Transfer from soil to DWC???

Ok, so here's the deal. I have 2 bubblelicious autos that are 8 days old and are looking excellent and are in small pots with soil at the moment. They are about 2 inches tall and have started their second set of leaves. If I were to transfer them to my DWC system ( which is a 5 gallon bucket ) how exactly would I go about doing it without killing or harming them?

I have all the materials needed but I've never used DWC bubbleponics and just need someone to walk me through this step.

you can do it, but I wouldn't advise it. First your going from a more concentrated environment to less. And if you do try not to change lights, that would be another added stress. its best just to plan ahead.

Maybe I'll just wait til next time then. Could you explain the process of germinating and setting up the root system in a DWC bubbleponics system please? I have mesh pots, rockwool, etc etc. I have everything I need I just don't understand how you get the roots to grow out of the rockwool directly into the water of your system. Seem like at some point you would expose them to dry air before they hit the water???? Or do you want the water line to be just above the bottom of the rockwool in the mesh pots?

This is the only part that has me confused. I have not been able to find a tutorial anywhere about this. If anyone knows a link to a good tutorial on this topic, I would really really appreciate it.

Thanks

the rockwool does it for you simply put. There are a lot of opinions on the distance from the water to the mesh pot.
Make sure you have bubbles on 24/7 otherwise roots will rot or drown your plants. The roots will grow just measure your nutes correctly and dont over feed.

peble said:

the rockwool does it for you simply put. There are a lot of opinions on the distance from the water to the mesh pot.
Make sure you have bubbles on 24/7 otherwise roots will rot or drown your plants. The roots will grow just measure your nutes correctly and dont over feed.

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In your experience how much space do you leave between the bottom of the mesh pots and the water line?

I have a crappy looking la confidential that I had in a 1.5 gallon pot of MG organic choice GARDENING SOIL, NOT potting mix, which is not only bad because its MG, but its not even potting mix. I ended up transplanting her from that crap, into a netpot 3 days ago.
What I did was use a 5 gallon bucket of 70 degree water. as close to room temp as I could. I dumped the plant out in my hand how you would normally do it for transplant, took a quick look at the roots and whatnot and dunked it in the bucket and GENTLY swished it around till all the dirt was off. Took me about ten minutes total. Mind you this was a clone I had put in, not a seed and it was not planted in rockwool, it was a jiffy cube. This seems like the worst possible thing to do right?
End result after all the washing off of dirt was a 14 inch root system due to growing in the pot for about a month.
Now just to give an Idea of how shitty she was doing, I was looking at 2 inches of growth in height for the past month. FAIL SOIL.
I took the girl and plopped her gently into a netpot and covered with hydroton.
Oddly enough she didnt even droop from stress or anything, Shes already an inch taller than she was 3 days back.

I only just started doing dwc myself so I'm learning too. I'm using a 3 gallon bucket with a drip system and airstone.
I really wouldnt recommend transplanting from soil to hydro unless it was absolutely neccessary. I also think that I might have gotten lucky this time as I heard LA confidential can be a pretty forgiving strain.
I've also never done autflowering plants before so I definitley don't know how they would react to it.
To be honest I made a thread exactly about this 3 or 4 days back because I was in the same boat as you.

As for the waterline/mesh level thing I've had people tell me to keep it about an inch or so. Roots will go anywhere they can to find moisture and nutrients and I'm not sure, but it might help them grow more.

When I transplanted mine from soil I just get a bucket of water and dip the root ball over and over till most of the soil falls off. It's okay to lose a few roots here and there. My plants weren't stressed from it at all, started growing again in 24 hrs. With autoflowers tho, I personally wouldn't risk stunting or stalling them, you need all the grow time you can get.

You are correct that sometimes the roots coming from rockwool cube can get air-pruned. They come out of the rockwool and before they can reach the water they more or less dry up. I've had this happen even with tons of bubbles splashing around. My problem was that I placed the rockwool plug directly in the net pot without and sort of media. Sometimes this worked, half the time it didn't. My solution was to simply use hydroton to surround the rockwool. The hydroton stays perfectly wet and the roots take off fast. I personally keep the water right under the net pot and drop it as the roots grow down until it's about 1-1 1/2 inches below the pot.

