flowering with aquaponics, revisited

Day 87: new pistils on great white shark have finally stopped. giving it just a few more days to plump up. trichs 80/20 white/amber. silver haze turned white top to bottom but new pistils still going and continues to bulk up. amber on the underlit undergrowth, but mostly white. still at least a week left, i think.

haole420 said:

maybe it's time to move the ballast(s) back into the cab? what are your air temps running at?

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Low 60's during lights off and mid 70's when on. I will probably pick up a small tank water heater while I am out today. The fish have a right to be comfy so they can concentrate on pooping.

I will try and get some pics up soon. The main plant in flower has been in there for over five weeks now. The smaller plants are still recovering from the transplant and flip on the 15th. I hope it limits the stretch of them some as they transition to flower. I'm also hoping the uv of the cmh bulb will translate into some extra trichs come harvest time.

Installed a 25w water heater w/ thermostat. Brought the total system power to 229w. Hoping the guppies will perk back up now and start eating more. The warmer water temps might help me keep my air temps up when the flower lights are off too.

finally chopped the great white shark, which went for 91 days/13 weeks. will post yield after drying/curing.


the pics don't do it justice! the bigger colas are as thick as an arm. heavy, sticky, and still popping new pistils. i think at least two more weeks still left. most seed banks list silver haze as a roughly 10-week strain. it'll be about 15 weeks when i chop. trichs still mostly milky, not much amber.

Looks real good. Do you think AP systems just might take a little longer to flower?

grouch said:

Looks real good. Do you think AP systems just might take a little longer to flower?

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That's my hunch. This has happened almost every ap grow before. My guess is that because nitrogen stays high the whole time, it just keeps going. Cant complain though. They're bulking up like crazy. Orange pistils finally reaching the top but after another feed (cns17 bloom, liquid karma, final drive, kool bloom), another round of fresh, plump, white pistils sprang up everywhere! Trichs still not showing a major shift to amber.

So you can add in nutes to the water and it does not effect the fish? I was wondering this. AP just looks like fun.

intenseneal said:

So you can add in nutes to the water and it does not effect the fish? I was wondering this. AP just looks like fun.

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well, yes and no. you can add nutes but it does adversely affect most fish. i probably went through about 200-300 goldfish, feeder fish, and local species pulled from a stream. only about 20 or so survived, but are very, very well adapted. i just wish i had a female in there to breed.

all kinds of craziness going on during week 13!!!

Congrats to all for trying Aquaponics. I can help with that part of it.
First and foremost is that you have to adjust everything for the fish. The fish really dictate the system since they supply the engine or the nutrients for the plants and believe me this nutrient really works. So the added nutrients that you use should be at the bare minimum. Which this is possible once the system is up and running properly. You could literally run this system with a solution of seaweed and kelp along with a solution of bat guano. You just have to be careful when you add supplements such as Cal-Mag or Silica among others.
Depending on the fish, you should keep water temp at no less than 60 degrees. I use Tilapia and they stop eating at any lower temps.
In order to deal with the amount of fish waste you have to create a Biofilter which is nothing more than a tub, 36 inches by 24 inches with 3/4 inch pea gravel and a bell siphon. Then you add red worms, red wigglers, and they consume the solid waste leaving the nutrient water.
Just some basics for you.

Duckweed Dan said:

Congrats to all for trying Aquaponics. I can help with that part of it.
First and foremost is that you have to adjust everything for the fish. The fish really dictate the system since they supply the engine or the nutrients for the plants and believe me this nutrient really works. So the added nutrients that you use should be at the bare minimum. Which this is possible once the system is up and running properly. You could literally run this system with a solution of seaweed and kelp along with a solution of bat guano. You just have to be careful when you add supplements such as Cal-Mag or Silica among others.
Depending on the fish, you should keep water temp at no less than 60 degrees. I use Tilapia and they stop eating at any lower temps.
In order to deal with the amount of fish waste you have to create a Biofilter which is nothing more than a tub, 36 inches by 24 inches with 3/4 inch pea gravel and a bell siphon. Then you add red worms, red wigglers, and they consume the solid waste leaving the nutrient water.
Just some basics for you.

