Autopot system grow diary.

Hey guys, I'm gonna do a grow diary on here see if anyone is interested, ive had to back date it a little but here goes
Week 1;
Popping some killer genetics a friend send over from America. They have been placed into root riots (no presoak I allways fuck that up) will expect to see signs in 2/3 days. Starting with 6 lime breath as they aren't feminized and one CBD amnesia 1:1. Hoping to get four females in total.


Week 2;
All seeds popped fine no issues, I have a three headed beast by the looks of things which I'm pretty happy about as I think it may well work well with the scrog method I use.
All the seedlings are leggy and looking abit all over the place pretty normal for my style though I'm putting them into canna Coco so I will just bury them a little deeper. Started feeding now at very light feed 0.3/4 ec They are currently under a Morsen 1200 (235 real watt) it's a great little light and I have grown some really nice tight buds under it although it's moved more to a veg lamp now as I've built my own F series strips fixtures for end of veg and flowering.



Week3/4; I've decided to flip them for a while to determine sex so i can cull the males and get the total number of plants down as I still have 4x vannila frostings flowering out in the tent at the moment.
After about 1 week of 12/12 they started showing sex this was pretty exciting times as I've only ever grown fem seeds before here were some pics a little too early to properly tell bit it's all happening I'll add a picture of the vannila frosting just because im proud of them


Week 5; I got 3 female lime breath and the one amnesia CBD 1:1 perfect! just what I wanted. I've moved them into there final pots the auto pots. They have 2 inch of washed clay pebbles in the bottom and then I have filled the rest of the pot half with 60/40 and half with stright ecothrive Coco. Guess that makes it a different ratio but my maths was never that good.
Now I did something I'm not sure I would do again after they showed sex I flipped them back to 18/6 for veg, reported into final autopots and topped them all in a day or so. And as luck would have it I
Hit a few issues here and as i changed quite a few things so quickly its really difficult to tell why I've hit issues. They dried out too far in the smaller pots befor I had a chance to transplant also and I think this is the root of issues at the moment


ALSO I've attemed to clone the tops i cut for an STS experiment.. to be continued will update in a week or so PEACE

Week 6
I'm pretty sure I've got past the issue and it would seem that I may have hit a few nutrient issues cause by letting the Coco dry out almost compleatly in the small 100mm pots.
I've got a few issues with Coco and I'm really starting to research dwc and I think it nullifys quite a lot of the problems of Coco, obviously it comes with its own, but on the whole it would seem cleaner, better yeilds and easier to control... As long as I spend time learning the intricacies, I grew an auto seed in krackty/dwc methods and tbh it blew my mind, it went through nothing but neglect and still grew crazy fast with great bud!
The three headed beast is the first to recover and started growing really fast again.. the others seem to have recovered a little. I'm not sure if ive got thrips or if it's a defiency I've checked soooo thoroughly and even treated for them but I'm still not convinced I havnt. One other thing I've noticed is some of the fan leaves have bobbles almost like hairs growing out of them. I've not seen this befor so I need to reasearch.
all the clones are seeming to be ok, no wilting but also no roots. How long can this take it feel like it's been aaaaaaages This weekend i'm building an aero cloner to see if I can get the cloning going better.
PEACE

I don't know how you would get around except for offsetting the ec to lower than the label suggests, that's what I done when I used aqua trays (big version of the auto pots) .

I now know almost 100% that auto pots are flawed in their design, plants naturally elevate the ec in the pot through environmental factors, they then get fed to run off which washes out the salt that's built up in just 24hrs in most cases, auto pots sit and stew in their own salts day after day week after week.
You need to wash the coco of the salts that have built up then start using a ec 2/3 points lower.

Star Dog said:

I don't know how you would get around except for offsetting the ec to lower than the label suggests, that's what I done when I used aqua trays (big version of the auto pots) .

I now know almost 100% that auto pots are flawed in their design, plants naturally elevate the ec in the pot through environmental factors, they then get fed to run off which washes out the salt that's built up in just 24hrs in most cases, auto pots sit and stew in their own salts day after day week after week.
You need to wash the coco of the salts that have built up then start using a ec 2/3 points lower.

Click to expand...

I've had 2 very decent runs in autopots now. 1st one getting very near 1gpw and then my last one, the vanilla frostings hit 1gpw. I quite like them as a system predominantly as they are so low maintenance. I'm pretty sure that these nutrient problems are caused from the getting too dry on the small pots. These aren't plugged and sorted into the system quite yet either.

*** website dosent seem to let me up load photos but I'll do a quick wrote up.
Week 7;
Going to add the scrog today so will take a few befor and after photos I feel like I'm past the issue totally now... What I didn't account for was the amount of time it would add to flip to see sex and flip back.. it's seemed to add a big old chunk of time but as Im hopefully running this strain a few times off clones it should become easier and easier.. I scrog pretty hard at the start getting the new about 100mm off the top of the pots then some times add a second net if needs be.

Side projects; coming on ok I've got a clone from the 3 headed beast into a bubble bucket and the two other clone I've got I'm going to try and STS experiment with .. pictures WI be added when I can upload them again

This is befor the scrog all colours are back happy and growth seems to have picked up.



After scrog as I said in post I do hammer them down quite far with he scrog as It helps me fill the canopy more even.