Blue brother
Well-Known Member
hey all thanks for stopping by.
I just wanted to post some pix and a few ideas for other dtw growers.
I love rockwool, it's cheap, it's inert, it's sterile and it has good water to air ratio.
I love drain to waste, using this method means I can literally set and forget my nutrient tank. I never worry about ppm or ph fluctuations, my girls get full strength fresh nutrients every time they're watered.
I love hempys, these are what my growing systems have evolved into, from rdwc to flood and drain to drip and eventually these awesomely simple black buckets with a hole in. They work very very very well.
Most people in this area of the site will be familiar with hempys but for those who aren't il explain. A hempy bucket is just a bucket with a hole drilled a couple inches from the bottom, 1 hole that's it. The bucket is filled with media (in my case rockwool mini cubes). When I wAter (from the top) the water travels down through the bucket soaking the cubes as it goes until it reaches the bottom of the bucket, the bottom couple inches of the bucket then fill up with water until it reaches the hole and starts to over flow.
This ensures that after each watering there is a reservoir of water at the bottom of my bucket. This acts like the underground water table that plants roots feed from in nature. Et voila the hempy bucket.
Now since I stRted this I've read a lot about why rockwool won't work. However in my experience it does work, and very well. I think it may be down to the fact that I use the most water repellant rockwool mixture you can buy for hydroponics. I water every 3 days, and by this time the cubes in the top part of the bucket are almost completely dry. The cubes in the reservoir are still wet but that's not a problem cos imo they should be.
I think if you were to put a rooted rockwool grown clone straight into a 15 litre bucket full of wet cubes then you will see overwatering stress and you probably will have trouble letting the medium dry out.
But I don't do that I start off plants in small rockwool starter blocks, then when they're rooted through I put them into the 4" blocks then when they're rooted through those they go ontop of a 6" block, only once they're through that do they go into the hempys. This ensures that they have a substantial and hungry root system before hand.
Here's some pictures of my grow.
I just wanted to post some pix and a few ideas for other dtw growers.
I love rockwool, it's cheap, it's inert, it's sterile and it has good water to air ratio.
I love drain to waste, using this method means I can literally set and forget my nutrient tank. I never worry about ppm or ph fluctuations, my girls get full strength fresh nutrients every time they're watered.
I love hempys, these are what my growing systems have evolved into, from rdwc to flood and drain to drip and eventually these awesomely simple black buckets with a hole in. They work very very very well.
Most people in this area of the site will be familiar with hempys but for those who aren't il explain. A hempy bucket is just a bucket with a hole drilled a couple inches from the bottom, 1 hole that's it. The bucket is filled with media (in my case rockwool mini cubes). When I wAter (from the top) the water travels down through the bucket soaking the cubes as it goes until it reaches the bottom of the bucket, the bottom couple inches of the bucket then fill up with water until it reaches the hole and starts to over flow.
This ensures that after each watering there is a reservoir of water at the bottom of my bucket. This acts like the underground water table that plants roots feed from in nature. Et voila the hempy bucket.
Now since I stRted this I've read a lot about why rockwool won't work. However in my experience it does work, and very well. I think it may be down to the fact that I use the most water repellant rockwool mixture you can buy for hydroponics. I water every 3 days, and by this time the cubes in the top part of the bucket are almost completely dry. The cubes in the reservoir are still wet but that's not a problem cos imo they should be.
I think if you were to put a rooted rockwool grown clone straight into a 15 litre bucket full of wet cubes then you will see overwatering stress and you probably will have trouble letting the medium dry out.
But I don't do that I start off plants in small rockwool starter blocks, then when they're rooted through I put them into the 4" blocks then when they're rooted through those they go ontop of a 6" block, only once they're through that do they go into the hempys. This ensures that they have a substantial and hungry root system before hand.
Here's some pictures of my grow.
