My 2, 2 week old Cheddar Cheese indica babies are dying. Born July 4. Please help save the chedda!!
DWC with water level 1.5 inches below net pot. water ph 6.1, water temp 68-72 with 2 air stones in each bucket. AC ION FRAME evo3 on level 2. Air temp 75-77 daytime, 72 night. Lots of air circulation. VPD around .6.
Assume the issue is the nutes but why so droopy? I started with (all per gallon): 1.25ml CaMg
.5ml micro-grow-bloom each
1.25 nectar
1ml Rapid
2 ml hydroguard=300TDS
About 4 days after they sprouted they stated drooping and turn yellow like mg deficiency. Added 1ml/g CaMg and color improved 400 TDS. Yellow seemed to move from the center of the leaves out to the tips as it improved.
The second week nutes: per gallon:
2ml Armor Si
3ml CaMg
2ml GH micro-grow-bloom
2ml Diamond nectar
1ml Rapid Start
2ml Hydroguard =700TDS.
Droopiness contined and tips of the first true leaves started to burn. Almost half burnt up now.
Yesterday I reduced the TDS to 400.
Tips of second set of leaves started to show burn today. Sure they’ll be dead soon. Here’s some pics of the steady decline since end of week one. I would really love a mentor to get me through a dwc grow using
Grow ebb and flow hydroponic setup. Using Green Planet nutrients. I follow the feeding instructions exactly and no problems. Appears your roots aren’t growing as much as I thought they should be.
Plants are hungry. You should be running a TDS of between 700 and 1,000 ppm at this point. As you are 700 now I’d run around 900 and see how they do. Plants will likely survive once root mass builds up.
I use gh trio nutrients never above 600 untill flower. I run my water low where the plant has to work for it makes the roots grow stronger. I do this in rdwc.
Thanks Ed! Those ladies look beautiful. Can you please share your feed schedule? Want to help me get through a grow? Everyone does things a little differently, especially with nutes. Half say more nutes, half say less. So confusing
Im not the most experienced at this but the vpd seems really low which would suggest that its not able to draw nutrient up the stem to the plant. Based on what you’ve posted id put your rh around 80% which is way too high in my opinion.
Dehumidifier will help you plant eat
What i am figuring out is low number means low transpiration rate and high number mean high transpiration rate. Vpd is the ratio between temp and humidity. If temp is high and humidity low you’ll have a high vpd level and you’ll need to be careful with nutes because more will be traveling upward. It could burn the plant. Conversely if temp is low relative to humidity you’ll have a low vpd level and your plant will not be able to get as much nutes because of the low transpiration rate.
I personally try to keep vpd between 1&2. When it gets too far out of that range i know somethings wrong.
Would love to get the perspective of someone with more experience in this area!
If you can get that down to about 60-65% I’ll bet you’ll see a difference. I’m struggling to keep mine above 1 right now. When i see it low im about 70% which puts me at .9. But its very humid here down in the deep south.
I think most here would agree that 60-65% is the idea range but some have done great this well outside of that range.
Shouldn’t be a problem, check to make sure it’s still getting wet.
Have you flushed your rocks with some res water yet, or no? I’d try that before running the PPMs up to where it was before or higher. I’m thinking it’s already high in the rock area, & that’s at least part of the problem. Could be wrong, & then you can try running it up to 1000 or however high you want to go.
You need to know your leaf temperatures & calculate your leaf temperature offset to work VPD correctly. It looks like Your controller is factoring in a -2f leaf temperature offset, but are you measuring your leaf temps so the controller has the real offset, or just guessing on the offset? However, if the leaves are reacting to stress then the VPD calcs might be off compared to what the leaf is actually doing anyway, but still watching the leaf temps & if/how the offset moves as the leaves move in & out of stress would be a more useful guide during stress. What has the offset actually been doing? Then once the leaves are out of stress, you can go back to working VPD.
OK it sounds like you’re working VPD properly then. I’d agree with the other guy who thought it might be a little low. If you raise it a little, it might make it easier for the leaves to transpire. Did you happen to notice a wider offset &/or lower leaf temperatures for the same conditions before the plants started to have problems? Just wondering if you noticed that or not. Although you are adding some stuff to the res that I don’t use & don’t know much about, so maybe there could be something going on there. If you flushed out the rocks with res water & no improvement then I guess you could try raising PPM like other have said, but they seem to be around the size where even 700 seems like a lot to me. But it could just be a transpiration issue where slightly raising the leaf vpd might help out. Also watch lowering the water level too much, in case you dry out the rocks by mistake. I’ve run buckets with the net pot 1/4" into the water or sometimes right at water level until I get a few roots into the water, & then dropped it to a couple inches below the net pot bottom. I’d probably try keeping the PPM at around 400 still for another day or two, & see if raising the leaf vpd a little helps. If you think they need something fast due to low vpd, or the roots aren’t working or whatever, you could also hit them with a light foliar feed (150ppm) followed by a fresh water rinse a few minutes later to see if they like that or not, or if you think they aren’t eating through the roots. That would probably be fresh diluted nutes only & not the enzyme stuff if you foliar feed them.
^^^ Also forgot to mention that if you’re using unfiltered water, there could be something going on there. Also I think someone else is saying that you could be over-bubbling, & there could be something there too, but right now you don’t have a lot of roots hanging down there to overbubble, so not sure if that’s too much of an issue now as long as the rocks are staying wet enough, but maybe could be later once you have a lot of roots hanging down. I know that those stones make a lot of fine bubbles given enough air pressure, if they are the ones that I’ve seen before.
I raised the VPD to 1.0 and did a res change. The new nute solution is 370TDS. Flushed the rocks again during change. They seem less droopy. Think lowering the water level helped. The rocks are still getting wet. Thanks everyone for your help!!
