Yeah they seem to be a hemp hybrid SIP at least in this bigger pots. In the first pick you can see the sitting in a bed of what I assume is perlite and or vermiculite. I loooove SIPs! They are the only way I will grow, but mine are much more traditional.
Hey, thanks for stopping in!
Definitely not traditional, but the functionality is so amazing it has me kicking myself for not doing this sooner. I can't even believe both the results, and how much easier this is on me in general. Less stress on my back/body, and less time spent watering.
The two big pots are 25g pots, sitting in a 2x2x1 cu.ft. wooden frame filled with a waterproof liner and perlite.
All of the other plants are 5g pots sitting inside of 10g buckets filled with perlite, the exception being the pot on the bottom row farthest from the left. That is a 7g pot with 2 of the Monkey OG clones pictured in the first photo.
I am utterly stupefied by the growth since implementing these SIPs into the grow. As the thread I read mentioned, there is an absurd amount of roots growing out of the fabric pots and into the reservoirs. It was a learning curve for me in terms of how full to keep the reservoirs. One of them took on this awful sulfuric smell due to having too much water in it. Had to remove the pot from the SIP, let it dry a bit, then dump the reservoir and replace it with new perlite/water the next day. Definitely won't be letting that happen again!
I dont see any SIPs? What am I missing?
When you mention drench,Is this just a thorough watering to runoff?
Ive followed a lot of your past posts,very informative.Thanks for putting it all in one post.
Perhaps I shouldn't have said drench, forgive me for the misleading choice of words. I make a diluted 1g mixture of what I listed in the "drench" list above, but the diluted 1g mixture is split between the 7 plants to avoid runoff. You don't want any runoff going into your SIP reservoirs, as they'll cause anaerobic conditions as I described above and that's definitely no good.
Glad the information is of use to you friend, I pretty much just want to display the results one can achieve with a simple soil. This is pretty much a variation of Coots'/Cornell University's soil mix, but it takes into account both soil compaction and my mediocre source of compost.
looks great - I'm going with similar simple soil build, was planning to try a no-till in fabric pots, but also really like the idea of SIP - is there a way to build an SIP with no-till in fabric pots?
Of course! Just depends on your pot sizes.
I'll try to get some better photos of the 5-7g SIPs that are in the 10g buckets. I got the 10g buckets from my local Family Dollar, they're $5 a piece. Cheaper than Rubbermaid totes, however they can be used too.
You pretty much only need something that can hold perlite and water, and you want to fill the reservoir up to the last 1-2 inches from the top of the reservoir.
You absolutely do NOT want them sitting in water, just on top of the perlite.
Doesn't really matter what you use to hold the water and perlite, so long as its not going to leak on you and can hold water properly.
You can technically build a frame that fits flush with a grow tent. Say your tent is a 4x4, you can build a 4x4 frame out of wood and line it with a tarp or pond liner. Fill it with perlite and water, then set your pots/bed on top of it. The biggest issue here, however is cost.
This is ultimately an individual preference. If you don't mind the cost of such a large frame/reservoir, it will be much easier/simple filling a single reservoir for a large bed or multiple pots as opposed to filling multiple individual reservoirs. Both will work just fine though.
People don't tend to believe me when I say this,
but when growing indoors there comes a point of diminishing returns when referencing the "bigger the pot, bigger the plant" rule. I'll try to get more photos tonight, but I'll show close ups of 2 of the Strawberry Cough plants. Same pheno, but one is in the 25g pot and the other in a 5g pot.
For instance, the 5g plant is over half the size of the 25g plant, but uses 20% of the soil!
Unless you are vegging for 2-3 months you will never have enough root mass to take full advantage of 10g+ worth of soil in an indoor grow.
Take most people growing in a 4x4 tent for instance. You can grow a single monster plant in that space, and spend 2+ months vegging, making for 4 months from clone to harvest. Or, you can put 4 plants in that same space, spend 1 month vegging, and now you're harvesting every 3 months instead of 4. That extra month adds up. Its the difference between 3 and 4 harvests a year!
Nice! That's a pretty sweet difference in just a month. As many folks in the SIP thread will attest, SIPs are the shit.
What size containers are you using? Any reason for top dressing periodically vs using a hotter mix to start? Seems like a lot of people go the super soil route in SIPs, with no top dressing, but I guess there's more than one way to balance between plant size, container size, and hotness of the mix to keep everything happy.
The 2 big plants in the back are 25g pots, the rest are in 5g pots with the exception of the one 7g pot holding 2 plants in it.
I haven't used supersoil of any sort since 2014. Like many others, I found it hard to believe that such a simple recipe could outperform a "super" soil. Then I tried it.
Having an entire laundry list of inputs, (and hot inputs at that!) tends to cause more harm than good.
Consider this, one's plant will only be as good as said plant's roots.
Hot ingredients like Blood/bone meals and guanos provide a quality end product, don't get me wrong. But the growth conditions are anything but optimal when compared to inputs like Neem and Crab meals. This is because of the rate at which they react with the carbon source (peat moss/coco) to decompose.
Light ingredients like Neem, Crab, and Kelp meals decompose gradually where as "hot" ingredients like guanos, blood/bone/alfalfa meals decompose rapidly. Rapid decomposition can result in temps of over 130F, literally scorching your roots and burning your plants by proxy.
This becomes even more problematic when these inputs have high sources of Phosphorus and Potassium, completely throwing the balance of one's soil out of whack. If your P or K is above a 6, it is much too high and will hurt more than it will help. High nitrogen isn't the worst thing, because your soil microbes and the decomposition process will make use of the extra nitrogen. They need it, in fact. However, excess P and K is the leading cause of failure in a living soil in my experience.
This is why I prefer not only using lighter inputs, but consistently top dressing with them as opposed to overloading the soil itself. Consider how it works in a forest. While the soil is initially full of nutritional content, it also gets a consistent "top dress" in the form of foliage falling from the canopy and onto the base of the plant, thereby decomposing and replenishing the soil.
For perspective, my veg and flower NPK ratios with this mix are 10-6-6 and 4-6-4 respectively.
