Bit of a difficult start to these girls seeing as this is my first grow and all, but they’re still growing and overall looking pretty healthy, good colour, springy, but I’m suspecting nute deficiency maybe but I’ve upped the food so we’ll see how we do!
Now, when to start topping 🤔...
Puff, puff, pass ✌️
You can put them in the buckets but . The thing you wanna keep in mind is the root system . With that being said the first question you should ask yourself is will your roots reach the water in the bucket . If not you might wanna water them by hand until they do . You can speed up the root growth with many variety's of nutrient line ups . Using products like this will do 2 things , increase the nutrient uptake as well as promote mega root growth ! But for now i highly recommend hand feeding your baby if your going to put her in the bucket until she gets a kick ass root mass going . I hope this information is useful in your quest to understanding when you can use your buckets ! -Happy Growing!
I’m doing DWC buckets. I’m 5 weeks into veg and need to top up the water occasionally. Should I be pumping the old water out every so often and putting new solution in, or do you guys just keep topping with ph’d nute water?
If you do swap out the water, what’s your procedure?
Hey there @CrazyDaver nice question! With individual DWC 5 gallon reservoirs like myself and you use you absolutely do want to be topping off the water daily as to ensure the proper Nutrient to water ratio, however you do not want to keep the same nutrients in the reservoirs for longer than a week. A completely reservoir swap every 7 days is highly recommended and usually comes with the change in nutrient schedule as well. If you have any more questions feel free to ask them! 😎
@Crazydaver,Hydroguard is not essential, however, it is good for helping keep your buckets clean. It’s A beneficial bacillus bacteria that helps fend off bad bacteria.
Best of luck with your first DWC grow. I am a Recirculating Deep Water 💦 Culture cultivator and the best advice I could give you is to feed at a fraction of the recommended strength on the bottle. My garden is currently in week 4 of Veg and I am mixing at 40% or 480 ppm. Also let your ph drift a little as the plant 🌱 will uptake the various elements necessary for plant growth at different ph levels. I will let it rise from 5.6/5.7 to 6.3/6.4 before dropping it again. I post no-weekly videos of my garden to my YouTube Channel. Check it out if you have a chance:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCJiLvEn7XRcH_o3sHd8qbyQ
“Keep It Safe, Keep It Green, & Smoke 💨 It Up!!!”
@Crazydaver, as long as your are not on any timeline don’t rush topping the plants. I like to make sure that they are in vigorous growth mode before topping. Get some good roots stretched out underneath. You’all know your in vigorous growth mode that first morning you go into your garden and say WTF 🤤
So, just wanted to suggest your plants need more Nitrogen. I see you're feeding "Big Bloom" and "Tiger Bloom". "Big Bloom" is fine right now, but "Tiger Bloom" is really for after the plants go into flower. I would suggest getting some "Grow Big" for the Nitrogen they need during veg. Just a friendly suggestion. Good luck with your grow!
@Fibro_Witch,thanks! My bad, it is big bloom and grow big I’m using and I’m following the suggested nute schedule. I did increase the ec to 1.1 on both plants and increased the water level as I thought they might not be able to reach it yet. Discovered last night I accidentally left the lights off for 5 hours. D’oh! Thank you!
You want to get rid of the water every 9 to 10 days or so to prevent the nitrates from basically rotting and causing problems. changing the water every week is considered too frequent 10 days should be okay, but you need to make sure you dont need to do it sooner. Just take the "used" water and either throw it away or use it on your garden plants - they love that! hope this helps ! 🚀
@Crazydaver,Hydroguard is not essential, however, it is good for helping keep your buckets clean. It’s A beneficial bacillus bacteria that helps fend off bad bacteria.
@MagicMikesMeds, first off I wanna thank you for taking all this time to reply, I really appreciate it. I’m not using hydroguard, all the research I did I never discovered that. Should I get it now and just add some? I’m using fox farm nutes and one of them is brown and my gut feeling tells me this is staining. No smell to the roots and they seem to be growing ok. I feel like plant 2 is a runt. It’s crazy how different they are considering they’re from the same seed packet lol. Thanks again. 👍
@Crazydaver,I watched the videos you posted and it was hard to hear, but it sounded as if you said that there was some “browning” going on with the roots? Sometimes higher res temps can cause root issues if not properly prepared for. Are you using any Hydroguard or adding beneficial bacteria? If the reservoir is too warm the ability for the water to hold O2 deminishes, and that is when issues with root rot can set it. Not that I am saying that you have any root rot (the videos show no signs of it) but browning roots can be a sign of it. Depending on your nutrient line, some of them also stain the roots slightly brown. As long as they are not slimy then you should be ok.
Hey @Hybrid yes lots of air, I think they’re close to getting full on nutes soon, they’re growing just slowly is all. Once they’re in the water I bet we’re up and running. I can’t figure out how to add photos to this week so I’ll make sure to take lots of both plants for week 2. Cheers guys 👍
@Crazydaver, To add photos, click on the week (Veg week 1) icon and there should be an option underneath which says "Edit Week". If you select that you can then upload more pics.