Things are goin pretty good man. This has been such a ride. My biggest struggle was in the root zone. I'm also having some smell issues towards the end, which will require a fix for the next go in this thing.
From h2o2 damage to organics, then back to h2o2. I finally seem to have the h2o2 dialed in, and it's causing root growth, which I havent seen since week 2 of flower. Even now with it dailed in, my roots seem to be a bit brittle as they hit the water, but still much better than the organics, which got slimed, strangled, then died off. As I look at my roots compared to some others, it's not even close. They get about an inch into the water then stop growing, become brittle, and fall off. I have no idea why. It might have just been the mistakes I made, but the h2o2 is certainly helping. The organics gave an incredible initial boost to growth (voodoo juice). Then, the combination of sensizym, piranha and what i suspect to be the carbo load basically coated my roots in slime, strangled them, and killed them. Those roots are now falling off daily, and being shop vacced out weekly. In hind-sight, the organics seemed like a good investment, and appeared to have saved my crop, but they really didn't. What fixed my crop was dialing in the temperature issue, and allowing the plant to produce new roots on it's own in the fixed environment. I could have gotten much better results by just dropping the h2o2 by 1/3rd, and using frozen bottles, instead of buying 120$ worth of organics.
Next run, I'm going from 4 airstones to 8, and I'm trying a product called dutch master zone. Need to get as much trial and error out of the way as I can. I'm hoping to have everything dialed in and producing 1.5-2lbs in a year from now in these machines. That's the goal anyways!!
And, on some advice of another grower on here, I'm considering investing in a water chiller and modifying the box to make it work. This isn't urgent, as the bottles are doing a great job, but it's just one more thing to make my conditions absolutely ideal (part of the big picture goal that I have). This will either happen after my next run, or during it.
Talk about a digression...
As for this run, my short little PK plants are ripening up nicely. They are starting to smell very strong, and like a mix of potent dank skunk with fresh ground coffee, it really is wonderful... but totally heat score
. I can't run my AC within an hour of having the doors open, or it just blasts dank stink out my home for all to smell. Sporting a very nice amount of resin. I'm still battling with a bit of yellow leaves, but I'm still unsure if this is outside the range of normal late-in-the-game yellowing, or a PPM battle. I'm going to pay even more close attention next run to the PPM and pH of my solution. The PPM wasn't something I even thought of watching earlier on, but as the plants started drinking litres of water a day, it really started to fluctuate. So, my daily process is to take a measurement of the PPM at the beginning of the week right after a batch of fresh nutes, then write it down. For the subsequent weeks, I simply add water to re-match that PPM, then balance the pH to 5.6, move the airstones around, add a frozen water bottle and close the lid. Also, I think my PPM was way too high for the size of the plants. This is one of the benefits of dealing with one strain over and over, is you get to dial things in so nice and tight. Next run I'll be using a completely different strain and will have a whole other set of problems. I'm going in with the attitude: Less is more, and work my way up. Eventually I'll find a strain that is outstanding for myself, and for these boxes, and dial that thing in so damned tight (really looking forward to this).
The colas are reasonable, with a little bit of side branching. There are a number of branches that are obviously going to remain underdeveloped. These were the branches facing the front and back of the box, that weren't exposed to the T5's. I'm going to take close not of these and be sure to trim them off next run to give energy to the buds that are getting light.
An observer on this thread SmokedUp once said in one of his posts that it's all about the roots, and was he ever right. I totally appreciate the connection between nice thick healthy roots and big sticky buds... It's a very real connection.
I'm not discouraged about this run at all. I'm a small scale guy, and I'm in this for the very long haul. This is the coolest thing I've ever done, and I can't wait to keep moving forward. Sorry for the long post, hope someone enjoys it.