Bottomfeeding: no drain, no waste

I see lots of folks hand-watering their coco, and measuring their nutes and run-off for both PH and EC, and some folks even doing so multiple times every day. The best watering method is the one that works best for you, and the one you most enjoy, and some folks love that kind of micro-management, but personally, I grow in coco specifically to avoid that kind of stuff.

So much so, that I've become a bottom feeder. I just pour my ph'ed nutes into my plants' drip tray (I've got a SoG with multiple drip trays holding 9 plants each), and let them suck the water up into the coco/roots through the drainage holes, using capillary action....pretty much the same concept behind a hempy bucket, but with an external reservoir allowing more control, or a shallow water culture without much culture....shallow water white trash, you might say.

Not a really popular method, and it's a pretty accepted and long-standing rule that you shouldn't leave your plants in standing water, but unlike soil, good coco won't get waterlogged, and will draw just enough water into the medium to keep your plants more than happy. The water never stands for more than 24 hours, so there's no chance of algae growth and no need to oxygenate, and the water is never deeper than 2-3 inches at a time, so very little of the rootmass is actually standing in the water. I do flush with fresh water from the top every week to clear out any build up....I suppose during the flushes would be the time to test the PH of the runoff, and adjust accordingly, but personally I'm too lazy for even that.

Pros:

• Have to water literally half as often
• No nute waste
• Half watering and no run-off measuring can reduce your watering workload by 75%
• Even, consistent feeding schedule for multiple plants
• Roots are drawn downward
• Plants never dry out

Cons:

• Without any runoff can't monitor plant/coco's PH
• Increased chance of nute/gas/salt buildups and lockouts
• No/little natural oxygenation
• Possibility for nutes to settle/disperse unevenly
• Requires familiarity with your strain, nutes and growing medium
• Requires all plants in tray to be on same feeding schedule
• Requires proper coco consistency for capillary action, too chunky won't work
• Increased humidity

I've had great results myself, and most importantly to me, drastically
cut down on the amount of water and effort required to grow with coco in small pots. That said, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to people, as I think it has the potential to get out of control and if you're not completely familiar with your plants, your nutes AND your medium, drastically altering your watering method is a good way to fuck yourself over, and confuse everything you thought you had figured out.

Any other coco bottomfeeders? What's the method to your madness? Preferred nutes/additives?


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As requested, here's some shots of my bottomfeeding setup. I'm not very good at pics. Apologies for my shabby cam/focus/lighting/arms/etc. No apologies for my awesome 2-liter coke bottle ghetto, DIY setup in aluminum pan-pizza trays. That's the way I like it.:

ACTION SHOT! Lookit me feed! There's 9 more identical bottles under the black canvas on the right side, I was just experimenting with shielding the roots from the light (didn't seem to be worth the effort, FWIW). You can see the residual ring around the root shield from when it's full.



Here they are in their puddle! It's rare that I have one batch of a single strain, let alone 2, but these are all GHS cheese, for whatever it's worth, except for one lanky SLH, peeking out way back in the far right. The ladies on the far right will probably be coming down tonight, while the left side has another 3 weeks to go. BONUS: shot of my super high-tech dry room (it's the paper sack).

I use your technique for my clones. Works out good.

Yeah, I do it for clones and seeds too, since top-watering can disturb the soil too much and upset the rooting.

Years ago, I tried putting various house plants into my goldfish tank, pot and all. It was surprising how many did well, even completely submerged for as long as two weeks. Naturally, I concluded the experiment with a cannabis plant. It sat almost fully submerged (pot and bottom completely under, top was poking out) in that goldfish tank for two weeks and came out looking just as happy as the day it went in. Even soilmix plants can be totally submerged in water without a problem.

i'm just doing my 1st run in coco and use an autopot system that automatically bottom feeds. Results so far are amazing never seen my plants grow so well

Mr. Greengenes said:

Naturally, I concluded the experiment with a cannabis plant. It sat almost fully submerged (pot and bottom completely under, top was poking out) in that goldfish tank for two weeks and came out looking just as happy as the day it went in. Even soilmix plants can be totally submerged in water without a problem.

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Heh, very interesting! My bottomfeeders seem more than happy to sit in water half the time. Unlike my experiences with hand-watering, where the plant would occasionally droop and perk up along with my timing, my swamp buds seem perfectly happy, and reaching for the sky, all day, every day.

I'm thinking about adding some H2O2 to my nutes to bring in some oxygenation, anybody got any peroxide tips for coco?

a while back, Johnny Chimpo had a great thread using this technique
with smartvalves so the the thing ran on autopilot...
and made quite a bit of very nice looking bud
check it?
Johnny Chimpo's Reefer Madness

I bottom feed when I go out of town with my amended organic soil (50% coco) for up to 2 weeks and with my clones in vermiculite all the time. I have a small grow with small pots and they get housed in a kitty litter pan in 2 or 3 inches of water when I go out of time for any period of time. I would worry more about it if I had heavy roots concentrated at the bottom of my pots but I never do. Maybe this is why!

