New Ebb & Flow help - Plants wilting easily

[Ymir]

Edit: I'd call this drooping, not wilting, can't change title

First time with Ebb and Flow. I have the Sentinel MEF-1 system using Dyna-Rok II grow rocks.

After transplant I seemed to be watering them a lot to keep them from drooping, but my humidity is really low currently (25-35%). I figured once they developed some roots I'd be able to dial back, and every couple days I'd try extending the time between floods but they'd end up drooping and I'd end up going back to about every 90 minutes. Every time I've tried extending it to 2 1/2 - 3 hours they'd end up completely drooped, even when the rocks were visibly still moist near the surface and certainly moist below the top layer.

My temps are easily managed, I'm running 2 600W Metal Halides with air cooling. I dialed them up to 750W at one point but they were drooping a lot again so I raised the lights a lot and put them back to 600w.

I didn't quite fill the pots to the top with rocks so I thought maybe the light was getting in there and killing my top roots, I just filled them up to the top 3 days ago and no improvement thus far.

Searching around on here and various places, most of the time people are suffering from over-watering, some say their strains sense when it's close to lights out time and they naturally droop before that happens. My strain (UK cheese) has never done this to me growing in Pro-Mix or coco unless they are totally dried out. I did however change from 18/6 to 20/4 lighting once I thought they were established and they usually seem to be wilting some time before the original lights out time (although I'm usually sleeping until around that time so it's hard to say for sure when it's starting.) I go up there and check on them, see they are wilted and give them a manual flood and turn the lights off and 5-6 hours later they come back on and they recover. I still have to water them every 75-90 minutes or they wilt. I just tried raising it to every 2 hr again yesterday and at first they seemed fine but were drooped again today (pics at bottom)

To me this doesn't look like overwatering, the leaves are not curling or twisting and they are very lifeless, the stems are soft and bendy too.

I'm using JRPeteres Hydro + Cal-Nit @ 650 ppm, started them at 400 and did a res change a week later and raised to 650, couple tips burnt here and there but nothing that has progressed.

The dyna-rok is filthy, I rinsed them for HOURS before putting them in and still my res is full of it's mud/sand. I did a full res change and again it's full of it so it's hard to monitor my PPMs at the moment, so if anything they are being underfed in my opinion because my ppms are rising and I haven't topped it off at all as of yet. Hoping another res change will get most of it out.

Any suggestions or wisdom? Most people are only flooding 4-5 times while lights are on from what I can see, so I can't imagine mine should need water every 90 minutes even with low humidity since the rocks are only drying out on the very top by the time they are drooping.

The first pic is from a few days ago before I topped off all the pots with more rocks, you can see they are clearly wet.

 

[AshitMyself]

Hey chicken i have run an ebb and flood and had excellent results i used to flood the table every 3hrs for 8mins because the Nutrient just touched the bottom of the root riot cube i also poured some Nutrient through the top of the pots till they had rooted into the clay pebbles sorry i cant help u more in flower i flood them 5mins every 1hr hope you get it sorted Peace Ash

 

[budshoteyes]

Get that humidity up! It's the reason they need water so much....your plants are telling you they need water as you've described in their temporary recovery cycles.

What are the room temps? Is it dry or winter where you live?
To get your humidity up you should have the room at 75 degrees or 22 Celsius...and slow down your air venting,their in vegative stage and don't need air as much as when they start to flower and gain mass! Fast air exchange will lower humidity which is most needed in flower/buds stage!

The silt from the rocks shouldn't hurt your plants but do change the res as much as possible just in case...plants do grow in soil too!

Your plants other wise look healthy and are well worth saving!

 

[Ymir]

Temps are 70-75 lights on, and around 66-70 lights off. Why would they need so much water when the rocks are all plenty wet? They seem fine most of the day and then randomly droop.

I did set my controller to turn the fan off when the temps are below around 72.

 

[Ymir]

And yea forgot to add it's winter here and hard to get the humidity up, I do have a small humidifier I suppose I'll set that up tomorrow if it's still happening. It's odd that they seem fine until before the lights are going to go out, it's been a bit better since I set the timer back to when they were originally turning off and the roots have made their way to the bottom.

I know the silt won't hurt the plants it's just annoying after all that cleaning that they are still giving off so much. Had to buy filter bags so I don't ruin my pumps. Thanks!

 

[gmanwho]

Ran the ebb n gro buckets for 4-5 years. lots of runs with them. Was able to achieve great yields. After transplant to a new bucket you always get that stagnate growth. Your humidity is low. personally i like to keep things around 50%. I found i like to flood Every 2 hrs for 15 or 30 min.

You will always get that slow stage where nothing happens after a transplant. Keep you lights higher or on lower settings till those roots get established.

also you never mentioned PH. Theres a range you can run, but i always found 5.8 to be my sweet spot.

