Have slight edge curling down here and there. Growth seems excellent otherwise.
Fill and drain system, 60 gal reservoir. 450w high intensity square LED array 25" above. Fills and drains in about 30 sec. Drains completely. Water runs for 15m 3 times a day. General Hydroponics liquid according to the label, switching to Masterblend dry soon. Lights 18 hours. Pic is after 18 days, all seeds were up at 4 days so pics are about 2 weeks growth.
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I’ve blocked the light as best I can everywhere from getting into the reservoir. I used to have an open top 100 gallon reservoir under my trailer back in the day. I never had a problem with algae if that’s what you mean. I think it takes a lot of light and still water for algae to form and this system keeps the water moving.
Anyway on this first run I am going minimalist to see what happens and algae infestation with this set up is one. Tap water, label nutrient concentrations, just pH and temp testing, 18hr veg, 12hr flower, not changing water, trying for a 12 to 16 week cycle and starting the second crop directly in the buckets without doing anything more than pulling up the stumps of the first crop. I want to find out how that works out considering there’s nothing in there but rocks. I’m hoping that what little root is left in the rocks will just provide nutrients to the new plant. If that works out, that would eliminate almost all the waste and maintenance.
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Algae in the feed tubes will block the feed ports.
But looks like your rocking it and all set
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The top tubes are PVC so there’s no light there and they have really big feed holes. No water stays in the clear tubes because they are vertical.
The system basically has 36 aerators running simultaneously when the pumps are on. I love watching and listening to everything run and watching the water go through the clear tubes. I’ll change things as problems occur from here. I just don’t like the little bit of curling I’m getting on the leaf edges. You can see it in the close-up. It could be just rapid growth.
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Back in the day I started using peat cubes and cups. I found that they inhibit initial root growth. The plant has to fight and expend a bit of energy to push all the new roots at the base of the stem past the peat. So I use sand right in the bucket. No resistance to initial root growth, no transplantation, 100% germination, simple and cheap. The pics are from around 1980. Growers had to use seed from whatever smoke they were buying. My experience was that a little over 50% turned out to be male. So you had to plant a lot and flower them before you found out their sex. And you had to eliminate hermaphrodites because they turned up now and then. The first pics are my first system, the last pic is what it evolved to before I stopped.
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a different setup for growing nice…the curling could be from explosive growth just watch and see how the rest of her grows… I almost always have some leaves that look like she has a problem but overall she is growing well and so I don’t react to these small nonconformities…
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Also the plants in my last pic are what pure sativa looks like, there were no hybrids back then. I only saw indica once or twice. I grew it in one crop and did not like the bud so I grew only grew sativa after that. That’s why I picked the super silver haze. It’s mostly sativa, but from the looks of the leaves in my crop, they have a heavy Indica influence.
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