Brown Slime Sludge After Adding Great White

[firsttimeARE]

Bleach breaks down into NaCl. NaCl is bad for plants.

It sounds like you have not cleared out the original colony. I've had success with 80F water late last summer. Using just tap water and nutrients. So yeah you can grow in warm water, but its more prone to root disease/res problems.

What I would do is use Aquasheild(if you're reading heisenberg tea thread you should have read that is a vital ingredient) 15ml per gal. 1 tbsp molasses per gal. 1 handful of EWC per gal.(in a ladies legging) and 1/8th scoop of Great White per gal. One scoop is too much, only in a non-economical way. Won't hurt any. That stuff is expensive. And brew that for 48hours and use it 1cup per gal.

Then change your res so the Cl will evaporate in time for when the tea is done. Add only nutrients. Now once your tea is done, spray all the gunk off your roots. Cut out all the dead parts, which the spraying of the roots would pretty much do on its own.

 

[hellraizer30]

Bleach breaks down into NaCl. NaCl is bad for plants.

It sounds like you have not cleared out the original colony. I've had success with 80F water late last summer. Using just tap water and nutrients. So yeah you can grow in warm water, but its more prone to root disease/res problems.

What I would do is use Aquasheild(if you're reading heisenberg tea thread you should have read that is a vital ingredient) 15ml per gal. 1 tbsp molasses per gal. 1 handful of EWC per gal.(in a ladies legging) and 1/8th scoop of Great White per gal. One scoop is too much, only in a non-economical way. Won't hurt any. That stuff is expensive. And brew that for 48hours and use it 1cup per gal.

Then change your res so the Cl will evaporate in time for when the tea is done. Add only nutrients. Now once your tea is done, spray all the gunk off your roots. Cut out all the dead parts, which the spraying of the roots would pretty much do on its own.

Thanks for pointing that out..... My first point was pointed at the fact that your tea was rong!
that being said thats why your getting slime! Been down this road back when that thread was
put up.

Little tid bit for you bleach or h202 will not kill 100% of the bad bactiria it only slows it down.
only sure fire way is fight it with good micro life!

 

[1itsme]

imo the bleach thing works, i just don't like the idea of it. i dont think bleach will harm the plants at reasonable lvls, but i still don't like it. as far as the hiesenburg tea i have used it sucsessfuly in the past. the thing is if your going to use it i would follow the recipie exactly- to the letter. partial recipie might work but it might make the problem worse. ppl have had problems with it (myself included) even from changing the ammount of water. that said, and this is my opinion from my own exp only, if theres one ingredient you could skip it would be the mollassis, and if theres one you don't want to skip its the ewc. gl

 

[1itsme]

oh earthy smell is good btw. sour, rotten, fishy bad- earthy good

 

[legallyflying]

Ok dude. I'm pretty fucking knowledgable on the brown slime. I always get it no matter what. Even when I physian the shit out of EVERYTHING..I still get it when the plants are young.

Stay the course with the great white. Make sure your not adding to much molassis..you could be feeding the bad bugs in your system. If you can get some ancient forest it makes great tea. Messy as fuck, but it works. I can get over a foot of foam on my tea bucket with just AF and no great white. One thing that realy helps the tea is keeping the water warm. In my basement the tea used to cool and I would only get a little foam. I wrapped a seeding eating pad around te bucket and the tea goes nuts!!

Do not go back to bleach, don't try h2o2 or anything else just keep adding the tea.

Bleach is hard to keep the concentration correct. I bought a free chlorine meter and I when I had te slime in my 18 bucket DWC it went from 4 ppm (nuclear) to .02 (nothing) in 4 hours. After a week of constantly draining all 200 gallons to the Rez and treating it I said screw it and went back to the tea. The plants love the tea.

Some people are lucky and can run sterile DWC and UC. Some are not. Te guys I know running HUGE UC systems (we are talking 20,000 watts run ewc tea constantly.

Relax, your doing the right thing. Just give it a week or two

 

[flyingsteve]

I went back to the bleach yesterday and today I ordered some DM Zone since it is Chloramine based. Chloramine is widely used in commercial hydroponic agriculture, products like Pythoff are chloramine based and used to treat real hydroponic farms.

I will go back to trying the tea, just not now. I only have a small window of opportunity to bring these plants to fruition before I move, so I really can't afford to fuck around and play the waiting game. I know bleach works and I'm not too happy with using it but that is why I ordered some Zone. I'm running a 3 pass mechanical can filter with 9w UV lamp, chiller set to 65f and I still got the damn slime but within 48hrs of adding 1ml/g bleach it was gone. I tried previously SM-90 and H2O2 but this stuff loves to accumulate on oxygen rich surfaces like the air stones, so I think H2O2 actually feeds it and SM-90 seems laughable at best.

