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My buckets are 3 gallon and the truth is in my space they are all I can use. Even then I have to veg for less than 3 weeks or it becomes a wrestling match. However I bought a light mover and may use 5 gallon buckets next grow. I grow vertically like most of us here, cage my light with chicken wire so the plants can't grow into the light (vertical scrog I guess) but with 34"x34" x 5 feet tall I can only do so much. Still I am pretty darned happy with my pulls. I use a 27 gallon drum for my reservoir and it will last a long time. My atmospheric control is poor so in the summer I let my hobby go idle and do things like party, fish and aggravate women. I do those things anyway.
 

high life 45

Seen your Member?
Veteran




Crap... can any of you experts help me. I seem to have an infestation of little white fuzzy worms in my ppk.... They look almost the same as the white worms you had D9.

Take a look at my thread for more details.
 

mcfly420

Active member
thats nothing...

¨Using and idea pioneered at the Land Institute in Kansas, Jackson and her students constructed a "big pots" facility at UNI in 2009-10. The 34 pots, made of PVC pipe 10 inches in diameter and 10 feet long, were "planted" vertically in a plot behind UNI's Biology Research Complex. Turface was used as a rooting medium for a variety of perennial species, and the plants were fed with an automated fertilizer-water system during the summer time.¨
but
¨In one year, the roots had grown between three and four feet. When pots were pulled in 2011, the roots of the plants were six feet maximum in length, with a fuller, thicker root ball than in 2010.¨
 

mcfly420

Active member
Why you should treat your turdface...shit may be tainted

Some leaves contained 15x the optimal level of manganese due to this variation in bags

How this media interacts with nutrients, very interesting


Copper was the only nutrient consistently found deficient in plant tissues, Although the P was almosty entirely removed from solution the entire time -100 days.
 

delta9nxs

No Jive Productions
Veteran
turdface is the stage before shitfaced!

but thank you very much for this paper, i have just started on it and will read it by sunday. great find!
 

mcfly420

Active member
They got samples of the crude clay (unfired, Turface precursor), Turface cooled by air, Turface cooled by water (the product that may be purchased commercially), and the well water from the Profile company and desorption of soluble nutrients was done.:dance013:After reading that bit I knew it would be good.

its a long read though, heres another sample
¨In order to achieve optimal plant uptake of phosphorus, copper, and zinc in ceramic media, over-fertilization or supplementation with these nutrients may be necessary. However, in our plant-growth studies in ceramic media with no manipulation of fertilizer treatments, copper is the only nutrient we have found to be consistently deficient in plant tissues. Given that certain nutrients are released into solution by ceramic media, it may be appropriate to decrease the concentrations of these nutrients in fertilizer treatments.¨

¨Potassium, calcium, magnesium, boron, manganese, and iron were in higher concentrations in ceramic leachate solutions than in the stock solution over the course of the study, suggesting that these nutrients are the product of ceramic dissolution and/or that they were exchanged from media exchange sites.¨

Might be worth testing the nutes after your grow?
 

mcfly420

Active member
This is the unofficial calcined clay/ceramic media/arcillite/turface fan club btw
..Made a frame/drain for some beer cups using 1/2¨ pvc (mostly Ts), and water/20oz bottles. The cups sit in the bottles, which fit tightly over the pipe. That might be enough of a description. It really solved my how to place a bunch of cups around a bulb without any leaks. Still handwatering once daily but the turntable is working great

So I set it up with a 1/2¨ pvc valve to drain, and noticed that an extra 20ml of water would drip out the cups when the valve was turned and the water level dropped:woohoo: So now its drained daily and a shop vac is used to suck new gasses into the root zone. Cut some circles from 1/8? gray closedcell?? exercise mat to reduce evaporation/keep salts in solution. The bottom leaves flutter slightly. Seems the piping is under equal negative pressure??

The cups could be flooded/drained together IF the outer ring wasnt raised 6in above the inner cups. Air bubbles might remain during the flooding though and the vacuum route might just provide more fresh air. seems to be working but changes can only be made slowly~ once a week
 

mcfly420

Active member
AERATION AND MODE OF NUTRIENT DELIVERY AFFECTS GROWTH OF PEAS IN A CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT
Used turface with drip,mist,porous tubes +/- aeration

Physical and Hydraulic Properties of Baked Ceramic Aggregates Used for Plant Growth Medium

these were also interesting
 

delta9nxs

No Jive Productions
Veteran
hey, mcfly!

i said i would read it by sunday and it's sunday but not the sunday i intended.

sorry for the delay!

a good read altogether but the toxicity issue applies to unleached root zones and prill technology.

we are leaching and recirculating. using continuous liquid feed, which will tend to mitigate any build ups.

but the paper does present a strong argument for at least an occasional solution change out lacking a means of testing.

in addition, in the ppk, the combined modes of watering pretty much eliminate accumulation in the root zone.

the author makes some good points about rinsing. one of the graphs shows a much higher manganese content with no rinsing compared to a heavy rinse.

i believe the dust, with it's greater surface area per volume, has a much greater potential for ablating.

