My basement corner Aero garden!

[stackmachine]

Grabbed the camera and took a few close-ups...Didn't think the roots would adapt this fast to the aero environment. Do these hairs look good?

You might have to open the imgur link to see the full resolution...The cubes still have a little bit of a mildewy odor I noticed when getting close with the camera but the fast growth is encouraging!

http://imgur.com/a/kNCHFT0

 

[stackmachine]

The gains weren't quite as impressive as the first full day with aero, but there was still some visible growth today. The cup furthest from the mister was almost totally dry when I pulled it out. Just slightly damp in a few spots. Looks like one of its roots somehow became a bit thin in a spot.

The cup with only 3 visible root tips (but lots of hairs) was fairly soaked on the side facing the mister.

I swapped the cup in the back with the one closer to the front, which appeared to be getting a little more leftover mist, but not as much as the one with 3 roots.

Today they were getting half a second mists every 90 seconds. Half a second is definitely as fast the the solenoid can cycle and when I did the video earlier, there wasn't a huge difference between half a second and a full second pulse, but estimated it around 700ms of mist-time vs 1.2s.

http://imgur.com/a/a8I4jbd

I should probably just install a root-cam with night-vision so I always see what's going on down there. Once I can see that they're taking off I'm sure I'll settle down a bit xD

http://imgur.com/a/srSyYrH

 

[stackmachine]

Here's a fresh set of pics from this morning. I tweaked some settings on the camera so I think you can see the close-ups with much better focus.

Not sure that I noticed any vegetative growth, but the plant that was swapped to the further position that received less mist appears to have gotten a little "thinning" on one root tip.

Edit: imgur mixed up the photo order this time so I made 3 seperate posts with each plant alone.

http://imgur.com/a/aUxQvsU

http://imgur.com/a/pMq57im

http://imgur.com/a/nMRPRoU

 

[stackmachine]

I think I finally found the angle where all 3 cups are getting nearly equal mist.

I was kind of disappointed with the root growth throughout the day yesterday, but this morning there are some new shoots, bigger shoots and hairs further down on the root tips of all 3 plants.

As always, cookies first:

http://imgur.com/a/oMT6bhT

Then superbud:

http://imgur.com/a/Hb9FMpF

http://imgur.com/a/9BKZnFO

I was thinking maybe I should go ahead and pop another cookies seed, but the Stevia seeds I planted finally germinated and are sprouting up (2 weeks later). So I'm going to go ahead and give them a chance to root out. If I need a GP for anything Stevia will be the volunteer.

 

[Airwalker16]

You're on your way. Just keep the water close to those roots so within another inch or so they're dipping into it.

 

[stackmachine]

Thanks!

I'm going to get one of the other bins spraying either today or tomorrow so I can analyze the mist pattern some more. The way the net cups are arranged right now, the empty hole doesn't have any visible mist underneath it. I know the atomized particles *should* fill the entire chamber, but I'm not sure that they actually are. Seems like the hairs kind of disappeared if a plant was placed in that empty spot.

Everything still looks fairly healthy though...just need to get it dialed in. The roots are growing downwards at least!

Yesterday was on an every 60-seconds half-second pulse. Changed it to 90-seconds at lights out. Back to 60 seconds now.

The day before yesterday was full-second pulses. I guess should weigh the mist coming out to see how much there actually is.

http://imgur.com/a/vn5B3ix

http://imgur.com/a/7AuDF6O

http://imgur.com/a/jXZcmYo

 

[Mak'er Grow]

Maybe figure out a way to turn the lids into a 'carousel' of sorts.

 

[stackmachine]

Maybe lol..... I'll get to testing spray patterns and take some more videos/pics very soon.

This might be the last time I take pics of the roots until I raise the lights up since they're getting pretty long and I can't comfortably lift up the net pots without bumping into things.

http://imgur.com/a/IBmCEGz

http://imgur.com/a/W9R0IYl

http://imgur.com/a/qmMudbp

Edit: I just noticed in these pics, the bottom fan-leaf tips look lighter, but that's just an optical artifact from the camera....the leaves are solid green.

 

[stackmachine]

Well dang...the roots on the front two are goin crazy today. The cookies plant is now the biggest of the 3 but the roots on her neighbor really took off in all directions!

I took some more videos and I'm waiting for my iPhone to upload them to my pc right now.

