1st Dwc - Med Tree Seeds Gooey Bear

Hello RIU!
I will be posting pics and diary entries for my first dwc grow and my first grow in about 15 yrs. I will be growing in a 3x3 tent by ac infinity, a mars hydro tsw2000, and GH flora series nutes. (Should I add pics of grow room?) I plan on starting just 1 seed at a time till I get the hang of dwc and will expand from there.

I'm super excited today as I finally got my hands on some quality seeds. I got these freebie Med Tree Seeds from the farmers cup judges kits.



Ive never grown an auto before so this should be interesting. Gonna start germination today and am going to try the floating in water method and then put it in half a rapid rooter stuffed into some ph'ed rockwool. I will post pictures once there something worth while. As this grow progresses please feel free to give advice, comment, critique, or ask questions. Thanks for all the support RIU!

Welcome Toppinz, I look forward to seeing your progress. I've been at my style of DWC for about 2 years. I've always wondered about rock wool, I've got a 6"cube but never took the opportunity to get it going. My method seems to work just fine for me.

wellcome from me too. i look foward to seeing your progress, as i too am going to give dwc a propper go this year. im going with rockwool in hydroton in a 6"net pot and 35ltr rez.
im debating the use of my
Hailea ACO9820 Low Noise Air Pump - 3600 l/hr
and useing half of the air for the dwc and half for a cuttings chamber im buildong. good luck

what size rez are you going for and how areyou going to get rid of old nute solution? im thinking of useing the top of a liquid detergent bottle to use as a solution expultion port, down into a tray and then out via a small pump.
i dont like the idea of leaving a bit of old solution in the rez as it will contribute to toxic nute levels and also mess with the ph

I'm just going to be using a 5 gal bucket. I plan on using a small pump designed for the top of a 5 gal water jug. It's not very powerful so it shouldn't suck up root and should do the job nicely. Then just rinse thoroughly and add new nutes. I might tap the side of the bucket and add a water level indicator. I would love to have a large rez but space is a little limited in the closet I am growing in.

This is the end of day 3 and I am highly impressed with the progress she has been making. If this were the other couple of grows I've done I'd have nothing to even take a pic of yet.

Today marks 7 days from seed. Everything seems to be going well.



I spotted what I believe to be the start of light burn and adjusted my light to 75% power. It appears to have fixed the situation. This 4in rockwool cube holds a lot of water. It kinda surprised me since its the first time Ive worked with it. I have fed once with a little GH Rapid Start in ph adjusted RO water. PPM read a mere 45. Should I have added more or something extra? As soon as I see root tips I plan to move it to my 5gal bucket DWC. Should I move sooner? Any tips, tricks, advice is welcome.

Seems like things are still going well. Got her moved into DWC after seeing roots pop out the bottom of the rockwool. Water is on adjusted to 5.8 and a ppm around 300. This is 15 days from seed.

Interested to follow your progress as you are very similar to my situation. Your plant is more advanced them mine at about same timing. Think I drowned my rockwool. Also not using my TSW2000 yet, rather 5500CFL that I had for photography. I have top feed DWC, so will be moving rockwool into hydroton tomorrow, tho not feeding yet. Roots just starting to show. Perhaps think about getting a little more stretch on her, to allow more air to circulate lower down later in the grow. Saw here another's grow with that prob.
My first grow in 20 years after 1top fed DWC back then.
Good luck.

I turned the light down to 50% and it is at around 24". I noticed that even at 32" 100% power on the light was just to much. Do you think I am over feeding or should have waited a little longer? I am using a slightly modified version (about half the max ppm of what they suggest for the light feed) of the GH 10 part feeding schedule. (I attached it for convenience.) When I looked in the bucket today I saw that only one root has emerged from the net pot and into the water. Im thinking I need to lower the water level in case the rock wool is remaining to wet. Any thoughts?

