1st grow - Grandmommy Purple - *Now DWC*

10/23 - 10/29 Week 7 Well this is the week we cut some clones... So I needed a cloner. I was able to put one together really easily with extra stuff laying around. Really It's just a bucket, a pump, some irrigation tubing, and the little sprayer head things. I also popped in the air stone for good measure. In one of the photos you can see the red tips stuck in a tube in the background, this is what goes in the bucket to spray the stems as well. I had used basic foam, like the foam my light came in, for the clone holding cut out things. Well a few days in I was thinking about light penetration and decided the easiest way to solve this issue at the moment was something simple like aluminum foil skirts. lol. So I basically just covered the foam with foil to prevent light going through. You can also see I put the extra cuttings just in a cup of water. When I did the foil thing I also got a sock for the cup to stop light. keep it simple right? I mean I only need this for a few weeks anyways. Before we get to the cloning, I want to take a second to touch on the height and bushiness of this plant. Is this normal? What about the special branch? It looks like this week the special branch is throwing 4 new leaves out. I have many photos of the branch this week, so check it out and let me know. As for the cloning, I do it on 10/26 and end up cutting every single branch off. LOL. All in all I took 14 clones. I only needed 4 and the cloner I built only holds 8.... I told myself I cut all the branches to be prepared with extras. Also, I cut the whole plant down because I was curious how it grew. Since it was so short, compact, and bushy it was really nice to be able to cut most of the leaves off and really get a good look at the structure. I swear weed should grow taller, right? I'm sure it would get taller if I put in in flower right? Is it because I topped 2x? Whatever, we will see. There is like no stretch at all on this plant. Like not even a little. Plus I have no place for a mother plant anymore. Also, after I cut all the branches off I noticed that wherever I cut was dripping water. It was dripping pretty quick, too. Crazy to think about how much water it was sucking up. Actually, now that I cut off all the plants I was able to really inspect the roots and was able to show them for the first time. It's hard getting photos of them otherwise(based on how I'm growing). But wow, those are crazy roots. Before I did anything I dumped off the top loose hydroton to see where the roots started and to my surprise they really really started taking over the whole net pot. I bought 10" net pots that fit on top of 5 gallon buckets and was worried too much root would have escaped the hydroton and it would be a waste. But to my surprise, only like a layer 2 balls deep(lol) was loose. Otherwise, the entire pot was rooted. I had to cut the bottom section off before I could even pull the thing out of the net pot to see. I was very happy to see how the roots spread through the hydroton and that it wasn't a waste. And wow to the roots in the bottom of the bucket. See I kind of planned for this and have a solution, or so I thought, in place for this. I was just going to use another bucket, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I figured roots would grow down like that but what I hadn't planned on is that they would clog the drain holes. So this would prevent the water from draining fulling and the plant got to steal meals. It also messed up the timing on the feeding as it would overflow a little. But the way I designed it, the overflow spills back into the res if it doesn't drain through the bucket holes back into the res. The way I tried to fix this was getting something I could put in the bottom of the bucket to act as a spacer/buffer between the roots and the drainage holes. This worked for a while, until the roots grew over the entire top and caused the whole mass to float up. I didn't know what was going on as I had to keep reducing the time the timer was on to stop overflows. But eventually I saw the roots floating with the spacer... At this point it was close to cloning so I let it ride. It wasn't until after I took the cuttings I could see the full extent of the roots. They actually ended up encapsulating the entire thing I put in the bucket. It's crazy, I've never seen anything like this. But I also have never grown before. But damn, they just wrapped that thing up. It even had one single feeder root that made it all the way through everything and was like 16inches in the res. Lol such a thirsty plant. I do plan on combating this in the future and will be very closely monitoring the root situation. I think trimming the roots so they grow down evenly will be the first step as I think part of the issue was a few long roots got all the way down and started making a nest. Then the rest of them caught up. So I'll work on that. Also, I have an idea for a better spacer buffer thing, but I'm still working that out. For feeding this week, I backed off because I figured I was going to clone the plant and go to RO water only that there was no reason to load up on nutes. I also let the reservoir go longer than usual because of the cloning operation to come. Usually I change every week, this time I let it go for around 11 days only adding in ph'd water when the system got low. But you can really see a difference in the leaves from when there where nutrient and ph imbalances. The clones were sprayed with RO water at least 3 times a day.