Super Silver Cheesedog in Coco Beds - Recirculating Top Feed - 2K on 6 Plants

[Han Grolo]

Its a bird, its a plane, no its Super Silver Cheese Dog!
This is a Super Silver Chemdog Haze crossed to a UK Cheese.
Not from the CSG cheesedog, got the seeds from a good friend, thanks man!
I've been waiting to finish up this new system to grow these out. They are super hardy clones and have actually grown a bit in size, after being left in the aerocloner for a little too long.

So those familiar with my 'shitty kitty' will notice I have revamped the design.. replacing the 6 kitty litter containers with 2 botanicare 2'x4'x7" trays.. I know so fancy! I lined these trays with 100% recycled felt for a custom tailored DIY smartpot.
What was once spaghetti drip tubing has been replaced with rigid pvc and ezcloner spray heads.

I used the pump I had on hand which is overkill for this system. I added a pressure release return feed off the feed line that goes through a ball valve back to the reservoir. This allows for a tuning of the correct spray pressure and mixes the res a bit at the same time.

Im running Age Old Organics, currently just the organics..grow, fish and seaweed and kelp. Set to 400 PPM at 5.8 ph in bubbled tap water. Enough with the blab lets see some pics!

Here's the system with the trays waiting to be filled:

And here is a close up of the pump and pressure control valve:

A layer of perlite is added at the bottom for drainage:

Product Placement Botanicare CocoGro amended with mycorrhizae precharged compost.:

Lets see a close up of that myco pron:

Getting these filled up was like playing in a zen garden:

The super silver cheesedog clones are then planted and we are off!:

That's it for today, ran the pump and got them watered in good.
Will prolly end up raising the feed line a couple inches for better spray coverage... Then comes the screen.. I will be scrogging the #!*@ out these

Stayed tuned for further adventures of the super cheesedogs!

 

[GDK]

Awesome..how long are u gonna veg?

Stay Safe

 

[Bueno Time]

Really cool setup you got there I like the irrigation setup.

 

[Han Grolo]

Thanks fellas!

I will veg these out till my screen is about 3/4 of the way filled GDK.
These plants are pretty rapid growers so I would guess not too far past a month.

24 hours in and the plants are still alive..roughly 2160 hours left to go

 

[Han Grolo]

.

 

[krunchbubble]

interesting.....

 

[Scrogerman]

is it a bird, is it a plane lol. yeah interesting set-up, i'll jump in for the ride. G'Luck!

 

[GDK]

Oh kool. Im trying out coco for the first time and im doin 8 plants under 1800w. I plan to put them in 5 gallon pots before they go under the 1800w and veg for another week before flipping. Right now they have been veggin for 3 weeks in 1½ liter pots under 400w. Im blown away by the growth and im guessing a 5 week veg total, they should have the right size to fill out the area...im definately taggin along here to see your progress

Stay Safe

 

[NorcalBob]

diggin it big time

diggin it big time

Really liking the new system, I think they are going to flourish like savages in there. I'll be here till the end, glad you ran these Sir. Really hope they go nuts for ya~ <3

 

[highonmt]

very cool idea using the landscape fabric as a filter. How do the pigments from the coco affect your nute mix...my run to waste table water is dark brown. I am interested to see how this turns out for you. I do half expect to see that fabric clogging but then I aint done it so we will see.

 

[TBug]

High ya...this looks interesting!

Peace, bugout

 

[Weedpipe]

That's a nice setup man, I built something very similar to your setup a few months back. My setup is a drain to waste and runs at a fairly low pressure.
im very interested in watching your grow progress using a recirculating method for feeding. I dump around one to two gallons of runoff a day, and have thought about trying a recirculating grow.
Good luck and happy growing.

 

[Tabwat]

Im really liking your setup . I'll be watching this one.

 

[conehead]

Along for the ride!

