DWC Root Slime Cure aka How to Breed Beneficial Microbes

you have to let the tea brew for a day or two before you add it, and i wouldn't do every day. sometimes i get some growth inside my container or on my airstones also, the tea seems to still work though. it helps to brew in the dark. airstones can be cleaned by soaking in h2o2 overnight.

I have been letting it brew for two days, and in the dark. a friend of mine suggested RIDOMIL- anybody have any ideas on this?

Have you guys heard of Capulator's Benificials? They handle a whole assortment of pests besides the slime including mites, aphids, and gnats (and can be used in flowering). I'm trying to combine Heizenburg's tea with Capulator's so that I can use it in my UC DWC. Anyone have any suggestions? These are surely the two best tea recipes I have heard of...

Capulator's Benificials can be found on the THCfarmer forum and are worth a look (just google "capulator's benificials"). Ever seen benificials kill bugs? Very exciting.

Heisenberg said:

The tea will fight bad microbes, but the only 'pests' it will directly effect are fungus gnat larvae. It will make them deathly ill and unable to grow into adults.



A plant's roots can not absorb organic compounds unless they are first decomposed by microbes. So without microbes you're unlikely to get the full benefit of an organic nute program. Some companies sell organic nutes that are already broken down and ready for uptake, so research what you have.



That quote was referring to organic PH adjusters, such as vinegar. Hydro PH adjusters that are not labeled organic are fine.

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Thanks Heisenberg again for you tea recipe again. Do any knows if the tea work good with my flood and drain table system? the plant is on a 6 inch rock wool. Do i add tea to reservoir every 3 days 1 cup per 10 gal? Im trying to get monster root. Thanks!

this morning the slime seems to have subsided after getting a cup a day after the original dose. they are getting a nute change on sat and i think i will still drop some ridomin in on friday to lay waste to whatever is gettin up in my garden

Hi guys, all good?
I am so hope you r to!

..so? I have this problem that I would very much appreciate if any of you a bit more experienced guys could answer for me, it was really hard actually to even take the step to log in to ask this specific question do to it´s nature, lol.. I took mr Heisenberg´s tip (as well as some of you others I could imagine) and started a new batch of 2G tea instead of my usual 1G brew, thing is though I have a hard time to remember if it was yesterday or the day before that even? Time was around 18-19 hundred hours (GMT+1) give or take a few?
Just that a friend that now live and work in Holland came home to visit me a few days ago and I had already told him I am trying GHS Lemon Skunk (tip from mr. Heisenberg regarding a tough strain) before so naturally he had been running around Amsterdam to get his hand on the best freaking Lemon he could get his hands on and gave me at least a 10´er as a delayed birthday present not to mention what else strains we were "investigating" before he left to visit his family here in same country later that evening. I know, I know.. not the best excuse to forget what day you started your new tea batch but there you go, it is what it is I´ll guess and it´s not the only thing I have forgotten about under these last 2-3 days either. I´m not a huge smoker but somehow I tried to be these days, nuff said!

Sorry about my boring story here, I would love to know if it is a good idea to go on for what could be 3 days of brewing? ..or am I better off potentially cutting the brewing process a bit short instead? Ideas and thoughts regarding that would be highly appreciated or perhaps a link to where it have been discussed earlier in the thread? I´m grateful about any info I can get my hands on that covers that topic (if there even is one, lol)? I´ll try to NOT be mentally handicapped when I start my next batch, thanks for reading guys!

/.dr

TriPurple said:

I have had great success with your tea. Recently I've been reading good things about Pond/Start-zyme & at a fraction of the cost. What do you think of these type of products? Do they have similar effects? Thanks!!!!

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I am using start-zyme right now in my aquarium. It became slimed around the same time slime showed back up in my cloners, which is another indication to me that slime spores come from the environment. The start-zyme did seem to help a bit, but not for 10+ days. Using any enzyme product in a hydro garden which is prone to slime is risky. It can trigger an outbreak or make an existing outbreak much worse. Also, any product meant for ponds or aquariums which contains microbes (start-zyme does) probably has microbes intended to remove nitrogen from the water, which is obviously something we do not want in our reservoirs.

mickfanning said:

What is the optimal temperature in the reservoir when using the Heisenberg Tea in a RDWC? And if I use a nutrient solution of 50% RO water and 50% Tap water, will the chlorine from the Tap water kill the bennies?

