My OBBT Bucket Build

Dirt cheap!

Obligatory shot of the medium in da bucket.



1 week to go and plants go in.

I would mention that I worked hard to mix the medium very, very uniformly. No clumps or pockets of anything. I was at a loss for a big mixing vessel, so I bought two new (large) plastic garbage cans.

I mixed the major components in the garbage can, and the minor amendments in a 5 gallon pail. Then combined the two thoroughly in the garbage can.

I used a cut off hoe (sort of a hand-held hoe) as well as poured the contents from one garbage can to the other about 20 times.

Air is coming through the whole system just fine it seems.

very nice indeed rrog, u r getting a head start on me, def gotta follow this 1. im wishing u the best, u sure r looking good so far for sure, hmmmm got the dirt in there already and the air flow just bubbling away huh, ahhh a man after my own heart, im prob at least a month or maybe even 2 away from my bucket going up, but yet and still i just wanna seem to get mine up and started too

ha ha

nice job man, so far so good!!!

Wey-hey! Good going buddy!

Are you still gonna try to supplement the pearlite cap with that fabric? Thought that was a neat idea. Got any more info on your whole rig-to be? Your sig is empty, been looking around for your 'home' thread. You've just been studying this for so long instead of diving in head-first. You've gone at it in basically the exact opposite way as I would have done. I think you're grow is gonna have a really high level of polish, you seem like you'll bring some sophistication to the method.

Good luck!

Thanks guys. I'll take more pics of the bigger rig at large.

Not sure about the topping yet. But I have to decide this AM before the myco gets established. I'll likely peel off 1" of that top medium. I'm just not sure I'd need both fabric and Perlite.

There's the reflected light advantage of perlite, but I have a lot of light.

EDIT:

I checked for moisture movement in the medium. Stuck my finger down and it seemed more moist. I inserted the medium dry, over the water-loaded rocks. This was last night.

I cleared off 1" of medium and added a finer grade layer of Perlite. No landscape fabric layer. I've said before that I generally like to follow a recipe first before I start modifying things.

Many years ago (maybe 1980) I grew a plant. Light crushed it. Then 1 year ago I tried again and grew 3 girls with Drip Hydro. Worked great. I have weed leftover that will get thrown away.

So this is really my second grow ever. I put all hydro equipment, ferts, pH and TDS meters and calibration solutions all in storage.

Wish me luck!

rrog said:

Thanks guys. I'll take more pics of the bigger rig at large.

Not sure about the topping yet. But I have to decide this AM before the myco gets established. I'll likely peel off 1" of that top medium. I'm just not sure I'd need both fabric and Perlite.

There's the reflected light advantage of perlite, but I have a lot of light.

EDIT:

I checked for moisture movement in the medium. Stuck my finger down and it seemed more moist. I inserted the medium dry, over the water-loaded rocks. This was last night.

I cleared off 1" of medium and added a finer grade layer of Perlite. No landscape fabric layer. I've said before that I generally like to follow a recipe first before I start modifying things.

Many years ago (maybe 1980) I grew a plant. Light crushed it. Then 1 year ago I tried again and grew 3 girls with Drip Hydro. Worked great. I have weed leftover that will get thrown away.

So this is really my second grow ever. I put all hydro equipment, ferts, pH and TDS meters and calibration solutions all in storage.

Wish me luck!

Click to expand...

wow, a no ph meter grow, ill def be watching this one man, good luck

im sure we all wish u the best on your voyage

itd be nice if i didnt have to use my ph meter ever again i got my 170 dollars woth of it i think so far

damn i cant wait to give this method a try!!!

No pH measurements required with OBBT. The micro-life maintains the pH for you. If you tried to change the pH the micro-life will simply bring it back to where it wants to be, according to DM.

The beauty of this method is that the micro-life takes over a lot of the duties we would normally do in chem fert hydro.

rrog said:

No pH measurements required with OBBT. The micro-life maintains the pH for you. If you tried to change the pH the micro-life will simply bring it back to where it wants to be, according to DM.

The beauty of this method is that the micro-life takes over a lot of the duties we would normally do in chem fert hydro.

