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hydroponic Growing peppers hydroponically Need Help!

S

ShdSteel

Hello everyone! I'm new here to the forums and was hoping to gain some suggestions and more knowledge in regards to growing peppers hydroponically.

I started with an aero garden 6 after I was given a variety of pepper seeds from bell to ghost by a friend. From there, I bought 3 aero garden 7 models which I used to grow the seeds.

I started researching hydroponics and got into it after visiting a couple shops when I was out of town.

My current setup consists of a two tier shelve system with a hydroponic drip system using 8 3 gallon pots with 60/40 perlite and coco coir medium.

I prune and top the plants often as to have kept them manageable within the aerogardens, but have just transplanted them.

http://imageshack.us/a/img673/157/mjmOJI.jpg

http://imageshack.us/a/img673/4010/DzYEgg.jpg

In the shelves, top is from left to right; various herbs, bell peppers, red and orange habenaro, cayenne

Bottom; ghost, red sweet, (empty), sweet banana


Any and all suggestions are appreciated! Don't know if I'm doing this right or if there's a better way to go about this. Some of the plants in the aerogarden were getting a little droopy and root rotted. So I hope this new setup will be good. Using flora series nutes

After clearing the aerogardens I think I'll start making small jungles of either ghost or Carolina reaper peppers. Hope to hear from you guys soon, thanks!
 
looks good, most people say just put 1 plant per pot, the little jungle may look cool but will be more stressful on the plants so you'll get less fruit.
 
Ah ok. So also my watering schedule is 30 minutes on, 2.5 hours off. That repeats till about 10:30pm then it's off till 4:30am for 30 minutes then continues. Is that an appropriate time for watering? The lights come on at about 6:50am and turn off right before 11pm, giving about 16 hours of light.

I was looking into the bonchi seen as well and was wondering if that were possible for my setup. As you can see, I've already tried using the red sweet plants.

One other thing I have is the DWC bubbler system for 8 5 gallon buckets. Is there any significant results between drip irrigation and Deep water culture hydroponics? Thanks in advance.
 
Any growing method or system is possible for Bonchi.. Just look at getting plants that are prolific for pod growth so there able to maximise fruit growth vs plant size, and choosing varieties with quick pod maturity time will help as well ( If your after fruit ).
 
Deep water when run correctly "should" always outgrow a drip soil system because if its run properly the roots should grow at a maximum rate and have maximum uptake of nutes while allowing great oxygenation. A medium based system will always suffer from additional environmental issues the soil free system doesn't have to worry about.
 
With your hydro the plants look to be stretching a bit and those lights are at a substantial distance from the plants, you might want to check the globes your using, get those 5500k - 6500k spectrum globes if you haven't already and maybe adjust them more frequently and get those globes closer to the foliage.
 
As for your aero garden , its very hard to see what's going on with those plants in this photo..
 
Thanks for the comment! I did end up having to run the drip system less often as it appeared it wasn't draining fast enough to keep the reservoir up as the 7 gallons were even then lower than the pump itself.

As for the lights, they are some brand of grow lights which already had T5 6500K lights in them.

I guess it seems the aerogarden would be better suited for seed starting than actual plant life correct?

Thanks again!
 
Checked the pH in the reservoir last night and it was sitting at about 5.5-6. It's been about 4 days since I transplanted the plants into the coco/perlite medium in the drip system, and haven't seen any issues yet. I did have to reduce the watering so as the water wasn't draining fast enough to refill the reservoir. So now it's 15 minutes on and 2 hours off.

Does this seem like a reasonable setup? One other thing I'd need to know is how often should I replace the water. I heard it should be about once a week. Also the reservoir is about 6-7 gallons.
 
Curious about the drop system as well. I've seen some pretty amazing results from coco and that setup. I've been running coco since last year and had great results.

I had a bit of a rough start this year, but things are looking up. What nutes are you using? What brand of coco?

Neil
 
I'm using cocotek and nutes are GH flora series (micro, gro, bloom).

Would the PH test be affected by the water color? The nutes gave the water a slight yellowish tint. Then when I tested the color it became a light greenish yellow.

Not sure on ppm. I'm currently uploading more pictures now.
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Since you have the full Flora set you may as well use it all. Once you run out you can safely do away with the Flora Grow. All you need is Micro and Bloom. They'll carry you through seedling to harvest. Check out last years glog for info on coco and Flora series.

http://thehotpepper.com/topic/43839-blisters-led-coco-grow-has-reached-its-inevitable-end/

EDIT: by greenish yellow I assume you're using something similar to GH's PH testing drops. A greenish yellow would put you right around PH6 which is fine. I like a little lower and tend to peg mine at 5.7, but I also have a digital tester. Your plants are looking good so far.

Neil
 
You'd need a TDS meter to test the ppm. What are the amounts of nutes you're giving your plants? Are you using tap water or reverse osmosis water?

Neil
 
Ah ok. I am using water from our sink. No mineral build up here. I believe that makes our local water "soft" here in the Mississippi gulf coast. I believe I used about 6-7 gallons and added about 15-35ml of each nutrient. I'll get the exact numbers once I get home.
 
We have really hard water where I live. It's somewhere around 500 ppm from the tap. It was killing my plants because it created an imbalance in mineral ratios so I had to switch over to RO water. I use milk jugs to simplify my life.

The original GR3ATFULHEAD solution was:
- 6ml Micro
- 9ml Bloom
- 1 gal RO water

When you use RO water this gives you a consistent 700ppm which seems to be about the upper end for most peppers during most of their growth stage. Seemed to work ok for the fruiting stage too.

For plants around the size you have now my notes say that I used:

- 2.4ml Micro
- 3.6ml Bloom
- 1 gal RO water

This mixture would give me around 300 ppm and worked great for plants in their early stages of growth. Too strong of a mixture and I'd notice crumpled leaves, burnt tips (yellowish-brown to black), and leaf tips curling down like a claw.

I used a children's Tylenol syringe with ml's marked on it to measure amounts. I tested the ppm's with an HM COM-100

Without testing your water to see what's in it, or even using a TDS meter to get an overall idea of total dissolved solids it'd be hard to say what your nute strength actually is. Then again your plants are looking pretty good!

Neil
 
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How often you change the water will depend upon the growing stage of the chiles.. PPM and Ph meters will help you to decide when to change.
 
Well I did a water change as the reservoir was running quite low, and I tested the regular water coming out of tap to have a ph which came to about 8.5. So is it good then to change the water out when the ph in the reservoir is too low/high? What exact tool would I need to test ppm?
 
I've never run a drip system, but from what I understand you basically top up your reservoir and make adjustments as needed. PH can drift and needs to be checked fairly regularly to keep it in the proper range 5.7-6.2-ish.

Same with topping up the nutes.

You'll need to get a Total Dissolved Solids (tds) meter in order to check the ppm. As I mentioned in another post above I use an HM COM-100 to test the strength of my nutes. It was a bit over $100 CAN and can be put into a number of modes to take just about every type of measurement you'd need and at different scales. EC/NaCl etc.

http://www.amazon.ca/Hydrofarm-COM100-Waterproof-Temperature-Combo/dp/B0045LQFTK

Neil
 
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I'll go ahead and grab a tds tester ASAP, thanks again. As for DWC systems, Any certain way that I would need to run them?
 
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