i hate my dwc and wanna go back to soil, should i?

[Hydro-Soil]

well like the tittle says,I hate my dwc, everything that can go wrong will and has, so I hate it. I don't wann give up on hydro, jus want something with less problems

Do what I did.... go E&F or drip.

Use Lavarock for E&F, it's cheap if you need that. Hydroton for drip. I use hydroton for both and love it. DWC worked for me for a few times but I found the need to work around heat issues a chore. Drip and E&F don't have those issues.

 

[Classyathome]

Too heavy nutes?

Toxicity can show in stunted, but seemingly normal green growth. And roots don't need to grow if the feed is hot.

Justa guess.

Don't give up on dwc - try a single plant soil vs basic hydro setup, you'll see the ease and speed of growth.

IMHO

(I use generic hydro store hydro nutes - a little leaner than the recommended dose, and practically none until roots are well established)

 

[djstiks]

do what ever is easy for you

 

[dmt]

i always add 35% h202 to any res for any system at 1.5-2.0 ml/l evry 2-3 days. even if temps get super high, np, always oxygen available. i find beneficial nematodes dirty and expensive. 20l h202 costs me 40 buck a piece if i grab 10 or more at a time. ive never seen healthier/cleaner hydro grows. i try my best to avoid any slimy abd or organic nutes. try a tea and or coffee filter to avoid any build up of harmful goo in your res and or system. i get away with 50/50 organic/chem feed and its hard to tell it isnt 100% organic. i agree with freezer that dwc are super basic. simplest hydro in my books. dont give up on hydro, soils the bomb, but dialed hydro can be amazing, d

 

[headfortrinity]

do your roots get slimy before they die? I had problems with my outdoor hydro last year, I bought some AN voodoo juice and didn't have any more problems with roots after treatment. like DMT said above, H2O2 works great to keep the system sterile I used it before I found the voodoo juice, it just depends on if you want the bacterial life in the system or not, in high heat a sterile system works best with h2o2 you won't get the ph drifting up because of bacterial blooms when the temp get high during the day. Lately I've switched from voodoo juice to hygrozyme and guardian tr because of cost, but I think the ease of voodoo juice having both enzymes to eat dead roots and bacteria to consume the converted dead matter and make it into a use able food for the plant, beats out the cost difference. the stuff just works.

 

[Mr Miyagi]

I agree with FreezerBoy DWC can't be any more simple. I prefer to use Supernatural nutes along with Great White, Cannazym and RO water. Never had root issues after using GW even with temps reaching 80 degrees. I've also never check the Ph, SN nutes are supposedly "custom buffered" I've never had a problem...yet. But none-the-less try GW or something similar along with some good enzymes. Good water helps too,

 

[deviant1]

wow that is a lot of info. all you guys make it sound like its sooo easy, but I have been battling with for almost 2 months, what is the problem? my nutes aren't usually that high, got that way from using so much ph down to control the ph. I jus wanna know why my roots and leaves won't grow right. what am I doing wrong? the thing that really sucks is that I've done most the thing everyone here has suggested, (except for of a few). most of you give such great advice, that I don't know where to begin. btw, I am using tap water, if anyone missed that before.

 

[LadyLargely]

well like the tittle says,I hate my dwc, everything that can go wrong will and has, so I hate it. I don't wann give up on hydro, jus want something with less problems getn through veg. im at 52 days veg and they are only 6-7'' tall and have lost roots 4 time now, wtf? I think im gonna go back to soil, but I really don't want to do that, any ideas or suggestions for me and my problem with dwc?

My good man!

Sorry to butt in like this, not trying to push our ideas onto anyone, but you really sound like a prime Bio Box candidate. You have experience with soil but have a whole bunch of DWC gear laying around that you've not gotten satisfactory results with.

Lost roots almost certainly equals root rot. The brown, thin, slimy-looking little root mass I see in your photo album tells the whole tale. I would bet serious money that you have yourself some kind of adverse life going on. Something pythium-like no doubt.

Also, usage of tap water could be part of your problem. All the hydro guys seem to hail RO water as the ultimate stabilizing help-all for hydro rigs.

You could stop this with H2O2 as suggested, try to 'sterilize' your container. I was once a big proponent of hydrogen peroxide and used it regularly in all my old coco drip-style grows. But over time it becomes clear that you are battling nature. The plants get along OK, but that's just it; OK. There's no vigor at best, and if anything does go wrong you have no safety net save higher doses of peroxide. And given that the toxic limit for cannabis is somewhere around 100 PPM and 30 PPM is near the minimum effective dose, you have very little wiggle room.

Instead of doing battle with mother nature why don't you make a deal with her, get her on your side? Have her do the battling for you, she's been at it for a while longer than you have.



