NeonTetra
Member
New grower here. Quick background on my setup. I'm shooting for NFT but I'm still in the seedling care stage, trying to develop a nice root ball. My seedlings are now in 3" rockwool cubes. I rigged up a small ebb-and-flow system that ran every few days.
Eventually when my seedlings reached their second set of true leaves they started showing signs of deficiency. I began feeding them 1/4 conc. nutrients and they continued to degrade. I checked the pH inside the rockwool cube and it was at 6.4, which seems a little high. I lowered the res pH to 5.5 and fed with ebb and flow once more. No obvious improvements, plants were stunted, continued degrading, roots stopped growing for several days.
Yesterday I manually top-fed and I'm already seeing big improvements. Number of root tips nearly doubled out the bottom of the cubes and plants are looking much happier. Today I rigged up an automatic drip irrigation system in conjunction with my NFT and dropped in my cubes, so I've now got a nice combo setup.
My guess is my problems stemmed from the rockwool pH rising during the dry days and the upper portion of the rockwool keeping that high pH. To keep it down, what I'd like to do is top feed more often with the lower pH water. This seems pretty reasonable to do with drip irrigation since I'm not flooding my cube at each watering.
My seedlings just now have their third set of true leaves coming in strong with the 4th leaves peaking through. How often and how much should I be watering with drip irrigation at this point, given that I'd like to increase feeding frequency to keep that pH down. Is there a good heuristic for dialing in a drip feed schedule?
Thanks!
Eventually when my seedlings reached their second set of true leaves they started showing signs of deficiency. I began feeding them 1/4 conc. nutrients and they continued to degrade. I checked the pH inside the rockwool cube and it was at 6.4, which seems a little high. I lowered the res pH to 5.5 and fed with ebb and flow once more. No obvious improvements, plants were stunted, continued degrading, roots stopped growing for several days.
Yesterday I manually top-fed and I'm already seeing big improvements. Number of root tips nearly doubled out the bottom of the cubes and plants are looking much happier. Today I rigged up an automatic drip irrigation system in conjunction with my NFT and dropped in my cubes, so I've now got a nice combo setup.
My guess is my problems stemmed from the rockwool pH rising during the dry days and the upper portion of the rockwool keeping that high pH. To keep it down, what I'd like to do is top feed more often with the lower pH water. This seems pretty reasonable to do with drip irrigation since I'm not flooding my cube at each watering.
My seedlings just now have their third set of true leaves coming in strong with the 4th leaves peaking through. How often and how much should I be watering with drip irrigation at this point, given that I'd like to increase feeding frequency to keep that pH down. Is there a good heuristic for dialing in a drip feed schedule?
Thanks!
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