I think the main problem might be with these nozzles. The cone isn't quite wide enough, so the bulk of the mist goes all over half the chamber, hitting across from it and half the lid on one side.

It's hard to get the nozzles flush against the wall, while also facing exactly to the middle. At least I confirmed that only 1 nozzle is needed per bin. In the videos I took you can see that the finest atomized water droplets spread throughout the entire bin, but I would like to find a solution for centering it a bit more. As much as I like that 2 plants are doing great, the one in the back looks neglected, but it is still growing just fine...and the 2 up front have water accumulating on the root hairs which might not be fine long-term.

I have a regular rectangle plastic storage bin for cloning, so I'm sure that will work out fine but the nozzle might have to be placed on a short side instead of right in the middle of the long side. They do seem to have a pretty decent throw.

http://imgur.com/a/bZwEyqF

http://imgur.com/a/mYrSVmO

http://imgur.com/a/11SyATP

 

[stackmachine]

Alrighty...got a few videos uploaded.

I also got some plastic baggies and captured and weighed the liquid mass in half second vs full second mists:

Half second: ~1.3grams of liquid
Full second: ~2.0grams of liquid

 

[curious2garden]

Alrighty...got a few videos uploaded.

I also got some plastic baggies and captured and weighed the liquid mass in half second vs full second mists:

Half second: ~1.3grams of liquid
Full second: ~2.0grams of liquid

Lovely pictures, good job, only one suggestion always have a back up pump or a back up to any critical piece of equipment. Keep up the great work and thank you for sharing this.

 

[stackmachine]

Thanks!

So yesterday I noticed these tiny dark spots on one of the super bud plants and this morning it seems to have gotten a bit worse.

Not sure what it is but will be doing research this morning. If anyone happens by and can pass along any hints I'd appreciate it!

My first thought was that it is some kind of bug related to the mildew smell from the gro-block but I had initially ruled out the mildew smell as a problem early on.

The roots still look excellent and are sending shoots out horizontally now.

http://imgur.com/a/MvevfVy

 

[stackmachine]

Well I'm stumped as to what the splotches are. I moved the lights about 3-4 inches up and carefully swapped it with the one with struggling roots in the back. She wasn't looking very happy at the end of the day so hopefully the longer root system will be able to handle the lighter mist coverage and swapped one with perks up a bit.

I'm going to lower the EC down to about 1.0 when I mix some more nutes and reload the tank tomorrow. I don't think that has anything to do with it, but after lots of internet searching today I'm out of ideas.

http://imgur.com/a/ZAjqwOz

 

[stackmachine]

I'm wondering if maybe the Super Bud strain is a little bit more sensitive to something in the nutrients, perhaps... The cookies leaves look perfect as far as I can tell, whereas both the Super Bud sisters are having some "issues" with the bottom set of fan leaves.

If you scroll through to the last pics in the series from today you can see that there is some mild yellowing in both Super Bud plants.

The cookies plant looks great, imo....full green, growing like crazy.

I got the tripod out so you can see the roots a little better under the lid. It has a long shutter time though so it still blurs a tad from holding the lid up by resting it on my hand.

http://imgur.com/a/1rWGHDM

 

[stackmachine]

Well the Cookies 'n Kush plant is really growing fast.

I decided to try and look up some more info on the breeder to see if there was something going on with the Super Bud that I was doing wrong. It turns out Green House Seed Co. actually has a 15 minute YT video with a couple of their guys talking about the plant and showing one through all stages of growth.

They were using 2:1:1 during the seedling stages and switched to 1:2:1 for veg/early flower.

I didn't look anything up about the Cookies yet, but based on this info I reformulated my nutes today and drained the tank and loaded fresh nutes in at the recommended 2:1:1 and 1.5 EC. I didn't think it was a deficiency but that must be the reason the cotyledons and first fan leaves are yellowing.6

These Super Bud plants are small Indicas with very very small inter-nodal spacing (per the breeder's video) so I'm not so worried about the size after all. I guess the small size of the plant also influences the size of the root mass.

I also got some 120mL vials and measured out grams of each micro-nutrient (except Iron since it won't dissolve at reasonable concentrations) so that it's a lot less tedious to measure them out in the future.

