Back To Basics

So Here's the deal.. I used to grow a good amount of pot.. I went and got a house with a huge 20X20 foot room and lined it with mylar and ducting.. I had a few 1000's on rail movers and a sea of green in a couple ebb & flow trays with about 100 or so plants under co2... and so on and so on.. It was a beautiful room, but it had some quirks just like almost every room does.. There's always room for improvement.

1) Mylar is only effective if it is COMPLETELY flat, sealed with a special glue and properly insulated underneathe (otherwise it promotes mold )
2) The ebb and Flow only fills water up to a certain point on the plants root structure (not a big deal, but it bugged me)
3) Ebb and flow doesn't take advantage of the properties of rockwool like I would have preferred to
4) I was spending a BUTTLOAD of money on co2 and electricity for the plants (worth the spending cash in the end but hurt my poor pockets in the meantime)
5)With soo many plants.. it's difficult to tend to each ones needs and not neglect others.. I noticed out of all the pounds I was harvesting, easily 65-80% of the weight was coming from about 20 plants that I subconciously favored and happend to be in optimal spots

If there is any piece of advice that I always give to newbies about growing it's that there are two HUGE main things to remember about growing..
***Keep your Set up simple and purposeful
***Keep your operating costs low for the room

So I ended up moving out of that house and into a new house with my gf, who doesn't know a whole lot about growing but loves everything about it. I figured this was the perfect opportunity to get back to basics, teach my lady the secrets, and relearn the standard stuff for myself before I rebuild the old room.. I started about a week ago and here's where I'm at.

The Set-Up:
Room Dimentions: 10X7 and 8 feet tall
- Plants sit on a shelf about 3 feet off the ground leaving about 4 feet under lights for growth
- I chose the Height because I'm going to use a "Bonsai" method of tons of trimming and supercropping; therefore the shelves allow me to spend less time on my knees (haha) and I dont need to move the light as much..

ANy ways here it is::

4 Purple Kush Clones
House & Garden Nutrients (love em)
6X6 Grodan Rockwool in Hydroton
18" wide buckets -- 8" tall
1 Sunsystem 1000 watt HPS
4" Intake Fan
6" Outtake fan
18" Oscillating fan
Carbonaire Filter
White Poly plastic on walls

Water:
I did an experiment before, when I had my other room, where I didn't put 4 plants in the flood tray and simply watered them by hand every day or every other day.. My thought was that if the stress would work on soil, then It should work even better on rockwool if properly maintained.

They grew like CRAZY.. Letting them dry out every now and then, and not saturating the entire cube in water in turned caused the roots to freak out and go searching for more sources; they were EXPLODING out of the rockwool

So I'm trying this time around to just water my plants by hand for as long as possible and put them on a pump toward the 2nd half or end of their cycle.. unless of course I see any signs of thirst or underwatering.. but hopefully it will work out..

Co2 :
I still haven't decided.. But I'm thinking about taking it back to the old school trick with the Co2 too and do yeast and sugar.. I did another experiment (this time in one of my chemistry classes ) and, long story short, figured that with aproximately 25 ounces of yeast and 8-10 pounds of sugar.. you could ultimately maintain the 1300 ppm mark for the co2.. I think I'm going to give it a shot, if nothing else just for the sake of experimenting on this one trial harvest.. Thats about $25 for supplies.

So I'll get pics up here in the next couple days and show how everythings doing, like I said I'm already about a week in from transplant.

Hope everyone likes and reads this journal, I think there's going to be a lot of good stuff for new people to learn and for seasoned vets to review on..

So I have to admit I made the highly dissapointing mistake of Nutrient burning my little girls after I put em' in the 6X6's. No one should ever make that mistake. But if you do here's how it happend and how I fixed it.

The root system was already solid.. I had about a 4.5 to 5 inch tap root and a big healthy root system besides that.. But I didn't give em enough time to root into the big rockwool. ALWAYS GIVE THEM AT LEAST 3 DAYS... Now you won't always nute burn your plants.. in fact I've only had this happen to me a handful of times, but your always better off safe than sorry.

Anyways, after a couple feeds, the leaves started turning yellow and slightly crispy, shriveling up and dying. Since the pH was perfect and the lighting was good (not to close) I knew it had to be nute burn. Other signs of overNuting are things like really dark greens and spotting.

Treating the Burn:
After a 6 hour dark period of rest.. I flushed each cube with roughly 1/2 to 2/3 of a gallon of pH'd pure water to pull everything out of the cubes and I put the lights on 24h. I let them go without water for a day and a half to keep em from drowning (from the heavy wash) and then gave em each another half gallon of straight water and repeated once more. After about 5 days of recovery, the plants' leaves got their green color back .

I mixed up a brand new batch of (a little stronger than) half strength nutrients and now after 2 days they've grown almost 3 full inches taller and 2 inches wider.. It's never too late guys.

So the babes got about 1 to 2 weeks of veg ahead of em (just for the sake of topping them a couple times) and then They're heading into real gametime. I'll post again after the first top and accompany with pics.

So I decided that I'm going to do this room in stages so that I can harvest more often and Let more light get to the outside plants. I chopped down two of the plants and prunned a few branches off the third to get myself some clones.
I Left the fourth one (the biggest and beefiest ) under the light and left branches on one of the others to grow back as a mother. I got some clones waiting now for me to plug in after the first cycles done..

Did the first round of supercroping on the branches two days ago and their already forming the Nutrien Knots on the pinch spot. Anyone want tips on that let me know, I'm pretty decent at it haha
Tried taking pics but my camera sucks.. soon, gotta go get a new cord or something from best buy.