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They are finally starting to put on a little mass.
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I tested the soil sensor in a pot of moist coco and the numbers seemed pretty dead on.
One thing about the little pots is I’m barely using any coco. I dehydrated three bricks, but only used maybe one. If the water cycles can keep up then this will be a really inexpensive setup.
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So you think they like it?
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Ive been busy dealing with my mom’s house the past week. We moved all of the furniture out the other day.
Plants are looking whatever. The bud development is concerning me. Aside from weird leaves the plants look healthy. I’m not too sure what’s going on. I may have left too many branches. I pruned and defoliated pretty hard, but it’s a jungle now. The plants are frosty and reek, so that’s good at least.
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Kind of looks like reveging?
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These little plants got cooked when the temp went back ups couple days ago. I had to readjust some things and they seems okay now. A few of them wilted when I transplanted them and looked like they were going to die, but they are okay now. I planted more than I needed, but I’m just trying to keep them alive as a Humanitarian effort.
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It does kind of look like that, but they have had those weird leaves the entire time. There’s also no light leak and I haven’t been pounding them with nutrients, so I don’t think that’s an issue.
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Huh, thays really interesting. You should burn them with fire once they are done growing…
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Did you figure out the apparent issues with the EC and moisture measurements?
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I just dropped the EC and started hand watering once a day. I don’t think the sprayers could keep the cubes saturated enough when the plants went into full production mode. If I were to redo this setup I would keep the sprayers, but also have lines watering the rockwool directly once or maybe twice a day.
I was originally using mister emitters instead of regular sprayers, but they watered too slowly to keep up without running continuously. I think having one mister along with watering the cubes directly would be a really good setup. High humidity and darkness cause the roots to expand beyond their medium. I may try adding one mister on this coco run.
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I will say running a long string of experimental grows and now being able to gather data has helped me grasp the interconnectedness of everything.
I used to see it as a plant vs the universe, and the more favorable the conditions, the easier it was for the plant to takeover. Now I see it as the plant being a void between all of these variables, and as equilibriums line up and chunk together the plant materializes out of them. I’m not growing a plant, I’m growing an environment.
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Interesting take. I think I kind of, to a limited degree am trying to do the same. I’m trying to build an optimized habitat and just kind of assuming the plants will do fine if I tend to all the things they need and want. It’s been a journey for sure. Outside mostly, just starting with the indoor thing.
It’s interesting to watch the plants grow, and react to changes in the way I do things. Learning a lot.
I see. So you think the media was a little too dry to keep up. I remember seeing pics of the troughs of roots blowing out of the rockwool cubes and the little nuggets. I really like the overall concept. And looking forward to seeing the coco setup.
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Not the medium so much as the rootball. This is something I’ve been trying to figure out since I ran rockwool the first time a few years ago. If you sit the cube on a rockwool cube or slab, the bottom cube always drains the top cube almost completely. This is useful for seedlings / clones because they tend to not enjoy a soggy cube, but not so much for a plant with a developed rootball. Aside from being dry, it also spikes EC around the rootball. Plus roots don’t like to explore unless they have to, and the lower rockwool cubes stays far more saturated. So it doesn’t really promote root growth. This is why I stopped using slabs.
I’ve gotten around this by using 4" cubes and sitting them directly on the tray. Then I filled in the gaps between the plants with little rockwool chunks. That worked, but I’ve never cared for growing small plants in 4" cubes because they stayed overly saturated for too long early on.
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I think if you grow in large cubes and water them directly then rockwool is fine. I’ve considered not even putting the plants in cubes and just plopping them into a tray full of little rockwool chunks. I might try that in the future. Right now I just need a normal decent yield to refill my dwindling stockpile / vanishing empire.
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I’ve had pretty good results with placing the rockwool onto coco mats a few weeks before flower. The mats don’t hold very much water and they don’t seem to pull water from the cubes like slabs do.
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I do really like coco mats. I had a roll jammed in a closet for over a year and I don’t know why I waited so long to try it. It is a pain to cut, but it’s cool that you can use smaller pieces to fill gaps and cut out custom shapes and whatnot.
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Also you can just throw the coco mat away. My leach trays have two deep troughs, so I was using a thick plastic screen to sit the plants on. When I harvested I had to cut and remove all of the big pieces of root and then scrub out the rest. That was a pain.
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