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70-78 is optimal. Typical amounts of chlorine found in tap water will not cause significant harm to bennies, especially if diluted.

big liverski said:

can you add too much tea? out of desperation i have been putting some in daily to try and keep the slime at bay until harvest.
Also, on the last batch i brewed, i got slime on my airstone. any ideas on this?

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Slime on airstones is not necessarily bad. It is an indication that you have organic matter entering the res. You may be using a bit too much food in your tea, or have some other source of organic material. Adding tea daily is okay, but at some point you get diminishing returns. Remember that microbes place a big demand on dissolved oxygen, so if you are adding them frequently you must have adequate aeration. It is also important to rinse slime off roots or snip off dead/dormant roots.

Chopsticks33 said:

Thanks Heisenberg again for you tea recipe again. Do any knows if the tea work good with my flood and drain table system? the plant is on a 6 inch rock wool. Do i add tea to reservoir every 3 days 1 cup per 10 gal? Im trying to get monster root. Thanks!

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Should work just fine, but you will want some housing in your res, like a lava rock. You probably only need to add tea every 5 days. Alternately you could just brew a batch of tea and inoculate the rockwool directly.

Illladelph said:

Have you guys heard of Capulator's Benificials? They handle a whole assortment of pests besides the slime including mites, aphids, and gnats (and can be used in flowering). I'm trying to combine Heizenburg's tea with Capulator's so that I can use it in my UC DWC. Anyone have any suggestions? These are surely the two best tea recipes I have heard of...

Capulator's Benificials can be found on the THCfarmer forum and are worth a look (just google "capulator's benificials"). Ever seen benificials kill bugs? Very exciting.

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Never heard of it. I'll have a look. Thanks for sharing.

dr.medecine said:

Hi guys, all good?
I am so hope you r to!

..so? I have this problem that I would very much appreciate if any of you a bit more experienced guys could answer for me, it was really hard actually to even take the step to log in to ask this specific question do to it´s nature, lol.. I took mr Heisenberg´s tip (as well as some of you others I could imagine) and started a new batch of 2G tea instead of my usual 1G brew, thing is though I have a hard time to remember if it was yesterday or the day before that even? Time was around 18-19 hundred hours (GMT+1) give or take a few?
Just that a friend that now live and work in Holland came home to visit me a few days ago and I had already told him I am trying GHS Lemon Skunk (tip from mr. Heisenberg regarding a tough strain) before so naturally he had been running around Amsterdam to get his hand on the best freaking Lemon he could get his hands on and gave me at least a 10´er as a delayed birthday present not to mention what else strains we were "investigating" before he left to visit his family here in same country later that evening. I know, I know.. not the best excuse to forget what day you started your new tea batch but there you go, it is what it is I´ll guess and it´s not the only thing I have forgotten about under these last 2-3 days either. I´m not a huge smoker but somehow I tried to be these days, nuff said!

Sorry about my boring story here, I would love to know if it is a good idea to go on for what could be 3 days of brewing? ..or am I better off potentially cutting the brewing process a bit short instead? Ideas and thoughts regarding that would be highly appreciated or perhaps a link to where it have been discussed earlier in the thread? I´m grateful about any info I can get my hands on that covers that topic (if there even is one, lol)? I´ll try to NOT be mentally handicapped when I start my next batch, thanks for reading guys!

/.dr

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I guess it is better to overbrew tea than to underbrew because you don't want left over molasses to enter the res. 48 hours is usually enough time for the microbes to eat nearly all of it.

Good luck with your lemons. I just recently let that strain go in favor of TGA's ace and 3d. Absolutely stellar plants. But GHS lemon and also cheese was some of the best ive grown previous to trying TGA.

Ok guys I did a bit more reading today. Seems there is a bit more information about the slime out there from professionals now that using bennies in hydro is catching on. (some of it suspiciously resembles my advice) Many people have trouble 'capturing' a res when they have plants with very little roots. This is because the bennies have no place to live and thrive, while the slime is able to just grow in the water itself. The simple solution is to start with a clean res and add inoculated housing to give the bennies an edge. Lettuce growers have began to favor sand filters or adding a layer of dichotomous earth to the bottom of their res. Dichotomous earth will also act as a food for the good microbes, and is supposed to NOT feed bad microbes. I am a bit skeptical as adding any organic matter to the res sets off alarms in my head, but it may be worth a shot.

Here is what I have had success with.

