My Water Culture

Read the thread in it’s entirety in one go last weekend so I might have missed this, but it looks like you clone into a tote and hang the clones into the water? Do you keep that topped up, or let the level go down as your clones drink? What makes you decide it’s time to move a clone into her own bucket?

I’m running top feed RDWC right now and I want to eliminate the top feed, just trying to think through how to go about it for cloning and seed germination.

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heya puffer! Usually I move the clone into it’s own bucket after the roots form. Depends on the time frame involved, but you can cut the plants apart even if they are really big and the roots grew together. I’ve cloned in the buckets as well just by putting 4 cuttings in each of 4 buckets and tossing out the ones that root slower. The seed germination was a tiny bit trickier… I would use a bread tie which is plastic covered wire to keep the seedling in place.I will definitely dig out those photos for you because I’ve never really seen anyone do that before. I am impressed by your exhaustive reading efforts! kudos

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here are some photos of the big bud plants being…hatched :wink: It seems so long ago! but it was may forth 2017…ohh shit. Those are rising from the ashes. I wait until the seedling is just big enough to get it’s feet wet. Then I rig it into this holder until it’s big enough for me to cover the top with another black something. It’s all about blocking the light. Lessons I learned, never expose the seedling’s…underbelly? to light. The stem grows weak and it flops over and dies.I suspect it to be the lethal side effects of exposing nutrient solution to light.


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Thanks for the photos. I put some seeds into some rockwool and hung that into the reservoir Kratky style. Hopefully they’ll germinate. Do you run nutrients as soon as you put them into their final buckets?

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yep I put clone/seedling dose which is about .8-1EC. I sprouted them in a paper towel in a plastic bag.

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well! It’s all over now but the crying! Oh and the cleanup. Buuuuut I was worried my drying line was going to snap with all the buds. Must be at least 6.02x10^23 grams in there! Hah hah just kidding thought I’d toss in some nonsense. Really, once the buds are dried, I’ll weigh them. I also have a comparison bud to see if these ones I grew are better than the first. I mean, they should definitely be better than the first round, considering it was experimental. I have bags of king tut and sugar black rose for data gathering. The freezer has been refilled! Unfortunately I know it’s lower yielding buds I got in there for the most part. Imagine if I had stockpiled another freezer of big buds?? I would have another like 125grams of primal hash on tap. You can see how this medical production can get away on a human. I’m at 25% of my legal production, but I’m still producing so much weed I could take a bath in it. That’s OK, I know people with serious medical conditions. The truth of the matter is, once they decimated the medical industry, all the good weed was fucking gone. Of course, on the license to grow it says I should toss my extra hash in a bonfire??? and burn that shit??? WTF kind of world am I living in??? facepalm

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heh heh so I called my friends and they helped me cut down all the buds for a couple handfuls of the stuff. That’s what I call “pulling the pin” once the smoke clears, the plants are gone. Hopefully I can get the next crop started tonight. We’ll see…what happens I suppose!

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Always easier with a couple friends, it’s those 2 day solo marathon trim sessions that can get a bit…bleak lol

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heh heh this one time I tossed these three plants under 2x1000watt. It was a crazy thing I bent all the branches down so they were flat on top. After my friend and I had trimmed 1500grams of dried buds… I had to call a halt to it. We were going to be stuck down there for fucking weeks lol so we took the remaining buds and froze them for hash. I promised that I would never do that again - so I haven’t.

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I used to have a friend who would harvest like 10-12lbs every 2 months or so. It would just be me and him sitting in his basement for days crushing beers and listening to music. It was fun for the first couple hours lol

Also knew a dude who got so much outdoor every year he would dry and freeze it all like you did. He’d just pull a couple pounds out at a time and trim it as needed. It’s such a neverending, thankless job :grimacing:

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ooooweeee boi! gunna be a big root harvest this yar! Nobody will defeat my grams per watt of root ballz!
heh heh really though, they are some sweet looking roots. Uhh first up big bud second is meat breath.
The secret to nice looking roots, is temperature. I keep em at 20C they are happy. If I put brown shit in the reservoir they will turn brown. Once you cut all the leaves and buds off a plant so it’s just a stick with roots, the roots go limp from loss of osmosis.

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I don’t know why I like root-porn so much.

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mmmmmmmmmmmmm, me too. I get real funky and give the root zone a good sniff too. Smelling fresh healthy roots gives me a real kick. They look great.

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now that you mention smelling roots! I got some story! If I ever open the lid and take a sniff and it smells earthy I know the oxygen levels are getting low and the plant is stressed. If I open the lid and I smell swamp, I’m in deep trouble, the roots are devastated and producing ethylene gas! If I take a root mass and let it sit in swamp water for a while, it smells like I murdered someone and shoved them in the bucket now their body is rotting. Definitely…a murder scene… when that happens. Swamp water = death usually. Be careful with the root zone! I will construct a freaky hardcore root porn photo montage and post it here. The roots are fascinating to me, because they can actually tell me things! How many growers are sniffing roots? LOL

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Yeah definitely another good way to check the health of your plants. I like to have easy access to root zones for that reason. Hence why i have nice convenient access doors in my buckets. That plus the buckets are 50L each so i aint lifting the lid on them. :slight_smile:

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ok here’s a nuts photo of all the root balls in my current grow area.

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I am making clones tonight and shifting production into the bloom area. Next, I have to plant those crazy king tuts. I am cloning big bud and meat breath. They are my next grow, and they are more than ready! I will trim lots of the big bud leaves and branches due to serious overgrowth.

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hooooooooooooooly a crazy storm moved through and the power went out. I am going to make sure this time, I only adjust the timer when the lights have already come on. That will prevent an edge case from being generated. If the darkness is fucked with, the plants don’t like it. You can easily cut an hour of light… but if you cut an hour of darkness…oooooo you’ve been warned!

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ok the sugar black rose was a dangerous 460 grams. Glad I tossed that hunk of shiiite. It’s hash productivity is so low I would have to grow 5X the crop to get the hash yield I crave. There was probably 100 grams more in the king tut. You can see, at a basic level the plants could almost be the same-ish in terms of yield…y-know within margins. But on a hash yield they are vastly different. Also the sugar black rose hash sucks ass. I am going to start prepping for a king tut batch of hash, that’s going to be the money shot right there, you know what I mean? Buddy never came back and got his experimental contaminated hash yield, and I can’t say that I blame him.

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now that bloom season has started and the clones are made, I will change the clones to veg mode and start growing a new batch. I call it the perpetual medium-less deep water culture…BABY! I just scrub the buckets from the last round and use them to plant the next round. How do I get my buckets clean? good ol elbow grease, scrubbing with some detergent, and then rinsing good. Don’t want bubble baths for the root system. Then I put the clones in there and let it rip. As long as you give em a good scrub then make sure the root zone is healthy - there shouldn’t be any pathogens. But, I’ll also tell you another thing. If your roots decompose from lack of oxygen you can just restore the oxygen flow then plant a new plant in there. The fungus that killed your last plant will in turn, be killed by oxygen. Oxygen depletion is the number one killer of hydroponic plants. The number 2 killer is mixing light and nutrient solution. EXTREME HAZARD! I guess that sums up the lethal risks for hydro. I mean, as long as you as a person knows how a plant grows heh heh. 'Cause if you think it grows in the dark, that can be lethal as well.

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