The "filtering" as Zurich noted is a side effect of large UC/RDWC style of grow systems. This is where a top feed halo ring or a hybrid of MPB comes in handy. But for sure the end buckets are the red headed stepchildren late to the dinner table on anything larger than a row of 6.
Hey DapperDan!
Is root filtering a common problem in UC Gardens?
We are running CS's full line in a test garden now. Our systems are 190 gallon UC16XL's - 3" bones with a 30 gallon epicenter. The system is UC with the exception of the epicenter and 3" PVC for the bones.
Recently, we have been thinking toying with the idea of splitting the systems in two.
30 days into a 110 day GSC run, the roots start growing into the bones. Every three days we are pulling roots out of pipes to keep the return pump from cavitating. We are growing in SCROG's and 65 to 70 days in, you can see the canopy color shift from a rich dark green in the front row seats to gradients of yellow as you move down the line.
We would like for each of our ladies to have a seat at the table. I know that it sounds a little institutional…. But we like for our ladies to have equality at the dinner table! J
What’s the word on the farm?
How is this creative community solving this problem without top feeding? We have tried giving our ladies a little juice from the top in the past and found it to be the equivalent of a personal invitation for pests and algae. These days we like to keep the medium as sterile as possible.
On a similar note, we had a really rough UC root experience last fall possibly worthy of sharing here.
The story goes like this….. In early October, we had a room that started showing signs of stunted leaf growth. The SCROG was pretty much full and they were ready to be turned to flower.
We started going down the UC bad shit that can happen checklist.
Literally, between day 3 and 4 of recognizing that we had a problem, I walked into the room and one of the ladies looked like she hadn’t been watered in a week. All the leaves on a plant with a 2.5” stalk were drooping. Normally, in veg we are running humidity in the 65% range. Our rooms are sealed room environments and have foliar misting systems. As soon as we saw the plants wilting, we cranked the humidity up to the 80% range in an effort to buy time, keeping the ladies alive while diagnosing the problem.
By day 5, with two more plants showing signs that they hadn’t received water in weeks, we went into triage mode. We cut the plants out of the SCROG, removed the SCROG so that we could pull plants and inspect the root zone – looking for pests and / or fungus or any other weird shit that can happen in a UC. It was heart breaking.
By then, it was clear the first plant that wilted (which we were keeping alive via foliar feeding) wasn’t going to make it if we didn’t act quickly. My Chika lifted the plant up out of the pot and a root mass that filled a 13 gallon bucket, connected to the stalk by 3 main large roots that sized anywhere from ½” to 1” literally fell off – all 3 roots severed at the net pot.
The roots had grown so big that they grew across multiple openings in the net pot. In other words…. The roots had grown thru one ¼” opening in the net pot. Then grew across the plastic to the next ¼” opening until it had grown big enough to have grown thru 4 holes in the net pot. Evidently, bacteria started forming between the plastic and the root and the root started rotting where the net pot plastic was cutting into it. All three major roots had grown the same way to varying degrees, and had rotted to the point where three of the four holes that the roots had grown across and thru were now severed by rot and the entire plant was being fed by one 1” root that lost 2 of the 4 connections the root had made thru the net pot to the stalk. A ¼” of root was now connecting 13 gallons of root mass to a 2.5” stalk. Those roots were browning quickly.
We cut the net pots off the plants and surgically removed the plastic pieces from the roots. It was awful. It literally took upwards of 2 to 3 hours per plant to cut the plastic out of the roots, cleaned the roots with an antiseptic (CS ROOT’s mix) and cake the wounds with rooting hormone. It looked like a nursing home.
We worked for the next 60 days trying to keep our ladies alive, hoping they could be saved. All plants were being kept alive by foliar feeding only.
As you can tell from the detail I have shared…… it was a pretty depressing to see those ladies go from being so healthy to fighting for their lives.
We had fatally lost 2 plants by that time and out of the remaining 14 plants, 11 were so injured that there was no hope of their tap roots healing. They kept building up slime around the root injury and we kept performing triage. They were only hanging on as a result of the foliar feeding. It felt like pulling the plug on your kids after a near fatal injury. We were only able to salvaged 3 of the 16 plants and lost close to 80 plus days of production time on that room.
Lots of lessons learned.
Anyway….. Root filtration is a serious issue that we are dealing with and would love a solution for. These plants in the UC love to run hard and fast and we like to keep the pedal to the metal! Would love some community input on how to “fix” the root filtering issue.