i once took some turface mvp, rinsed it heavily with tap water, turning it over to get the fines out of the pores, pressure blasting with the hose. got it really clean.

then soaked it in ro water three days, dumping and refilling each day. then into a clean jar of ro water and let it sit for months.

i checked it with a tds meter at three months, which is a grow for us, and it only gave off 30 ppm of something.

so, anyway, i don't believe toxicity is an issue with turface under any normal growing circumstances.

but it would be interesting to get a tissue analysis after a grow.

i have a container with a bunch of holes drilled in the bottom. i dump in a bag of dry and rinse heavily, turning it over repeatedly.

until it runs clear.

then it gets another heavy rinse after mixing with the rice hulls and loading.

this time i also filled the system with regular strength solution and ran it for a day, then drained and refilled before adding plants.

as you can see from the pics the plants are very healthy.

another good point is about particle size. with the turface mvp particle size being best for porosity.

he recommends screening fines to increase porosity but i have found that using rice hulls in the 3/1 ratio accomplishes this as well.

my mix tests at 35%.

also for many years i cleaned and reused mine. it seemed to get better with age.

at the time this pic was made i had been using it for seven years and had accumulated enough to fill two 8' in diameter by 16" deep kiddie pools.

well, thanks for the links, it made for some fascinating reading.

later
 
Last edited:

real ting

Member
I got a question for all you PPK Pros. When you install the sink tailpiece in the bottom of your media container, with the plumbers goop it ends up sticking up about 1/8-1/4" of an inch from the bottom of the container. Does this little lip create a second mini water table inside of the pot? And if so why not?

Is it beneficial to have an additional say 3/16" drain hole next to the tailpiece to eliminate any water that would collect there?
 

oldone

Member
I got a question for all you PPK Pros. When you install the sink tailpiece in the bottom of your media container, with the plumbers goop it ends up sticking up about 1/8-1/4" of an inch from the bottom of the container. Does this little lip create a second mini water table inside of the pot? And if so why not?

Is it beneficial to have an additional say 3/16" drain hole next to the tailpiece to eliminate any water that would collect there?

I think it would create a problem. Can you apply the plumbers goo on the other side, let it dry, then grind down the inside?

The problem with a hole down there would be roots growing into the res. I have had that problem before...

What do you think boys?

OO
 

mcfly420

Active member
Have you seen the nasa ´pillows´ filled with turface that sit on a reservoir with nitex? for wicking?

after finding a few more papers (links soon) going to try the smaller Profile product with 12-16cm tall containers. The bulk/particle density, total porosity~73%, saturated water content~0.65, and air filled porosity~8% are practically the same. Gravity drained water content of 0.61, obtained from drip irrigation of 6 cm deep aggregate, corresponds to matric potentials of about –15 H2O for 0.25–1-mm particles. It was 0.74 when they flooded it and removed the ´trapped´ air with a thin spatula.

THe papers are from soils.com but google docs has them cached. Links dont worrk though..
https://www.soils.org/publications/sssaj/view/76-5/s11-0438-1-2012-8-20.pdf
Diffusion Aspects of Designing Porous Growth Media for Earth and Space
An important aspect we did not consider as part of the CWD concept is the volume displacement by roots. The root
intrusion to substrate macropore space, up to nearly 20% of pore space in the given media, will be within the region of gas percolation threshold (see Fig. 4 and Fig. 8) and hence will not adversely affect gas diffusivity.

· Based mainly on the concept of CWD for oxygen and nutrients, this study presented a comparison of four
prospective growth media (pumice, Turface, Zeoponic, and Profile) to select best-performing media under the terrestrial
and Martian conditions. Among the tested media, Profile showed best overall performance, followed by Turface and
Zeoponic in that order. Pumice showed a poor performance due to inadequate aeration for plant growth.

The appropriate selection of particle size for optimal plant growth was discussed based on a mean particle size
and pore size-based design diagram. As an important part of this, a. strong relation (r2 = 0.98) between percolation
threshold for gas diffusivity and mean particle (aggregate) diameter was found. The overall results implied to avoid
mean particle sizes below 0.2 mm (due to insufficient aeration) and above 5 mm (due to large percolation threshold) when selecting optimal plant growth media for Earth and, especially, Martian conditions.


www.soils.org/publications/vzj/pdfs/11/1/vzj2011.0081
Beyond Earth: Designing Root Zone Environments for Reduced Gravity CondiƟons
They used a 6in pvc cap filled with Profile-
At the end of the sixth week 65 g of fresh roots were extracted from the root zone,
translating to approximately 9% of the total pore space (17% of
inter-aggregate pores) assuming a density of 1 g cm−3.
 

real ting

Member
I think it would create a problem. Can you apply the plumbers goo on the other side, let it dry, then grind down the inside?

The problem with a hole down there would be roots growing into the res. I have had that problem before...

What do you think boys?

OO

Hmm, does the plumbers goo bond well enough during the curing process that it wouldn't break off without the lip?

Wouldn't the air gap be enough to stop roots from growing down into the drain holes? Or is the 30 minute timed drip irrigation often enough to sustain a "root bridge" through the air gap zone?
 

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