Skunk Monk's RDWC landrace sativa

I joined this forum a long time ago during my first foray into growing. Life had gotten in the way of continuing to grow so I took a hiatus. Now that it is legal in canada and I've bought my first house I built the hydro system I've been planning for quite some time.

So here goes...

The system us a 4 site rdwc. Using 5 ikea totes, 1 for res connected at the base by 2 inch pipes to the other 4 buckets. I have a 1 inch pipe that connects the res to an inline water pump which pumps the nutrient solution up and takes off into the top of each bucket. In each buckets is an air stone connect to a 60l/m air pump.
The total volume of the system is 200L.

I've also connected the res to a ph, ec, water temp, airtemp, humidity sensor and track the depth with a ultra sonic sensor connected to a raspberry pi and arduino. The arduino collects the sensor data and passes it to the raspberry pi where it serves the data up to any computer on my home network. I also can control the power to any feature of the system with the app I made. This was done to keep an accurate log of any inputs by me. All this information is also stored into a spreadsheet for review after.

The light is a 480w draw led driver driving 4 quantum boards.

The nutrients I'm starting the first grow are general hydroponics 3 part base line to give myself a baseline of performance to adjust against in future grows.

I have 4 clones, 3 malawi x purple haze by ace seeds and a panama x malawi also by ace seeds ( have not sexed yet but I've got the "moms" of these clones in dirt in the second tent if only one of them is female. I have a 3rd clone from a choco bud I grew in a friends greenhouse this summer from seeds I bought in Amsterdam, in case all else fails.

Currently the clones have been rooted for 2 weeks and I had them sitting in the system while I've been trying to set up my monitoring system and dial in the nutrient solution.

Ph is currently 5.3 (and slowly rising)
Ec is around .8 / 400 ppm

I plan on switching the lights to 13/11 on november 1st and hopefully these turn out to be girls, if so it should be a fun 3-4 months of flowering and I hopefully can keep them netted down.

wow, that is a cool PPM system. Need to look into that app.

Thanks, I made the app on the raspberry pi using node-red to create the ui

Skunk Monk said:

Thanks, I made the app on the raspberry pi using node-red to create the ui

Click to expand...

nice, I was wondering about that after I posted (if it was custom programmed). As a fellow programmer, I've thought about custom making my own automated system to monitor water/temp/nut, and applying automatically. This is awesome to see implemented, as I have only thought about the concept.

Yeah my plan is to be able to fully automate it. I have some stepper motor pumps that eventual will auto feed/ adjust ph. I definitely recommend it I had a lot of fun putting this all together.

End of flower week 1

Well I've been busy but I've got an update from the first 3 weeks since switching the lights on november 1st.


The first week I didnt realise the leds were way too close and while dialing the nutrients in slowly they showed some stress and deficiencies.

Ec was 0.8
Ph stayed within range

End of flower week 2

Deficiencies continued through the week. So I calibrated my ph sensor and it was correct. I added 3.25 tsp of raw npk calmag which worked out to about 100 ppm in solution. Over night the plants looked better and the solution had dropped by almost 200 ppm while only losing about 3l of water. I topped up with 75ml
Of bloom, 50 ml of micro and 25 ml grow. I also added 7.5ml of ph down to bring my ph back down to 5.9.

Ec was increased to 1.2 through the week

One of my clones got mixed up with a clone from a male plant from the same seed batch and was replaced with a purple haze clone from the same kom as the rest that I had on standby

End of flower week 3
More cal/mag added this week to the full strength. Added 15ml bloom 10 ml micro and 5ml grow. Ph is creeping up so I've been adjusting down as it reaches 6.2.

Best week of growth so far but still seeing lots of brown spots on the leaves.

Added a humidifier since it's starting to get real dry during the day into the 30s rh.

Hairs are showing now on both the panama x malawi and the malawi x purple haze.

The clone I swapped out for the male. Is starting to establish itself and doing fine.

End of week 4. Still cant get enough mag

End of week 5, during the week I started weaving the plants through the net. Increased magnesium in the res and added silica as well. Ph meter started spiking so I swapped it for my backup one.

I'm gonna hitch onto this ride. Getting serious about picking up some Malawi fems from Ace so your grow should give me a good preview.

What's your attraction to the African sativas? For me, it's a hunt for THCV strains.