - I left the darn timers turned off AGAIN! They have been off for almost 4 hours. Numbers 1 and 2 of the babies look like they will be ok but #3 is looking pretty rough. On top of that, all three have lost most of the fuzzy hairs.
This is especially aggravating because they have been growing faster and faster the last couple of days and the roots were starting to fuz up nicely.
This is what they looked like earlier today. I have had a humidity domw over them and the humidity got up to 86% and they drooped quite a bit, but were doing ok other wise.
Here is poor #3 now.
Roots on #1 earlier today.
And now
I think #3 will recover, but I suspect it will be the new runt from now on.
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That damn CRS gets worse with age eh?
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Im sorry, what were we talking about? 
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Day 15
They have had most of two days since the dry spell and they seem to be recovering nicely.
The roots on all three actually are looking pretty darn good considering the trauma they had. Even #3 that got hit the hardest is developing some nice fuzzy roots and side shoots. One and two are sending out shoots that look like they plan to climb up onto the roof like they did on the last grow.
1 still the best of the bunch.
2 looking ok and no longer the runt.
3 is now the smallest, but has made a huge recovery.
The leaves on 1 and 2 look good, but are drooping somewhat instead of standing tall and reaching for the light. Not sure whats up with that. They have been going back and forth from drooping to looking nice and perky. They were looking a little pale yesterday, so I raised the EC from 0.5 to 0.6. I wish I knew what wa sup with the drooping for sure. Humidity has been fluctuating a lot lately - 45% to 85% even with my dome. It was staying up over 60-70% to I took the dome off. Its now holding around 55%.
3 leaves are the worst looking. The older ones look the worst, and the new ones are looking a little burned, but Im going to keep the EC as is. Im assuming the burn is still leftover trauma from the dry spell.
PH has gone from 5.6 to 5.9 over the last three or four days. In fact it has been holding remarkably well for my water. I actually had to firce it up from 5.8 to 5.9 this morning. Im trying to keep the PH moving between 5.5 and 6 over the course of a rez cycle - which is running about one week right now.
I also lowered the temps in the rez to the lower 60’s instead of the upper 60’s I had been keeping it at. I did some tests and found that the water in the tubing running from the rez to the nozzles has plenty of time to warm up to room temp - around 70F - by the time it gets to the nozzles. So I can keep the rez extra cold to help limit algae/bacterial growth and still spray the roots with water that isnt freezing.
Ive also been running a sterile rez at aprox 2PPM chlorine. This time around it isnt hurting the fuzzies like it did last time. Of course, last time I was running higher chlorine levels trying to kill zombie F’ing algae.
Over all, I think I dodged the bullet this time.
It does seem to me that they are not growing up top as fast as I was expecting. @ReikoX - what do your plants look like at this stage? These babies are 15 days from coming out of paper towels.
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I’m running my own hydroponic setup for starters …i know it will handle and made root for cuts and so on…
I have not tested the thc in my weed I felt it would not be necessary to check on with my meter or the temp of the water. BLAH and so on…
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Is that Ghost Toof x SBR? How many days since it popped?
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Hmm, looking but can’t quite make them out…
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Thanks!!
It looks like my largest one is about the same size as your smallest ones, so I guess Im in the ball park size wise. Its interesting to me to see the variations in growth rate.
I just checked the roots again and there is a lot of new fuzzy growth just since last night - maybe 14 hours.
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Day 17
As usual, things are going good and bad.
The good:
The plants look a tiny bit pale, but pretty good other wise. Ive upped the feed a small bit to a hair over EC 0.6.
The roots are doing very well. Im starting to see lots of real bottle brush roots and they are growing at a good pace. Im very pleased with that. Even the runt that took the dry spell the hardest is doing well.
The PH in the rez has been holding remarkably well the last several days. Ive actually had to force the PH to rise using PH UP!. Ive been thinking about that and I think it has to do with my lowering the temps in the rez. I had been keeping it in the 65F to 70F range and now Im keeping it below 65 all the time.