Click to expand...

ok well thats lovely, but having said that "chem ferts" and all what if i do all organic nutes what will that do?

will my ph be maintained no matter what nutes i go to use??

thanks man thats really helpful!!!

Actually, you can get mantinence-free pH and use artificially derived nutrients.

OBBTs just need the majority of their nutrition to come from organic sources so that the microbes have something to eat. So long as the microbes are well-fed and well-oxygenated they will maintain the soil pH no matter what!

Thing is, there's no real reason to use mineral nutrients when you have access to organics. If you have strong microbes to break them down, organics are superior for most your cannabis-growing needs. Organics do especially well in providing a large amount of high-variety nitrogen sources.

Organics should be used for 80-90% of your plants' nutritional needs. There are organic substitutes for most trace nutrients as well. Kelp and pretty much all ocean products are packed to the gills with traces. And molasses is all-natural CAL-MAG. And in the right ratio too! Molasses almost always packs twice as much calcium as mag; perfect!

But! And it is a big, round, full-bodied but. Getting the huge amounts of phosphtes into the medium fast enough to cover a well-veged cannabis plant's insatiable desires with organic nutrients only is a big challenge. Other than bat guano there aren't a lot of phosphate-heavy organic nutes out there, and most of them are very tightly-bound 'slow release' type stuff.

This! is where mineral nutrients really come into their own. If you are going to use any artificial fertilizers use them during heavy bloom. There's about a 4-6 week span where the plants will devour nearly as much P as you can throw at them. Organics will run a great OBBT and will do almost everything you need. But if you are looking for maximum yield and don't care about being '100% organic' then use some good strong flowering nutes like Fox Farms tiger bloom.

If you make sure to keep your mineral usage reasonable and well spaced-out a well-sorted OBBT will continue to grow strong microbes and keep the pH well-balanced!

KW,

You definitely need to be sticking all-organic for now. Stay with organic ferts as you initially mix up the medium and use only organic teas to get through veg and early flower. If you make it through the first 4-7 weeks with organics-only you will be well-rewarded. pH stability will be rock solid and then you can sneak a few artificial nutrients later on during heavy flower when it really counts!

So until then, stick with the all-natural stuff. Its worth it big time!

LadyLargely said:

And molasses is all-natural CAL-MAG. And in the right ratio too! Molasses almost always packs twice as much calcium as mag; perfect!

Click to expand...

LadyL I am running RO / DI water and added CalMag+ to get TDS to 250. Like "regular" water now. I'd rather use the molasses. You're saying I could add Molasses to the RO water to get it to 250ppm and fly with that?

I have a well that runs through a water softener, then through the RO / DI system. No way around that. So I have to supplement the water.

Thanks

Ahh, eww, RO water??

Bummer man, the naturally-occuring minerals in most tap/well water is really good. Is there any way for you to get water from the front-end of the system? Before it goes through the softener and filtration?

If not then you're gonna need extra traces in your grow. Molasses would be a good place to start, though I don't think you could use it exclusively to add mineral content to the water. It always carries a huge carbohydrate load. Thats great to feed the bactirial microbes, but something makes me thing doing that on every watering could be bad, but I don't have enough experience to know.

Beyond adding some sort of CAL-MAG to the water before using you'll prolly wanna be constantly using small amounts of kelp extract. Liquid kelp will replace all the random minerals that you get in tap/well water.

Very glad you aren't overlooking this issue. Too bad you didn't go mineral hydro, some of those chem hydro guys dream of a water setup like yours. For organics though, 'empty' water is no good. Keep your mineral content high, it sounds like you have the right ideas about it.

Well I could use well water straight from the ground. Very high in Ca and Mg and I have no idea what else. I'll just use that and see how life goes on.

Thanks for the insight.

I did mineral hydro on my first and only grow last winter. This is my second grow. All that equipment... in storage... sigh

QUESTION: It's been 2.5 days and the top of the medium doesn't seem particularly moist, though it was cool 2-3" down. The water was already in and bubbling before I added the dry medium. Somehow that seemed the way to do it at the time. Now I think this was not good.

I think this will certainly moisten up much more, but this would throw off my 1 week incubation calendar before plopping in seedlings.