I go out of town every 3 months or so. Even in day to day watering I keep my small pots in trays of 8 so they don't leak all over my cabinet and they always have some drainage at the bottom of the tray that gets soaked up by the thirsty ones. When I was using DIY grow bags (coffee bags) I was putting my drain holes an inch or two up the bag to keep a res like a hempy bucket. Seems I'm always trying to fight dry pots and I have never had any root rot or seen the effects of an over watered plant. Although I do have these mexi bag seed sativas that never seem to grow healthy and that may be it for them, IDK.

Thx for the link, ogenko. Those autopots are pretty cool...I'd be interested in checking 'em out, but they don't fit my cab footprint. But they DO sell the valve on it's own:

http://futuregarden.com/hydroponics/smartvalve.html

I love the fact that you can feed it by gravity, so you don't have to buy a pump or pay for the electricity. Seems like an awesome way to automate bottomfeeding. A 5gal bucket(s) stacked on top of the cab for a reservoir, and a valve in each drip tray, could further reduce my watering schedule by another 80%.

My only hesitation is the possibility of failure and resultant flooding. Even a 2-3 gal flood would be near disastrous, if left untended for too long in an apartment.

zen_trikester said:

I bottom feed when I go out of town with my amended organic soil (50% coco) for up to 2 weeks.

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That's pretty much how I came to use this technique. Going out of town for any amount of time will put a hitch in your hand-watering schedule, and the first and most obvious solution was to just to dump a bunch of water in the tray and hope for the best.

thesloppy said:

That's pretty much how I came to use this technique. Going out of town for any amount of time will put a hitch in your hand-watering schedule, and the first and most obvious solution was to just to dump a bunch of water in the tray and hope for the best.

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Exactly. I have thought about this since I actually am doing mini hempys right now and wanted to do what you were doing but was afraid of the flushing. How do you flush if you have 9 per tray? Do you work it out to finish 9 at a time? I don't think I could ever pull that off. I am WAY to random! I am all organic now, so the whole flushing thing will be new for me. I run 7 strains and don't time things amongst each other... it is just pull one when it is done, and replace it with whatever around here!!

Coco don't need to be flush if you feed it lightly. Keep it moist and your golden.

zen_trikester said:

How do you flush if you have 9 per tray? Do you work it out to finish 9 at a time?

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Uhhh...if I'm running 9 of the same clones, it works out great! But like you, that can be a rarity. I do fill my trays all at the same time, and try to keep the strains in each at least within a week's finishing time, it's not that bad. One strain'll end up getting one week of straight water while the other gets two. Or maybe I occasionally let an 9-week plant go 10-weeks, or bring a 12 week plant down to 11, to bring a trays flushing times closer together....I'm usually looking for an excuse to sample the effects of different harvest times anyways. As BlueHaze noted, as long as the feedings have been moderate a week or two of straight water is probably more than enough with coco.

I guess that's a critical point, and a good catch zen. If you're NOT filling your trays at the same time it would probably require way more math and planning than it was worth to get a bottomfeeding schedule going that allowed for feeding, tweaking and flushing of several different strains, planted and harvested at different times. I'll add it to my list of cons, up top.

thesloppy said:

....I'm usually looking for an excuse to sample the effects of different harvest times anyways.

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Tbhis is a good point and I also do this.

I guess that's a critical point, and a good catch zen. If you're NOT filling your trays at the same time it would probably require way more math and planning than it was worth to get a bottomfeeding schedule going that allowed for feeding, tweaking and flushing of several different strains, planted and harvested at different times. I'll add it to my list of cons, up top.

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Yeah... I'm perpetual and completely random. If I had a little extra space I could put the pots individually in plastic cups during the flush. That would ultimately bring my plant count down, but I was thinking about doing that anyways.

And not that it matters, but for the record I implied above I am doing all hempys right now but that isn't the case. I do soil, but I have 3 mini hempys going as a trial.

I have catch pans under all my pots and I water every day until I get a couple inches of overflow, pretty much hempy style. I like the water to run through the soil, so I always top feed, but don't drain to waste. The next day the water is dried up and I need to replenish. It seems to keep them happy. Roots grew through the bottom drain holes and just hang out down there to suck it right up. I see no ill effects yet, been 2 weeks flowering like this so far. I will just flush with half strength once a week.

I also second the fact that you don't need to measure anything coming out of the coco. It will just confuse you. Only when problems pop up is it necessary. Then a quick flush usually corrects the problem.