Lowering the water temp increases the amount of dissolved C02 that the water can hold. That in turn means more carbonic acid and therefore, a lower PH. I think the colder water must have a lower ‘natural’ PH level due to the higher dissolved C02, so that means less pressure to raise the PH with aeration. Thats my theory anyway.
The Bad:
The rez got infected again!!! I was really hoping that keeping the rez colder would stop this crap, but it seems that it doesnt. A few days ago, when I dropped the temps, I stopped adding any chlorine, but it seems that was a mistake. I checked the rez earlier today and the first thing I noticed was the PH had jumped up from 5.7 to 6.4 in just a few hours. When I looked closer, I saw the water was cloudy again. No bad smell, and not nearly as cloudy as last time, but pure Mega Crop stains the water brownish, but its never cloudy unless bad shit is growing in it.
I had already increased the circulation/aeration pump timing so it runs for 2 minutes every 45 minutes, and sucks in fresh air while its doing that, so I know its not anaerobic bacteria. What ever it is, it loves nutes and doesnt care about the cold water, so Im going to have to maintain the chlorine.
Back to the Good:
There is no sign of any nasty crap on the roots themselves. They look great.
The roots dont seem to mind this low level of chlorine as much as I thought they would because I am still growing nice fuzzies.
Here are some shots comparing todays roots to two days ago.
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I forgot to pass along some changes Ive made in the spraying and where Im at now as far as timing.
I originally tried spraying directly at the roots using short timing cycles. I tried anywhere from 0.2 sec ON to 0.4 sec ON by anywhere from 15 to 35 seconds off. That grew some fuzzies but not much.
So, I went back to the originally recommended technique of spraying off into empty space and ‘filling the chamber with mist’. Ive tried anything fro 0.5 to 0.8 sec ON and 20 to 60 sec OFF.
Interestingly enough, the total flow rates are not that different.
Right now Im at 0.6 sec ON and 40 OFF and that seems to be pretty close to ideal for this stage of growth. Ive been playing mostly with the OFF times the last several days going from 35 sec to 45 seconds, and around 40 seems to be working the best.
Thats aprox 1.18 GPD of nute use, so in theory I should get almost 7 days out of the 9 gallons I have in the rez. In practice I really need to re-fill it after about 5 days or the circulating pump will start sucking air. If things go like last time, I will need to increase the flow rate as the root mass gets bigger.
Oh - adfter changing out the rez and adding back the chlorine, the radical PH increase has stopped again. Im back to a very slooow increase. Apparently, what ever was growing/making the water cloudy also increases the PH.
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Day 19
The roots are growing fast and looking great. Plants One and Two are starting to play footsie under the table. Two is trying to convince Three to join them in a threeway, but Three isnt sure she is quite ready for that yet.
Here is an honest to goodness root porn pic
Up top things look ok.
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I was thinking in the back of my mind that things are developing slower than I expected, so I decided to go back to my HPA C99 grow and see what the roots looked like at this same time.
The HPA/C99 are on the left and this grow is on the right. Its interesting that the root structure is very different. This is not really a fair test as far as comparing roots under HPA vrs AAA because they are completely different strains. Its still interesting, and certainly looks like the AAA is doing better on the roots.
This is the old C99 on the left and the @ReikoX auto on the right. They look very similar to me.
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I have been having a hard time keeping my LITFA program going, but Im doing pretty good over all this time. It is soooooo hard not to mess with things just to see if it gets better. Ive been doing ok on that and things are getting better every day 
However… I had a “thought” a while back about a way to stimulate more lateral growth on the roots. I have been resisting trying it out because - LIFTA - but its really hard.
Ive read about ‘air pruning’ and Ive seen it in action - on fabric pots and on my roots in aero. When a shoot gets into an area where there is no mist/water, it dries up and shrinks away to nothing in just a few hours.
So far every grow in my root chamber, the roots have sent one or two main shoot straight down towards the bottom of the chamber, while most of the others go off to the sides or at least dont go down so directly.
Here are a couple of pics of the roots now that shows this clearly.
My “thought” is to trim off those long shoots before they get to the bottom of the chamber. The idea is that Trimming those long shoots will tell the roots to stop growing down and grow sideways.
I am not at all sure I can resist, but Im trying…
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