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first off, duckweed, glad to see another ap enthusiast on riu!

yes, those are the basics and i tried it that way for about 4 or 5 crops and it grows shitty weed. the few other indoor ap cannabis grows i've seen online aren't anything to write home about either. i have yet to see an indoor aquaponic cannabis grow that produced a yield or potency (trichs) anywhere close to a "regular" hydro grow.

purist aquaponics is great for lettuce, greens, and vegging cannabis, but not good for flowering big, sticky buds. even with decent sized nugs for the wattage i was throwing at it, resin production was minimal with pure aquaponics. you get a ton of N and not nearly enough P and especially K.

i agree, vermipoinics is the holy grail, and i tried that too but not with this new system. honestly, i'm not after a purist ap system. i'm after a system that's tuned for churning out high quality cannabis. i may revisit vermiponics later. the red worms i used were thriving in the hydroton and reproducing, but when i tore down my experimental systems (4 of them), i lost the worms in the process. the problem with using food scraps was also that it attracted pests. bananas were especially notorious for introducing fruit flies into my room. i don't want to risk introducing any pests into my grow room, so fresh (or rotten produce) is simply forbidden.

fish will thrive in a wide ph and temp range. tetra, for instance, are known to tolerate ph as low as 4. not all fish can deal with this, but some will, and those are the ones you want. mine aren't jumpy and eat, sleep, and poop just fine. unfortunately, that means many fishies had to give their lives for the sake of my grow room, but i can live with that.

the fish are not the key to the system. the nitro bacteria are.

the fish do nothing for the plants. i could actually just pour ammonia into the system at this point to feed the nitro bacteria and forget about the fish altogether. the nitro bacteria displace pathogens that would otherwise cause kill a terrestrial plant in an aqueous environment. that's the ONLY reason i run aquaponics in my grow room. the extra nitrogen is just a bonus. feeding fish is cheaper, easier, and more fun than adding ammonia, so i keep them around

i'm not growing tilapia or any fish i plan to eat. the naturally selected fish are very well adapted to this environment and are thriving. when they get big, i turn them out to pasture where they can live out the rest of their lives in 7.0 ph 0ppm rain water in my outdoor "pure" ap system that i grow food and fish that i eat.

when you don't have to worry about slime and root rot, you don't have to do res changes, you don't have to chill the res, you don't have to sterilize, and you don't have to add bennies. all this fussing is just a normal part of hydro growing. you can take a lot of maintenance out of the picture once you get risk of root disease under control.

the optimal ph for nitro bacteria is 7.0-7.5. however, at that range, you will get scale (soap scum) as soon as a high phosphorus fertilizer hits the water with calcium in it. those precipitated nutrients will foul the roots and pump and eventually kill the plants and even the pump in a very short time. i've done it, multiple times, so i know. in pure ap, you're not adding anything, so high ph and nutrient precipitation are not issues.

dialing pH down to 5.2-6.5 range (i usually stay below 6.0), which is ideal for the plants, caused NH3/NH4 ammonia to shoot up to around 4ppm. i'm presuming most of the nitro bacteria died, but some survived and reproduced. successive generations of nitro bacteria further selected low-ph-tolerant nitro bacteria and now, many, many generations later, i have a nitro bacteria colony that is fully adapted to ph range of 5-6. the last time i checked ammonia, i had just a hint, barely registering. i have yet to test for nitrate, nitrites, but the fish, plants, and bacteria colony all seem pretty happy.

all that said, don't get me wrong: i love aquaponics and think it is the future of food production, but pure aquaponics has its limitations, especially when it comes to growing weed.

next grow i'm going to use general organics nutes only, so stay tuned. adding guano is a good idea too, but i'm trying to keep the amount of solids i add to my system to a minimum.

any plans for an ap cannabis grow, duckweed?.

