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Well here goes my 1st DWC experiment, what can go wrong lol.
After the loss of a seedling in another diary i got looking at DWC setups and here we are.
When the lone bean sprouted I transferred to hemp fiber growing cubes, I wont be using them again as they seem to hold water too much and not drain as well as I had hoped.
I did manage to somehow forget to snap a pic of the bean when it had sprouted its tap root.
I will be running a top drip for the first little while until the roots can reach the water below. I will be running the top drip for 20 seconds every hour, does this sound about right?
Good progress this week, the roots have made it out of the hemp cubes and will be transplanted into the DWC setup in the next day or 2. So far so good I haven't managed to kill it yet lol.
The seedling has now been moved in to it's final growing place. The top drip will run for 20 seconds once every hour until the roots are long enough to reach the nutrient solution below.
Well although this is just an experiment to see if I can get this to work, I was still getting very frustrated with the lack of progress especially after reading a lot about DWC and the expected growth rate, all that was happening was very tiny leaves were growing with no real progression.
If you look at the previous 2 weeks i had a cover over the Hydroton while I was running the top drip until the roots reached the solution below, thinking it would stop the solution from being affected by the light. Well all is seems to have done is hinder the growth of the plant. I found this out as last night after I removed that cover and was surprised with the growth spurt over night probably as much over night as there has been in the last couple of weeks. With this i am excited to see how she progresses now. I also noticed the first root starting to emerge from the basket, i was very excited when I saw this!
The top drip cycle is now set to come on for 30 seconds every 30 minutes.
I changed the res water today with the added nutes listed above then PH'd it down to 5.5 as i know its going to raise With an EC of .5
I have made some rookie mistakes with this round of grows and got too gung ho with my feed schedules and caused problems with lockout, but I have backed off on my feed schedule and things are starting to recover some what.
I also made the mistake of not washing the hydroton well enough and ended up with brown sludge attached to everything. So I washed a second batch thoroughly and then left it bubbling away away in a 5 gal bucket with a big air stone with the water ph'd to 5.5 with some h202 in the mix.
I then completely and carefully replaced the hydroton in the net pot, there was a root system but not a very good one. Since replacing the hydroton there has been no brown sludge.
There has been some improvements but not great ones, if there aren't great improvements I the next couple of weeks i might sadly pull the plug on this plant.
Well what can I say, there has been a very slight improvement on this experiment but not much, but this is all down to my mistakes, not flushing the hydroton well enough, over feeding and transplanting before the root system was mature enough, lessons learned!
Northern_bc_bud