Cookies 'n Kush:

http://imgur.com/a/2gCChch

Super Bud:

http://imgur.com/a/DCcBIHG

Love amazon....lol

http://imgur.com/a/A34Eyl8

 

[garby]

Just some observations...I guess you can't really expect these industrial pumps to really break that easily.

Quite a few things I've read about people with debris inside their diaphragm pumps jammed up. But after I disassembled it Thursday I realized they're pretty well-made. The entire time I visualized that the pressure switch would reset to the "on" state if you de-energized the pump.

TL;DR: When you're filling the accumulator, it will pump up to ~100PSI then stop. If you de-energize the pump, then re-energize it above the low-pressure level it still won't come back on.

The only reason I got a pressure switch model was for redundant safety backup in case the microcontroller somehow stopped sensing pressure with the pump in an "on" state.

 

[stackmachine]

I have my dry nutes out rn and am about to whip up another batch of nutes for the next week or so.

I just noticed that the gross error on Sulfur is pretty high into negative territory.

The first window on the right shows the breakdown of the substances. As you can see from the 3rd image, if I go to a 2-1-2 solution there's no problems with gross error. It's completely fine if I use K as the degree of freedom. The other choice for DoF is using NO3- since these are the only 2 substances available in more than 1 compound.

Does anyone think that this much of a sulfur deficiency would cause any problems? I read up a bit and I don't *think* it matches the problems the Super Buds are having, but then again I don't have the same choice of compounds available rn that the breeders do.

I just used the default value for S since I didn't notice it mentioned much in any of the nutrient articles...I guess that's the only reason I am questioning it.

I think I'm going to go with this for another week or so, then change the formulation since the super buds should have grown up a bit more. Unless I can find any good info to convince me to change it earlier.

Here's the 2-1-1 formulation I'm currently using:



S as DoF:



Here's a 2-1-2 formula with almost zero deficiencies using K as the DoF:

 

[stackmachine]

I was just checking out the roots and raised the lights up a bit and had a thought about the yellowing fan leaves. I think it might actually be because there isn’t quite as much mist as I estimated.

Quite a bit is hitting the wall and the plants are trying to grow and possibly not getting enough Aero droplets.

Here’s one I snapped w my phone. Pretty hard to tell but the pots further from the nozzle are not nearly as damp - and the one way in the back has all its roots bunched up toward the front of the groblock:



I bumped the mist time up to 1 second per mist now and rotated them a bit so the bigger plant isn't quite as close to the nozzle.

As an aside, I think this setup may work better in a 3-plant per bin configuration. (too late though, since I already cut all the holes like this...)

Here are a couple more shots...the yellowing on the one super bud plant makes me think maybe it actually is a nitrogen or other macro deficiency:

http://imgur.com/a/gHoO7h5

Not sure what this could be....showed up the other day on cookies, but it hasn't grown at all:

http://imgur.com/a/nzVI9Ht

 

[stackmachine]

Might have to do a merri-go-round after all unless a reposition of the nozzle on the main wall of the bin, rather than the handle section where they're currently located gets the cone more centered.

With the 1 second mist it is really soaking the root hairs in the far left end of the cone. I'm reducing it to 3/4 of a second mist and am going to look at getting one of the other nozzles testing.



You can really see the wall is soaked in this one. I now rotated it so each plant moved anti-clockwise one space:



Here are the rest of the pics I took today. Was able to get some up-close on each plant now that I'm going with a merri-go-round:

This is the super bud that looks to be growing a bit faster. Might be that the larger root area lets it pick up more of the droplets Compared to the other two its roots were much drier with the full second mist going on:

http://imgur.com/a/Ynh4Zx3

This is the cookies. Was in the same position since the start, just moved slightly away from the nozzle compared to where it was originally. Doesn't appear much more or less damp than before. Still trying to figure out what's going on with those older fan leaves. The root pics aren't as clear, but there isn't much new to see

http://imgur.com/a/MEfCf4N

:

Here are a couple more I took with my phone, showing all the way down in the bin. Kinda wondering about that....I thought they weren't really supposed to go all the way down like that. Not sure if I should snip them or just let em be. Not in a hurry to do anything, since those roots do look pretty healthy and hairy:

 

[myke]

Was wondering why u still have the cover on the rockwool cube?The pics of the roots are cool but I’d try not to shine your light on them much. Keep it dark.