First Grow. Using Ebb/Flow 11 Crops

In my research, I came across a thread that provided a lot of perspective in a variety of ways. I list it below. Ideally, I’d like to contribute the same way. I noticed in his thread, there were talks of “hijacking” and whatnot. I don’t care about that here. Anything that could possibly contribute to myself, or anyone in regards to the successful growth of this amazing plant, please comment. If you think I’m doing something stupid or wrong, please elaborate. So thank you GreenThumbSucker. You are the reason I am journaling this grow and you are the reason I chose this site to post it at. I should update regularly as time is of the essence. I ask you all for your help along my first journey. Thank you.

https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/237271-lucas-formula-hydroponic-grow-journal.html

A little bit of background. About 10 years ago I was interested in closet growing. At the time I was going to use soil. I had bought a couple of things: MH lamp kit, couple of pots, soil. That was pretty much it. So I started a couple seeds and got them into some pots in the back yard. I honestly don’t remember why but I just never tended to them after the first week. Not all that interested I guess? 10 years later…… Here I am, a grown adult with somewhat of a god complex

The thought of playing god to these living things really interests me. In addition, I am a legal grower and consumer of medical marijuana. Naturally, my interest for growing peaked again. I have spent a decent amount of money to get this project going. Around $2000 actually. Depending how detailed I get with specific things, you’ll see despite my hours upon hours of reading and research, I unfortunately overlooked some things along the way. I feel I have a pretty legit setup, but no where near perfect. Here is my setup.

-Mylar liner grow tent. 5X5’ and 6’ tall. I’m really impressed with the quality of this thing. I have a sump pump in the tent flowing back to my reservoir. It is turned on when enough water initiates the float ball switch. It’s an insurance policy if you will. Although I found out in the event of a flood in my tent, it wouldn’t work. More on that later.

-One 600 Watt MH/HPS combo light with air cooled hood reflector. For the Veg state I have my lights coming on at 2000 hours and turning off at 1400 hours. I need to adjust this soon. Hopefully I can wait till I flip them to flower but this is just really inconvenient right now. Don’t know why I picked it.
*PHOTO*

-Ebb and Flow/Grow Hydro Irrigation System. I built this myself using instructions/common sense from the Big Boy set. 1 controller bucket and 11-3.5 gallon buckets. The buckets are lined with 10” “basket bucket lids” which contain the roots and grow medium. All buckets (except for controller bucket) are rested on 2X4’s to give a little extra height to alleviate some of the pooling water at the bottom of the buckets. I am using a 48 gallon stand up reservoir which is actually designed as a horse water bucket feeder. It is clear so I wrapped it with black stuff for a under a lawn and garbage bags to keep it dark. I was forced to use this tall narrow one as I ran out of space. This caused a water pump issue for me as you’ll later see. Well, two pump issues. There’s not really a lid for this reservoir. I’ll only elaborate on that part if someone requests, meaning they think they may purchase the same reservoir. The Big Boy system comes with a 400GPH fill pump and 250GPH drain pump. I decided to go with 800GPH fill and 400GPH drain. I just wanted my water moving a little faster I suppose. I have an air pump with 4 air stones in my reservoir. Too much? Is there such thing as too much oxygen? I am using a EC/TDS meter. I have calibration solution which I test every 2 or 3 days. I am using pH test STRIPS right now. Out of my tap, I’m recording pH of 6 (strips don’t give points) and 80PPM. I also have pH solution that came with the GH pH Up and Down but I just don’t believe that test. It shows more around 6.5 but the strips (in between colors) show more like 5.5 I am considering getting a better tester, I know I should. I am using GH Flora Series for this grow. I was originally going with really small rock wool grow cubes in my buckets. My concern was the cost of Hydroton. All my research showed I would have had to spend $100 on Hydroton. I went with the $15 bag of rock wool. I later thought (without filling with water yet yet), since by buckets flood from the top up, the rock wool wont have proper support, therefore the roots wont. So I get and clean real good some gravel and line the top of my buckets with it for stability. The more and more I read about this method (this pretty much non-existent method) I decided I had to go with the Clay Pebbles. I go to my garden store and to my amazement; it was $50 for the amount I needed. He said the BRAND Hydroton is out of business. Since I bought most of my stuff from Amazon (best prices around), this is why it was so expensive. Supply and demand, just like Twinkies right now, the Brand Hydroton is expensive.

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-One 464CFM inline fan on a speed controller. I am using the fan on high when the lights are on and halfway when lights are off. When guests are over, I turn the fan all the way down as to not draw attention. I do not notice a temperature difference when using low or half speed. I just use half for more air movement. There are three openings on each side (less the front) of the grow tent. Air is pulled from those openings and sucked into one side of the reflector hood. The other side of the hood has the ducting leading to the outside of the tent where it is attached to the inline fan. The inline fan then sends more ducting to my closet door. When necessary, I’ll use the carbon filter that came with the fan. I will be blowing INTO the filter, not pulling air from. I’m aware of the “controversy” and I feel the positives and negatives for each method are identical in importance. This way is more convenient for me so shove it

-Purple Bubblegum strain. I chose this strain for no reason other than it was what my buddy had.