Cons:
.....
Increased chance of nute/gas/salt buildups and lockouts....

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drip clean (or another salt mitigating agent like SeaGreen) will eliminate any salt issues. i buy a tiny bottle every 2-3 grows. (and i run 60-80 gallons of water a day). shit lasts forever.

LOL...

So drip clean just makes salts disappear? Must be the secret ingredient in Va-Poo-Riser.

For Drip Clean to work you'll need to remove the build up. It may prevent precipitates but you keep adding salt to a system, I don't care how much drip clean a person uses, the salts don't just disappear.

Honestly, I don't see this method working as well as top feed. Some pictures would be useful when backing up some of the claims made in this thread.

IMHO runoff is crucial to coco and I'll never grow without it. What do I care if 30% of my solution goes down the drain? Nutes=$200. Harvest=1000 grams. Do I really give a shit that $60 in nutrients were washed out when my harvest weight can "compensate" me for that? Avoiding runoff would burn my plants quick, resulting in a much smaller harvest, potentially 1/2 as much.

So, in my mind, that $60 worth of runoff gets me 500g. Worth it? eeyah.

I'm working on trying to figure out why ICMag has the gayest image upload of any site I've ever been on. It won't let me upload anything larger than a few KB.

Fuck. This place is frustrating. You guys can keep it.

Snow Crash said:

I'm working on trying to figure out why ICMag has the gayest image upload of any site I've ever been on. It won't let me upload anything larger than a few KB.

Fuck. This place is frustrating. You guys can keep it.

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Things change when you get to 50 posts! I know it can be frustrating at first.

I don't know about the salt buildup issue since my (~2 years) experience has been all organics, but I have smoked herb that tasted like miracle grow and I am not interested in having my own taste that way. I use fish nutes in my water maybe 2 times per cycle, but don't really have to do that to finish my plants properly. I think this concept may not be as good of an idea with larger containers. If you are pulling 1000g harvests, you are certainly in a different realm than me, but idk about the OP. Some things are just different when you are going small. That is the first thing I learned when I started my micro.

Snow Crash said:

IMHO runoff is crucial to coco and I'll never grow without it. What do I care if 30% of my solution goes down the drain? Nutes=$200. Harvest=1000 grams. Do I really give a shit that $60 in nutrients were washed out when my harvest weight can "compensate" me for that? Avoiding runoff would burn my plants quick, resulting in a much smaller harvest, potentially 1/2 as much.

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The runoff has nothing to do with your plants burning, that's entirely dependent on your nute strength. Too strong and it won't matter how much you're running off, and the same strength solution would burn your plants regardless of how the roots got access to that solution.

Of course it increases the chance for buildup, but you really have to already be an aggressive feeder to push it past the point that your plants require more than a flush every week or two, and run the risk of burning. If you're using a nute mix that your plants love now, they're not going to suddenly decide it's too strong because the water is standing.

As far as yield goes, I can only attest to the 'eye test' and tell you that my harvest have done nothing to make me think the yield is dropping in the slightest. Lastly, the prevalence of commercial bottomfeeding methods like the autopots, and DIY solutions like hempy buckets, that will and have run fine with coco and no run-off, should tell you it's not that ridiculous.

Also consider that when you top water any minerals, salts, and solids are being introduced at the top of your soil, and every single particle needs to move through the entirety of the soil to get flushed out, but when you bottom feed, the water and nutrients are sucked up through the bottom through capillary action. I can't attest to the science/effect any more than that, but there's a possibility that top-feeding promotes buildup as well, in it's own particular manner.

Foremost, I should note that nute savings is not the primary motivator for me personally...it's the fact that I can water every 2-3 days, rather than every day. The nute savings is just gravy. I'll try to add some pics and specifics to my own technique, to my original post, unexciting as pics of plants sitting in water may be.

Snow Crash said:

LOL...

So drip clean just makes salts disappear? Must be the secret ingredient in Va-Poo-Riser.

For Drip Clean to work you'll need to remove the build up. It may prevent precipitates but you keep adding salt to a system, I don't care how much drip clean a person uses, the salts don't just disappear.

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nope the salts dont disappear. they just dont interfere. i didnt say different.

i usually reuse my coir and thats the only reason i flush till runoff for the last few days. but if i was tossing the coir out and going fresh from the start, I think my routine of plain water for 10 days without runoff is fine (from a final product perspective). otherwise, no runoff at all from the time the clones are cut until 4-5 months later when the flush ends. never any salt issues, nothing but happy girls.

the op is asking about other experiences with zero runoff etc.. well my experience is use dripclean (also should mention that it vaporizes poo by making the salts in the poo dissapear)