Oh-Oo-whoa, The Sweetest Nugg- 2K9. READ IT AND WEEP...

Alright this is my second crack at growing fine buds after getting a somewhat decent yet disappointing yield the first time around with my homemade aerospring setup which I built after reading about the setup in HowToHydroponics. If you're curious as to how it works you can read all about it on futuregarden.com and even buy a kit if you want. I've now expanded my setup to two 20-something gallon totes with 8 plants each. I'm also adding two bubble buckets to the side with two plant capacity each. I ordered the seeds from attitude and was very satisfied with their basic express shipping. I ordered only feminized seeds this time around as I plan to try and clone these fine ladies. The list is as follows:

6 Kushberry
3 Afghan Kush
5 G13-Haze
1 Purple Lady fem. (came free w/ order)
1 Pure Power fem. '' ''
1 Pure Gold fem. '' ''

As you can see I received 17 feminized seeds but my setup has 20 plant capacity, so I also sprouted threeThaiXSkunk seeds that I'd had leftover from my first grow. My Attitude order also came with 5 free Power Skunk seeds but I plan to save those to plant outdoors.

My light system also received a major upgrade. While last time I grew 8 plants under a 400W Sun System 1 HPS, this time I added a switchable 1000W C.A.P. Extreme ballast with a Hydrofarm Radiant Reflector and a C.A.P. 435 cfm blower to cool it. It's currently outfitted with a MH bulb for veg. in case you wondered. Now I have 1400 Watts of light in a 8x3x8 area coated in panda poly, so all you need to know is that I pretty much rule the school when it comes to lumens. Haha jk. But seriously I hope to get some good yields with this much light. I also picked up a GH dual-diaphram airpump from the local hydro shop to pump more oxygen into my reservoirs and buckets. The air pump I still have from my last grow is one of those Elite 802 aquarium-style pumps with 2 outputs.

I germinated my seeds by dropping them into Perfect Start starter plugs and letting them sit until they sprouted, only giving them a light spray with tap water every few days if they looked dry. I've had 100% success with these plugs and I like the simplicity. I ordered them from futuregarden.com after I read that they're a foolproof way to start seedlings. Once they all sprouted I put them into 3" netcups, filled with hydroton, and inserted them into the springs/totes. They haven't been given any nutes yet but I'm considering adding a low dose tomorrow because they're all looking good uptop and rooting well after a week in the spring. I haven't made the bubble buckets yet but I have everything and plan to do so tomorrow and insert the last of my babies. (They're currently in a tray nearby which I keep spritzing) I will post pictures right after I get some new batteries for my camera because I know you have questions about the setup.

Here are some pics of my setup, as you can see the two springs are coated with panda poly which I rigged up with the help of some gorilla tape. There is still a little bit of leakage from the bigger tote when the spray bar is on so I'm probably going to get some silicon tomorrow and see if I can rig up a better seal for the lid. It's currently hooked up to an NFT-1 timer which I have mixed feelings about because I don't think that its absolutely necessary to have better aeration but I feel it helps keep my nutrients cooler by not running the pump all the time. Anyone have experience with these?

Anyways I don't think I'm going to add nutes for another couple of days or so because a couple of the girls that sprouted late are still looking kind of smallish to handle any nutes yet.

Oh and before some smartass decides to tell me, I know I need a fan in the room blowing on the plants! The fan I had previously was a piece of shit and broke right after my first grow, so a new wall fan is on my list of things to buy on my next trip to the grow shop.

I also went to build my bubble buckets today and realized that I don't have enough air tubing, so that is also on my list.

Okay so I know I haven't been very organized about my information on here so far, so I'm going to try to be a little bit more detailed about the setup. I also need to be more detailed as far as timeline, so to be clear I used the day my seeds first sprouted as the starting reference for my day count. As I mentioned before it is a dual-aerospring system that I rigged up myself. As you can see from the pictures by using a single spraybar going through both springs I'm able to spray in both reservoirs using a single pump, pvc pipe, and pin sprayers. The reservoirs are connected via bulkhead fittings and 1" ID black tubing.

I managed to make a trip to worms yesterday and picked up an AirKing 16" fan to mount on the wall. It's a little bit overkill for my closet grow but I do plan on owning my own house soon and hope to have lots of room to expand so I'm looking towards the future. I also decided to ditch the bubble bucket idea for now and just focus on the springs for now. This meant that I had to ditch a few of my seedlings. Another one of my seedlings in the spring seems to have petered out now also, leaving me with 15 feminized seeds. I had a bit of a scare when I gave my babies their first dose of nutes, as they didn't grow for a few days and then I discoved a yellowish/whitish slime coating the insides of the reservoir. The dose of nutrients I gave them initially was Liquid Earth Grow 1 tsp/gal and Liquid Earth Vigor 1 tsp/gal, with a dose of SM-90 at 2 ml/gal. After discovering the slime I went out to CVS and bought a bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide and then poured half of the bottle into the combined reservoir which had about 20 gallons of nutrient soup at the time. After a day the roots seemed to be perking back up and sprouting new white fuzzy growth. After a couple more days I added some more h202 at a rate of about 1 tbsp/gal just to be sure I was killing everything, and also added 5 gallons of fresh tap water. Since then they've been growing like normal and I think that tomorrow I'm going to change the reservoir, treat with h2o2, and give them half of the recommended full dose of nutes for max. veg. growth.

Okay so I took some pics with the new camera today since I changed the reservoir yesterday. They seem to have grown a lil bit but nothing outstanding. Here's the new brew in 25 gallons of tap water:

h2o2 3% 3 tsp/gal
Liquid Earth Vigor 1 tsp/gal
Liquid Earth Grow 2 tsp/gal
Magical 1 tsp/gal
sm-90 2 ml/gal

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