I have been adding a little bit of tiger bloom to the water I add. I use it as my "ph down" to get to 6.0 and the fish don't seem to mind. I wonder if autoflower growers would experience longer flowering times as well. I tried a couple autos before and they could have used a bit more time to bulk up.

grouch said:

I have been adding a little bit of tiger bloom to the water I add. I use it as my "ph down" to get to 6.0 and the fish don't seem to mind. I wonder if autoflower growers would experience longer flowering times as well. I tried a couple autos before and they could have used a bit more time to bulk up.

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yeah, i don't know what it is about the longer flowering times. kind of nice, though, to have that extra time to fully bulk up. my guess is that it is the higher nitrogen content and/or the availability of so many different forms of nitrogen (ammonia, nitrite, nitrate).

as far as toxicity goes, here's what i've dug up so far. mostly focused on NPK.

ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate toxicity is well-documented on forums and in articles about aquarium fish and aquaculture

http://lakes.chebucto.org/DATA/PARAMETERS/TP/ccmesummary.pdf
says phosphorus not directly toxic to fish, but can promote algae growth and therefore lower DO

http://www.plantedtank.net/articles/Fertilizers-in-a-Planted-Tank/1/
potassium not toxic to fish

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4064450?uid=3739928&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101533444037
KCl (potassium chloride) toxic to bluegill at 1360ppm

IBA and other hormones are supposed to be toxic to humans and animals, but cloning gel, IBA powder, and the hormones in superthrive and final drive never caused a die-off in my systems.

i'm not too concerned about calmag and micronutes. fish need all that shit anyway, just like we do. aquarists add PK and micronutes to their aquarium to feed aquatic plants all the time.

for the bleeding-heart fish-rights activists on this forum to suggest that i'm torturing the fish is just ridiculous. i may have "tortured" 90% of them, but they didn't suffer too long. they usually died within a week if not days or hours of being dumped into the system. the 10% that survived never get sick, are constantly growing and putting on weight, having lots of sex, and seem to be living a pretty happy fish life. some are more than two years old.

i haven't had a fish die since the last time i added fish from the pet store 4 months ago. if they were being tortured, stressed, or otherwise abused, they'd all be dead by now. death is a very necessary part of finding the RIGHT fish. it's just like planting 10 seeds and culling out the weak ones. why should i adjust my system to accommodate 100% of the fish? then my plants will suffer. doesn't make sense whatsoever. this is a weed-growing system, not a fish-growing system.

so i chopped, did a rough trim, and dried whole for 4 days. cured with garbage bags on and off for 3 days, then did a final trim, snipped it from the stem, sorted, weighed, and jarred.

total weight: 1169.1g = 41-3/4 oz = 2lbs 9-3/4oz

popcorn: 216.4g = 7-3/4oz

nuggets: 952.7g = 34 oz = 2lbs 2oz

i thought it was going to be closer to 12-16oz! sweet! still a lot of optimization i need to do, but my best harvest to date. super dank, a little speedy at first, but more stoney than high.

and for what it's worth:

1456watt light total (600+600+256)
0.8g/watt
1817kwh (1456watt * 104d * 12h / 1000)
0.64g/kwh

note that the lights were dimmed by digital ballast for the first few weeks. side lighting wasn't added until about a month or so into the grow. to keep things simple and to be conservative in my calculations, i just went with max wattage for the entire duration.

silver haze 5oz/plant. it was pretty crowded. i probably would've gotten the same yield with about 1/2 as many plants with just another week or two of veg time.

great white shark 1-1/3oz/plant. it was neglected in the shadows until i popped in the side lighting, which helped, but was too little too late.


