derekdakid
- 18
- 3
Background
Decided on a whim to jump right back into growing since I missed the hobby. It's been about two years since my last few failed attempts caused by powdery mildew (1st time due to a malfunctioning humidifier) and by nutrient lockout. My last few attempts were on a 2x4 grow tent using FFOF soil + FF Nutrient Trio and I've been reading that soil is only advantageous for organic growing, which I'm not interested in any longer as I noticed a very pronounced difference in growth speed when using the nutrient trio vs going full organic with just compost teas, so I've decided to go for a full hydroponic ebb-and-flow system using Coco Coir as my growing medium.
I purchased the following for my grow setup
Covert 405CFM Exhaust Kit
Gorilla 5x5 Grow Tent
Gavita 1700e LED
Gavita LED Controller
Gavita EL1 Controller
FastFit 4x4 Tray Stand
Botanicare 4x4 Flood Tray
12x 1 Gallon Smart Pots
Coco Coir
2x Gorilla Gear Boards
1x Hurricane Super 8 16" Fan
1x Hurricane 12" Oscillating fan
Botanicare EBB&FLOW Fitting kit with 2 extensions
This all cost a pretty penny but I just want to make sure I have proper equipment going forward since the seeds I'm working with were pretty expensive ($550 from Supreme Seed Bank).
Where I'm At
I just finished a 24 hour soak on the seeds in RO water until I could see them slightly opening exposing the white tap root inside. After that I transplanted into rockwool cubes that were soaked in water PHed to 6.0 before moving the cubes into my Seed Sprouter. They are currently sitting in the sprouter on top of a heat mat with my hygrometer/thermometer reading 77F and fluctuating between 70-80% RH. I'm leaving the lights on for 24 hours until they sprout and until my grow timer comes in from Amazon, once that happens I plan on running it 18/6. I'm technically on day 3 of the germination phase currently, with day 1-2 being the 24 hour seedling soak and day 2-3 (now) being in rockwool and the supersprouter. I'm anxious about the whole
Hard Lessons Learned
I'm not sure if I'm crazy for full sending it on such a big equipment + expensive gear purchase having failed a few organic grow setups but I feel confident that I learned some pretty valuable lessons from my previous attempts
1) Keep adequate active ventilation with no stale air pockets (I had no oscillating fans at all in my previous grow attempts as I never bothered figuring out how to mount the static fans, a problem that I've solved with my Gorilla Gear Boards).
2) Test runoff PH/PPM as well as inbound PPM of the water. Before I would just put nutrients into the water and then PH it, without measuring EC or PPM, which worked until I had nutrient burn issues. I kept feeding more nutrients because the symptoms looked similar to the ones I saw when the FFOF ran out of nutrients around week 4 of veg, so I just upped my nutrients entering a very terrible cycle until the plants died.
3) Keep humidity down low and actually deploy a dehumidifier / Do not let runoff just sit there and evaporate
- I had huge humidity problems as I would water the plants and let the runoff just sit there in the tent and get stale, making the humidity climb up all the way to 80% at some times during the veg stage. To make things worse the runoff would be full of nutrients which the plants would just sit and soak in causing them to get fucked with nutrient issues and also PM issues. I really don't know what I was thinking.
Anyways I would love to hear what you guys think of my plan and what I'm currently doing and here is a picture of my babies in rockwool right now. Here's hoping that I don't ruin $550 worth of seeds lol
Decided on a whim to jump right back into growing since I missed the hobby. It's been about two years since my last few failed attempts caused by powdery mildew (1st time due to a malfunctioning humidifier) and by nutrient lockout. My last few attempts were on a 2x4 grow tent using FFOF soil + FF Nutrient Trio and I've been reading that soil is only advantageous for organic growing, which I'm not interested in any longer as I noticed a very pronounced difference in growth speed when using the nutrient trio vs going full organic with just compost teas, so I've decided to go for a full hydroponic ebb-and-flow system using Coco Coir as my growing medium.
I purchased the following for my grow setup
Covert 405CFM Exhaust Kit
Gorilla 5x5 Grow Tent
Gavita 1700e LED
Gavita LED Controller
Gavita EL1 Controller
FastFit 4x4 Tray Stand
Botanicare 4x4 Flood Tray
12x 1 Gallon Smart Pots
Coco Coir
2x Gorilla Gear Boards
1x Hurricane Super 8 16" Fan
1x Hurricane 12" Oscillating fan
Botanicare EBB&FLOW Fitting kit with 2 extensions
This all cost a pretty penny but I just want to make sure I have proper equipment going forward since the seeds I'm working with were pretty expensive ($550 from Supreme Seed Bank).
Where I'm At
I just finished a 24 hour soak on the seeds in RO water until I could see them slightly opening exposing the white tap root inside. After that I transplanted into rockwool cubes that were soaked in water PHed to 6.0 before moving the cubes into my Seed Sprouter. They are currently sitting in the sprouter on top of a heat mat with my hygrometer/thermometer reading 77F and fluctuating between 70-80% RH. I'm leaving the lights on for 24 hours until they sprout and until my grow timer comes in from Amazon, once that happens I plan on running it 18/6. I'm technically on day 3 of the germination phase currently, with day 1-2 being the 24 hour seedling soak and day 2-3 (now) being in rockwool and the supersprouter. I'm anxious about the whole
Hard Lessons Learned
I'm not sure if I'm crazy for full sending it on such a big equipment + expensive gear purchase having failed a few organic grow setups but I feel confident that I learned some pretty valuable lessons from my previous attempts
1) Keep adequate active ventilation with no stale air pockets (I had no oscillating fans at all in my previous grow attempts as I never bothered figuring out how to mount the static fans, a problem that I've solved with my Gorilla Gear Boards).
2) Test runoff PH/PPM as well as inbound PPM of the water. Before I would just put nutrients into the water and then PH it, without measuring EC or PPM, which worked until I had nutrient burn issues. I kept feeding more nutrients because the symptoms looked similar to the ones I saw when the FFOF ran out of nutrients around week 4 of veg, so I just upped my nutrients entering a very terrible cycle until the plants died.
3) Keep humidity down low and actually deploy a dehumidifier / Do not let runoff just sit there and evaporate
- I had huge humidity problems as I would water the plants and let the runoff just sit there in the tent and get stale, making the humidity climb up all the way to 80% at some times during the veg stage. To make things worse the runoff would be full of nutrients which the plants would just sit and soak in causing them to get fucked with nutrient issues and also PM issues. I really don't know what I was thinking.
Anyways I would love to hear what you guys think of my plan and what I'm currently doing and here is a picture of my babies in rockwool right now. Here's hoping that I don't ruin $550 worth of seeds lol
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