How To: DWC

I actually think it was more than 4 days, sorry.. It's 9 days old right now from clonebox(takes me 10-14 days to see a root) and I took that pic 4/29 so it was 5 days old. No magic, just aquashield and water. After that day I switched the bucket and added a very small amount of nutes along with more aquashield.

Originally Posted by IN33DW33D

I actually think it was more than 4 days, sorry.. It's 9 days old right now from clonebox(takes me 10-14 days to see a root) and I took that pic 4/29 so it was 5 days old. No magic, just aquashield and water. After that day I switched the bucket and added a very small amount of nutes along with more aquashield.

Good job INW keeping up with the questions in my thread, I've been pretty busy lately

Thanks I'm a newb too but I know what its like looking for answers hahaahhah

In33dw33d, getting your roots to water is much easier than it is for me. A traditional 6" netpot lid is a lot different than a 2gal 'grow chamber' in terms of how the roots first establish themselves. Whereas your roots will pretty much grow straight down(the 2 actual DWC plants I have growing now did), but all my plants in waterfarms spent the first 2-3 weeks with no roots showing at all below hydroton. By the time they reached into the lower chamber, I had a fully LST'd 2ft tall plant. I don't care to try and feed 8 of those without automatic drippers. So as I recommend a drip line for WF's, I didn't and won't use one at all on my regular DWC buckets, because there's no need like you said.

Oh cool that explains alot, I can understand all that. Thanks

The plants I budded in the water farm had huge root balls. I scrapped the water farm tho, but kept those drippers for my outdoor garden! They work great.

Originally Posted by mike91sr

In33dw33d, getting your roots to water is much easier than it is for me. A traditional 6" netpot lid is a lot different than a 2gal 'grow chamber' in terms of how the roots first establish themselves. Whereas your roots will pretty much grow straight down(the 2 actual DWC plants I have growing now did), but all my plants in waterfarms spent the first 2-3 weeks with no roots showing at all below hydroton. By the time they reached into the lower chamber, I had a fully LST'd 2ft tall plant. I don't care to try and feed 8 of those without automatic drippers. So as I recommend a drip line for WF's, I didn't and won't use one at all on my regular DWC buckets, because there's no need like you said.

This is the "growers" responsibility to know this. I mean it's basic common sense that a 10" net pot with a seedling is going to need a drip no matter what unless the medium is down into the water to wick up the other 50% of medium in the pot. You should be transplanting the pants into appropriate pots during their growth if your growing technic cannot supply food/water to roots in a monster net pot relying on bubbles only.

I use 3 3/4" net pots from seedling to harvest, but my plants are 4-5 feet tall. I keep the water at bottom, base of plant in hydroton is about 1/2" above that so there is no problem with wicking to the roots with just bubbles alone. I mean I cringe when I see a guy with a 10" net pot and a baby seedling in there dying with no way possible the water to get there without a drip of some sort with that huge as net pot, yet the post crying "help". STOP right now and just go to the dispensary because you will fail if you cannot even understand this basic concept of growing a plant. /rant lol

So I figured this would be a good place to share this, as stated by uchq at another board:

In our experience over the years we found that simply raising the water level provoked a more symetrical, well developed root mass than drip had. We had originally included drip as standard with UC's but found the drip plume encouraged development of fewer roots which then proliferated out once they came in contact with the solution. This resulted in very large root masses developing that had very few main roots that essentially became the week link in the root system in the event any of these roots were damaged.

I guess that while drip may be easier, raising the water level is more effective in growing stronger, healthier plants. Interesting stuff...