I DIYed a single plant flood and drain system that I’m still improving, and I have a question.
Normally I run an autoflower in a 5 quart bucket. The autos fill the tent up pretty good.
This time I’m planning on running a photo period plant (Dinafem Early Amnesia CBD) in it.
It will be in a 2x2 tent with a scrog screen.
Can I get away with 5 quarts of hydroton, or do I need more? I’m not sure if I’m more likely to see issues with being root bound or not with a photo period…
I don’t quite understand the measure you talk of with 5 quarts. But if you have a flood and drain and hydroton in a net pot. Root binding shouldn’t be an issue.
Hey man, I’m using a 5 quart bucket with holes drilled. The roots stay in the 5 quart bucket. I worry about using a net pot and having roots clog up the plumbing.
Only bit that doesn’t is the 5 quart bit cos I’m English lol. The rest does perfectly. The trick to not clogging your plumbing is to have some kinda media at the bottom of the pots to stop your roots tryna crawl through the pipes. But so water can still move freely bro
I will drill holes in that bucket to allow water in.
The bucket is 5 quarts or almost 5 liters.
Does that make sense? The roots would be constrained to the 5 liter bucket, but I’m not sure 5 liters of hydroton is enough for this application.
Here is an autoflower I’m growing in a 5 liter pot of hydroton in a different system. She is doing ok, but I’ve never tried this with photoperiod plants and the photoperiod might be bigger.
Thanks man! I’ve only run it once before and it didn’t go great because I did not drill enough holes in the bucket. I tried having some holes out of the bottom but I didn’t realize that roots clogged those holes quickly.
I fixed it by drilling holes up the sides of the bucket but it was too late, the plant was pretty fried from drying out.
This time I’ll drill the holes up the sides at the beginning and hopefully that will prevent clogs etc. Here’s hoping…
No worries mate that’s what we’re here for init. To help each other out. I’ve only ran one F&D run but it was a success. Not suited to my style of growing but it worked lol
I’ve never really found algae an issue. I had a bit of a sediment issue using megacrop. But nothing untoward. Have you got light getting in. Algae can’t really do much without it
I appreciate the conversation too but I ran out of likes a while ago
That appears to be a good setup, and I don’t suspect you’ll have any real problems with it. Good job, bro. As far as algae goes, it’s unsightly, and it sucks when I touch it and it gets under my fingernails, lol, but it’s perfectly innocuous. It won’t harm anything. I always get a little bit in my flood tray before the canopy fills in above, blocking the light, and ending the algae party.
A little bit of light gets into the flood chamber. I cover as much as I can, but I think it also doesn’t drain perfectly. So together those two things create some algae.
I agree it probably wont mess anything up, but I don’t like it lol so I usually kill it one way or another…
I will spray paint the outside of the whole system white before it gets used (inside stays black). Hopefully that will help keep the water temps down a bit more, which might also help.
Oh PS I just realized it was actually your scrogs that inspired me to run my Amnesia cbd in this setup!
It’s been a long time since I did a scrog, but I really wanna grow this strain and I was avoiding it until I saw you run those Sativas in a 2x2. Amnesia cbd isn’t the most sativa plant, but much more than I’m used to.
Will be popping the seed hopefully before end of week.
I actually popped into your thread here because of all of the post likes you gave me yesterday, lol. Feel free to ask me anything over in my thread if you ever have questions. I am all about answering questions.
Can I ask what type of media this would be. I have had problems with roots plugging the pipes and I put a small amount of copper (I cut pieces of those copper pot scrubbers) but have heard they are not the best and on occasion I have wondered if they were responsible for dropping my PH but they do stop the roots from going through.
More clay pebbles was my go to. You get enough of a gap to let water through. (Maybe slower) so if you’re on timers. Set them again to be sure. I’m no expert with f & d like I said only ran one bro
Mine is a hydro drip system on timer net pots inside plastic buckets With garden hose return to the res and because my space is vertically challenged I do put pressure on the root space and have had to resort to a small ball of the copper stuffed into the connector at the bottom of the pail. It works but would chose something else if I could.
I’m curious which node you top at?
I’m planning to top above node 5 and keep the highest 4 branches (branches from node 4 and 5) . I’ll eventually trim off branches 1 and 2 and 3.
