Aero-Soil Hybrid: Lemon Skunk, Jock Horror, LA Woman

Hello this is my first successful (so far) run at hydro. I started off with DWC, using organic fert, but I kept getting crazy foam that blocked my bubbles from popping and wetting the roots above, so I thinned the solution, and the foam went away. The next problem I had was PH. I ended up buying a digital meter because I was having to check it so much. It would always be up too high within a few hours, and was getting annoying because I'm a pretty busy person and I cant be messing with ph all the time.

So, after searching for a while, I came across this article and this thread, I decided to try this soil-hydro hybrid method.

I've been testing it out on an autoflower that I started off in the DWC. She's been doing really well, despite getting ammonia burn from some bat guano pellets. It is very hard to transplant a plant that has roots already growing long out of the pot, but I managed. The aero environment seemed to recover her roots very quickely.

Setup/Environment:

400W HPS w/ DIY cool-tube
3'Dx2.5'Wx4'H cab
18 gal Rubbermaid Rough Neck wrapped in bubble wrap and mylar w/ foil tape.
300 GPH pond pump attached to PVC pipe with 8 sprayer heads, watering 15secs every 15 mins.
Wisper dual air pump for bubbles at bottom of rez.
Air Temps: 72-86F
Water Temps: IDK yet. Before I wrapped the rez, temps were climbing to 75F, so hopefully they'll stay down below 70F.
I mixed 50ml H2O2 @ 3% to ~4-5 gallons of tap water to keep it clean. No need to PH
The pots are 6" plastic soil pots with a bunch of 3/4" holes drilled into the bottoms. The bottoms are lined with coco-mats, then filled 2" w/ perilite, then another coco-mat, finally soil mix (1/3 perilite, 1/3 coco coir, 1/3 vermiculite, few tsp of 6-9-0 bone meal).
Hopefully I'll be able to feed these the same as I would soil plants. Eventually I'll make a drip feeding system. The key is to give it the exact amount of water, so that the nutes dont drop down into the water. If a little does it's no big deal. I'll swap out the water every month, adding H2O2 each time.

Strains:

1 Low Life Autoflower Mix Pack
1 Green House Seeds Lemon Skunk
1 Sativa Seeds Jock Horror
1 DNA LA Woman

Feel free to comment, make suggestions, ask questions. This is experimental, so I may do some things that people could find odd. I really don't want to have to deal with negative comments. If I do something stupid, then at least someone else might have the chance to learn from me.

The rez temp is right at 71F after 24 hours with wrap. I'm guessing this should be okay with the H2O2?

Update
Most has been well. I guess i didn't notice when I watered in the LA Woman seed, it washed up and the tap root got exposed the the uppermost part of the soil, so it dried out and died. I should have covered it with a coco mat before watering it in, as I usually always do, but I didn't feel like running to the other part of the house and grabbing it. Laziness has once again fucked me over. It's a good thing the LA Woman was free. To take her place, I started an Alaskan Ice fem seed from GHS. She just popped a taproot, so I'll be planting her today.

I added a couple gallons of water yesterday, getting the rez back down to 71F. It consistently stays at around 75F, so as I add water I have been adding ~10-12ml of 3% H2O2 along with every new gallon of water. I expect for the rez to cool down once the plants fill in the space.

Here are some images of the new planting of Alaskan Ice, as well as an update of the autoflower. I should have taken a picture of the roots. They are growing like crazy. I turned off the lights for 4 hours today because i think the auto may be bleaching on newer leaves. I'm not sure though. I need to get a new timer, cuz I took the third pin off it when using it for something else. Up until today I've been running 24/7, but now that it's getting warmer outside I can turn lights off during the day without having to bring a heater into m already crowded cab.

*edit - Notice how the inner leaves are a nice green, but the outer ones are more yellowish (excluding a couple bottom leaves that suffered from ammonia burn)? Wouldn't that mean light over-saturation? The plant is only about 8 inches away from a 400W HPS bulb (in cool-tube).

The other morning I installed a timer and thought I set it to 20/4, but I guess I actually set it to 4/20, whoops. I didn't check on things for a day and a half, and when I did, I expected for it to be on the daylight cycle, but everything was dark, the thermometer/hygrometer read 58F @85%H, with that being its lowest temp on he thermo's memory. I was pretty pissed until I noticed that my autoflowers (one in soil, one in soil/aero) seemed really enjoy the humidity, even though the one in soil is 12 weeks old. My seedlings did stretch, though, due to the long darkness.

