My first [recent] hydroponic grow.

This diary is going to be a day by day if I keep up. Unless I am on vacation I will take pictures every day. Sorry for some of the potato quality pics earlier on. After week 2 or so I'm going to only take pics with my camera flash. The first image is about a day after sprouting. No pictures for the pineapple for the first week as I wasn't sure if it was going to grow or perish. It must have had a mild root infection but it has won the battle against it as of now and is doubling in size daily after a week of not doing much. I am using a uv light in the reservoir. My method is using 3-D printer root sprayers to pump water directly to the roots, I also have an air stone in each 5 gallon bucket. I have an overflow on each bucket to drain the water back into the reservoir. I positioned the buckets on top of chairs to let gravity do its thing there. Humidity has been fine lately so I am not using the dehumidifier. Future grows I will get a controller to turn the dehumidifier on if needed. I wanted to clone these but realized it's not good to do with autoflowers so I have ordered regular feminized purple haze and cbd blueberry for my next grow. Stay tuned!

The pineapple auto flower was germinated at the same time as the blueberry. It took some time to catch up, I'm not sure what I did wrong but it's just now starting to show signs of future success. I had a couple other auto strains that all failed to sprout due to my negligence. Update on those, my last seeds seem to have taken when I opten to put them in my outdoor hydro setup for germination. The conditions must be better with the uv from the sun preventing over dampening from being a molds paradise. I don't have the time to watch these all day so this was my best shot. I noticed some yellowing. Turns out my ph was off because I never calibrated my ph sensor. Fixed everything 10-Jul, hopefully she comes back to vitality soon or the yellow is just light green from the new leaves.. I diluted the nutrient solution down today but only to 1000 from being up to 1200. If nothing changes in a few days I will replace half the current reservoir supply with new ph adjusted water. I don't dechlorinate with a filter but I bubble the water for a day and hit it with uv just for good measure before adding new water. Update, after researching, it appears this is iron deficiency. Hopefully correcting the ph is enough to prevent the yellowing from continuing. Fingers crossed. Else I need a supplement. Update July 11, after calibrating my ph monitor and getting back in acceptable range yesterday [I have been shooting for 6.0 or just below] the leaves are becoming more dark green in color and the yellowish color is dissipating. You can see some of the lower leaves have some sort of burn. I am not sure if it is heat damage or caused by ph imbalance but I don't see this on the newer growth.

Introducing some mild LST this week. It's a very bushy plant, I am not sure if this is normal or not but I don't have much to compare to. On the 14th after taking the picture I cut off a few lower leaves that were either infected with fungus or have a calcium deficiency. I ordered some cal mag to see if that does the trick but a couple of the other leaves are already afflicted. Will see what happens. Just a couple days later [16th] the smaller growths have totally replaced those leaves I removed and then some.. The blueberry is very bushy compared to the late start pineapple which is almost as tall as the blueberry but with a fraction of the leaves. 16-Jul switched the reservoir[s] out with maxibloom @ 900ppm. I bubbled the water for 24 hrs or so before adding the maxibloom. Ph ended up right at 6.0 so I did not do any adjusting. 17-jul ph sitting at 6.3, will monitor and bring down a bit probably today. 17-Jul I removed two leaves that were obstructing new growth

I got kinda laxadazy taking pics this week sorry. The 23rd is day 4 of week 4 so 4 days of growth from the last pictures. So, the leaf problem is back and I am now certain it's rust fungus. Going to clip off the badly infected leaves , spray with garden safe fungicide, and I think I will switch to 24 hr light cycle for a couple weeks, applying the fungicide in another week or so. It's just affecting the blueberry so far but I will spray the pineapple to be safe. The girsl are still fine as far as I know but humidity is very high and I am out of town so hopefully I can fix the issue before anything bad happens to them. Lights still on 24/7. Will be cutting the light time when I get back. -Jul 31

So I left for a week and haven't posted new pics in even longer. Not the best angles but these girls are massive. It's been a challenge keeping the humidity down. They are each pulling nearly a gallon a day. Just ordered a much bigger dehumidifier since I have no choice where I live but to scrub the air and the carbon filters got waterlogged while I was gone. Been having yo use the whole house as a diffusion zone for the air to maintain lower RH.

Sorry. Apparently I was off on my weeks count. Week 6 is Aug 3-9th. I'm not moving the pics around though. I had HR issues and odor. I bought a more commercially sized dehumidifier for in the grow tent and now the humidity has been as low as what I set it to. Shooting for 55%, less power used that way. I decommissioned my indoor lettuce garden and robbed the light to add to my tent. I had to flatten the pineapple plant on the left side. She's way too big and just barely having preflowers. I have one carbon filter I pull through out of the tent and then an additional scrubber setup as a secondary filtration in the room outside the tent. After leaving for a week the HR was very high at about 85%! Odor was insane. I sprayed organic fungicide as I did see some of the damn rust fungus coming back. I sprayed the blueberry with some water mist just as an attempt to let residual of the fungicide runoff. I'm going to avoid spraying anymore because I'm sure I already got a small amount on the buds while they were small, don't want them soaking it up as they grow bigger. The bud pictured for Aug 8 is from blueberry and is just the apical meristem which obviously sees faster growth. My LST worked pretty well though as you can barely tell that is the meristem.

I got my microscope this week so I thought I should share some pics. I'll get better pics when I have more time. Too busy taking care of my vegetable garden today.