Moving an adult plant to the res with young plants. If the adult plant is healthy and has an established microbe population it should be enough to keep the slime at bay until younger plants can build a root structure. You will want little to no nutes in your new res, so the adult plant will not be eating much and may suffer. Best to use a 'spare' plant if you have one.

Brewing a lava rock in the bucket with the tea and then transferring it to the new res seems to work well. I am also currently brewing about 1/4 bag of hydroton with my tea and I will let this just float around in the water (or sink) in my new res. I use a shallow water cloner which is too small for lava rocks, so I am hoping I can just throw some brewed hydroton in there among the cuttings. I will let you guys know the results.


I also found confirmation that h2o2 and chlorine are poor ways to go with young roots.

There has been a major move away from the'kill everything and sterilize approach' for nutrient solutions to a more integrated and environmentally friendly method of allowing microbes to exist naturally in a well run, fully aerated system. Sterilization of the nutrient has proven many times to be difficult and expensive to carry out, often resulting in plant damage, nutrient problems and residues of sterilization chemicals. Using sterilization techniques such as H2O2 and Chlorine in nutrients solutions requires a high dose to kill some of the persistent plant pathogens and this has been shown to damage young and sensitive roots in many crops. 100ppm H2O2 is required to kill spores of some of the common hydroponic pathogens, but even a level of 8ppm was found to damage lettuce seedling roots. The same problem exists with the use of chlorine. Studies have also found that after nutrient sterilization when all microbes and algae have been killed, re-growth of these occurs very rapidly in the nutrient, and this can in fact result in some of the pathogenic microbes re-establishing fastest, causing many new problems in the systems. A better approach, which is used by many commercial growers, is to start with a clean, sterilized water source, add in the nutrients, then inoculate the nutrient solution with a mixture of beneficial microbes

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So if you do want to kill slime on young roots, seems physan 20 is the way to go. In my experience, roots treated with h2o2 take longer to start making new shoots. In my latest bout with slime I did not sterilize roots. I just made sure everything else was clean and sterile, rinsed roots under the sink really well, and removed any that were suspect.

It seems for me a flushing agent works pretty good to clean the roots. Lately, if I see some discolored roots I just flush them with plain water and a flushing agent and there pretty clean looking afterwards. Now that I think about it every time I used h202 I had a hard time re-establishing my bennies before the slime would take back hold. Also for me clear formulas mean clear roots. Clears in the clear ...im such a dork lol

This thread helped me learn much about bennies and using them properly I now never have problems with slime and if I ever see it I knock it out with the quickness. Also I feel I got the best results out of the tea by dialing down the application rate. But thats just me. This tea is so highly concentrated in beneficials a small amount seems to go a long way.


Thanks heis for sharing your knowledge. A prince & a scholar.

I have been wondering this for a while, can I make the tea using only earthworm castings? They themselves have bb's. Is this not enough different strains of bb? Will it work but just not as well? I want to try it because if a dwc set up. I have the brown slime as well.

Thanks

djones12 said:

I have been wondering this for a while, can I make the tea using only earthworm castings? They themselves have bb's. Is this not enough different strains of bb? Will it work but just not as well? I want to try it because if a dwc set up. I have the brown slime as well.

Thanks

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Sure. EWC tea can work great as a preventative, but you will be in a bit of a fight if you already have slime. It still should win out eventually. Good luck!

My 100x scope is enough to allow me to see nematodes swimming around in the tea water. You may want to have a look, it's pretty interesting. I also had a look at the stingy slime floating through my water and saw no movement at all. Guess it takes a real microscope to see what's going on there.

None of my plants currently have slime, but if I make a new res it shows up in a few hours. This res can be completely dark, have ~0ppm, and no additives and it still get slimed. As I stated, I solved this problem by adding lava rocks and hydroton to my brew. Meanwhile I had one tub I did not mess with that had been allowed to get gobs and gobs of stringy snot in the water, collecting on the airlines as it floated through. (no plants) In my brew this time I used two airstones, one came out looking like new, the other came out with a thick black goo coating it. I have no idea why one gets goo and the other is perfectly clean, but I moved this black goo stone to the super stingy res. 15 hours later I had a look and there is NO stingy stuff in the water and the cloudiness cleared up. I moved one small barely rooted clone to this water and low and behold a root tip has begun to peak out of the bottom of the cup.