I was surprised to find that my LA Woman came back to life! I had just left her dead (presumably) on the top of the soil. Her taproot had shriveled up when I left her, and all was left was the head with the cotyledon leaves. In the high humidity she said fuck it and made a new taproot? So I plucked her out of the pot she was sharing with her replacement (Alaskan Ice) and put her in a 2 inch pot w/ coco for now. I guess what I'll do is move the hydro auto into a dwc bucket, and move the LA Woman to take its place.

Sorry for no pictures, I did not expect this craziness when I went down to check on them. I'll take pictures next time I go to check

The autoflower has been looking kinda ify lately. Her upper leaves are very yellow green. I stuck my finger in her soil last night and felt that there were very few roots in the pot. This is probably because I had to transplant from another pot that got ammonia burn. To do this I had to cut the old pot off, cut a larger hole in the bottom of the pot it is in now, and carefully put the roots through the hole, wrapping coco mat (cut into strips) around the roots at the bottom of the pot.

That was a few weeks ago. I've been feeding her soil layer, but I don't think she's getting enough, seeing how much of the roots are outside of the pot. There is a massive root ball that sits at the bottom of the rez, where I have it bubbling w/ H2O2 mixed in. Does anyone know how long it takes before H2O2 breaks down completely into O2 and H2O?

Anyways, I carefully picked her up and placed her back in the DWC bucket w/ 1/8 of my grow fert, 1/4 strength humic acid, 1/4 strength calcium supplement. I forgot to bring my PH meter down with me, so I'll PH down to 5.5ish in a minute.

I did this whole soil-hydro thing to avoid PHing, but I don't think I have a choice with her. I could always put her in soil, but I should at least once practice the concepts of conventional organic hydro before sticking with an experimental system when I don't how the production value compares with conventional DWC.

My seedlings are coming along. The Jock Horror is kicking all the other girls' asses. She did get planted a little earlier, sprouted faster, and is under a more intense area of light. When I run into some dough, I'll get a better reflector, but these cheap batwings should do me just fine for now.

LA Woman is fighting hard to come back to life, and she's doing good too. I potted her in a 4inch pot for now. I'll get her in a 6 inch when she gets a little further along.

In the pics, the one before the last is LA Womaon, and the last one is Lemon Skunk.

*edit - BTW if anyone thinks I've misdiagnosed my autoflower's light green leaves, let me know what you think. I take advice lightly if it is not logical, or backed up with experience. rep+ for any positive advice

The auto seems to be doing well in the DWC bucket. I upped her nute solution to 1/4 part grow nutes for a total of 10ml in 4 gallons. Her new growth is very green. I PHed her water down to 5.6 w/ distilled vinegar.

Jock Horror is kicking the others' asses so bad... in growth, but she's got some yellow leaves at the top. Most of the new growth is yellow green to mostly yellow. The leaves are very soft. All of her roots are in the soil - the same soil I use for all my other plants. Idk I'll check it tomorrow and put up some pictures.

The other seedlings are coming along, looking pretty green. Even the LA Woman is looking nice and green. She's doing pretty damn good for a seedling that lost most of its taproot after it had only come out a couple centimeters.

I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

So it looks like my problems with the yellow leaves is persisting. I took some pictures of today's damage, but I really need some help with this.

Ever since I took out the auto, the aero chamber/rez is turned off. I want the roots to fill out the pots some before I let the roots grow down into the rez.

If you can, please help me out with this. I'd really appreciate it, and of course rep+

Here she is today:



Her new leaves are yellow, her leaves feel soft, and her leaves are curling up at the edges.

I've checked the plant diagnosis guide, but it looks kinda like a few of the pictures, so I don't know what to make of it. She still seems to be growing at a decent rate, just yellowish green to yellow

I meant to post some pictures sometime last week but I didn't get around to it. I've had a tough week battling ph with my DWC autoflower, and she's showing it. I ph it with vinegar to 5.3 and by the next time I see it (anywhere from between a day to three days) the ph is up to between 7.6 and 8.6. Today I checked it and the water smelled like a vacuum cleaner fart, so I took it all apart, bleached and scrubbed and bleached the bucket and hoses and the lid, all the while sitting the girl in a bubbling H2O2 solution (75ml @3% / 3.5 gal water). Her roots were pretty funky with sludge. I washed them off well, gently with the hose and with my hands, but some of the little root ends broke off. The slime is off though. I mixed in my grow fert at 1/4 strength, and my calplex and humic acid at 1/2 strengths.

My Jock Horror got much better. I ended up bring the light up a few inches and giving her a flush. Whichever it was helped. Shes actually way outgrowing all the other plants, so I tied her back and turned her top away from the light, so that maybe the other girls get a chance to catch up.

