Cheapest and Simplest Hydroponics System Known to Man

Here are pictures of a vegetable garden in a 100 sq. ft sand box, a SpritzWiz intermittent pulse valve to run four micro-sprinklers , and Osmocote® slow release fertilizer sprinkled on top.

Nice job, certainly inventive. I guess you could call that hydro, but since you are watering them with tapwater, I'd say your pot plants in that system would do much better if the bed was filled with soil.

HTH

Pottie, you're generous... but it's not hydroponics unless the nutrient is in a liquid solution.

Osmocote is not the way to go for cannabis. If you overapply, you can't leach it out of the soil (or sand...). When changing to flowering, the nutrient given must change to a high P type to suit. If there's still high-N veg ferts in the media come flowering time, buds will end up leafy and loose.

Seems like a long way to go to avoid using a $14 aquarium pump.

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qmmckenna said:

The sand does seem to leach out fairly quickly though. I had mistakenly been using water from my water softener and realized that I was getting too much salt. I turned off the water softener and flushed out the sand ... and it was OK.

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I'm glad you think it's easy to remove Osmocote from sand.

I live on the side of a sandstone mountain with our "topsoil" being about 90% sand. After a year in this joint, I dug out a garden bed to replace the sand with soil. I had not put any Osmocote in this bed, yet a year after we took occupancy and probably a good bit longer before that, someone put the stuff in that bed. It was still there. Mind you, that's what Osmocote is supposed to do. It is supposed to do a slow timed release, staying in soil for extended periods, dissolving very slowly.

For that reason, it's a patently bad idea to use Osmocote on cannabis, where one will be changing the plant's diet some short weeks after applying vegetative ferts.

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If you are going to fertilise weekly, you don't need a timed-release fert. A week is a reasonable time to expect regular soluble fertilsers to remain in the soil (unless there has been heavy rain).

In the bed I dug out, the Osmocote beads closest to the surface were hollow but quite a few of those more than a couple inches below the surface still had ferts in them. This was at least a year after they were applied, perhaps as much as 18 mos. I'm sure this was the longest lasting sort. Still, the 3 mos type intended for vegetables is still too long lasting for the vegetative growth cycle of cannabis.

Osmocote is wonderful stuff for certain applications. I DO use it around here. It's great for perennials in particular, where you don't want to yutz around maintaining the beds much. It's just not the right tool for the job of growing cannabis.

qmmckenna said:

Sorry .I keep coming up with new questions. What would you think would be a reasonable period of time for a slow release fertilizer for the vegetative state? And then use a different fertilizer for the flowering state how long for that.

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Don't use timed release ferts on cannabis- at all.

Maybe also here is another idea.

Use different beds for the two different growing phases. Sort of like an assembly line. I have been scooping my vegetables out of my sand completely intact with all their beautiful roots. I think it should be easy enough to remove the plants from the first sand bed and then plop them into a second sand bed that is already going strong with the flowering type fertilizer. Intermittent sprinkling would reduce the shock of the change.

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You can do that if you want, but the chance of transplant shock and stunting the plant will be very high indeed come the time to change to flowering ferts as the plant will (hopefully) be well developed with a rather extensive rootmass.

The real solution is much simpler- don't use timed release ferts on cannabis.

That's cool, no prob.

OK, best of luck

Thanks. All your insights seem very knowledgeable and I just wanted to pick your brains of your general growing knowledge and how I can use my intermittent sprinkler.

I don't know beans about growing cannibis and never will. But I hope I have offered some insights of my own of this new intermittent sprinkler technology for growing things other than marijuana.

I'm going back to my veges, sprouts and flowers. I appreciate your forthrightness and willingness to share your knowledge.

I wish you all the best.

Al B. Fuct - Thanks for your input about problems associated with slow release fertilizers and the need to accommodate the changing needs of plants going between vege and flowering states.

A propos, I would like to experiment on my vegetable garden with implantable slow release "tea bags" that can be switched to accommodate the changing needs of plants as they grow.