• Do you need help identifying a 🌶?
    Is your plant suffering from an unknown issue? 🤧
    Then ask in Identification and Diagnosis.

I gotta learn this, I gotta learn this, I gotta...

W

wordwiz

For about three years I have been trying to grow stuff hydroponically. Something always seems to jump out of nowhere and beat me like that lobster tail in the commercial. A 54-watt LED light suffered a burn out in 1/3 of the lights in the first trial. The next one: the air pump quit working. Another time, the pH meter quit (none of these times did I find the problem until it was too late) and another time the air stone got clogged and did not work.

The last time, the toms in the GH were doing quite well - I used a professional pump, soaker hose, natural light and bought a new pH meter. But then one day, the weather forecasters were off by 200 percent, the temps in the GH got well over 125 and the pump shut down, causing the plants to fry.

I use DWC, because it is simple, each station is independent of others and they are cheap and easy to build. I'm thinking the basics are: control the pH, ppm, temps, use ferts and nuits that plants need in the amounts they need, give them the light they need, make sure the water level stays deep enough and that there is enough oxygen in the water. Right?

Then why can't I do it? A simple mistake of not thinking about lights going out, air stones getting clogged, pumps not putting air even though they make noise, meters going bad and giving false readings? Or are the garden gods and gods of water aligned to foil my best laid plans?

I have no choice - I've had a hand grab a glove slap my face and dare me to successfully grow some plants in water. I've armed myself with good pumps, chucked the air stones for hose, bought reliable lights, am using litmus paper that won't give me pH reading of 3.8 to 8.3 in the same tub of water. I plan on using VitaGrow nuits but am open to other suggestions, as long as they have calcium (I've become paranoid of BER on tomato plants) and don't cost more than similar products.

I'm also thinking about doing three money-hums and playing "What A Marvelous Night For A Moon Dance."

Mike
 
Good luck to you Mike. I am going to try a DWC this Fall through Winter. I figure for my first shot I will go with basil. That way when I most likely fail I won't feel so bad.
 
Josh,

I can tell you that from my grow test (dirt, not water) basil superthrives under HPS. That's what I am doing this evening - replacing six tomato plants that keep developing BER with nine basil plants. Hey, one good thing is that in a few months, I will have a bunch of compost!

Mike
 
Sorry to hear that wordwiz.I had the same issues when i had a cheap p.h meter some cheap-o i got off of e-bay a few year ago.THen i got my hands on a milwaukee ph 51 pen and this thing is great.Hear a link Milwaukee pH 51 Waterproof pH tester meterAs far a nutes go pure blend pro and cal-mag do great for my tom's:P Here's a pic of a tom cutting in a powergrower.
now21.jpg
 
Toasty,

I appreciate the reply and sentiment but let's be honest: most of the plant's branches laying on the floor and a huge length between nodes are not a ringing endorsement. :rolleyes:

Mike
 
I would suggest a clean, sterile, environment for growing hydroponically. From your earlier pics I notice a lot of dirty equipment. You may also want to start with distilled or R/O water or at least know whats in your source water
 
+26 on the clean environment.
Wash your hands after working with dirt. Dirt and hydro should be done in separate areas.
Gardening tools should be kept separate or cleaned.
 
OK, I'll try to pay more attention to cleanliness. But in all fairness, I don't think my problems are related to the environment (except for the one day when the temps got wa-a-a-a-ay too high). A light that lost a whole circuit of bulbs, pH meter that read the same no matter what I added (I probably had a pH of about 2.0 after the third day!), a clogged airstone or an air pump that only had one outlet working. It's more like I am jinxed. The GH toms in water were doing great, better than the ones in dirt, until that fateful day.

Derek, I use tap water to fill the tub or buckets, but aerate it for 24 hours. After that, I try to use rainwater when replenishing the supply. I check the pH before adding it. In the GH, where I had eight plants, I fixed up a batch of nuits, mixing them with rain water, adjust the pH and ppm and ran a bubbler to keep it aerated. As I said, they were doing extremely well. They were in food-grade 5-gallon buckets that were throughly cleaned.

I did lose some transplants last fall and still am not sure why. The first batch of eight were perfect, the next ten all eventually died. I "think" the difference was the water level. The first ones I made sure the roots were in water but not all of the stem. The last ones the level was higher and much of the stem was also in water. Plus, the weather was much warmer when I started the second group. I don't know if that made a difference or not.

On a positive note, the broccoli has not died - yet!

Mike
 
Don't give up, you'll get it sooner or later.

I sucked at growing hot peppers 15 years ago, I grew all the standard, ceyenne, jalapeno, serano mainly because those were the only seeds I could find in stores - then one day I was in a garden centre and found habanero seeds, I thought I hit the jackpot.
Bought them, planted 6, all 6 came up and I thought "oh ya, I'm the man", they seemed to stay small for quite along time, so I got creative "more heat is needed I said", I built a little wooden structure with a plastic cover, I set my 6 little habs on my deck in nice bright sunlight and covered them with my new mini greenhouse. Off I went to work, couldn't wait to get home and see what progress was made..... or NOT. If hot pepper leaves contained THC I could have smoked my 6 little brown, dried, crisp plants.

I planted 6 more, I think 1 came up, I was depressed, the plant grew, never flowered, then died. But as years went on, I gradually got better and today I have habs.

Same story with Tepin, found seeds at walmart several years ago, planted 6, 1 came up, it grew slightly but never produced fruit, then died. Last year I planted 6, 2 grew, I gave 1 away, I ate Tepins last year, in December(I know rather late but you eat them when they ripen and December was when then ripened). I was really disappointed, the fruit wasn't tasty, had a searing hot burn for about 5 minutes and all I remember is the seeds filled the fruit and were hard to chew. I still have the plant, it is about 2 feet tall. I won't be growing Tepin anytime soon, I call this a success.