 

[Weedpipe]

heres my old pvc set-up, its real simple, 396gph pump w/18gal res, flood tray, run-off pan. 4 ez cloner sprayers per plant.
i got a new design ready to go at end of my current grow, will be ditching the manifolds for a straight pipe lay-out

 

[true grit]

Have you done prior grows in coco with Age Old nutes or other organic nutes? I had some issues in a bed i tried running organics...but would be nice.

 

[elykdogg]

so you put down the felt to be used as a filter? how much runoff is actually making it back to the rez?

subbed, loving the simplicity!

 

[NorcalBob]

Lets get an update over here......

 

[Han Grolo]

update over here

update over here

Hi Everyone! Thanks for the kind words and for taggin along

highonmt: Once adding the organic age old the res is brown to start with :]

weedpipe: Nice setup with the pvc! Looks like you were keeping the reservoir out of the grow area?

elykdog: The coco holds a lot of water in itself but once the coco has been wet, the res will return to almost the same amount of water after a pump cycle.. Takes about 30 minutes to finish draining.

true grit: I just completed a highly successful grow in recirculating coco with half organic and half synthetic Age Old nutes.. The grow log url is-
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=214810

I was giving all organics a shot. I figured I could always add synthetics if I saw deficiencies. And deficiencies I saw..

I ended up starting off with a N def right out of the gate. It upped the ppms to ~800. I experienced radical ph rise. The res needed adjusting before every watering.. 4 times a day! I was also seeing the PPMs go down after cycling. Every other grow before this in various systems I would watch the PPMs climb over time from evaporation.

I remade the res using some synthetic nutrients low on P as to not kill the myco herd.

Still continual nitrogen deficiencies persisted. It was then I realized what a tight rope we walk and I probably should of stuck to changing one thing at a time from my last system so I would have an easier time of identifying what works and what doesn't.

I did some reading on the web. My problem starts this round with the addition of the recycled felt liner. Having them pull over and hang outside the tray was a design flaw. Once soaked the felt itself would pool water and drip on to the floor. So I changed my pump to cycle off after 2 minutes of running to keep it from getting so soaked it drips.

My trays weren't cycling completely and the water was getting stagnant. After reading up a bit I found this gives a breading ground for anaerobic bacteria which is a cause of denitrification. Whats denitrification?? Well lets see what wikipedia says..

Denitrification is a microbially facilitated process of nitrate reduction that may ultimately produce molecular nitrogen (N2) through a series of intermediate gaseous nitrogen oxide products.
This respiratory process reduces oxidized forms of nitrogen in response to the oxidation of an electron doner such as organic mater.

Organic mater... kinda like the compost I added to the coco? Whoops, least I know where my N went.

I have yanked the plants and old coco. Relaid fresh unamended coco and am planting 6 fresh SS Cheesdogs.

Attempting to mirror my results of my BPP in the shitty kitty I will be returning to my old nute regime of 50/50 organics and synths.
Im also going back to standard hydro PH down, the vinegar seems to wear off and need reapplied too much.

I have tucked the felt inside the trays to prevent drips. And have also retrofit my feed manifold to connect a low pressure pump through my ball valved pressure release. The old pump was too much overkill. The low pressure pump seems to work good in test so I will drum up a proper connection for it at the hardware store.

My last round I watered twice a day and let the pump recirculate for an hour each time. Now with the felt inside and the low power pump I hope running longer cycles will really move the water through the trays.
I have thought about running the pump 24/7 but wasn't sure how that would pan out. Don't really want to see another 6 clones in the trash 3 weeks from now Has anyone tried such a thing or foresee any problems running the top feed continuously? Seems like stability of the plants might be an issue as the coco would be quite soggy.

Here's a pic of the old root zone dissection. Seems almost no new root growth occurred in the trays.

Well we need to learn from failures and move on so...

REWIND!!!!

As of tonight, 6 more SS Cheesdogs set sail. Lets hope these don't go Titanic on us.

Peace- Han.

 

[MacGyver420]

cool man glad to see your working it out! dont give up on it i think these trays are a sweet idea!