Heisenberg said:

When I transplanted mine from soil I just get a bucket of water and dip the root ball over and over till most of the soil falls off. It's okay to lose a few roots here and there. My plants weren't stressed from it at all, started growing again in 24 hrs. With autoflowers tho, I personally wouldn't risk stunting or stalling them, you need all the grow time you can get.

You are correct that sometimes the roots coming from rockwool cube can get air-pruned. They come out of the rockwool and before they can reach the water they more or less dry up. I've had this happen even with tons of bubbles splashing around. My problem was that I placed the rockwool plug directly in the net pot without and sort of media. Sometimes this worked, half the time it didn't. My solution was to simply use hydroton to surround the rockwool. The hydroton stays perfectly wet and the roots take off fast. I personally keep the water right under the net pot and drop it as the roots grow down until it's about 1-1 1/2 inches below the pot.

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Thanks man, I appreciate the post. I have decided to not transplant them since they are looking so healthy and growing so well. If they were not doing good in the current set up maybe I would go ahead and transplant them to DWC. I will just wait til next time and start with DWC.

+rep to you

I was just in another thread and I stated that I did it with clones that were about 6 inches tall...just took em out and rinced the roots thuroughly and and was very careful with the roots...threw them in rock wool and 5 gallon buckets with 7 inch net pots and saw no I'll effects...within a week I saw explosive growth
I say do it

I take plants that are in soil and put them into a dwc all the time. All of the clones I get are in soil already so I don't really have much of a choice. Like folks above me have said, just rinse off the soil and try and be gentle with the roots.

I have cut off a big chunk of roots by accident one time. It just took the plant an extra day or two before it started to take off. Remember these things are weeds, they are quite hard to kill.

I've transferred a plant from soil to dwc. You just have to rinse as much dirt off the roots as possible, and be really careful weaving the roots trough the net lid.

I've done it np. Rinsed the dirt off the roots, dug a small hole in a rockwool cube and just set the roots and stem in the rockwool and filled in the rest of the small hole with rockwool. Then I just put the rockwool in a net pot with hydroton.

I have done it many times, no issues. Rinse roots off, some will break or fall off. Just be as careful as you can be and start them off real low on nutes and work your way up.
I get a tub of RO water some H2o2 and rinse most the dirt off with a brisk run with fingers or if you have a sprayer you can gently spray the roots so to get most dirt out.

Like always many chime in with erroneous information not even really doing it themselves.

Why do you guys use rockwool, just layer the bottom of net pot with hydroton and lay roots on top and surround the rest with hydroton. Roots will drop in a few days and your good to go. I would think your asking for issues using rockwool if you dont have water level high enough to keep it moist.

Doesn't it make a little more sense to grow what was started in dirt in dirt and what might have been started in rock wool or grow plugs in Hydroton? One of you got lucky but I know a number of folks who did that and stressed their plants. Most of them turned 'hermie' and some lost their plants. There's no substitute for planning ahead of time. That's my two cents worth. Hank

Rockwool holds water better than hydroton.

go for it dude! just like one of the other guys mentioned, just use 2 buckets of water so like that , you could finish cleaning of the roots with the water thats more clean. be gentle with them. i had 3 planted in the dirt cuz i didnt have rockwool, and once they grew their first set of true leaves i put 2 of them in buckets. the 2 that are in buckets just blasted off, and totally out grew the 1 one that was left in the soil. go for it man!

KrAzY80 said:

Why do you guys use rockwool, just layer the bottom of net pot with hydroton and lay roots on top and surround the rest with hydroton. Roots will drop in a few days and your good to go. I would think your asking for issues using rockwool if you dont have water level high enough to keep it moist.

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some people use the drip halo with the air pump, and it does the trick. the roots will work there way down and the rockwool renders itself useless. its basically just there cuz the base of the plant is gonna get big.

happy growing guys!