Al, I completely understand what you're saying...but I'm not talking about week long gaps just a couple days...also a guy who is living in my house next year is gonna go in on the op with me so as long as I prepare him well I think we should be ok! That being said, I think that your total devotion to marijuana growing is inspiring and I really appreciate all your advice!
Thanks for the praise.
Sorry, I have misunderstood you; thought for a moment you might be at uni and have a grow going in a dorm room or something mad like that. Will tell you someday about this uni student I knew who thot it would be OK to just put his plants in a bar fridge while he was off on xmas & spring breaks...
To give competent instructions to a plantsitter, first, know your system inside-out and backwards and second, foolproof it. Don't make it easy for your assistant to make errors. Keep instructions as short & sweet as possible and insist that they are followed to the letter with no independent modifications or additions to your plans.
My very earliest grows were (intended to be) cooperative efforts- but the partners (and anyone who knows about your op may try to situate themselves as a 'partner') were problem #1. If they didn't want to do mad shit like I send up in '
How Not To Grow Dope,' they wanted unreasonable shares of the grow op's output.
One clown lent me a 400HPS for about 6 weeks to raise mums- and he thought that was worth 50% the op's production- in perpetuity- despite me providing
everything else, including the actual op's location, power, water, a pair of 1000HPS, all the watering system bits and daily maintenance. When I balked, this asswipe threatened to dob me in. FYI, I don't cow to threats very easily. Without any comment at all, I shut down the op, ran all the plant matter over with a lawnmower and left the mulch- and his light- on his back step. Never spoke to the guy again. Hope he was happy- he got 100% of the op's output.. and about 10% of my lawn. Can't say I'm not generous.
AL B. Fuct sorry one more question. What do you mean by cutting the water back to half of what Im using now. Do you mean to water every other day, or to still water every 24 hours but to fill the table only half as much. Thanks
Try every other day first. Should do it. If the plants consume more than 50% of their water (measure by weight) between every-other-day waterings, resume watering daily but cut the timer's ontime down to only enough time to flood only the bottom 1/2" of the media before the pump is shut off. As plants get larger, they will want more water. If you can, segregate larger and smaller plants from one another and adjust the watering interval accordingly. This was one of the considerations I applied when deciding to use 4 individual flood systems instead of a pair of 4x8' trays and two really big tanks. It's easier to tailor nutes and watering to individual 2-week phases of flowering and get it closer to right on average for all plants.
what i mean is a bucket inside a bucket. the lower bucket has the 1 big drain line going to the res.
the top bucket has the plant witha few holes in the bottom draining into the lower, so cut a few holes pack the r/w at he bottom & maybe it wont drain faster than it fills up making a flood effect but it actually be a line just pouring from the top into the bucket, get it now. lol
aslo we use a 50gal res & keep about 3-5gal per plant, so we know what u mean on res size went throught that already.
way easier to have more water than be cheap.
oh, OK, I sorta see what you're doing.
I like the watering ring you used the first time, but I can see how a pot of pellets would drain just as fast as it was being watered and not all the pellets would get wet because there's little wicking action in clay pellets- any pellets not right below the drip ring were not getting watered. Were you running that drip continuously? Did you have constant aeration in the nute soln? If so, that should have been sufficient to cause the roots to thread though the pellets in time. Once the roots fanned out, they should have been getting plenty of nute soln.
also we use the water for 2 weeks & just do a nut/water top off after week 1
When you top off the nuts, do you use cashews or pistachios?
Seriously, don't monkey around with adding more nutrient concentrate to your tanks between dumps. Trying to jockey the nutrient strength so it remains the same between dumps will very likely throw out the proper RATIO of N, P, K and other elements in the nute mix, inviting nutrient burn and perhaps not being quite correct for the phase of growth you're supporting.
Nutrient concentrate mixes are engineered to provide not only adequate concentration of the individual elements for the life of a tank of sauce, but do so in the correct ratio to one another. As you know, the ratio of P to N & K will be higher in flowering nutes; there will be more N by proportion in veg nutes. Let's suppose for a moment that your flowering nutes are 10-20-10. That's 1 part N, 2 parts P and 1 part K, relative to one another. Let's also suppose your plants eat 1/4 the N, 1/2 of the P and 1/3 of the K in a week. Then you jump in and add more nutes- but your nute meter reads by overall conductivity of the total dissolved salts in the soln. It does not tell you how much INDIVIDUAL N, P & K are in the soln. You
can't know what the existing ratios are after a week's use of the tank of sauce, nor exactly how much of each element is present, just using a common ppm meter. These only can give you an idea of the total conductivity of the solution. When you add more nute concentrate, you're adding N, P, K and everything else all at once, in their full proportion- which would be fine if you were adding to plain water, instead of a half-eaten tank of nutes.
Now- if you happen to have a
mass spectrometer, a hugely expensive piece of laboratory equipment, which
can divine the actual concentration of EACH element in the mixed tank of nutes-
and you have individual jugs of N, P, K (and all the other stuff) lying around, you WILL be able to monitor your solutions and correct for what the plants have eaten.
Unfortunately, if all you can measure is total dissolved salts (TDS) and all you can add to replace eaten nutes is the complete nute concentrate with all elements included, despite being able to bring the TDS ppm back up exactly to the target ppm, you will throw the ratios out of whack.
Your tanks should be sufficiently large that the TDS ppm stays close to your target figure through a 2 week life of a tank of sauce or at least stays above about 60-70% by day 14 with a top up with plain water on day 7 of the tank life, without adding any more nute concentrate. If the ppm falls below 50% by day 14, think about bigger tanks.
