My first attempt at PPK is linked in my sig. That was all coco.
Second attempt had the same design as the first, but gnats took over and all but killed the plants.
For my third attempt, I'm using the back 3ft of a 9ft wide room. 3 plants. Each plant will hopefully grow into a 3x3ft area. Two of them have a 1 gal coco root ball, with perlite filling the rest of the 2/3 gal containers.
Perlite in the wicks. Air gap I cannot accurately measure but perlite doesn't wick nearly as much as coco. With coco the air gap was probably close to 4" this perlite seems to need 2" or less.
I still don't have a cycle timer. Manually turning pump on for a wave feed, frequency varies obviously but 0-3 times a day.
I'd imagine a drip ring would be much better than the feed I have set up, with perlite this is probably a lot more important than coco. Each container has 3-4 feed lines, 1/4" tubing.
Using .1-.2 EC tap water with Ionic nutes and GH PH Down, no other additives, to bring the solution around 1.0-1.5 EC and 5.5-6.5 PH. This has worked well for me for over a year now. Ionic Grow for veg and Ionic Bloom when buds form +20 days into flowering.
Yellow gnat traps on the containers work great. The largest plant probably lost much of its root mass to gnats... when I first put a gnat trap down it caught +100 within hours. Since that and Bt, it started to recover and grow again.
In the future I'll likely use either all perlite, or else all coco with a perlite wick. If not for gnats, the coco growth rate in PPK can be great, but the wicks can get clogged. Or, one half dead plant from my 2nd attempt had a wick not properly packed, and there was dead air space in the wick when harvested. Main downside that I know of so far with using perlite is not being able to do a saturation pulse with PPKs.
Currently just two plants. The third is in veg still, hopefully ready in 10-20 days.
The tomato cage is 2' diameter and the pvc trellis thingy is just under 3ft wide.
I'd prefer not to have 1 plant per 10sq ft of canopy... better results with more plants. My preference is 4 plants in a 3x3ft or 4x4ft square. (well, preferably SOG but my medical count doesn't allow that) But this is all that my clone/veg performance allowed me.
The lighting is like this...
123
456
if each number is a 3x3ft space, 9x6ft total. There is a plant under 1, 2, and 3.
1 and 3 have 600w lamps.
2 has 1150w. (Gavita)
4 and 6 have 600w lamps with the reflectors angled at the plants.
5 is empty.
This gives each plant at least 3 significant angles of light, not including reflection off the walls. Each plant gets the equivalent of nearly 1200w.
Which is over 100w/sq ft though plenty of light gets wasted.
Photo is from day 1 of 12/12.
I have no idea how this will turn out. I have numerous crop failures under my belt.
Feel free to ask any questions
Second attempt had the same design as the first, but gnats took over and all but killed the plants.
For my third attempt, I'm using the back 3ft of a 9ft wide room. 3 plants. Each plant will hopefully grow into a 3x3ft area. Two of them have a 1 gal coco root ball, with perlite filling the rest of the 2/3 gal containers.
Perlite in the wicks. Air gap I cannot accurately measure but perlite doesn't wick nearly as much as coco. With coco the air gap was probably close to 4" this perlite seems to need 2" or less.
I still don't have a cycle timer. Manually turning pump on for a wave feed, frequency varies obviously but 0-3 times a day.
I'd imagine a drip ring would be much better than the feed I have set up, with perlite this is probably a lot more important than coco. Each container has 3-4 feed lines, 1/4" tubing.
Using .1-.2 EC tap water with Ionic nutes and GH PH Down, no other additives, to bring the solution around 1.0-1.5 EC and 5.5-6.5 PH. This has worked well for me for over a year now. Ionic Grow for veg and Ionic Bloom when buds form +20 days into flowering.
Yellow gnat traps on the containers work great. The largest plant probably lost much of its root mass to gnats... when I first put a gnat trap down it caught +100 within hours. Since that and Bt, it started to recover and grow again.
In the future I'll likely use either all perlite, or else all coco with a perlite wick. If not for gnats, the coco growth rate in PPK can be great, but the wicks can get clogged. Or, one half dead plant from my 2nd attempt had a wick not properly packed, and there was dead air space in the wick when harvested. Main downside that I know of so far with using perlite is not being able to do a saturation pulse with PPKs.
Currently just two plants. The third is in veg still, hopefully ready in 10-20 days.
The tomato cage is 2' diameter and the pvc trellis thingy is just under 3ft wide.
I'd prefer not to have 1 plant per 10sq ft of canopy... better results with more plants. My preference is 4 plants in a 3x3ft or 4x4ft square. (well, preferably SOG but my medical count doesn't allow that) But this is all that my clone/veg performance allowed me.
The lighting is like this...
123
456
if each number is a 3x3ft space, 9x6ft total. There is a plant under 1, 2, and 3.
1 and 3 have 600w lamps.
2 has 1150w. (Gavita)
4 and 6 have 600w lamps with the reflectors angled at the plants.
5 is empty.
This gives each plant at least 3 significant angles of light, not including reflection off the walls. Each plant gets the equivalent of nearly 1200w.
Which is over 100w/sq ft though plenty of light gets wasted.
Photo is from day 1 of 12/12.
I have no idea how this will turn out. I have numerous crop failures under my belt.
Feel free to ask any questions