Day 104, just before the chop. last 2 days lights were out 24hrs.


made a 3' tall/wide funnel with heavy masking paper to catch clippings directly into my (dry) bubble bucket bags. i'll turn the trim into bubble hash.


the big jar on the left is the popcorn, which will be turned into honey with butane/vacuum. the small jar and baggie in front of it is great white (28g nugs, 10g popcorn). the other jars and baggies are silver haze. the two baggies on the right are 1/2oz each, which gives you a size reference.

still room for improvement and a few issues that need to be addressed with the system/approach in general (which i'll get into later), but i finally managed to pull off a respectable proof-of-concept grow without a single res change, not one drop of H2O2, no bennies, no chilling.

Now that is some great info. Love AP. Im really looking to doing this soon.

so the main thing that came up was persistently high nitrate levels toward the end of the grow. this started after i pruned most of the fan leaves. nutrient uptake slowed for several days, and never got back to the rate it was at, which is expected, since there is less foliage to feed.

ppms got stuck at 1000-1100ppm, spiking close to 1300ppm at one point. so for an entire month, i wasn't adding any nutrients. it only occurred to me after i realized that i was having an iron deficiency (misdiagnosed as a sulfur deficiency) that there were some lockout issues. turns out high nitrates will lockout iron. so i started feeding the plants again (bloom and ripener). sure enough, they were sucking up what i was feeding them at a rate of about 40ppm/day. the "baseline" ppm didn't change though, it never went below 1000ppm. never solved iron deficiency or lockout issue, so i'm pretty sure it's from high nitrates. should take care of itself once i get nitrates down.

it didn't occur to me until a few weeks ago to use a freshwater aquarium master test kit to find out the composition of my water. i wiped the dry-erase board i was logging readings on, so i don't have the exact figures anymore, but just prior to harvest, i had 500+ppm nitrate (ammonia and nitrite negligible) and about 300+ppm calmag (hardness). the other 200ppm (give or take) i attribute to micronutrients and simply a difference in scales for the test strips vs the digital test meter.

so to remedy this, i removed half the fish, the biggest/oldest ones, started feeding a lot less, and turned them out to pasture in my outdoor system, which is always nearly at 0ppm. in the last week, total ppm final started dropping below 1000. there's just 2 seedlings going on in there right now, so i don't expect much of the drop off to be attributable to them.

i plan to vacuum out the solids in the next few days, use all that organic decaying matter for outdoor fertilizer.

i'm sure during full-on veg and first few weeks of flowering, nitrate uptake will be enough to balance out the system again, but i need to come up with a "nitrate sink" for when nitrogen requirements drop off again. i have two ideas:

1. plant a fast-growing green crop like mint that mostly needs nitrates. ideally, nitrate uptake by the mint would outpace nitrogen production. advantages: simple. disadvantages: doesn't have the added benefit of actually digesting organic solids, could also bring in or invite pests to the room, although i've never seen bugs chomping on my mint outside.

2. integrate a small anaerobic digestor (biogas) and/or a slow sand filter. both get seeded with anaerobic septic tank bacteria. advantages: not only breaks down nitrates into N2 gas, also breaks down solids from fish, fish food, and organic nutrients. disadvantages: complex to set up and tune, bacteria also remove some phosphates and micronutrients.

i like the idea of an anaerobic digestor/filter, as it doubles as a composter. i should be able to just drop some banana puree or other nutritious whole foods in there to boost the PK. with vermiponics, you have to avoid citrus, meat, greasy stuff, dairy, all of which the digestor should be able to process. not that i'd necessarily want to add that stuff in there, but it's not as finicky.

with vermiponics, you're still going to be dealing with organic solids running through your system. with the digestor/filter, it not only filters out the solids, it will digest them. i doubt it will produce enough biogas, but i should potentially be able to run a small bunsen burner to convert the methane to CO2!

second, i went a little overboard with the pruning of fan leaves all at once. i think the way to go is incrementally, on an as needed basis as buds start to fill out.