Look familiar? Air pump with stones, lava rock (or hydroton), bit o plumbing, not much really. It's very similar to DWC in ways. You surely have a lot of necessary gear laying around already.

The Difference is that Bio Box uses this:



The magic of soil. DWC techniques are used to constantly inject oxygen through a semi-soil-less medium. Dope with a liberal quantity of dormant beneficial microbes and it Comes To Life!



The results are a snapping, growling pack of oxygen-loving bacteria and beneficial fungi. Armed to the teeth with defense mechanisms honed to perfection over hundreds of millions of years. A tightly-webbed fungal mycelium network enshrouds the roots of any plants placed therein. Water and nutrient exchange is accelerated while foreign life forms are blocked out. A successful Bio Box is like a life support system for baby plants.



Last pic was taken at 31 days from dry seed. So that includes incubation, sprouting, rooting and all. Maintenance as far as the bio boxes where concerned (disregarding all my mad training and other practices, not related to Bio Box) was watering them. Once.

These gals where dropped into the medium without fear, despite the fact that it was pre-loaded with nutrients very heavily. Per 5 gallons of medium there was:

REQUIRED PER 5 GALLONS OF FINISHED MEDIUM:

3 cups Bio Tone
6 cups kelp meal
2 cups blood meal
1 Tbsp Epsom Salts
2 Tbsp Fast-Acting Lime

OPTIONAL PER 5 GALLONS

1 Teaspoon Myco Madness
1/3 cup bitchin bio-active bone meal

These sort of nutrient levels would out and right kill a well-established plant, let alone a seedling.

The bottom line is, though a bit experimental the technique has been found to be stupefyingly stable and its not just me.

Perhaps the most successful Bio Box grow to date. Mr. RipVanWeed just pulled this harvest recently, no word yet on the numbers but needless to say its looking good. Came from this setup:

Looking familiar again? Buckets, air hoses, simple overflow drains, it sure ain't rocket science. And running them is the exact opposite of rocket science. Other than roughly measuring out the dosages of of pre-loaded nutrients in the soil you do very little else. RipVanWeed, SilverSurfer OG, and I (all Bio Box gardeners so far) have never done any of the following things to our Bio Box Grows:

Checked/messed with the pH in ANY WAY
Measured TDS of anything
Battled nutrient lock-out
Dealt with in-soil pests
Used fancy RO water

And in RVW's case, even measuring anything at all. He took a very handful-of-this-and-a-dash of that approach to his nutrients. And did he have years of experience to guide him? NO, it was his second ever indoor grow. Straight bubbled tap water, absolutely nothing fancy. Bio Boxes love nasty high-PPM tap water. Dirtier the better!



Heh, errr... So anyway! If you are stuck on the fence between DWC and soil just know that you don't have to chose! There is a small clutch of gardeners out there who are reaping the benefit of BOTH DWC and soil techniques. If you have any further interest in what we're up to, just hit the "Club Bio Box" link in my sig.

Thanks for the listen buddy, sorry for barging into your thread! Hope you have good luck and find harmony with growing the cannabis plant no matter what you choose to do!

 

[deviant1]

forgot to say, im using gh micro,bloom, and ph down, and that's it. I went as simple as I could this time and nothin but problems. thanks to everyone helpin

 

[FreezerBoy]

Well, crap! I was trying to figure how you deviated from my grow but, apparently, you're not. I don't know what to say ...

 

[LadyLargely]

Well, crap! I was trying to figure how you deviated from my grow but, apparently, you're not. I don't know what to say ...

*jumps around and points a lot*

It's gotta be some kind of nasty life local to his vicinity! Some super-badass pythium or something. Don't you think man? Just look at the roots he's got:

That shit just ain't right. I've had roots like that before, back in my early organic coco days. Shit like that is usually the underlying cause of BRS that is very hard to see and diagnose.

BRS = Bad Room Syndrom. Its when you give experts like FreezerBoy the full run-down of your situation and they just scratch their heads. 'Huh, damn man, given the info you've told us you should be fine.'

There's no such thing as a bad room, its just that, for whatever reason, the environment there is deeply inhospitable in some way. Sometimes its something crazy lurking in the water, sometimes its unseen pests, sometimes its an ancient mold colony hidden in the walls/crawl space of the house, the list just goes on and on.

My is that your BRS gremlin is some sweet-ass strain of pythium: crazy parasitic bacteria that behave so strangley that up until recently people thought it was a fungus.

