Thanks man. Germination is something I put a lot of attention to detail into doing. It's all about managing and directing energy to put the odds heavily in my favor for a fast and successful start.
There's a lot of stored energy inside a seed and when it's soaked in water, releases that energy.
The very first thing a sprout does when it comes alive is orientate itself to gravity, figuring out which way is up and which way is down. Suspending the seed up off the ground get the gravitational pull needed to send the root down and the green part up. If there's no pull on the point of the tap root the root will coil and that's not good at all.
Next part of the detail is constant moisture but not drowned. That will shed the shell easily. This sprouter design with the channels to help guide the tap as straight as possible does a great job at managing all that energy so the sprout doesn't waste any of it and puts it all to use in a good way.
It will work for you but since you're using rockwool is a little tricky. You would likely need to go with 4" blocks. It's been over a decade since I've used rockwool so I've forgotten most of what I knew about it but I do remember using a conditioner when I had issues with it and it worked better than the pH soak I had been doing.
The only conditioner I'm seeing now is Hydrodynamic Europonic Rockwool Solution so that may help you.
Anyways yeah you would need to use 4" conditioned blocks.
Take the sleeve off and slice the block in half. Lay the long sprout down on the inside of one half of the block and cover the sprout with the other half of the block. Put the sleeve back on or use a rubber band to hold it together. After a week or two the roots will stitch the block together and the sleeve or band won't be needed.
Nah no shock. They're just out of sorts from being picked up off the mat but after a couple hours they're all up and perky. This light is pretty ez on the plants. They love it and will try to eat when they get big but I've never seen a time where a plant will act like it wants to hide from it
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Right now I'm using PLA filament but I have a spool of PETG. I'll need to adjust my printer setting to use it though. Right now my nozzle temp is about 20-30 degree too cool to use it.
I've organized my profile on TinkerCad and have made the vertical germinator public. For people to download them they may need to start a profile on tinkercad to access them.
There's three parts to it and total print time for all three parts is probably around 4 hours.
I've also made my support stakes and a reusable yellow sticky trap available to the public. The sticky trap will require Tanglefoot to make it an actual trap but it's a good use of a freebie spool of yellow filament I have here
Tinkercad user Bandit420.
www.tinkercad.com
For anybody who wants to make these it's super simple and you don't really need to own a 3-D printer if there's a place like some UPS stores have one for rent and even some public libraries have printers people can use for free.
So yeah go to my profile and click on a design. The design will come up in a window with an option to either tinker with it or download it as is. Click download and save it on your PC. Get a micro SD card, I prefer 8gb because my printer does not like bigger storage than that, and save the file on the SD card. Then you can take that card and plug it into a printer and print it out.
If a design I have is not public just let me know here and I'll open it up. Some are still a work in progress.
Thanks Man! Glad to have you along for the ride!