There is a local commercial hydroponic tomato greenhouse that I plan to stop by one day and see if they'll educate me on their practices.

** I brewed my tea at 70f... I brewed several batches over the past month which I was going to use in the DWC but changed my mind and used it in some soil grows instead. I've gotten good foam action before but didn't get much this time around. I asked Heisenberg through PM about using only Great White and molasses and he said that was a good substitute. Next time I make the tea I will use the exact ingredients and instructions. I'm not doubting that the tea works, I know it does. I used it last year in an outdoor F&D garden grow and despite water temps frequently being 80+ I had zero issues from pathogens or insects. I wish I could use it now because then I could use other beneficials like Recycler, but I just simple don't have the time to brew tea and hope it works out, blah blah.

 

[legallyflying]

I'll save you some time.

Zone isn't going to do fuck all. Been there. Tried that.

The only thing I have not tried that is supposed to be good is hydro sparkle.

Benies dude. Use the bennies. It's your only hope at this point.

You can try the zone though. Some people (like myself) just have to watch it fail to really learn

 

[hellraizer30]

Dm zone is crap!

When adding tea it will always seem to get worse before it gets better.....takes about a week

 

[Malevolence]

molasses does not do well in hydro, thatt could be part of it and having about 10x too much greatwhite. Try pondzyme instead.

The molasses is used only in the brewing of the tea and is completely used up by the beneficials before adding the tea to the hydro system (according to Heisenberg and other beneficial tea advocates). I tried Pondzyme before... I have a container of it still. I'll say that my results were less than spectacular.

How much molasses do you use... can you still smell molasses when you are done brewing the tea? My first thought is using too much and it's not getting eaten up so you're dumping it into your res.

Pond-zyme is mostly just food for bennies; could try brewing tea with it instead of molasses. It's also food for pathogens, which is why shit blooms explode when you add it to an already slimed res. You can't always tell you have slime; it can be present on the verge of a nasty bloom... then adding known triggers such as enzymes or superthrive etc can make for a bad day. I was having hard ph drop for a while and couldn't figure out what the fuck because my roots were pristine and the water crystal clear. Well, I increased the bennies and the ph started behaving normally indicating I had pathogens ready to step on my nuts at the first fuck up.

 

[legallyflying]

In terms of indicators that all is not right in your hydro system; can we all pretty much agree that when your seeing your ph drop more than say .2 a day...you got some issues.

That has certainly been the case for me. My best runs have always been when my Rez, after topping off with tap water to the original level drop about 200 a day and PH rises about .2-.3 a day.

 

[Sativied]

My best runs have always been when my Rez, after topping off with tap water to the original level drop about 200 a day and PH rises about .2-.3 a day.

If I use the amount of nutes the plants ask for (based on ppm level staying the same) the PH level also stays stable (+/- ~0.02). But since I need to top off several times a week I give them just slightly more nutes than they need, which makes the ppm level climb slowly and the PH drop slowly (never more than .2 a day). That allows me to top off with only tap water, lowering the ppm to slightly above what they need again and raising the ph again (from like 5.7x to 5.8x). Convenient, but no comparable runs so, I'm curious, did any of your runs include one where both the ppm and ph stayed stable (for week after week)? Or did the opposite of what you describe?

 

[superstoner1]

Guys you are looking at it the wrong way. The key is find the ppm spot where as water is used by the plant the ppm stays the same, "sweet spot". I run about 600 ppm in my dwc and never top off and rarely does ph need to be adjusted. It starts at 600 and when 3-3.5 gallons have been used it is around 570-620 then i change it. It just takes time and documentation.

 

[legallyflying]

Many ways to skin a cat. I don't like adding nutrients to me Rez as I'm not sure what the actual chemical make up of the Rez is. Maybe it's mostly N that has been absorbed? Maybe it's P? So I top off with tap water, it's an auto top off system. I only add nutes to the top off if I'm going to be gone for awhile.

So naturally my PPMs slowly drop but on the good side, my PH slowly floats up. I don't like a static ph..at all, for the obvious reasons. Based on my Rez and plant size, after about 10 days or so my PPMs are below where I want them and my PH is too high so I do a complete Rez change. I start my PH at 5.5 and change when it's about 6.3.