Im not sure on your veg space, or number of plants you can have. best way i found was to buy another set of the same planter buckets an pre veg them in another area. that way you can set them up prior till they go into the main flower system. Less shock to the plant. Better time management. Top drip irrigation i found is the easiest for preveg as you never have to worry about are the roots at water level.

When you transplant clones into the final bucket, do the transition in water or nutrient water. find a bucket or something to hold your water, an fill it with water to just about the height of your planter bucket. fill the planter 2/3rd's with your grow medium, take the clone an cup the roots within your hand. burrow your hand down into the medium till you find your happy plant level.top off with rest of medium an slowly pull planter out of water. Water suspension transfers are much easier on the roots!!

Also if you use a cloner plug or rockwool, MAKE SURE the plug or rockwool is above the high water mark during a flood. If the plug stays wet all the time you will increase your chances of stem rot within a few weeks time!!!

It also helps to increase your veg lighting as you go. You dont want to go from cfls' to 600 watt hids. You want something more like cfls to t5's to 400w mh or 600 mh, then to flower light intensity.

The plants will have smoother transitioning this way. you want a consistent steady ramp up in light,while having a consistent steady ramp up in nutrient strength.

rez management is important. How big is your rez?? you may find your rez at your current state will allow say 10days of proper nutrient. same rez with plants 2-3 times bigger you may only get 5-7days. Under higher light an co2 that rez time will change too. Different flower stages etc...

Later on, when the plants start growing faster, if you notice a considerable spike in growth after you changed the rez,you may have waited to long to change the rez.


Now you said your ppms are rising. your ppms could be rising because you have to low of an rh. the plants are transpiring more water an leaving the nutes behind, causing the ppm to go up.

Hope i made some sense as im not always good at getting thoughts to paper.

b-safe

 

[BigNev]

gman wish i would have seen that posed 2 years ago. Chicken- that is spot on from my 2 yrs of growing only thing i do dif is feed 15 mins every 4 hrs, and about to try 70 % rh til end of strech as per most vertical ppl.

 

[Ymir]

Ok so basically I put in a humidifier and played with the watering intervals, my RH is 40-60% now. They clearly looked over-watered after a couple days and so I started dialing back the times. It's odd because at night they'd look perfectly fine, then the next day I'd wake up and check them a couple hours before the lights go out and they'd look horrible. My dark cycle is 2PM-7PM.

As far as PH, I use JR Peters Hydroponics and they and many others have said not to bother adding PH adjusters as their nutes are supposedly soluble in a wider range of PH. The PH is about 6.5-6.8 without adjusting.

The leaves also started to get a leathery look to them, looked like mag deficiency and some of the lower leaves are rusty and look like a calcium deficiency. I've been running 620-650 ppm. I topped off the res with lower strength for a couple days @ 525ppm with added epsom salts and then got them back up to around 620 yesterday with a little extra of the Cal-Nit and also added a small amount of PH Down to get them down to around 6.3 PH.

The tips curling under usually is overfeeding but there is no tip burn at all really so I assume that's mostly from the overwatering. At the moment they are on 4hour watering intervals and I set it to not hold the flood at all so it drains as soon as it's completely flooded (takes like 7-8 minutes to flood).

I see new root growth under the top layer of rocks now so I'm hoping they will start actually drying out the rocks now between watering. I'm not sure why the rocks were always wet when they were clearly wilting at first and didn't appear to be over-watering at first.

And as far as the deficiencies, everybody says the JRPeters Hydro + Cal-Nit has plenty of calcium and magnesium, so not sure if I should be adding cal-nit or what I should be doing exactly. The plants look somewhat healthy but the newer growth is not filling out how it should be. I am running 12 plants and 2x750 (which I turned up to 1000w 2 times but they didn't seem to like it so I dialed it back to 750) The lights are well above the distance recommended for the wattage and the temps are not going above 78

 

[Ymir]

P.S. I'm using the same nutes on my mothers in coco @ around 400ppm and they've never shown any signs of deficiency, they are just under a couple 23w spiral bulbs though.

 

[gmanwho]

with grow stones, hydroton an lava rock there is really no such thing as over watering. stagnate heated low 02 water causes problems, or to cold water temps in your case will get reduced growth. in another system , you could run top drip rings with that same medium your using an run the water 24/7. the higher ph could not allowing certain elements to not be absorbed properly. your wattage is still pretty intense for that stage of growth. lower the watts till the leaf an root system can keep up. your wasting electricity.

if your worried about temps get a heater in there. we also suggested an aquarium water heater but you have ignored that as well. we suggested lower ph an u insist on keeping the ph higher. ???

 

[Ymir]

I'm not trying to ignore anything, I said my temps are easily managed, I have a heater for the room and an aquarium heater and running 1ml/L h2o2 every 5 days or so, would you suggest more? The leaves are generally doing this at this time of day, a few hours before the lights go out, at any of the wattages. I've noticed good new growth since using h2o2 and increasing light and the problem hasn't been AS BAD since decreasing the amount of waterings.

