Got the reservoir filled up yesterday so the 2x4 is officially ready for plants. Here's a rundown of how I mix my res.
1. Fill up 27 gallon HDX tote with 16 gallons of reverse osmosis water. We'll be setting aside 4 gallons of additional water to mix nutrients, so we'll end up with a total of 20 gallons in the res.
2. Measure out the Jacks 321. I use mini dipping sauce cups. 60 grams Jacks in one cup, 40 grams of Cal-Nit in another. and 20 gram of Epsom Salt in another.
3. I also use .4/grams per gallon of fulvic acid, so I measure out 8 grams of that.
4. Grab two 5 gallon buckets, fill each bucket with two gallons of reverse osmosis water (this is what I'll mix the nutrients in).
5. Jacks and Epsom go in one bucket, Cal-Nit goes in the other. The Cal-Nit always dissolves first, the Jacks takes a little while so be patience and keep stirring occasionally.
6. Once everything is dissolved, I dump both buckets into the reservoir.
7. Dump the fulvic acid in the reservoir and give it a stir.
8. Measure out 12ML of Orca and 12ML of
Mammoth P, put in res.
9. Lastly, measure and dump 5ML of carefree enzymes into the res. (it's my alternative to cannazyme/
hygrozyme) way more concentrated/better value.
10. Give the res a stir and wait a few minutes. Measure the PH & PPM's (PPM's should be right between 830-850). PH will be low (around 5.2-5.3) so I add PH up to stabilize at 5.9.
That's it. Total time takes about 30 minutes, and aside from the top off's and water checks, this system is about as hands off as it gets. I used to change the res weekly, but after letting it go over two months between changes (and just doing top offs) and still having very healthy plants, I believe performing weekly res changes is a waste of money. My comfort point is to change the res every 3-4 weeks.
My next step is to prep 19 3x3 plastic pots and saturate the coco I'll be using with nutrient water. I've used coco straight out of the bag, but this last time I think I got an old bag that was kind of dried out. I didn't soak it ahead of time and the plants had a bit of a battle with magnesium uptake early on. The other half of the plants (that had fresher coco) had no issues, so I'm positive that the early issues were due to that.
All I do to saturate the coco is put the pots on a tray, and dump a gallon of water from my reservoir on them, and let that water soak in the for a bit. Afterwards I discard the water and put the pots inside the tent, under the light for a day. I use a pencil/stick to stir up the coco in the pot to keep it loose, and when the seeds are ready to be planted I put them right in there.
After 3 weeks they should be ready for their first topping. A week after that I'll take cuts and put them into flower, keeping an eye on the reg plants to determine sex. I typically don't touch the plants or do anything for the first two weeks of flower. At 14 days I like to perform a leaf strip and clean up any larger fan leaves that are interfering with bud sites getting light. I'll also lollipop each plant and clean up the lowers. I do this again around day 28-35.