I was always told that if your PH is dropping, your nutrients are too strong.

 

[Sativied]

Guys you are looking at it the wrong way. The key is find the ppm spot where as water is used by the plant the ppm stays the same, "sweet spot".

That's actually pretty much how I'm looking at it, however, I have two reason for going just slightly higher than that sweet spot (like 50-65 ppm) :

1. I do 'need' to top off several times a week because I need to keep the solution level high enough (relatively small rez but also got pump near the top to prevent too much pressure reduction). If I were to sit on that sweet spot I would have to find it every time I top off. By going slightly higher the ppm increases and the ph drops (because it relatively uses more water than nutes as in not on the sweet spot) allowing me to use only water when topping off. Instead of adding water+nutes+additives+ph every time I need to top off. Added bonus is that I can add cold water at any point without ending up without having to readjust nute and ph levels.

2. I've been told many times to push the ppm level in order to push the plant's ability to take higher nute levels. If you merely give it what it asks for you're not pushing it to its full potential. Let me add that some of those (oldskool hydro growers over here that laugh when I add 'ponic') used burned tips as the main indicator for the max nute level. Lighten the tips, then take it a notch down and you got the real sweet spot. Not saying that's useful or recommendable as a default practice but I'm not sure sure the sweet spot is really that what the plant asks for).

I was always told that if your PH is dropping, your nutrients are too strong.

Indeed (though could depend on additives, some left unused could raise ph) but like you said, "I don't like a static ph..at all." So I just start out a bit higher (5.95-6.00) and let it drop to 5.6-5.7 over roughly 2 days.

 

[legallyflying]

I agree with everything you said except "pushing more nutes increases the ability to take more nutrients". The opposite actually holds true. As you increase the concentration of nutrients you increase the gradient at which the plant has to expend energy to pass those nutrients through the roots. It's not a "free exchange"..ergo passive. If you remember the chemistry term, it is called active transport which is the act of expensing energy to transfer molecules through a semi-permeable membrane.

This is why if your nutes are too strong the plants get burned. The concentration of salts in the solution is higher than the salts in the plant..which draws water out of the plant. In biology terms it's called hypertonicity. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertonicity
Nute burn isn't actually too much nutrients its too little water. The plant can't expend enough energy to draw water into its cells.

Lots and lots and lots of things in nature are all about concentration gradients on both sides of a membrane or tissue. From how your liver and lungs work to how salmon deal with living in fresh and salt water. Ever wonder why salmon get all dark and janky looking when they return to spawn? It's because they har adapted to live in the ocean (saltier then their bodies) so they use specialized cells in their gills to retain moisture. When they return to fresh water (less salty then they are) they just absorb fuck loads of water. So what your seeing is super bloated fish. Which also triggers all kinds of hormones blah blah blah.

Sooo. Lower concentrations are easier for a plant to uptake...and also makes them grow more roots to absorb more nutrients. What happens when it's hard for a plant to find water, or you kill plant roots? They respond by growing more roots. Plants are not like animals where an abundance of nutrients will trigger them to eat more...or reproduce. (You probably heard how the population of hares and foxes track each other...lots of food (hares) then foxes will reproduce more...which cause a reduction in hares...which causes the foxes to breed less...which cause the hare population to rise

Sorry about all the animal stuff. Had a double major in college, botany and wildlife science

 

[plumsmooth]

For a while now I have been chasing a relatively higher PH in my RDWC power Grower systems. I have attributed it to 1. Heavy Microbe Inoculants 2. Undersized reservoirs since my Plants are big. Howell once I got tired of it and couldn't make sense of it and I did a H202 Flush and actually even with reinoculated bennies saw a drop of at least .5 back to a healthier range. This time it is ridiculous; one of my plants albeit a little smaller and defoliated is for some reason maintaining like the dream PH of around 57-58 while my other larger plant about 2 weeks behind in flowering is doing this classic 7.1-7.2 shit again. I am starting to think I have some kind of algae or algae-like bacteria i.e. cya-bacteria or whatever growing in my systems dominating my PH. Through this however I feel I have established and proven to myself that a much wider PH range is tolerated especially obviously with chelated nutrients! This wide difference is unjustified and I please need help solving the mystery. What could be causing this. I might do a 24 hour h202 flush on the 7.1-7.2 plant and see if I can establish a lower ph range? I really don't like doing this unless I have some kind of rot though. Because I prefer to maintain a healthy Benny population as opposed to running sterile systems! Thanks for your time... I will add a couple of pictures...