So, just placing tea into the water did not prevent the stingy slime, but it seems adding any type of housing will IF you brew the housing in the tea batch initially. The inoculated hydroton doesn't seem to be keeping my clone water from foaming.(although so far water looks clear and the cut stems still look fresh) My next step is to move a larger plant into the clone tub, spread out it's roots, and set the cups among these roots. Click here if you are not familiar with my shallow water cloner.

Heisenberg said:

Sure. EWC tea can work great as a preventative, but you will be in a bit of a fight if you already have slime. It still should win out eventually. Good luck!

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Would you think it would be better to use double the recommended amount of castings? I don't know what the other products have that arnt in the castings. Maybe I won't be able to fight all the varieties of bad bacteria?

djones12 said:

Would you think it would be better to use double the recommended amount of castings? I don't know what the other products have that arnt in the castings. Maybe I won't be able to fight all the varieties of bad bacteria?

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EWC will give you a very nice base of good bacteria, but no need to use more. About a handful per gallon of water. It's absolutely worth a shot. EWC will not give you mycos or other fungi, but you will get dozens and dozens of good bacterial strains.

Heisenberg said:

EWC will give you a very nice base of good bacteria, but no need to use more. About a handful per gallon of water. It's absolutely worth a shot. EWC will not give you mycos or other fungi, but you will get dozens and dozens of good bacterial strains.

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Your so freaking fast with your replies. Its awesome. You guys are so helpful.

Heisenberg said:

My 100x scope is enough to allow me to see nematodes swimming around in the tea water. You may want to have a look, it's pretty interesting. I also had a look at the stingy slime floating through my water and saw no movement at all. Guess it takes a real microscope to see what's going on there.

None of my plants currently have slime, but if I make a new res it shows up in a few hours. This res can be completely dark, have ~0ppm, and no additives and it still get slimed. As I stated, I solved this problem by adding lava rocks and hydroton to my brew. Meanwhile I had one tub I did not mess with that had been allowed to get gobs and gobs of stringy snot in the water, collecting on the airlines as it floated through. (no plants) In my brew this time I used two airstones, one came out looking like new, the other came out with a thick black goo coating it. I have no idea why one gets goo and the other is perfectly clean, but I moved this black goo stone to the super stingy res. 15 hours later I had a look and there is NO stingy stuff in the water and the cloudiness cleared up. I moved one small barely rooted clone to this water and low and behold a root tip has begun to peak out of the bottom of the cup.

So, just placing tea into the water did not prevent the stingy slime, but it seems adding any type of housing will IF you brew the housing in the tea batch initially. The inoculated hydroton doesn't seem to be keeping my clone water from foaming.(although so far water looks clear and the cut stems still look fresh) My next step is to move a larger plant into the clone tub, spread out it's roots, and set the cups among these roots. Click here if you are not familiar with my shallow water cloner.

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Heis, as I stated a few weeks ago in this thread I was adding tea through out my grow, even though I did not need it anymore. I would add a gallon twice a week during veg and than dropped it to a gallon a week during flower til about the 7th week. Need to check my notes for the exact date that I stop the tea. Well my roots were brown and where they were clump together, they were dark brown and you could even say dirty looking. Why am I telling you this, you might be wondering. Well since I was dumping so much tea in my rez that I believe the benne's made the root mass as their "housing". At chop the roots smelled fine and although dirty was very healthy. What do you think of the assumption that the benne's made their housing out of my root mass?

Does anyone have experience using Heisenberg Tea in the WaterFarm drip systems? I was wondering if the Bennies would do well in the WaterFarms if I didn't use air stones(?) I know that the slow dripping of the WaterFarms causes slight surface disruption of the water in the reservoir below, but is that enough aeration for the Bennies? My problem is that my roots always cling to the air stones and then if I lift up the top part of the WaterFarm, the roots get torn

mickfanning said:

Does anyone have experience using Heisenberg Tea in the WaterFarm drip systems? I was wondering if the Bennies would do well in the WaterFarms if I didn't use air stones(?) I know that the slow dripping of the WaterFarms causes slight surface disruption of the water in the reservoir below, but is that enough aeration for the Bennies? My problem is that my roots always cling to the air stones and then if I lift up the top part of the WaterFarm, the roots get torn

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Ive Run My WaterFarm Without An Airstone In My Bottom Res With No Problems.However Today I Run A 5 Inch Round weighted In My Res's.This Is To give My Bennies An Oxygenated Home Plus IMHO You Can't Have too Much Dissolved Oxygen In Your Res.

Heres MaryAnn Week7 Day1 Of Veg.Shes A Very Small Plant.