FuckJeffGoldbloom
Well-Known Member
Love the shoebox draining method...looks like it works well for ya!
Anyone tried smart pot hempy? I'm about to give it a shot in coco with a perlite res.... seemed like a good idea walking around the hydro store high as fuck yesterday... we will see. Picked up 5 pots.
Exhibit A
View attachment 2821251Exhibit BView attachment 2821252A + B = ??? View attachment 2821253
I experienced the same thing with the three gallon smart pots, Watt. Slow growing, maybe a half an inch of growth a day. This is not a good thing when coming from both small and large rigid containers that pop out two+ inches of growth a day. I'm certain there is a way to get the smart pots to work better/properly and the reason it was growing slowly was because of me. Because they didn't do as well as the others I had (in rigid) I never took them into flower, so I can't comment on how well they would have yielded.In both runs the smart pot hempys lagged behind in growth compared to the hard sided buckets in the same grow.
im thinking smartpot hempy's would work with a 2 or 2.5" layer of rockwool on the bottom and a 85/15 coco/perlite mix on top. I want to do a drip set up and see if i can get it to do 2 waterings per day; one right before lights on, and one 4-8 hours later (dep. on growth stage and light cycle) with the drip cycles off at night.
thinking humidity may be a problem though when i do this... cause the smartpots are getting more air they also increase your room humidity . Hopefully ill be able to get an intake + exhaust that straight outside to deal with that type of issue
This almost wouldnt be a hempy though, because there is no reservoir, but there kind of is, it would be the rockwool. Im thinking if i could get a huge slab of rockwool i could cut out circles to fit perfect to the bottom of the pot and then just put the coco mix on top of it. From here i can get a dripper setup and set everything on a perforated watertight floor that goes to a drainpan. Airflows over the pan through a sewer pipe (those black perforated ones ) and diffuses equally under every plant, rises up through the air hockey type floor and gets extra air to the roots.
Maybe the hempys could be a hard pot with several holes in it,line with grow pot fabric, leaving the bottom 2" for a hempy res. The problem then would be not getting air in through the rockwool, which i think sort of defeats the purpose.
I've thought a lot about this topic and hopefully some day i can nail it!
also eventually wanna incorporate this into a stacked up vertical setup
My sentiments exactly. Our rigid buckets, when things are explosive, see a lot of root activity circling around the side. Coco exposed to air around the sides will go dry as it does up top. At least up top you know it's not hurting anything. I actually want my water wicking upward from the "water table", not outward. Here's coco over rockwool croutons.There is no real science in the follow statement, only my observations and opinions.
We all know the the hempy concept of a good air to water ratio, which will get the most out of a container size. And smart pots are proven to air prune roots, and they create a larger air surface for denser mediums. I think what we have here is two really good items but they don't mix well together, like peanut butter and chocolate do. What I noticed during breakdown was that the smart pot didn't have the thick root mass along the walls of the smart pot like the buckets do. So I'm thinking that during the couple of days it takes to use the rez, the coco around the edges would dry out too much.
IMO SP's should stick to DTW, where they excel. I do like the concept of the RW in the bottom to create a rez like environment. With a drip feed system the RW would be saturated all the time. If it were me the RW slab would only be 1/2" thick, but I could be way off on that line of thought, RW keeps surprising me with it's qualities.