The Journal:

12/14/12
Originally I was supposed to get 11 clones on 12/10 but my buddy said there would be a 2-week delay. Thinking I had some time, I lagged on finishing my setup. He calls this morning and basically says it’s a now or 1 month wait. I take advantage of the call and meet up with him that evening. As you can see, my room isn’t completely set up. What you don’t see is my fill and drain pumps aren’t hooked up quite yet. I performed some empty room tests for temperate/humidity reasons. Temperature is not exceeding 82 degrees while the humidity is around 23%. Dark temperatures are 68 with humidity of 40%.

6PM-Meet up with my buddy and acquired 11 Purple Bubblegum clones. So I put them in the tray you see and wrapped them up with the black so the roots would stay dark. The cubes were plenty moist so watering wasn’t an issue. Now after examination, I did notice the following. In my beginner ability to judge these things, 2 were CLEARLY stressed. I called them the runts. 7 looked pretty decent and 2 would be what I would describe as “thriving.”

8PM-I placed the babies under the light as you can see in the photos. I set my ballast to 50% running them at 300 Watts. I am so excited to have them

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12/15/12
4:30AM – I check on the girls, they are looking the same as the night before.

8PM – I safely “inject” the cubes with 3ML of 300PPM nutrient solution. I then flood my buckets in order to get a time table on how long they take to flood and drain, or Ebb and Flow Uh oh……. As I mentioned earlier, the height of the reservoir now makes the pump not powerful enough to push the water up to it. A 400GPH pump?!?!? I was extremely irritated. I had to drain by manually guiding my drain pump hose into the sump pump and pump everything back into the reservoir. Irritated…. No, pissed at this point. I’m thinking, I know the Big Boy reservoir is a foot and a half shorter, but they used a 250. The instructions for my 400 say it should have worked but oh well. I decide to put 1000GPH pump in my drain bucket. Shouldn’t have any problems.

12/16/12
9AM-Today is my day off so before football starts, I get all my rock wool situated in the pots. I safely “injected” 1ML of 300PPM nutrient solution into each cube then transferred the rooted cubes to the pots.

8PM-Lights on as it’s good morning for the ladies. I now have the ballast at 100% giving them 600 Watts. Here are 2 close up photos of 2 different girls. One is one of the “runts” and the other is the one with the most leaves. I read lots of stories about runts turning out to be the best crop so I’m not concerned at this point……

12/17/12
So my 18 hour lighting schedule is still 2000-1400. Today at 1230 the power went out. It did not come back on till 2330. I will do my best to adjust/get it back on schedule while giving the proper light. Runt is not getting any better.

12/18/12
4:30AM-50ML of 300PPM nutrient solution surrounding the rooted cubes in each pot.

5:00PM-Lights off instead of 1400 to compensate for the light loss during power outage.
9PM-Lights back on. Will have them shut off at 1400 and from then on, my normal 2000-1400 schedule.

12/19/12-
No watering needed today, still plenty moist. So like I mentioned above, after thinking about the rock wool as my medium, it just seem more and more like a bad idea. I got up to the garden store and got some Hydroton, or “Clay Pebbles.” I start work at 5am so I when the lights came on at 8PM, I was only able to get 4 transferred over to the Hydroton.

12/20/12
Moved remaining 6 into the Hydroton. Roots are about ½ inch out of the cubes. My runt is pretty much confirmed dead. No roots coming out of his cube and they are brown. Maybe he will come back? Haha. You can see him next to the healthy plant in the middle right pot. Watered by hand using 150PPM nutrient solution. Received my 100GPH pump in the mail today so I install it.

2/21/12
Starting at 8PM (when the lights come on), I will run start flooding these manually and watching them as they flood. I will log the time it takes to flood and drain, then set them to water 4 times a day dispersed evenly over the 18 hours of light. I will have them water as soon as the lights come on, and no later than 2 hours before they are set to turn off. My tests show it takes 19 minutes to flood and 18 minutes to drain. Perfect…. Now I know how to set their timers.

12/22/12
So I’ve been having a problem. My grow tent which is in my closet is warm. It’s a consistent 77-79 degrees in the tent and the closet with a consistent 65-67 at night. This isn’t a problem for the babies; it’s a problem for the reservoir which sits in the closet. I can’t keep the water temp below 70. I figured I’ll changed the water when it’s coldest in the morning. It comes out at 63 consistently. I changed out my reservoir with fresh water and will start keeping frozen bottles in the freezer at all times to constantly replenish. This is my only solution. I can’t buy a water cooler, I’ve spent too much already According to the bottle Veg stage requires 1:1:1. This worked out to 250ML of each bottle for my size Reservoir. Reservoir PPM is reading 680.
1

12/23/12
I’m sitting on the couch watching the football game and it dawns on me. I think I may be over watering. I’m using less light and fewer plants than he is and I don’t think he’s going 4 times a day. So after referring back to my printout of GreenThumbSucker’s journal, it’s confirmed. He’s going twice a day, so I will bump mine down to that. Since my second runt is looking kinda funny, I moved the light up from 20 inches to around 34 inches. I figured I want a little stretch anyway…. I plan to flip to flower around 18-21 inches.



