[stevewinthrop]

Alright boys and girls, I just gotta show you my deep dark secret.

My background goes back a few years, I've been a designated caregiver for a patient up here for a while now, and I've grown in just about any style you can think of... Soil, coco, aero, dwc, nft, ebb n flood, flood tables, etc. I just happen to have a patient with a high requirement (most of the plant is turned into a thick crude oil. see phoenix tears for more information). I tried this same vertical setup as a test run with just a standalone wall and a 150w hps... Seemed to work great! Much faster than any other method I've tried.


Now I have 3 walls squeezed into a 4x4 area, with 1000w of light. Due to the method in which we process the medicine (using the whole plant, leaves/stems/buds) I've never actually had any sort of measurement to my success... At least not in bud weight.

Of course we aim for mostly bud in this system, but there has never been a need to weigh any of it, since it is immediately turned into sludge after harvest/drying.


Now to the growroom.



First we have my mother room... There were bigger mothers in there, but for now I have my ak48 mum in the 5 gal bucket (she was about 6 feet tall a month ago), and 5 new mothers, just topped and starting to put out sideshoots (strains are Matanuska Thunderfuck, Purple Urkle, Durban Poison, NYCD, and a local strain named 'slappy'). They are under a 2 foot, 4 bulb T5 from htgsupply.





Next is one of my cloning shelves. I use rapid rooters and standard cloning powder, with a 99% success rate in this shelf... I recently constructed a 16 site aerocloner, but i'm still looking for a home for him... At the moment it's under a bare bulb sitting on the floor. I take 22 clones every 2 weeks...






Next is the veg area, I have 2 shelves like this, each with a 15 site shallow water culture... I only veg the clones for 1-2 weeks, and the only reason I do this is because I've found that if I do not give them at least a little vegetative time, I end up with very little roots, which in the end = very little bud. They are sitting under 2 42 watt CFL's (one warm, one cool). There is a little single outlet variable output air pump powering a bubble ring. I feed them a little bit of N, and some Biobizz root juice.





Here is the aero cloner... Took maybe 10 minutes to put together out of parts I had lying around... Still needs a home tho! (the clones are looking terrible because i accidently hit the power switch on the pump last night, and it hasnt pumped for about 20 hours).





On to the flowering room!

As I stated before, it's a vertical aero/nft. Only reason I add the /nft, is because when the tubes are full of roots, the misters can only shoot so far, and it generally ends up running down the back of the tube, but for the first few weeks of flower, i see EXPLOSIVE growth. The system includes 15 vertical tubes, each with 5 plant sites, as for right now it is only hanging on 3 of the walls, because I have yet to engineer the swinging door for the 4th wall.

I am running a 600 watt hps (higher up) and a 400 watt light (lower down). The total grow area for the tubes is 5ftx3.5ft per wall, giving me 57 watts per sq foot on each wall.

She is powered by a 4000gph waterfall pump, and it dumps into a 25 gallon rubbermaid, and recirculates, I empty and replace water every week to minimize sprayer clogs. It is my first time working with this powerful of a pump, and I have to say it's done several things that I didn't expect, including eat an entire filter bag, and shit it into my lines. Luckily I have a 200 (i think) micron filter at each PVC end, so cleaning it wasn't too much work.

It's been running with no plants for about 3 weeks, and these plants have been in here almost 2. These ones are just test plants, with no veg time, and very little roots, but they seem to be catching on now, and are starting to bud fairly prolifically.

Now for the pictures.











If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to speak up!

-- steve

[illuminatus]

It sucks not being able to tell anyone about something you put alot of time and effort into, but atleast there is icmag!! How long do you mist and are you running bio-bizz in the tubes also?

[stevewinthrop]

Not running root juice in the tubes, but I spray once an hour for 6 minutes. I'd spray less at a smaller interval, but the timer I currently am forced to use allows only 6 minute intervals and I've tried doing 2 6 minute intervals per hour, but it was just wasn't working as well.

Ideally I'd like to do 2 minutes every 20 minutes.

And the reason I don't use the root juice in the tubes, is because I don't want them focusing on growing roots while in there, I want them to grow buds! Also the humic acids in the root juice would just aid in clogging my misters.

Also, something I forgot to mention, was this is a SOG of sorts... I guess a WOG (wall of green)... I'd love to go bigger, but keeping the lights 2 feet from every wall is rather restricting. I'm assuming later I'll be putting up netting if the plants want to get too big, but that's something I'll deal with in the future.

Thanks for stopping by, Illuminatus!

-- steve

[stevewinthrop]

Oh, and yes, I love being able to share here on the internet. My stomping grounds are usually *****, but unfortunately they have been offline for quite a long time... So this is my new home!

[stevewinthrop]

Today I added another 15 clones to one of the walls, bringing the total plant count to 38. Also took another 25 clones off the AK mother. Things are cookin along quite nicely!

-- steve

[dark_ronin]

is the room sealed? do the plants still want to grow up? geotropism? or do they grow at an approx. 45 degree angle?

[stevewinthrop]

plants will grow out at a 45 degree angle for a few days, then take a sharp turn up, which is a good thing. I wouldn't want them growing onto the lights.

And yes, the room is sealed, except for the exhaust and intake.

[researchOnly]

Good luck my friend, there have been a number of unfinished vertical wall projects round here so I hope yours turns out great. Your yield can be great if you tune everything right. A lot of work for these systems.

[stevewinthrop]

everyone says its a lot of work... but so far i have found that a standard soil sog was way way more work... the hardest part for me so far was building the room (framing, insulating, wiring) as i am no carpenter, and second was designing and implementing the system itself... running it is as easy as topping the res and checking for clogs... the nozzles are so cheap i usually just replace them and put the old ones in an ultrasonic bath until i someday need them.

thanks for good luck wishes tho... as far as abamndoning the project, i cant... no more room in the house for the kinda grow we need.

- steve

[stevewinthrop]

Flushed system and started a new nutrient regimen today.

I was using BC line of nutrients, but have had great success in dwc with the lucas formula so I switched to the GH line. The BC line is an awesome line of nutrients for almost any growing style, however with aeroponics, the water gets a strange buildup after about a week, and it would gum up my pump filter if left too long, so lucas it is.

So it went like this 200ml of micro, 400ml of bloom, 10ml of pH down, 100ml of AN overdrive (got a liter for 7 bucks, gonna try it out), and 100ml of h2o2.

pH at 5.7, PPM at 1450


Plants looked great, the AK is starting to show it's true colours, looks real nice. This may be one of her last runs, my mum looks like she's flowering, despite the high N content... If I can't trim her roots and have her survive, I may have to start a new mother from a clone... will be sad to part, but she's been alive for almost a year and a half now and her clones are showing it. haha.

There's a GH cheese in there as well, has a wall to herself at the moment, and she's looking just AWESOME. Sativa pheno, I can't wait... Her stretch is done, and she clocks in just over a foot tall. (from a 4 inch cutting)

Luckily, they agree on the nutrients, which I was a little wary about at first, having them all share a res... But I read that in aeroponics you can really pump the nutes through, and it doesn't show until near lethal amounts, haha, so it's a good thing everyone is doing good.


Going to have tester clones of the other 4 mothers going into flower in a couple weeks... wee! MTF, Purple Urkle, NYCD, Durban Poison and a local breeders strain called "slappy".

Hoping everything will kick ass.

-steve