Question about Submerging/Dunking Plants

[scatersley]

Hey,

Sorry I haven't introduced myself yet....but I'm a little timid about posting on these boards, I prefer to just soak up the information but I have a pressing question.

My friend/grow partner has decided to start essentially dunking our plants daily. He fills up a 20 gallon container with water, adds nutrients, and puts the pots completely under water. I feel like it's harming the plants.

Here's some background....

• We have 5 citrol plants being grow under a single 600 watt hps.
• We are using foxfarm ocean forest
• We vegged them way too long so the plants are about 4' to 5' tall.
• They have been in flowering for about 2.5 weeks.
• We had some serious salt buildups, dry pockets, and root binding so we transferred them from 3 gallon buckets to 5 gallon buckets.
• The plants have some deficiencies. All of them have potasium and one of them has nitrogen but we haven't seemed to be able to fix them.

SO what should we be doing right now to solve this nutrient issue? What exactly should we be doing right now?

I've read a bit around people submerging plants but it seems like it isn't too harmful if you do it occasionally when you leave town or something. Should you nute it daily? We've been keeping to a once ever 3 days so far, is increasing the watering to daily really bad?

Any insight would be great!

Thanks.

 

[Florida Girl]

Good god man... stop submerging your plants! If you are having salt buildup issues then don't feed so often and add a good flush once every 2 weeks.

Treat deficiencies as they occur. If you are having a hard time treating deficiencies then check your PH (both going in and runoff). Usually if treatments don't work it's because the PH is off and locking out the nutrients.


Good luck

 

[BatMaN SKuNK]

flush once every 2 weeks.

i can see once a month, but every two weeks? doesn't that seem like a little much?

 

[Florida Girl]

i can see once a month, but every two weeks? doesn't that seem like a little much?

Well he did say he was having a salt build up problem. But you may be right... may be too much if he's growing in soil. I grow hydro so flushing every two weeks is no big deal

 

[Dirtyboy]

It wont hurt them a bit. Just dunk (the container) when they are due for a watering. Thats how ya make sure a SMALL plant is watered well is to dunk the the plants container in water.

 

[xochi]

just feed thrive alive for a lil while when you fertilize no never dunk daily, hell the only time i ever submerge my plants is when i cut clones.. spray with foliar spray, did you trim back before inducing bloom?

 

[OregonMeds]

Dunking is EXCELLENT to keep from having dry pockets and make sure the roots can use the entire container but I would never do it every day unless the plants are really drinking that all up until it's dry each day before the dunk/soak.

Also sounds like you may be overfertilizing and making ph problems in the soil worse every day. Are you re-using that dunk water all the time, that won't flush salts out.

You say your plants are 4-5' tall entering flowering? Are you talking sativa or indica? You may very well need more than 5 gallon pots if you're talking indica. An indica that tall could use a garbage can size container and it'll end up quite huge after stretching in flowering. There is a method someone did where they planted trees like that in garbage cans that were cut in half to make them shorter but they planted the rootball and tree completely laying sideways. What was a tree became a sea of green type thing. They (he) cut a slit in the can just big and long enough so the trunk could lay completely flat. Sorry I don't know who that was. This is just an option in case you are running out of vertical space and need to figure out a way to fix it.

Check the ph of the soil and the water, you may need to flush dolomite lime through.

Your pots should always go from fully watered to light and dry and never ever be soaking wet all the time day after day. Being that big though they could be taking all that water every day, only you know, you're the one there that can pick them up and tell when they're light and if the leaves are drooping cause it's thirsty.

I hope you have a LOT of 1000w lights for those, or outdoors.

 

[scatersley]

Thanks for all of the insight...

This isn't my grow so I'm not completely involved with it...just being helpful to a friend.

The plant is an Indica and he definitely over-vegged them...for about 8 weeks. In the past few days the plants have grown several inches and are incredibly bushy. They were put into flowering about 3 weeks ago and according to the seed company they flower in 7 weeks. IS there any way that the buds will be done in 3-4 weeks, progress looks fairly slow so far....? There are only very premature buds that are forming, kind of like emerging leaves.

Currently there are only 4 plants in this huge space under a 600 watt...is this enough? Unfortunately we only have a 600w going right now but we do have a 1000 watt that we may need to switch out after your comment Oregon Meds.

I believe that he is also using the same nutrient solution so I'll reccomend that he does straight water once they are dry. A lot of the lower leaves are dying off and there are signs of potassium buildup...hopefully this will work out.

What kind of yield do you think we will get from plants like this?

 

[mr thc]

Give us some pics...and we'll tell you.

 

[OregonMeds]

Your grow should not be in a huge space with a single 600 light and four plants. It should be enclosed as small as practical with reflective material all around so the light isn't just wasted that reflects all over a big room.