third, an inch or two away from the glass of the reflectors was way to close. due to lack of training, i had to get the lights as close as i could to penetrate to the lower parts of the canopy. better training or scrogging would help. also, i think the ideal distance for 600watt air cooled is about 1ft from the glass. buds in that range were well-balanced with respect to size and frostiness. part of the problem was that i ran out of vertical clearance. i should be able to eek out another 4-6" by redesigning the boom and pulley system. i think i'm going to split the boom in half so each light can be at a different height (indica on side, sativa on the other).

fourth, i noticed that the stems that were directly blown on by the oscillating fan had dried out leaves, fewer trichs, and were smaller. using indirect air circulation by "bouncing" the air off of the wall first, which diffuses it and lowers the velocity. i may need a few more solid state fan controllers to slow them down a bit more. i think 2 or 3 indirect, slowed fans is better than 1 big one directly blasting one side of the grow. it also caused them to lean away from the fan, even on low setting. i had to tie them up to keep them from falling over.

fifth, the T5 array helped provide side lighting, but i think i would've been better off just putting in another 600watts HPS. the 8X T5 draws just under 300watts. i have a spare digital ballast and reflector. thinking of rigging it up and turning it just in the last month or so. might try mixing spectrums at the end, maybe running MH in the first few weeks to keep things under control during the stretch.

switching to general organics next time. two seedlings a few weeks old vegging now under the T5s. i'll probably get a few clones and throw them under there as well as backup in case seedlings turn out to be male. planning to veg until end of january, maybe longer. i'll probably go with 4 plants next time. when i make the switch to 12/12, i'll start a new thread.

thanks for tuning in!

Nice harvest you got there for yourself way to go.. take that all you Nay Sayers Aquaponics rocks and with very little effort and great highs..
It may take longer to grow but if you keep up with clones and new plants you can have all the weed you need until the next plant is harvested.
When I want to get high I just go to my plants and pick a bud stick it in a bowl and toke away. The longer the plant grows the more potent it gets.
So if you have different strains going you have different tastes different highs what more can you ask for with the cost and the effort you put into it?
Haole240 great job and great promotion for ap.....keep up the good work....

WOLFMANIZ said:

Nice harvest you got there for yourself way to go.. take that all you Nay Sayers Aquaponics rocks and with very little effort and great highs..
It may take longer to grow but if you keep up with clones and new plants you can have all the weed you need until the next plant is harvested.
When I want to get high I just go to my plants and pick a bud stick it in a bowl and toke away. The longer the plant grows the more potent it gets.
So if you have different strains going you have different tastes different highs what more can you ask for with the cost and the effort you put into it?
Haole240 great job and great promotion for ap.....keep up the good work....

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thanks, wolfman. vegging from seed for another month before going at it again. some nirvana freebee seeds and a maui wowie x blackberry in the mix. hope they're all female! also making a few mods to the system.

speaking of flavor, the haze has a remarkable flavor now that it's cured for about 2 weeks. some described it as cinnamon or minty. lots of essential oils. the flavor is more concentrated and even more pronounced in the honey butane extract.

my ap bud always seems to have a underlying "earthy" element to it flavor-wise. it's not a bad taste and it's not "fishy," but it is distinctive. i'm thinking it's all the organics going on in there. ap bridges the gap between soil and hydro. it creates more complex and subtle aromas like soil and is similar to soil in terms of having a naturally occurring beneficial microbe colony, but you still get the performance (yield, potency) of hydro.

despite the long time flowering, it's pretty well-balanced between high/stoney. no couch-lock, but does hit you hard.

stay tuned for my next ap + general organics grow starting in a few weeks, maybe february 1...

A couple ideas for you after reading your summary. About the nitrate uptake, could trimming the plant heavily be a good way to cause a lockout and be used to flush at the end of flowering? I ask this because I am thinking a perpetual grow may work out very well to keep a constant uptake of nitrates going on in the grow beds. The only downside I see to perpetual is not being able to flush the plants at the end of flowering. Planting clones into the system at three or four intervals will keep a constant plant load coming into and out of flowering.