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. 
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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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speaking of growing in the dark, I heard rumor of someone giving the plant 48 hours of darkness before bloom phase. What a load of hog shit, I have never heard of such lame unsubstantiated claims.
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I sterilize my buckets with a wipe down of 70% iso before giving them a good rinse.
Your style of planning is eventually what I want to get to with the photos I’m running. Just waiting for the mothers to grow up before I can start taking clones.
I’m sure you’ve mentioned this before, or I could probably figure it out from timestamps on posts but I’m a lazy stoner, how long do you veg the clones before you flip em?
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LOL I never keep track of the veg period because the blooming of the previous crop dictates when I can move them in. They don’t grow as fast under the LED as they did under the hps. Soooooooo they were cloning 3 months ago. wow time flies?? march 12 was the first photo showing they were in buckets. So they vegged for 2 months! Approximately the time it took for the first crop to bloom out. Phew they take twice as long to grow under LED what a ripoff, where is the infrared radiation?? That’s a rant for a different time.
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Wow, that’s a long veg time. I’ve never grown with anything but LEDs, do you know if your LED has IR spectrum in it?
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I guess I can go look it up, but it doesn’t seem like it has enough or any actually. Based on the growth of the plant. I had tested them originally beside an hps, but failed to realize the radiation was shining on the plants further away as well. Under hps I would get them chest high after 1 month they were ready for bloom. Also there wasn’t a million useless growth nodes either so close so the cells of the plant can’t be growing long enough.
The damage on the leaf pictured…I mean you could try and figure out what happened. I have a simpler answer for things like this: the person growing this plant let the EC reach .4 - which resulted in widespread nutrient deficiency. Solution: Raise the EC to 2.2 at least.
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a couple of days makes all the difference in the world. Plants are all regenerated from abuse! These plants can take a more concentrated nutrient solution, so perhaps they will yield better 
Just kidding I know the big bud will yield good, unless something strange happens. Like boogeyman attack. I’ll be keeping my eyes on the meat breath, because it’s experimental. I will be torturing the secrets out of it by abusing the nutrient solution to see how it reacts.
Right now I am in the “middle of the road” dose which should work good for medium sized plants. I’ll see how that works, then on the next dose, I’ll give one +1 bisection and the other one -1. After that, I’ll have covered the spread, using this crop and I’ll be able to figure out what dose they really thrive on.
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High JoeCrowe
I made up my own version of DWC using Rubbermaid tubs back in ‘01 and have done about 50 tubs worth since. Basically the same as yours but in tubs. I always ran sterile using 35% peroxide until I made a chiller out of an old water cooler, fountain pump and 20’ or so of 3/8" tubing. No problem keeping the nutes cold.
I used a bunch of different aquarium pumps over the years and they worked OK with 2-12" airstones in each tub. Got a couple of ECOair commercial pumps with 8 spot manifolds and they rock. Had to use the bigger one to aerate my dugout and may have burned it out but I’ll see what’s up.
I’ve been doing experiments in organics and I’m not good at that so will be getting back into DWC eventually. This winter will be mostly getting into making fem seeds and growing in soilless.
Can’t beat DWC for crazy growth and ease of use!
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I’ll rip organics outside, but for the lab, things have to be chemical. Indoors you can do chemical without worrying your pissing on the planet. Outdoors I recommend organic for symbiosis reasons, it will help regenerate the earth.
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It really has its benefits. I have partial paralysis. So i designed a RDWC system so that everything is light weight and all set up prior. Then nothing moves for the entire grow. All the medium (water) is just pumped in and out as required. The pumps doing all the work instead of me lugging around pots. The only lifting done is getting the root ball out of the pots at the end as they are 50 litre pots so the root balls are big.
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Tagged that for future reference… .thanks for sharing!
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Again, I’m actually having much better luck with Clorox regular bleach than I ever did with poolshock. 0.2ml/gallon clorox every ~3 days. I’ve gone up to a day or two later without issue but 3 days is when the smell has dissipated. Would not go above 0.3ml/gallon and only if you have root issues.
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