The LA Woman is hanging in there, not really all that green, so I gave her some compost on top. The rest of her medium is coco, perlite, and vermiculite, so hopefully this will help her absorb nutients better. Her roots at least seem to be coming along - they are coming out of the bottom of the pot.

By the way I don know if I mentioned that I've turned off the pump and sprayers for the time being. I'm gonna let the roots fill out the pot a bit more, maybe just a couple weeks. I was originally hoping to switch to 12/12 at around 4-20, but I may have to wait a bit longer. I just don't want to wait too long, so my summer plans and my growing plans don't collide.

In the first pic you can see the damage to the auto, but in the second and third pic you can see its still doing pretty good for 4-6 weeks away from its harvest. The fourth pic is of the nasty vacuum fart water being pumped out. The next pic is of the new clean phed water.

Well I'll be damned. The ph in the auto's DWC is exactly where I left it 24 hours ago - 5.4. It's the first time this has happened. I guess it's because I cleaned the shit out of the bucket and its parts with bleach. I usually don't opt for bleach, but this time I did. Whatever Im happy, she seems to be doing fine.

The Jock Horror seems to be taking her LST well.

DWC bucket ph back up to 7.6.
75ml of apple cider vinegar brings it back down to 5.4.

Other plants looks good

DWC ph back up to 8.0.
+90ml of apple cider vinegar.
I'm pretty sure I have root rot. I tried to pull some slime off the roots and some roots broke off easily, so....
What can I say, I don't have time to take care of this problem. I can change out the rez this weekend and give it fresh water and h2o2, but I wonder how many roots I am going to lose. Her nuggets continue to get frostier, so I'll grow her until she shits out, and then I guess she goes towards butter? I'm not a big fan of butter, but I do know of a couple people that suffer from pretty bad pain that could use it.

The highlights of this grow, meanwhile, are doing fine. The LA Woman might not be included in the 12/12 switch, due to her stunted growth, but if she does come back strong later on she might be a candidate for mothering the clones for the next grow. If I do take her out of this grow, I'll move Jock Horror to one side, and Alaskan Ice and Lemon Skunk to the other, tying down the JH as much as possible. Still no aero sprayers running yet, maybe another couple weeks. I do have an air pump bubbling some bubbles at the bottom of the aero rez, and it keeps the rez humid enough to have several root tips poking out of the pots; so when I do turn on the sprayers, they should take very quickly.

So I've been pretty upset about the way things have been going for my autoflower. I checked ph just a minute ago and it was back up to 8.6. I checked rez temp since I haven't done that since when I thought it was stable. Well it wasn't. The water temp was 78F. I didn't account for the fact that since it has been getting warmer outside, so has my grow, and thus the rez. Tomorrow I'll change out the rez, bubble wrap the top and sides, and mylar it again.

Man now I know I'm gonna have heat issues real soon. My temps have been climbing to as high as 90F and spring has just barely begun. I figured that growing in the basement would give me cooler temps, which it does, but eventually a space is gonna heat up. I think I'm gonna change my intake/exhaust this weekend. Instead of having exhaust go through the cooltube, I'm gonna cut another hole in the cab and have the cooling for the light separate. Maybe that'll help. I'll have to cut another hole for the new exhaust. And I guess I need to start thinking about odor control, so I will make my exhaust fan more powerful than my intake, and I've already made a DIY carbon filter with those cotton cleaning cloths, carbon, and velcro. This should be interesting. Every time I think something is stable I have to do all this bullshit to get it right.

I stopped by the hydro store on the way home, and ended up talking to one of the guys that works there about my potential heat issue. He said to just try venting the light separately, and it may be adequate. I guess it's better to try it out than to drop $150 on a fan (340 cfm 6" inline is what I was looking at. When I got home I double wrapped the bucket in bubble wrap, then mylar (foil tape for the top). I scrubbed the bucket and lid out, cleaned slime off the roots as best as I could, and then put everything back together and added my nutes. Grow nute @ 1/8, calplex @1/4, and no humic acid this time. That stuff made the water really dark and I wonder if it had something to do with the slime. I think I'll just use that stuff for soil applications. My tap water ph sucks, but for now I have to live with it. It comes out of the tap at somewhere between 8.5 and 9.5. If I filter it with a brita, it only drops by about .3. Anyways the ph was a little under 7.0 after nutes, and 30ml of apple cider vinegar knocked it down too much - to 5.0. I'll check on it later to see if it is still that low.