You can combat these fuckers with peroxide, but I've always seen that as a stop-gap solution. Colonizing your root zone with powerful beneficial microbes to fight off the intruders is one possible long-term solution

do your roots get slimy before they die? I had problems with my outdoor hydro last year, I bought some AN voodoo juice and didn't have any more problems with roots after treatment. like DMT said above, H2O2 works great to keep the system sterile I used it before I found the voodoo juice, it just depends on if you want the bacterial life in the system or not, in high heat a sterile system works best with h2o2 you won't get the ph drifting up because of bacterial blooms when the temp get high during the day. Lately I've switched from voodoo juice to hygrozyme and guardian tr because of cost, but I think the ease of voodoo juice having both enzymes to eat dead roots and bacteria to consume the converted dead matter and make it into a use able food for the plant, beats out the cost difference. the stuff just works.

This chap has clearly also run into pythium. Slimy roots tells the whole tale. He is also battling these issues with beneficial microbes, though it seems he's going bacteria/enzyme only and maintaining a traditional DWC. Also an option for sure.

 

[FreezerBoy]

Excellent point. A chemical analysis of local water is a good place to start (that 80 ppm threw me. How can something that devoid of ingredients have anything bad? One way to tell). I'd also do the old "field-strip and sterilize" trick. Everything non-porus is disassembled, washed in a 10% bleach solution and reassembled. Everything porus, including plants and clones, gets thrown in the trash.

 

[deviant1]

ok 1st off, those roots are from last run, which sucked but made it through. my whole problem is that roots won't even grow past 3'' out of netpot they jus turn brown and die, over night. but still could be like said bad room, but haven't had these problems with soil, it was grown in same place. im glad im getn help from you guys this late I really appreciate it, to all. I might have left things out so keep askin questions

 

[LadyLargely]

*nods*

Some forms of pathogenic life are incredibly resilient and hard to detect. They can fly under the radar of many forms of typical water analysis. Even the tiniest trace concentrations of these bastards are capable of breeding beyond control given the right conditions. A warm, dark, nutrient-rich DWC bath is just the ticket for utter destruction.

deviant1

Mate, if you go the sterilization route take Freezerboy's advice! Everything must go, you've got to strip down, disassemble and sterilize every last inch! If even the most minute, tiniest trace of life is left behind you could face this issue all over again.

If you where to fight back using your own harnessed biology you wouldn't have to do this. Just clean it well enough to get the numbers of the offending pathogens down low. The new life you introduce will quickly multiply and boot out the sneaky little bastards. Equilibrium would be maintained and if you ever did get a contamination of them again it has a good chance of being held under control. If you just straight-up sterilize then you will still be constantly under threat of a new outbreak. You would have to be very careful about what goes in and out of your room.

 

[LadyLargely]

ok 1st off, those roots are from last run, which sucked but made it through. my whole problem is that roots won't even grow past 3'' out of netpot they jus turn brown and die, over night. but still could be like said bad room, but haven't had these problems with soil, it was grown in same place. im glad im getn help from you guys this late I really appreciate it, to all. I might have left things out so keep askin questions

Root Rot.

Without a shadow of a doubt, you've got pathogenic organisms on your hands mate. IMO, you're gonna need to commit a serious holocaust to get your shit straightened out. A whoooooole lot of single-celled little bastards are gonna hafta die.

 

[deviant1]

freezer, I have done just that several times, cleaned everythind with bleach, very strong solution. I never did through out plants though, they are from amterdam, I can't just through it away, its special.

 

[LadyLargely]

freezer, I have done just that several times, cleaned everythind with bleach, very strong solution. I never did through out plants though, they are from amterdam, I can't just through it away, its special.

Oh-ho, no!! Haha, matey, if you're gonna clean these fuckers out all your plants have to go. Any living tissue in that box will have at least a low-level infection of the undesirable organisms. Going the clean route means scrapping it all and starting over!

If you intend to keep your "special plant" then Bio Warfare is prolly the only option you have! The trick will be to clean everything as well as possible and then whip up a strong colony of beneficial microbes before the pathogenic ones can re-populate and take hold again. The small numbers of them living on/in your existing plants should be wiped out by the superior numbers of the bennies.

 

[deviant1]

ok guy I would like to put some bb in my res but really have no idea what to use. I've heard of sub-culture, I think that is what its for. like I said I really don't know what to use, suggestions?

 

[bendoslendo]

pythium: crazy parasitic bacteria that behave so strangley that up until recently people thought it was a fungus.

Actually an Oomycete or "water mold", not a bacteria. Tell your friends I only know this because there was some dude on NPR yappin for like an hour about it.

Your system looks intriguing, I will take a look.

As for suggesting benes, I just started using Earthworm Compost Tea in my DWC. We'll see how it goes I guess. I'm certainly not paying the crazy amounts of $$$ companies want for bottled benes.

 

[deviant1]

lady, I also would like to learn more about your bio box setup, sounds like something id like to try out.