Irie Farmer
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That's actually a great idea bro! Or even a saucer turned upside down. I like to flood and drain so they are perfect for me. Best, Irie.The mix I'm using is coco/perlite/ewc with leonardite and yucca so not what one would consider soil, more of a soilless mix. I let em drink some then water the pots back to field capacity as even at full saturation the mixture retains 30-40% air.
If we were talking a clay-based soil then for sure, root rot would be an issue.
@Irie Farmer thats a good idea with the holes, I can picture how it would work. I've been using fabric pots for years, but I tried out plastic for this round to keep the root ball elevated from the runoff in order to avoid wet feet. Im thinking in the future I'll go back to fabric and use, say, clone trays, to keep them out of the runoff and get some air circulating beneath them. I'd like to start using fabric instead plastic pots for the early stages of veg as well.
You sure that isnt just where the dirt washed away when you watered? I have to recover a spot of roots like that alot when I water.Noticed this the other night, couple weeks back I topdressed with ewc from a compost tea. The roots grew up into and out of the clump:View attachment 589766
Post updates homieYea, but I'm using it for my co2 at the moment. I'm using 8 Lph (2gph) pressure compensating drip emitters and a digital harbor freight timer for the pump. The emitters put out 133.33mL/min so I've been basing the cycles off of that.
Just ordered a digital short cycle timer with a photocell that goes in increments of 5 seconds. Ill plug that into the harbor freight timer set for the 8 hour irrigation window. It should allow for more precision as I'll be able to dictate the volume down to about 11ml (5 seconds of 8 Lph).
Ye I did a thread on Ca:Mg ratios I suppose. Recommendations can be all over the board and vary depending on if we are looking at base saturation or a nutrient solution.Thing is, with the calnit dropped to 1.6g/gal it throws my ca:mg ratio off. Not sure of how big a deal this is but it seems like maintaining a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I have some edta calcium around to do this, but my research on its necessity is incomplete.
So I started playing with my elemental ppms in cannastats and realized I could get the same ppms of P and K that I got with .5g/gal blossom booster if I used .3g/gal of mkp instead. So bingo, just what I needed, a slight boost of pk without anything extra. The booster has micros in it as well so it looks like it would be better suited potentially as a base with some calnit and Epsom, much like the jacks 3/2/1. But that's something I may play around with later.
Thing is, with the calnit dropped to 1.6g/gal it throws my ca:mg ratio off. Not sure of how big a deal this is but it seems like maintaining a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I have some edta calcium around to do this, but my research on its necessity is incomplete. I believe @MGRox is knowledgable in this area, if he and/or @Capulator can chime in on this I'd appreciate it.
Also, I've been playing around with my irrigation schedule. Read an inspirational presentation some coco company made to Mexican tomato growers about this (http://www.myriadint.com.au/Mexico Presentation.pdf). So I bumped up from 3 irrigations daily to 4 evenly spaced, then to 5 yesterday. Basing the total irrigation volume off of the plants daily use with 20% added for runoff. This is all within an 8 hour window starting 2 hrs after lights on and ending 2 hrs. Before lights out. I also started logging the volume going in and the volume running off as well as the ph and ec of both. Was discussing this with @Funkadelic of he'd like to follow along.
Anyway, here's what happens when the flowers get too much N at the wrong time:
View attachment 595852 View attachment 595853 View attachment 595854 View attachment 595855 I'm not really sweating it as the ladies have just over a month left and I believe I've got their ratios back on track.
However, overly stretched node spacing and foxtailing here may be related to watering frequency rather than N. With N to K ratios you can alter node stretching "relative to N", even in an N+ situation (particularly after floral initiation). However, ratios will not alter stretching with too high of water frequency. This is related to water being held in the medium relative to watering interval.
Deeply appreciate your science. Keep up the great work, pleaseIn other news I've been getting a fungal tea together. Last round I applied one in weeks 6,7,8 on this 9 week strain. Pretty interesting stuff. After the first application a bunch of springtails showed up and ate all the dead-looking slimy roots on the top of the pots (hand-watering early on had removed any top layer of coco, my diy drip rings have solved that issue). The little guys acted like natures own crawling enzyme.
Anyway, I used Jeff Lowenfels tactic he outlines in teaming with microbes called "giving fungus a head start". My last fungal brews I did this by adding 3-4 tbsp of organic steel cut oats (ground to a powder) per cup of ewc. Added 30g each of the biowar root and foliar packs, and added enough water to make the mixture cohesive but not waterlogged. Put this in a clone tray with another on top and put it on a dark shelf on a heat mat. 3 days later it looked like this:View attachment 596752
This time I changed the recipe up a bit:
1 solo cup ewc
8tsp insect frass
5 tbsp oatmeal
30g root and foliar
Stirred all this together dry then added dechlorinated water in roughly the same fashion then layed parchment paper of the clone tray and spread it out until it was roughly 1/4 inch thick, taking up much of the tray. No heat mat this time, just covered it the same way and put it on a shelf butting up against the flower room which has been in the mid-80s with 70-75%rh.
Checked on it 36hrs later and voila:
View attachment 596753 View attachment 596754
Looking damn perfect. I'm currently brewing this up in my 5gal bucket airlift Brewer with 1tbsp powdered kelp extract and 2tsp cytoplus and 4gal dechlorinated water. It's looking like I'll let it go for about 18hrs or so. I'm not sure yet if I'll dilute it into the resevoir or just pour it in the pots by hand.
I used to add the frass with the kelp and humic just to the brew, not the head start mix but I read a study this week about how chitin (chitosan, specifically) encourages the growth of endomopathenogenic fungus like metaharzium anisopliae and bacillus thuringensis (http://www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/3/4/757/pdf) which (along with several others) make up the biowar packs. This reminded me of a study I read forever ago about people multiplying the met through a similar process as the Lowenfels head start while adding chitin. Well, I have the frass around as a source of chitin so I figured I'd give it a shot.
I'll post up some canopy pics later when the lights come on.
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