After quite a bit of trouble here we are at the end of week 4 from seed. So.... Started this grow as my first attempt at DWC but after some problems beyond my control it is now in a coco perlite a mix (70/30). The plant was obviously shocked/stunted and over watered from the transplant. Things didn't look so good for a while and I thought about just starting over.



But things are starting to look a lot better. I ended up removing 8 damaged leaves while also trying not to over water since there is still a huge 4" rockwool cube in there. But today marks the end of week 4.



I can start to see pistils starting to pop at the grow tips and nodes. I will post pics of those as they become more apparent. Any thoughts, comments, tips are always appreciated. Thanks RIU.

Plant definitely looks good. I was in the same boat, a couple of roots protruding from a 1.5" rockwool and I put mine into a basket with hydroton, and turned on the top feed system initially with no nutes. Drowned the poor little buggers, they were starving and my light (Mars TSW2000) was too close. Leaves started yellowing and seriously stunted growth. Searched and read.. Turned water off for a couple of days, just giving it a little hand feed once a day with diluted nutes, and finally I am seeing daily growth. Couple of roots have ade it t the water, tho' having top feed that is not as important than if not.

So are you still water culture or have you gone drain to waste? People say I'm crazy but I use coco and perlite in my DWC.

Johiem said:

So are you still water culture or have you gone drain to waste? People say I'm crazy but I use coco and perlite in my DWC.

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I have gone drain to waste. I just was not able to monitor water temps the way that I should (among other things) and she started to suffer some early signs of what I'm going to assume was root rot. So I just filled a bucket with coco/perlite and transplanted the best I could without damaging to many roots. She took quite a hit but seems to be recovering nicely. Funny enough this is also my first experience with a coco coir grow as well. All my previous grows have been in 100% perlite. I have heard of coco being used as a medium for water culture but I wasn't sure that making that switch here was an option or would have taken care of my issues. Plus I am pretty unfamiliar with water culture as a whole so this seemed like a much more viable option as its much closer to what im used to.

I'm just waiting for something like that to hit me. I don't have temp control either.Not looking forward to it but anticipating it. I've been wondering about some bennies but I don't know how well they'll do. Maybe if I micro dose directly into my net pot and try to limit what drops into the rez.

Johiem said:

I'm just waiting for something like that to hit me. I don't have temp control either.Not looking forward to it but anticipating it. I've been wondering about some bennies but I don't know how well they'll do. Maybe if I micro dose directly into my net pot and try to limit what drops into the rez.

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I was using hydroguard at the recommended dosage. I could have been using a doubled or even tripled dose (since it won't burn plants) knowing I was going to have temp issues as an even further preventive measure but I'm also not sure that would have ultimately been successful or not. The other option I considered was running pool shock in the rez to just kill all the bad stuff but the miniscule amounts needed for a 5 gal rez was just too difficult for me to measure correctly. I know I could have mixed more solution to make it easier but my space is quite limited and can only mix 5 gallons at a time. No place to store all the extra solution.

Today is day 37 from seed. Had some issues along the way but here we are about to really start flowering (I hope). I am currently feeding week 1 early bloom from the GH light feed schedule above and am watering 1-1 1/2 litres a day. Lights are at 100% power and about 18" from the tops. Temps have been no higher than 77f and no lower than 69f during lights out. RH has been hovering around 50%, sometime slightly higher/lower. I think I am going to tie a few more branches down cause she is definitely still stretching. As always any comments, questions, critiques, etc are welcome.

She beautiful, keep it going.

Definitely on the spread her out.

Still just chugging along nicely. Here we are at 6 weeks and 2 days from seed and looking pretty good. Starting to see some shiny trichs and getting a little funk coming off her. Starting week 3 flower feeding from the schedule above and did some defoliation.







Also in the tent keeping her company are 3 little Cindy 99 fems from Expert seeds.

I haven't posted anything in a while. But the Gooey Bear is coming along very nicely, a few days into week 10 from seed. The other plants are c99 photoperiods getting ready for the flip in about a week.