DWC Root Slime Cure aka How to Breed Beneficial Microbes

Thats strange. Pondzyme is a bacterial product, mycogrow is I think same bacteria plus fungi. I really don't see why algae would run wild on it. If you say its a leftover, perhaps it's contaminated.

ive had that happen...tried adding Smart Garden ..Defense System..its a powder sachet of bacterias..didnt work for me just seemed to suffocate roots and allow the pythium/slime to take over...
@spanky84 ill post a pic of that "NITRIPRO"....did you check ebay?

colatraine said:

I have been using this tea for a couple weeks with some great success...I have been applying 1 cup every 3 days to my 2.5 gal res and 2 cups with nute change. I have noticed a lot more roots growing but it seems to look sketchier everyday. It is starting to look like regular slime...is this bene after-slime?or just plain old cyanobacteria brown slime? There isn't a bad smell in the res like there was before but this just looks unhealthy... using DM gold nutes, ppms-400, ph-5.7-6.4, temps 71-72 F. The plant on top looks good but is not growing 'super fast' by any means.
Anyone who would know any information about what this could be I would greatly appreciate it...
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Colatraine,

I have almost the exact situation that you have. I added tea about two weeks ago and within 3 days had an explosion of new roots, then they just seemed to stop. Been adding tea every three days for the whole time period. No new root growth since the first inoculation. And as a matter of fact. After a res change I added tea to plants with wonderful white roots and within 3 hours they seemed to have medium sized brown spots of what appeared to be pithium. I am confused as hell. I have followed the rules to a tea. But the plants are definitely growing at a slower pace than they should. I've seen the growth rate that happens when everything is proper and mine are growing slow.

I'm with you, anyone have any insight?

Could it be that you're adding too much sugar that is resulting in slime?

Scroga, thanx I've found it. Your spelling was wrong the first time

Tea seems to be working OK for me for now. I'll try to add nitro it in my next brew.

It would be interesting to see for how many DWC tea works and for how many it does not. People who write hear are mostly those who have problem. I wonder if there is a silent majority using it with success...

Your welcome mate, nice and cheap hey...i don't brew a tea, simply add to res or sprinkle on roots..ect takes six hours to activate...

Hey SCROGA how do you use that pondzyme? I have an rdwc system and the tea makes it so nasty and hard to clean any advise would be great bro

I hasn't used it yet mate...got some on order... Use google... pondzyme cannabis...should give you plenty of info...from what I've read about the powder, it takes very little too condition a rez...

1 tsp per 100 gallons once a week.

Does anyone perhaps know what bacteria are in pondzyme?

I called them and they won't say because it's a proprietary secret.

My girlfriend had a good idea... I don't like how the barley gets in the roots (it doesn't hurt anything and is probably beneficial, but still...), so she said make little tea bags of pondzyme like a little ball of panty hose and just let it float around in the res. I might give that a shot in my little cloner to see if it is still effective without the barley floating around.

I'd try and brew it in a microbe tea and filter it, but I cnat get it at a reasonable price.

I had a scare yesterday. I lift up the lid, and find my roots full of brown stuff. Then I took a closer look with more light and see that roots are actually not slimy and fishboning nicely. Brown stuff was easily removed with a bit of water and it turns out to be some kind of powdery substance. From what I managed to make out, it looks like fine grains of soil and some unsoluble stuff from great white that got through the filter got stuck to the roots when I poured the tea over the base of my plants. Lesson learned, don't panic

Anyway, one thing I've noticed, when adding bennies, my pH goes up. Adding great white causes slight pH rise. Adding tea causes a bit more pH rise (up to 0,5 points). Adding bad tea that caused slime resulted in sudden drop in pH by up to 1,5 points. It seems good biological activity causes slight rise in pH while bad activity causes it to drop.

Are you guys seing similar effect?

Sprechnez,
After two weeks of the tea I had brown stuff all on my roots. I have taken a different route and gone to pond zyme and aqua sheild for the last 5 days...it seems to have whitened my roots and I have begun to see more root and plant growth. Fingers crossed...

I'm also seeing some issues with brown mucky gook coating some off the roots and eventually suffocating them and causing pyth to start..... I believe this is whatever is not soluble in the mycogrow soluble since it forms a thick black paste in the bottom of the bucket if you don't stir/agitate the tea before use and when I pulled some roots off the gook had a metallic sheen to it just like the mycogrow has....I am wondering why we are not supposed to filter smaller than 400 microns. In the bacteria/fungal spore world that's HUGE. Subtilis is only 10 microns at its largest, trich spores are under one micron. A lot of people on here use coffee filters which are about 20 microns and seem to be doing fine...400 Microns just seems huge. I began using the tea with a 20 micron bubble bag for a filter and had nice clear honey tinted tea that didn't gook up the roots, but then I read all the posts here screaming at people for using coffee filters saying they are filtering out all the "good stuff" so I switched to a 400 micron filter sock made for filtering biodiesel, but then I poured that tea into the rez it was horribly dirty and all the roots were just coated thick, not sure why heis and others don't have this problem. I read up about as many bacteria and fungus sizes I could find and found that there is nothing that I can see in the list of the ingredients we use that would be filtered out with a 20 micron filter except a few bacteria that get close to the 40 micron size but they seem unimportant. After reading all that I settled on a 140 micron filter bag for now which still leaves the tea cloudy and still coats my roots with brown gunk but it's manageable for now.

I have three 100 gallon systems going, two are going alright with the tea, growth seems slower than when chlorine used to work before I got slimed, and pH needs to be adjusted down daily, but everything is ALIVE and GROWING which is all I care about at this point after not having a harvest in over 6 months due to slime over and over. The third system was one that already had the slime, the first two res changed with tea made them start to recover and grow new roots, but for some reason a day after the third res change they super slimed and died overnight like there was no tea at all. I know it wasn't the tea itself because I used the same batch on the other two systems that are still fine. My guess is that since the first two good systems started with non-slimed plants they had a head start and never had to compete with the slime very much...the third system was slimed/roots trimmed/slimed again/roots trimmed and tea applied, started growing, slimed again. Maybe the slime was hiding inside the rootball since it was pretty big and I didn't want to remove too much, and it bred super slime....not sure. Just glad the tea is working in my two systems that I started with tea in the first place. These systems had horrible slime issues in the past and all I did was run 15ml/gal physan20 overnight, drain, rinse with tap water, filled with RO and 1 cup/gallon tea, put plants in, waited 12 hours, added nutes.

I also wait 12 hours when I do a res change before adding nutes even on the flowering systems just in case.

Just got my powdered pond zyme..what would be the dosage on a 5gl dwc?

I sprinkle in enough to cover the surface of the water in a thin film.... talking like an eighth of a scoop maybe...

I went the tip of a small teaspoon..?

sounds about right... you will know when you look at the roots tomorrow haha