Purple KUSH Deep water culture grow with the Luas formula

[jakeman311]

Purple KUSH Deep water culture grow with the Lucas formula

This journal will be following my first attempt at using both the DWC style of growing as well as the Lucas formula for nutrients. I will be doing 8 plants from my homemade aeroponic cloner. I have been growing since i first recived my medical recommendation 10 years ago (and i little before that shhhhh) and have alwasy been a soil guy with a few grows in different hydropic kethids such as flood and drain and coco drip systems but after following another members journal Closetgrow https://www.rollitup.org/indoor-growi...c-bubbler.html and seen great results with both DWC anad the Lucas Formula I decided to give it a shot myself. But Enough of a back story and on with the grow.
I will be growing a Purple Kush strain that is a very decient yielder outdoors that has a short squat, bushy growth pattern with chunky buds that i figured would be perfect fit for this grow since i will only be doing 8 plants in a 4 x 8 area under 2 1000 hps in daystar 6" aircooled hoods and I wanted to be able to fill the whole canopy with out plants that were 6 feet tall ( og kush, sour diesel, etc)

I purchased all the equipment for around $200 and am using round air stones on a commercial air pump that will run all 8 sites by itself. I opted to go with a heavy duty pump and the larger diameter air stones by figuring the more air the better and those round stones put out a awesome volcano of bubbles that im sure the plants will just love. After a little drilling and gluing and connecting everything I filled the buckets and added the nutrients and let everyhting run with no plants for 24 hours just to make sure there weren't and kinks and to see how much the ph would fluctuate over night without subjecting the plants to the fluctuation. Its a good thing I did that because the hose from the airpump that leads the the splitter blew off over night which would have suffocated my plants of they were in there and most likely killed everything so i fixed that with some zip ties.​

 

[jakeman311]

So the clones are pretty much itching to start their cycle they have been in the cloner for prob a week too long i was hoping the 2 weaker clones would grow roots faster but no they just continued to suck and take their sweet time while the good clones grow roots over a foot long just kicking major ass. Ive never planted bare root clones into a hydroponic setup so i was hoping i did it right and didn't f the roots up too bad in the process and is it just me or does it feel like your pouring a bowl of coco puffs when your filling up the pots with that hydroton stuff lol. Anyways I have the water just barley touching the bottom of the net pots with a lucas solution with natural spring water ( like actually out of a spring itself not bottled claims to be out of a spring arrowhead crap or anything). I know your supposed to use RO water with the lucas formula but i dont like waiting 17 hours for my RO to pump out the needed 30+ gallons of water im gonna need every reservoir change out but the spring water ph's at 6.7 and has a ppm of 50-60 so into not bad at all and i felt it was close enough plus every summer i see all the local hippies lined up at the natural spring filling up big 50 gallon drums with this water for their assumed crops so if the hippies like it im sure it will be fine for me too lol. But I have the water phed at 5.8 and the ppm at 600 for the first few days since the plants have only been getting RO water this. So you can see the plants sitting in the cloner on the pics below I will be using the clones on the left the ones on the right are not close to being ready on top of them being taken from a flower plants so they would need to reveg on top of the rooting time and that just way to far down the line im anxious already but they. And in the last pic you can see the plants all planted on day 1. I have them plants underneath a 1000 MH on a light rail for the first part of veg.

 

[ColoradoLove]

Looking good man. DWC is a lot of fun. I read that hydro is 25% faster than soil too which is a nice perk

 

[CLOSETGROWTH]

Hell yea!!

You got it going on my friend.

You have the right recipe for an enormous Yield.

Keeping a close eye on this thread.. sub'd

 

[jakeman311]

OK 3 days into this grow and I am already completely SOLD on DWC. The plants are growing at a amazing rate already and they only have 1/2 strengh of the nutrient solution and are relatively light green still compared to the other soil plants in the room but are still growing faster even with their obvious lack of nitrogen. So Im gonna go ahead and step it up and give them the full strength Lucas formula for grow now as well a LST the 2 larger of the clones.

Side note as you can see there are only 7 plants now the runt didnt make it I pretty much expected it to die though it had a piss poor root system from the cloner that little guy just didnt have it in him.

 

[Rusty Crutch]

Those clone roots are huge. Nice work dude

Along for the ride.

 

[Dropastone]

Looks good brah. I'll be coming along for the ride.

 

[jakeman311]

Thanks guys and I know in 3 days the plant went to having abolutley no roots poking out of the net pot that that! Ive alwasy grown into some type of substrate (soil/coco/rockwool/hydroton) before so ive never been able to the actual root growth day by day.

 

[rudy.racoon]

Sweet, I am thinking about trying hydro now that I have learned alot more than I knew before.

 

[dk0515]

Nice setup Jake. I'm planning on doing the same thing as soon as I move out when my lease is up. I can't wait. I wanted to try it out after I read closetgrowths thread too.

I'm going to do a similar setup as you did. How many flowering plants do you think would fit in that 4x8 area comfortably with your 2 1000watts?

 

[jakeman311]

Well I was planning on doing 8 plants in the 4x8 area and just using the low stress technique and spreading the plants out and make them as bushey as possible as to achieve a full canopy of the area with that smaller number of plants. DWC seems to be a lot more work since you have many individual reservoirs so I didnt wanna go all out and have like 18 plants (basically 18 reservoirs) in that area, like if i was using coco or soil with medium sized plants or 32 if doing the sea of green method. Also I wanted to stay under my legal amount. Right now I only have 7 though since one didnt make it so Im gonna have to find another plant somewhere that has the similar growing characteristics of this Purple Kush strain im running right now so there all the same height.