12/24/12
So I’ve been able to maintain by Reservoir temp at 66 degrees over the last 2 days. We will see what happens. Plants seem like maybe they don’t like the nutes at this rate? I’m not sure. I’ll monitor. What is clearly obvious is there is plenty of new growth in the last 10 days while going through 2 transplants. Here is a photo of the whole garden. You can compare and see yourself What’s going on here with my second runt? Light burn? Nute burn? I’m maintaining my light at about 34 inches above. The third photo is just a regular plant. She look OK to you?

12/25/12
Woke up late for work this morning so I couldn’t check on the babies when I woke up. At 1:30pm, this photo was taken. Some new growth here. Will add some nutrients tomorrow.




12/26/12
1:30PM-Get home from work. Girls are about 30 minutes from nap time and done eating for the “day.” I added 100ML of FloraGro and 100ML of FloraMicro to my reservoir. The PPM is now up to 850. Still having an issue maintain my res temp. It’s not going above 71, but I’d like it cooler. I can’t keep enough frozen bottles in my freezer. My freezer bill is going to be higher than my lamp



7PM-Turned the lights on an hour early today as I had plans for later in the night. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know they could grow so much at ‘night.” Sprayed them with a very diluted form of soapy water, then again with regular water. I’ll spray them every couple days while Vegging. Don’t know why I’m doing it other than it just seems logical that plants get rained on.




12/27/12
4:30AM-My babies are doing fairly well in my opinion. I don’t really have any experience to compare it to but I am very please thus far. Disappointing losing the one.




1:30- Despite 9 of them thriving in my opinion, this one seems to be getting worse. The photos are named with the date taken so you can see the gradual decline. Suggestions???


Here is the progress of the "runt"

12/28/12
I am adjusting my light cycle. Hope it doesn’t affect them too much. Lights will now be running from 0400-2200. This way they are running whenever I am home. I am also noticing my Fill pump is taking a lot longer. The only thing I can assume is now that the nutrient solution is “thicker.” It used to take 23 minutes to fill my pots, now it’s 44. Something just isn’t right here. I’ll do a reservoir change soon and see if the pump filter is already clogged. Hard to imagine seeing as though it’s brand new. I’ve noticed some rockwool residue on the bottom of some of my pots anyway. Had only planned on 1 res change during Veg but oh well.
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12/29/12
Manually flooded my pots today. Unusual flood/drain times continued.
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12/30/12
6AM-Off today so I don’t know if my 0400 flood actually fed the plants. Was able to get the reservoir changed out by feeding time at 1100. The fill pump had some residue in the filter. Adjusted the nutrients to 780PPM. 400ML Gro, 200ML Micro and 200ML Bloom. Flora Series of course…. Getting the pH adjusted. Going to try to maintain 5.7. A manual flood now has them filling at 16 minutes, draining at 17. Can anyone provide any imput on this. Am I going to have to babysit these floods? Is it normal for various PPM solutions to affect the drain/flood time intervals? I used this method because of it being “self-sufficient” so I’m a little confused at this point. Maybe a couple more days will tell. Maybe it was the rockwool residue

Not much to update. Growth continues. Not one reply to my thread here, don't know what's so unappealing. Maybe some criticism would help? I won't be as detailed anymore as maybe that's just boring?

Anyway, flipped them into flower Jan 5-6. Here is a photo the day before flower, and the first day of....





There has been some massive root growth. Most pots have at least 7 coming out the bottom/sides of the pots.

Are you going to trim up the bottoms of those plants? Looks like you might be asking for a lot of popcorn in a 5x5 w/ only 1-600w.

Thanks for the reply. Care to elaborate? I knew I was working with a lot of space for such little light. I don't have the amperage to go any higher though. Once the 5X5 came, I with I had gone with 4X4.

I typically trim the bottom couple inches of foliage that are getting blocked by the upper stuff. It makes for more big buds and less popcorn down below the canopy. If your only a couple weeks into flower I think you could still do this without stunting your ladies.

RXFarmer said:

I typically trim the bottom couple inches of foliage that are getting blocked by the upper stuff. It makes for more big buds and less popcorn down below the canopy. If your only a couple weeks into flower I think you could still do this without stunting your ladies.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply..... I am only 8 days into flowering now. I have another 600 watts on the way giving the ladies 1200 HPS within days. Would you still recommend trimming with the extra light? First time grower here buddy....