While I was at the hydro store I picked up some 6" net pots and 6" cocotek liners. All my vegetative plants are now in soil, coco liner, net pots. The transplant shouldn't be too hard on them since there wasn't really much breaking up of the soil. For the most part I just picked up the mass of roots and soil and just put it in the liner, and put that in the net pot. I did have to line the top of the coco liner with strips of cut coco mat because there was about half a cm of area where soil could have fallen out. These pots should be better for letting the roots get through

After about 20 hours after bubble wrapping my rez temp is 72F. Better, but the ph is still going crazy. I found it at 7.6. 30ml of apple cider vinegar brings it to 5.2. Its strange that when the rez is fresh, much less vinegar is needed to move ph.

Other plants are fine

The usual happened today with the DWC bucket. Same ph problems, same rez temp problems, blah! I'm over it. Acutally I've never really been too upset about it, as she was just an experiment. If I can get the DWC's rez environment right at any point before she dies, I'll be happy. I ordered a 6" Inline Duct Fan (530 cfm), so hopefully I can bring temps in the room down to below 86F. Whether or not she dies, I'm not giving up on traditional organic DWC. I'm gonna clone my Jock Horror soon and put it where the auto is now when she is either harvested or dies.

The soil (soon to be aero-soil) ladies are doing well. The Lemon Skunk and Alaskan Ice took the day off yesterday, probably partially because of the temps getting into the lower 90s, and partially because of transplant shock, idk. Today they grew a little bit. Jock Horror slowed down a bit too, but not nearly as much.
I turned on the aero unit today. I decided that is how I'm gonna water her from now on - through the bottom. My on/off intervals are 60sec on / 60min off. I'll check it tonight to see if this is too much watering for the plants, but 60 minutes off should be enough time to allow the roots to air prune when they get too far out of the pots. I may swith to shorter on and off intervals - something like 10sec on / 10min off - as soon as next week.

Here are some pics from today during lights off:

I got some time today to work on my cool tube. I mounted the light socket in the tube and connected ducting on the other end of the tube that was previously left open for the cab's exhaust. The 6" booster fan was moves to the other aide of the cab to shorten the length of the ducting that leaves the cab. I'm still waiting for my inline fan to come in the mail. My former intake fan is now inside the cab, and act as my exhaust. Intake to both the cool tube and the cab are passive, but the cab's intake is through cracks and along te door hinges where I took the light blocking tape off. I didn't have time to cut a passive intake hole - I had to go to work. But lights don't come back on until 6, and I'll be there around 9, so I don't think it should get too hot. The exhaust fan seemed to be moving air well enough.

I will post pictures of some of the changes made later on tonight.

Well it got hot. In the 90s. In my earlier post I forgot to mention that when I went in this morning, the temp was 98F and the girls weren't happy, especially Jock Horror. Her new leaves were all twisted. AI and LS had their top leaves pointing up in the air, while drooping at the same time. I think they're getting a little over watered, so I changed the aero cycle times to 5sec on / 8hrs off. When they dry out a bit, I'll change it to maybe 15sec on / 6hrs off and see how that goes. Also I adjusted the water's ph to 6.7 because I was basically watering with 8.5-9.5. My last grow went fine without me ever checking ph, but I think it really got held back from what it could have been with better balanced ph. I would use reverse osmosis water, but carrying those big jugs to my grow site would be almost impossible. One day...

Here are some pics from tonight. It's hard to see what I actually did to mount the light socket in the cool tube, but it was done by bending curtain rod hanger things, and screwing the end to the socket's mounting screw holes. The insulated tape is used for water heaters. A clamp tightens the ducting to the insulated tape. In one image is my new cab exhaust, former intake. In the group shot you can see that the AI and LS are almost caught up with JH in height, but because I've been tying her down, she is way bushier. When they pass her I'll tie them down and let the LA Woman catch up. The shot of the bottom of the pot is pretty much what they all look like. Little roots are sticking out, ready for action.

I've been pretty busy, so I haven't posted in a few days, but I got my 6" inline fan in the mail last week and installed it on the cool tube; moving the booster fan from the tube to my intake. Things are looking a lot better. My temps dropped from the mid to upper 90s down to an average high of 81F - awesome. My tube is cool to the touch now.
With the temps looking a lot better, my plants decided to start growing again (they took almost a week off due to the heat), and they are growing fast. I also switched my aero sprayers to 15sec on / ~7 mins off. The roots are growing well, and now that they are several inches out of the pot, signs of over-watering are gone, despite the soil staying moist at all times.

I gave them full strength fertilizer yesterday and they loved it. I'm really stoked that this method is working out. My Jock Horror is gonna be a tricky one to keep tied down - her nodes are just so damn close to each other. LA Woman is catching up to the rest, as they have been LST'd along with JH. My auto is doing much better too. I guess the temps helped? I haven't really been checking or adjusting her ph much because I've been so busy. I'm supposed to be working right now, but I had to go take a peek at them.

I should be able to take some pictures tomorrow and do an update.