New Mother Tent Setup

SuperiorBuds · May 22, 2019, 5:42pm

This is a separate thread to document my attempt at growing new mothers out that will provide clones to my high pressure aero flowering room.

For info on the HPA setup, please see my original build thread.

Equipment

4x3 Amazon Tent

HLG-65 v2

SensorPush Temp/Humidity Monitor

Durabuilt 27 Gallon Tote

The Plan

Seeds were popped using the paper towel method and transplanted into the aerocloner to get some legs. Once they get big enough to take clones from I will move the clones into the flowering room until they show sex. Females will be finished to test the smoke and males will be fed to the chickens. I only have two bubble buckets right now, so only two females will be selected to become mothers. (Hopefully I get two different strains, or phenos, or at least two females!)

The Strains

3 different crosses are being tested this round.

2x Master Kush (M) x GG4 (F)
1x Master Kush (M) x Chemdawg (F)
1x Master Kush (M) x Strawberry Shortcake (F)

SuperiorBuds · May 22, 2019, 6:13pm

I’m a bit behind on updates, catching you all up now…

May 9th
They showed their heads above the hydroton today. Added a portable heater to the tent since the temps were a bit too low.

May 13th
Plants are getting bigger and the roots have reached the water.

May 14th
A little more growth.

May 15th
The shortcake is a bit behind the others, but that was expected since she’s a smaller plant when finishing generally.

May 20th
Uh oh. First sign of a problem – they’re getting droopy. Changed out the res with fresh RO/tap mix and reset back to base.

May 21st
No real improvement today. I ordered another air pump so I could increase the airflow in the res, hoping that solves the issue. pH is stable, EC seems fine for babies.

I also ordered a new oil heater for the tent. Temps are swinging up and down with the portable unit I have and that’s causing strange humidity swings. Hoping this unit keeps the temp a lot more stable.

zimbogro · May 22, 2019, 8:27pm

wow nice roots.
Im struggling with different ways of germinating seeds for dwc. I hate rockwool, high fail rate for me. So I have tried many different ways including coco disks, instead of std collars for cloners. My successes never grew that fast, very very slow to take off.

SuperiorBuds · May 22, 2019, 10:46pm

I had a hard time settling on something that would work for me, as well.

I needed to end up with plants going to flower in 4" net cups with bare roots. I tried rockwool, rapid rooters, foam cubes – none of them seemed to be what I wanted. Last grow my plants became too large for the collars and caused some of them to tip slightly. I wanted to try and solve that this time around as well.

By having the hydroton I’m hoping for added stability later on – plus it was easy to get the germinated seeds into the system.

zimbogro · May 23, 2019, 3:00pm

Im using growstones, youre making me think of doing the same as you. I just have to top feed until roots reach the water

SuperiorBuds · May 25, 2019, 6:25pm

May 25th

They’re still growing and the droop is nowhere near as pronounced.

Seeing some problems with some of the leaves so I need to go double check all my numbers in a bit. (ph, EC, Temp) Not sure if this is just leftover from the pH problems earlier in the week or if they’re over/under fed. Or something else entirely.

SuperiorBuds · May 27, 2019, 4:52pm

May 27th

I think that the new air pump has helped and they’re looking a bit better.

The roots for the most part look good, though they are way more tangled then they end up in the HPA system. The water movement just seems to twist them up and around everything in the tub.

There’s been a few issues with the small pump/sprayer manifolds that I got. When I first purchased them they didn’t fit together very well and yesterday I found one of the manifolds had popped off and was floating in the water. It went back together but that’s not an issue I want to deal with again. I also don’t like how small they are, which forces the water level to be a bit too low for me.

Since I still have a bunch of the yellow and red sprayers laying around I went ahead and ordered a new, larger submersible pump and I will be building my own manifold this week to replace this setup. This one pump will replace the two that are in there now while still increasing the flow rate two-fold.

SuperiorBuds · June 3, 2019, 10:36pm

June 3rd

The two glue crosses in the back are still growing, even though they’re showing some issues with the leaves. The shortcake cross unfortunately seems to have stopped all growth in the past few days and has started to die back. There’s no real new root growth so I’m afraid this one might be a lost cause. The chemdawg cross is also not looking so great, but I’m hoping she’ll recover.

I added some Southern AG fungicide to the tote a few days ago to see if that would help and the submerged roots do seem whiter today. I’ll continue with this for now but if it comes to it I do have HTH pool shock on hand.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00VXQG23O

I also increased the water level a bit today and removed the submerged pump so the system is back to a DWC bubbler again. The water temps are good but I did turn off the heater in the tent almost a week ago. (Maybe I should put that back on, it’s been going between 64F - 67F in there daily.)

The bad leaves I was talking about on the glue look like this.

I see deficiency, over-feeding, and under-feeding signs across this same plant so I’m wondering if my ph was getting out of whack. This is why I hate small reservoirs.

Being that the plants were already stressed and I was going to be making adjustments anyways I went ahead and topped the back two. I need them to bush out a bit more so I can pull clones when these go into the flower room. (As long as they survive.)