So, now I am trying Fatalii for the first time and I suck, one tiny plant out of my efforts and 1/2" tall, been that size for a month, sits 1.5" under a grow light, on a heat pad, 90 degrees says the thermometre, I have a couple more in germination bags but no sprouting yet. I'll figure it out.

Good luck, I bet you will figure things out and say "why didn't I just do it this way in the beginning?" - the learning experience, can't replace it.
 
If you had caught all the mishaps that occurred within a few hours would you have been able to correct them and the plants survive? If so then maybe you're not checking on things often enough. Physically check everything that can go wrong on a daily basis. Get a routine established and stick with it. You know Murphy's law right? If it can go wrong it will at the worst possible time.

Good luck to you Mike.
 
Mike-
Don't give up. It's a learning process, that's for sure. Right now I've got a couple tomatoes in Autopots that are dying slowly, and right next to them a Datil and Fatalii are in Autopots and they're going nuts. Last month I started a shit ton of peppers and cucumbers and toms and squash in an Ebb & Flo, then I left for work for two weeks knowing that they would be going gangbusters. Then when I returned after two weeks I found that I'd forgot to plug in the pump. As you've found out, if you're going to go hydro you get what you pay for when you're buying equipment.

Replace cheap equipment with quality stuff, pay attention to pH, ppm, temperature and light.
 
BC,

Yeah, I've been there too. Outsmarted myself. I've given up trying to compete in the annual pepper growing comp. Last year, almost every pepper seed I sowed came up, but not a single Fatali. Same this year - great stand of habs, japs, even 7-pod but not a single solitary Trinidad.

Patrick,

Yes, had a known what I did not know I needed to know, I could have saved all of them (though the overheating GH was because I followed the weather forecast and it was far too cold to open the door before I left). But I presumed that if one outlet of a pump was working, the other one would also. I didn't think an airstone could get clogged - water pumps, yes, but all that was going through it was air. The light "looked" bright and it was suppose to last 50,000 hours, who would have thought it would short out in less than 500, especially just a part of it. BTW, it still does a great job on seedlings! And the meter going bad - yeah, I should have checked it with a solution but it also was relatively new - maybe five or six months old.

That's why I am cautiously optimistic. I know to check the lights, I did check every bucket every couple of days to make sure the aerator was working, I'm using litmus paper which won't go bad and give me false readings.

Mike
 
Thats the biggest problem with hydroponics and with greenhouses. The more automated you get, the more problems you can have if the system fails.
Good luck
 
Derek,

I wished it would have been partly automated - the door would have come open! It was so hot it even caused the pump to quit working, though it came back to life after it cooled off. One guy mentioned an automatic vent opener that relies only on temps, not electricity to operate. As the fluid inside it heats, the piston expands opening the vent. But IME, losing the pump for a few hours would not have hurt anything had the temps been much lower. A couple of years ago, we were without electricity for five days, although my neighbor shared his generator for a couple of hours twice a day. After three days, the plants were still surviving so I started aerating the water for about 15 minutes a day the rest of the week.

Mike
 
I think you may need an exhast fan, I just can't see enough hot air escaping through just a vent especially in the summer
 
I won't be using it much in the summer. But if I do, it will have screens on the side instead of windows covered with plastic! And I do have a fan I can suck air through it with. I learned that we simply do not get enough light in winter to make growing plants viable. So my plans are to start tomatoes in it in August and harvest them through the middle of December. Shut it down until February, then have plants that will produce from March thru June. In the dead of summer, I may use it to isolate a pepper plant I want to get pure seeds from, and in the dead of winter, overwinter some banana plants, though that may change. We had a long but not frigid winter (my lowest temp was 3.5 degrees) but keeping it warm enough was not that much of a problem. But adding lights simply isn't economically wise. I have a room upstairs where I can grow 50+ plants and it is already heated.

That's why I have to get growing hydroponically down. Still have to experiment to be sure, but it looks like I can grow about 56 plants using 1500 watts of energy for 16 hours a day. I used 1650 to heat the GH and some days the heaters ran 24 hours. Plus, add in another $40 for kerosene to cover those really cold nights.

Gas-ripened tomatoes are selling for $1.89/lb. now, and that is at a discount produce store. I don't know if I can get to the 40 pounds per plant level I would like to (thinking about Florida 91 and Red Delicious for the plants but if Red Stuffer turns out to be a hit at restaurants I may add it), but if I can, I can double my start-up costs the first season.

This is what I want to do for a living in the long-run. I've talked with enough people to know that out of season (November-May) people will pay $2/lb for tomatoes. Restaurants will gladly pony up a buck-fifty for good ones, maybe two bucks for a stuffer. There is a market, I just need to find a way to fill it!

Mike
 
If you're going to go pro you will want to use professional equipment.

I think you've found a unique way to make a living Mike, I wish you the best of luck with it.
 
Patrick,

God willing, the Devil doesn't interfere the creek don't rise, it will be 2-3 years before I will be able to make this my sole means of survival. That gives me a chance to experiment with different types of lighting and if a kid or two moves out, different types of hydro systems. Plus types of plants to grow. I figure I will need to grow somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-50K pounds of toms a year, in a greenhouse, garden or building to make it doable. I'm eyeing restaurants and stores (grocery and delis) more than consumers in the long term. Kroger, a huge supermarket chain, is headquartered in Cincy; a main shipping facility is about five miles away. If I can get to the point where I can supply them with a ton of maters per week - I would be on easy street! Of course, that would mean growing about 1,000 plants but hey, I love gardening!

Mike
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top