 

[dk0515]

Thanks a lot jake. I was planning on doing 10 in 5gal buckets in a 4x8 area with 1000watt and 600watt on a light mover. But, looking at your picture I think I might be able to get away with 12 in that area.

I can't wait to see how yours turns out. I won't be able to start mine until about End of July. I can't wait though.

 

[jakeman311]

oh yeah you can def get away with 12 in that size of a area more even if you dont mind all the extra time or plant #'s

 

[ColoradoLove]

Not trying to hijack here Jake, but 2 tips for you involving DWC DK0515.

1. Make sure you get an additional "storage" bucket for each plant you have if you're packing them in. That way you can pull all your plants out and let them chill in the empty storage buckets while you check their res's. I tried to get away with having only a couple extra buckets and just doing 3 at a time but it's messy. You're dragging rootballs over the other plannts and buds are getting caught on each other. If you have a packed area do yourself the favor and get double the buckets!

2. Go with the 6" pot lid like Jake did. I've got the 10" and they weigh a pretty decent amount once they're full of hydroton and wet. (like more than is easily lifted with one hand) Since all the roots are going down below anyway, I can't figure out why anyone would need the 10" unless they were doing multiple plants per netpot. I've also found that due to the large amount of loose hydroton in the 10" pot that the Rockwool cubes my clones were originally mounted in have shifted, tilted, etc. So I've got them tied upright so they don't fall over. I already snagged replacement 6" lids for next round.

That's all I got, I'm no DWC expert, those are just 2 things I picked up along the way when I switched mid grow from soil to DWC.

Jake your girls are looking awesome, keep up the good work dude!

 

[dk0515]

Thanks for the tips. I was planning on only buy a couple extra buckets to do that. But, now I will buy more.

Jake, you have any pix on your ladies?

 

[ColoradoLove]

Yea definitely dude. I tried to make 3 spare buckets work til I snapped a branch off when another branch caught it and cranked it off underneath the bucket rim. Can't have that!

 

[sakhalchea]

Nice set up dude the OG kush is straight killer, u will love it also have you ever thought of super cropping it? I supercropped mine on the second day from clone and 2 days later OMFG.. Lovely shoots appeared, its like it dosent stun them or anything right now at day 4 my bushiest looking clone is the clone i accidently broke the main stem when i was super cropping lol like badly too had it litterally dangling and 2 days later its the bushiest of all. I will have pics on my journal soon.

 

[jakeman311]

Not trying to hijack here Jake, but 2 tips for you involving DWC DK0515.

1. Make sure you get an additional "storage" bucket for each plant you have if you're packing them in. That way you can pull all your plants out and let them chill in the empty storage buckets while you check their res's. I tried to get away with having only a couple extra buckets and just doing 3 at a time but it's messy. You're dragging rootballs over the other plannts and buds are getting caught on each other. If you have a packed area do yourself the favor and get double the buckets!

2. Go with the 6" pot lid like Jake did. I've got the 10" and they weigh a pretty decent amount once they're full of hydroton and wet. (like more than is easily lifted with one hand) Since all the roots are going down below anyway, I can't figure out why anyone would need the 10" unless they were doing multiple plants per netpot. I've also found that due to the large amount of loose hydroton in the 10" pot that the Rockwool cubes my clones were originally mounted in have shifted, tilted, etc. So I've got them tied upright so they don't fall over. I already snagged replacement 6" lids for next round.

That's all I got, I'm no DWC expert, those are just 2 things I picked up along the way when I switched mid grow from soil to DWC.

Jake your girls are looking awesome, keep up the good work dude!

Thanks Colorado and yeah what i've been doing when I check the res,adjust ph, etc. Is I take the first plant out and put it in a extra bucket with a air stone then once i have adjust the res I take the plant that was next to that bucket and put it in that ones place and I do that with all of them until I replace the last bucket with the first plant I initially removed. Even though my plants are still small I realised I was going to need some type of system figured out before these plants have big sticky nugs falling all over the place. Do you have any tip on keeping the large flowers up when that time comes? I imagine any type of trellis wouldnt work and im not sure how to stake them the hydroton moves around to easy to out something like a bamboo stake in it.
Ill upload some pics later today dk0515 and sakhalchea i decided to go with the LST method of training these plants i want to get them as wide as possible.

 

[dk0515]

Closetgrowth sent me this link a few weeks ago. I can't find it right now. But, the person had used a reservoir about 35gal and a control bucket that would distribute water to all the buckets and also would drain them back into the reservoir when you needed to replace the water. I guess this would be the easiest way.

 

[ColoradoLove]

Yea imagine how nice it would be if you could just clear out the growroom, check all the buckets at once, then slap all the plants back in.

I don't have a solution for keeping the buds up. SickSadLittleWorld is using the bamboo someway I believe, I'll link you to his journal.

https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journal-discussion/287846-going-big-new-year-new.html <----- LINK

Somewhere towards the end of that he's using bamboo stakes to keep his Trainwreck tree in check.

My buds are all hanging low but the stems appear to be strong enough to handle it. They just kind of brush against one another as I'm pulling them out. After snapping that 1 branch off I got 1 storage bucket for each plant I have and it hasn't been a problem since. See what works for ya. I think I'm gonna try a mini tree type pruning approach next time to get them up off the buckets a little more. The branches only seem to be in danger when they're down low and at the height they can get clipped by putting on the lid or other buckets, I think mini trees might solve that. Other than that if you've got a fan in there stimulating stem strengthening then your branches should be able to support their bud weight... I think. Ha! Now I think I'm rambling.