so , I gotta ask, is my cultivation method in DWC so radical? Ever seen anything like it?
The main guy who hosted the contest/expo said he had never seen anything like it before.
1 Like
Sounds like heresy to me. How dare you not adjust Ph all day long.
Séems so much easier that way, put it in and let em run with it, something to try.
Where am I gonna score all that LITFA from.
3 Likes
yah in my mind I had boiled it down to the minimum required to grow excellent weed. Perhaps that’s the reason my apprentices could never handle it? Soon as I left they were hopping on the ph down like some kind of frog.
Whenever someone said LITFA I always translate that to Leave It The Fuck Alone. I have a feeling that’s not what it means?
1 Like
As far as I know you are correct on the acronym translation.
Not adjusting ph, damn near revolutionary, are you even allowed to do that.
hehheh well clearly you can see my ph hits a zone at ph 6.2 then slowly drifts up as the nutrients are used. I thought that was normal agriculture?
I do the same shit with my blueberries except ph 5.5-4.5 pure organic. I’m using serious ph down on those beasts. Elemental sulfur and coffee. Same concept different ph zone.
1 Like
You got the acronym correct. I made a parody thread calling LITFA a product. So that is why you often hear people referring to it like a macro nutrient. 
3 Likes
lol, well I guess I bought myself a lifetime’s supply of LITFA.
The ironical part about the blueberries is I was using acidifying fertilizer that came in a box. The plants were growing great and producing. Then, when I was in the store, there were no more boxes! So I was like no sweat I’ll just go organic. Ugh then I tripped over broscience/oldwives tale that you use woody debris for acidification. My plants almost died followed by reading an actual write-up on managing ph outside instead of wackocrazybonkers info then my plants grew as tall as I am. If anyone questions my methods they can check out the results 
2 Likes
hah hah an even more humorous part is, depending on which ph hydro chart you use, I’m either in the right zone for ph or totally off the charts. I let the plant decide.
1 Like
alright! We got buds!
and plants, they would have been as big as me, if I hadn’t tied that one down. Hooray!
I had to share the ph thing well after people knew I was growing mass weed, or else nobody would even take that shit seriously.
6 Likes
Things are doing good in veg. Those big bud plants are going to require TLC as opposed to LITFA, something crazy is happening with them, where they go into bud before bloom phase. All other plants are doing fine, no crazybudgrowth, so it’s definitely something about that plant in general.
7 Likes
lol 19 days ago they looked like someone took a crap on them. I’m still irritated by how slow they grow under the LEDs…but! The timing actually works out better for the grow. By the time the small plants are huge, the blooming plants are cut down.
Hey @JoeCrowe, so your technique is very interesting. Do you think if you drop your pH down to around 5.7 for a period of time that the plants would burn up? That is very high EC for DWC and if I run that my plants would be dead. Just spit balling but do you think that the high pH could be stopping the plant being able to absorb too much nutrient so that the hot solution does not burn it? Perhaps the plant then can still get just enough of what it needs when at that high pH because the solution is so strong. Have we been put on the bum steer with low pH for DWC all this time maybe? The EC you are running is getting back up to what most other techniques use which makes more sense in a way.
1 Like
Just to give you some idea of how sensitive these plants are in DWC for me, I recently tried to up my EC from 1.2 to 1.3 and the pH starting swinging way down within 24 hours it was down to 4.8 and kept trying to drop. i had to keep adding RO water to pull the pH back up to the 5.7 zone. Eventually i added enough RO that the EC was back down to 1.2 and pH stopped dead and hangs around the 5.7 zone happy again.
Recently i read someone posting that with DWC they never go above 1.1 EC and all their issues went away. I found keeping mine low also did this. Depending, once i have done my nuke and reset of my room to rid the virus it has. If I am feeling done with organic I might set up a second DWC instead. If I do I might trial your technique.
1 Like
I put on my log, I notice the plants are happier even in dwc at 6.5 rather than a 5.5. Also noticed the ec as well. Just not smart enough to put together puzzle pieces I was given!
hey…don’t you go proving my lazy method of growing works now… but I would definitely like to see someone else try it. I always feel people’s DWC are on the edge of collapse due to the chemistry involved. All a guy needs, is some nice pure water, chelated nutrients that are slightly acidic start at EC 1 with ph 6.2. Add only a very minimum of ph down if required. I swear, growing in DWC is easier than they make it out to be.
2 Likes
One of my apprentices I had set them up with an excellent grow. Almost a mirror of my grow. After a couple of rounds this guy shows up he’s like hey your grow is all about managing the ph. OK so then the apprentice goes nuts with the ph down…ph up…etc he’s always ph-ing the thing. His plants did super shitty. Then he gave up growing. WTF? It’s like the things I said were straight up heresy to other growers, meanwhile what the fuck do they know about how it works? Of course buddy also had to add “super magic formula ingredient” who knows what that shit was either. Probably nuked the ph buffering and led to deformed plants. One day I opened up his reservoir and the vapors stung my face I was like yo, it’s not supposed to be like that.
3 Likes
hah hah then of course who the fuck am I? A cannabis expert or the king of some country? no, I’m just the guy producing so much weed he can’t smoke it all. I mean who wants to listen to an idiot like that??
2 Likes
Yeah I was watching a doco and this guy couldnt figure out why their clones were not surviving. Till he saw his worker setting up the res and put in ph down, trest, ph up, test, ph down, test, ph up, test … and on it went. Problem solved. I also work on minimising ph adjustment chemicals. So i set my res low level, so that i find the ph slowly goes down by 2 points during lights off and then up 2 points lights on. slowly over many days it might get a little low on ph (about 5.5) so i just add a little RO to bring the ph back up and there is plenty of room in the res for the extra RO. Even adding nutes while adding the RO I hardly ever add ph adjusters. I have tried to boost the EC up and control the hell out of the ph using adjusters and I have fried the crap out of my plants but boy have I still had some serious quality weed. Still better than anything else i have tried from elsewhere in the last few years. Sitting down 1.2EC is an issue for me though as I can not quite give the plants enough of what they want because my water here is so hard. Out the tap it is 0.9EC. I am having to make tap/RO mixes to bring it down to 0.4. If i can get the EC up to above 2 like you then the 0.9 tap water will not be so much of an issue and i can stop filtering it.
1 Like
yah ironicle but they teach you ph 5.5 EC 1.4 using chemical ferts in hydro even in the agriculture dept.
ok so here’s the deal… I boiled it down to almost no work. Like, listen to this shit. I never change the water in the reservoir. I never check or adjust the ph. I go down there and water every couple days, and I check the EC once in a while. You can see why I call it coma mode. I wonder if people would have an easier time in water culture with higher ph levels? I’m not going to pretend I don’t know how it supposed to work, got all the digits here writeups out my ass. But I mean… Things improved…since those days, when I was following all the rules… it definitely made things easier. Probably improved productivity as well.
2 Likes
This is very informative, in the past running larger rooms, coco, aero, dwc, I never had much luck with higher EC, although, like you say, I was always adjusting ph. Probably messed up coco buffering and many other things along the way so my biases may be totally off.
Always had a nagging doubt something was wrong and I should be using more nutes, even now, going above 500ppm/1EC tend to give troubles.
Currently dialing in my little dwc cab, seems to be doing fine at 230ppm flora, ph ~6(yellow), tap water is 26ppm here.
Will start being a little more “brave”, let it drift up.
1 Like