Also, I will have a slightly uneven rate of medium incubation here. Bottom "done" before top. I can't risk plopping in the seedling in that upper layer until I've given that upper layer a week of moist incubation I figure. So I'm tempted to get the entire medium uniformly moist by gently surface watering and let the overflow do it's thing a bit. Just enough to ensure a moistening thru and thru.

Any opinions would sure be welcomed.

Thanks!

What is the depth of your medium compared to the original bucket? Hopefully all you need is a little more water. Another good informative thread. Thanks for the lesson.

Hey h2

They are 5 gallon pails with the bottom 2 gallons of lava rock. This allows for 1 gallon of water in that rock space.

I have staged the lava rock as LadyL outlined. I washed and separated the lava into 4 size categories. Put the big ones around the two 4" airstones. Then piled on the next size, followed by the next. Capped with a layer of hydroton. Pretty as can be. This final layer is 1/2" over the horizontal overflow pipe. I'm hoping for some settle, since it now dawns on me that the top of the pipe is 1/2" from the bottom of the pipe and that's where the high waterline would be.



However... I have an awful lot of air blowing moist air up through. So I should be fine after an initial light soak of the whole deal.

Ohhh, crap, you mixed up the medium dry? Any particular reason for that??

Huh, yea, dunno if time will get you a uniform moisture rate. All OBBTs I've ever run started with a wet medium, moistened when the additives and dormant microbes went in to make the whole thing 'wake up' quickly. The idea was always that the medium started out near full moisture capacity and then the water in it would be replaced by water bubbling up from the bath. Not sure if the strong osmosis effect is enough to fully moisten a completely dehydrated medium.

Hold on, didn't I say to cook the chunky coco moss anyway? You should have had some mostiure in the whole thing just because of that. The whole reason I prefer the cheap chunky stuff and recommended it was because when you add a couple gallons of boiling water to a bucket filled with the chunk coco it all gets wonderfully soft and spongy. You should do this anyway because cheap coco bricks are not usually well-rinsed and still carry a lot of undesirable salts.

Sorry I didn't catch your add the medium dry idea before you did it. Pretty sure it isn't helping you any and I would put money on it actually slowing down the incubation process quite a bit. A good OBBT medium also fluffs up quite a bit when you add water to it. You may find the quantity you put in dry is actually too much. Remember, we wish to achieve the lowest possible density with this type of medium.

I do hope you at least cooked the chunky coconut. Un-washed coco chunk is a bit of a deal-breaker, it is not very nice stuff to have down there.

Hope you did ok, good luck!

LadyLargely said:

Ohhh, crap, you mixed up the medium dry? Any particular reason for that??

Huh, yea, dunno if time will get you a uniform moisture rate. All OBBTs I've ever run started with a wet medium, moistened when the additives and dormant microbes went in to make the whole thing 'wake up' quickly. The idea was always that the medium started out near full moisture capacity and then the water in it would be replaced by water bubbling up from the bath. Not sure if the strong osmosis effect is enough to fully moisten a completely dehydrated medium.

Hold on, didn't I say to cook the chunky coco moss anyway? You should have had some mostiure in the whole thing just because of that. The whole reason I prefer the cheap chunky stuff and recommended it was because when you add a couple gallons of boiling water to a bucket filled with the chunk coco it all gets wonderfully soft and spongy. You should do this anyway because cheap coco bricks are not usually well-rinsed and still carry a lot of undesirable salts.

Sorry I didn't catch your add the medium dry idea before you did it. Pretty sure it isn't helping you any and I would put money on it actually slowing down the incubation process quite a bit. A good OBBT medium also fluffs up quite a bit when you add water to it. You may find the quantity you put in dry is actually too much. Remember, we wish to achieve the lowest possible density with this type of medium.

I do hope you at least cooked the chunky coconut. Un-washed coco chunk is a bit of a deal-breaker, it is not very nice stuff to have down there.

Hope you did ok, good luck!

Click to expand...

well this kinda answers the question i just asked in your grow thread ladyL, ill have to go buy some 5 gallon jugs and mix my stuff up real good i guess

RROG, im sure everything will be ok, this shit is cheap and if u do gotta start all over agin at least u wont be out anything

i messed mine up also, my medium is till kinda wet tho cause when i went to take the top off of the rubbermaid tub it was in i posted in LADYLS thread it was full of moisture, damn now i gotta go throw all this shit way FUCK, where the fuck am i gonna dispose of it at?

lol oh well, at least my plants wont suffer cause of our mistakes!!!!