Right now it's at 4.5 hour cycles and the rocks are still wet by the end of it, now I'm seeing roots growing to the top (I have poly film squares over the top of the pots so light doesn't get in) and there were plenty of roots coming out the bottom of the pot as of 2 weeks ago. I'll lower the lights to 750w

 

[Ymir]

So I'm going to revive my thread, as I'm still having issues. It only happens in veg stage after so many hours of light. I had no issues once I went to 12/12 and they are always fine until about 12 hours or so into the day cycle. This grow I had a humidifier going the whole time hoping to avoid what happened the last time but it's actually worse this time if anything.

Water temp: 68F
Water PH: 5.9
Room Temp: 72-78F
Room Humidity: 30-45%
Nutes: Jacks Hydro/Cal-nit (Was 1.1 EC, backed down to 0.8 yesterday as they were looking a little too green and starting to curl under slightly)

Light cycle is 20/4 (2x600W Metal Halide), have tried watering every 5 hours and also tried every 3 hours and doesn't seem to make a difference. Even after 7 hours the rocks are not dry other than maybe some of the very top layer.The flood takes 6 minutes to fill, then it was holding for 2 minutes and draining (which takes another 7 minutes). I just misted all of them with water, backed the lights off and gave them an extra watering and let the flood hold for 10 minutes. After another 30 minutes I checked them and there is no difference. Am I not letting the water hold long enough for them to drink? I assume a couple minutes on top of the 15 it takes to flood/drain would be sufficient.

Initially I was told it was simply the humidity causing this, I don't believe this. I've done many grows in worse conditions in promix/coco and never had this problem before I switched to ebb and flow. The roots are healthy looking, the plants look fine half of the time so I'm stumped.

 

[br26]

they will grow better with less nutes. curling under leaves is excess N. 300-400ppms at that size is plenty of nutes.

 

[gmanwho]

i keep my veg an early flower about 60% hummidity, to low an i see problems. Alos you need to double triple check your ph meter is correct. fresh calibration solution, fresh ph probe. they all go bad over time. also 5.9 is a little high at first. i like to run a swing on nutes. meaning if my nutes tend to rise i will start a fresh batch of nutes at like 5.2-5.4 day 1, then day 3 i will adjsut to 5.4, then day 5 5.6 day 7 or so i will ride 5.8. an by day 7-10 it could be time to change dependit on each situation.

also ppm meters can be your best bet to learn if they are eating. say u start 1000 ppm, an it holds of 3-4 days or u see your nute rise. your nute is to strong. you kinda wanna see your nutes drop an water level drop at the same time.

those full drain buckets are nice. again, u are not having a over water issue.

i am new to jacks myself, an i feel at this point for whatever reason jacks seems stronger then any said nute ive worked with at any said ppm level. meaning 750 ppm of jacks i feel is stronger then gh lucas ratio at 750ppm. if that makes sense.


the other thing is how many gal rez u have, how often you changeout. this is another balance area that takes time to learn. res nutes dont last for ever. smaller the plants longer the rez life. but even if it reads 1 e.c , an u started at 1.3 ec, at 1.0 ec the rez may be depleted of what the plants wants......

hope some of that made sense.....

bsafe

 

[Ymir]

I have mommys in my closet that are under a 125W CFL, which I feed 0.8 EC in 24 hour lighting, and they love it, never once seen any nute burn or anything. Considering it's only under 125W CFL, I felt that was a good starting point for my small plants after transplant.

The first grow I had, I suffered a mag deficiency, so I added a bunch of extra mag to the hydro mix and that may be why they are a little extra green, probably don't need the extra mag quite yet.

The res is 55 gallons, I keep it at around 32 gallons. I change it about every 2 weeks. I have a blue labs combo meter, which I calibrate often. I use sulfuric acid as my base ph down, which has worked great at 5ml/gal at a 2.4% solution (I mixed mine a little more potent than the guides you'll find). I think it might be the silica rocks I'm using but it doesn't lower my PH as much as when I'm mixing regular nutes in a sprayer for my moms, so once I get to 6.2 I throw in some phosphorus based ph down to get down to 5.9 and it's pretty stable there as they aren't drinking very much water yet.

That is all helpful info, I just don't think it has cracked this particular case as I've had nothing but good results from similar nute strengths and conditions...just not in these silica rocks (dyna-rok II). Also, I had kept the lights on past their normal bedtimes while I misted them and re-watered to watch if they'd bounce back, but they didn't so I put the timers back on. After only 2 hours of dark they look mostly normal, that's the part that confuses me. If they are struggling this much why does it take 12+ hours for them to show these symptoms. Apparently ll it takes is turning the lights off for an hour or two and they are fine for hours before showing these symptoms again.

Also I've read a million threads about this, a lot of people say certain strains just droop before bedtime. I've grown this strain (UK Cheese) for years, never had that happen and generally used 24 hour lighting until flower and really only using 20/4 because of this problem. I'll probably go ahead and just do 18/6 for another week and then flower them assuming they look healthy enough.