My first grow attempt

Been lurking around for a while. I finally decided to try growing. I dont actually consume, I have a significant other who consumes for medical reasons.


I asked a friend for some extra seeds and purchased a bunch of hydro equipment. I am diving right in.

I purchased a 12 disk seedling tray and heating mat. I followed the instructions and had little shoots coming up within 2 days. After a week, 8 seeds sprouted and 4 did not do anything.

This is where my problems started, the shoots quickly hit the top of the seedling tray. So, I took the top off and put them in my dark room tent and turned on my metal halide light, keeping the light a good three feet above the seedlings.

I think the tent was too dry and I almost lost all of the seedlings. After one day it appered that two seedlings died and others were developing black tips. I quickly back-tracked. I purchased a taller seedling tray and put everything in there, recreating the environment in the small tray on a larger scale.

I have 5 seedlings that look like they might make it. If you look closely at the leaves, you can see the tips of the feeder leaves are black. Hopefully, since the first set of true leaves is out the plants will survive.



On the left you can see my orignal tray (I put 4 new seeds in the remaining disks and am trying to germinate them). The black wire is a temperature / humidity probe for when the cover is on. I put the 5 living disks in a bowl so I can see how much moisture is under the disks and the extra water just laying around the bowl is to keep humidity up.

Here is the setup from a little further away.


You can see that there is also a humidifier in the room. I was having real troubles with humidity. Where I am at the ambient humidity is around 8%. The manual dial you can see in the picture shows the humidty now around 70%, I am letting it creep back down now.

This is my dark room with the metal halide turned on. This is the location I was running it from (3 or so feet) above my seedlings.



I think it was just to intense and overheated the plants. I have two fresh air intakes at the bottom of the tent with an exhaust fan at the top. In addition, the metal halide lite has a 6" fan on it keeping it from heating the tent. My digital thermometer showed the temp at plant level to be in the high 70's to low 80's. I will note more when the plants are bigger.



Last but not least, my bubbleponics system arrived today (this was my motivation to post this).


There were several posts around about this system, lots of opinions. Basically it came down to this. It seemed I should be able to build one for cheap, but I was uncomfortable since I did not know what I was doing. So, ordered this to see how it works and decide if I should build or buy the next one.

The whole system with shipping was $125, let me save you $75. You can see all the parts there, 6 Gallon Sterilite tote (blue bucket), baggie of hydroton (red clay balls), air pump (box in front), bubbler (green stone), Water pump (box in back), Rockwool cubes (white blocks in baggie) and DIG Six outlet adjustable drip emitter (google it). Total purchase price Less than $50 bucks.

I dont begruge someone making a profit, but 150% markup kind of hurts my feelings.

That said, I would purchase it again, if you dont know what you are doing, there is nothing like getting the first kit with all the pieces. You can always home build the next one.

Time to set up the bubbleponics system and move the plants into it. According to the documentation for the bubbleponics system, I could have started to seed from the system. I chose not to do that, I went with the peat disk because it seemed there was less to go wrong.
Started setting up, ran into a problem right away.

The doc included with the bubble ponics system showed it like this: (Notice the screw in barbed adapter)


Mine looked like this... no screw in barbed adapter.


I put the plastic adapter over the one on the pump, it was snug. But a small bump would pull it off. My friend was over helping me out and he went digging for some old hose that would could put on the small adapter on the pump and then use a real plumbing adapter on. We found the some small hose and it was very snug. I pushed it on with a little work. When I went to pop it off something magic happened:

Well damn, the little adapter pops out.

On top of that the big adapter fits in very snug, so I dont have to do all the workarounds. They should update their docs.


The next thing is to fill the tank with 6 gallons of water and mark it with a black line. They call it callibrating the tank, sounds very technical... like sanitation engineer (trash man).


Now to ph balance the water. Here is my starting ph:


I added 5 tsp of this. The instructions said to use 1 tsp per gallon (should have been 6 total). But I figured if I undershot it would be better than going over and getting into the ph see-saw I read about.


Here is the ph after. Looks like its high 5 to low 6. Decided I really need a ph meter, this feels very imprecise. I know 5.5 to 6.5 is fine but the sloppy color thing bugs me (I'm a bit OCD).


Now to put in the pumps (air and water). They put this neat little hole in the side of the tank for the air hose:


Here is good shot of the water pump all hooked up from the bottom:


Here it is from the top:


Then I tried to close it. You can see the power cord for the water pump gets in the way.


My friend said we should just cut a slot for it. But if you put it in the center of the tub you can snap it closed. I will probably cut and light insulate a slot for it shortly. Seems silly they went through all that trouble for the air hose and had no solution for the water pump power.

At this point, I dumped all the ph balanced water in and give it test run:


I had read the instructions, and it says the drip lines go under the plants. That seemed wrong to me. So I made them drip from above. It was very hard to get them to drip in the right spot and the drips would keep the soil to wet. So, I decided to follow the instructions and put the drip lines underneath. I had to take out all the baskets and re-seat everything.

Here is a little plant sitting on the drip line on top of the hydroton. The insructions say to have the top of rockwool (peat in my case) even with the top of the basket.



Here are the plants in the baskets. We are still in the process of setting them all in this picture.



Now, we have placed everything in the grow room. See that right gauge? Its says 20% humidity, I am still fighting this battle. I am hoping that once I fire up the air stone, the humidity will go up.



Lastly, here is picture that worries me.


The instructions say 6 gallons of water. This leaves about two inches form the bottom of the basket to the water. Seems like a long way for a litte root to go for water. I think the idea is the drip line will provide water until the roots are in the tank. Time will tell.

Thats it for this entry. The next post should be me changing out the tank water. I plan to do that this weekend. I basically want to "dry" run that process before there are a whole bunch of roots in my way.