LadyLargely said:

Ohhh, crap, you mixed up the medium dry? Any particular reason for that??

Well I soaked the coco brick in boiling water exactly as instructed. The coco was laid out on a 3' x 8' plastic sheet on a work bench as I broke up the big pieces into little. That process took a while and during that time I thought I might get more uniform disbursal of amendments if the medium were dry. Frankly I just don't remember reading anywhere where doing this wet was critical. Obviously the unwritten assumption was that after the soaking of the coco the farmer would immediately start mixing the remaining rough components.

Huh, yea, dunno if time will get you a uniform moisture rate. All OBBTs I've ever run started with a wet medium, moistened when the additives and dormant microbes went in to make the whole thing 'wake up' quickly. The idea was always that the medium started out near full moisture capacity and then the water in it would be replaced by water bubbling up from the bath.

That sounds great. Makes perfect sense. I'll incorporate this important step into the assembly instructions. Reading this, the moisture in the coco block is insufficient to moisten the whole deal. So additional water would be needed during the initial mixing.

Sorry I didn't catch your add the medium dry idea before you did it. Pretty sure it isn't helping you any and I would put money on it actually slowing down the incubation process quite a bit. A good OBBT medium also fluffs up quite a bit when you add water to it. You may find the quantity you put in dry is actually too much. Remember, we wish to achieve the lowest possible density with this type of medium.

Click to expand...

So I have three pretty-as-can-be OBBT pails that are sitting there dry farting all that air. I have three choices:


#1 Do nothing and let this hydrate all on its own. This option sucks apparently.

#2 Add water to the whole mix while in the pails as-is. This seems like it would work BUT adding water could swell the medium too much. So this isn't a good idea either.

#3 Scoop off the top Perlite and remove the medium down to rocks. Moisten the medium all over and mix, and re-insert into pails.

That's where I'm headed!

UPDATE:

Interesting peeling the layers of bucket off and assessing. Medium was moistening, but would have taken a week or more to get hydrated.

I vacuumed off the Perlite and scooped out all of the medium into a brand new clean garbage can. Re-mixed and added well water. Mixed and mixed. While I was at it, I lowered the stone layer slightly. Top of stone layer is 1/2" above actual overflow line.

Medium when moist will not create a ball when compressed in your hand. No matter what it is way too spongy. Smells awesome.

Re-inserted medium into three buckets very gently. Topped off with fresh Perlite. Watered each until overflow. Used the initial runoff to water the others, since the runoff seemed to hold good brown stuff. Overflow works great.

QUESTION:

I'm assuming I should re-set the 1 WEEK CLOCK to today, since the last 3 days were dry days. Make sense?

Sounds good rrog, sorry you had to re-start. Yea, the microbes won't develop in the dry and even if they had made some progress you've sent them back to 0 by removing the medium and re-mixing it (nothing wrong with that, IMO, you made the best choice).

Fungal colonies have to re-start and work on a new mycelium network. The good thing is that you've re-mixed it and can be confident in the layout. Once the medium becomes activated you are stuck with it. You must not disturb the medium once it has come to life. The fungus is very sensitive.

Sounds like you're right on track. Trying to incubate dry has set you back a little, but you'll move along swiftly now.

See, starting that stuff out dry was just demonstrating how much of a non-pharmer newb I am.

But given how dry it was before the re-mix I'm not thinking anything much started. Now it's just percolating away nicely.

Starting seeds Monday along with LactoB

Seeds started today. They've been "soaking" in Ethylene gas for 10 days as seeds.

This is my over-done incubator. Heating pad on bottom with layers of material such as cardboard and towel that allow me to hit 85 degrees perfectly.

I have a temperature probe in there. Basic hardware item



Basic little tote

Inside the tote is a small plastic box with seeds in paper towel. Also 2 ripening apples for more ethylene







Looks like a kids lunch box. See temp probe and 4 little seeds. 2 Northern Lights #5 and 2 Purple Diesel.