First DIY stealth aeroponic cabinet grow, SOG

res swapped yesterday, 50 clones taken and stuck into jiffy pellets under humidity dome. Clones in dwc rooted 11/18. More pics of vegging plants which ar going nuts under the HPS. I may even take clones from then, since they almost have cloneable branches. And it won't let me upload my picures but i have a bunch.

here's a couple of pictures

jiffy pellets get this whispy spider wed like mold on them in one frigging day! i've read it might not be fatle to my clones, but that it also might kill them; we shall see. For now, the dome is half off to increase the airflow and lower the humidity slightly.

plants in the hydro system continue to look great, although with the light so much closer in having trouble keeping the temp down below 75 C. Ice bottles help, but i really need a more permanent solution to this radiant heat problem. I think im going to go ahead and grab some styrofoam plates and see if putting one around the base of ech plant helps at all.

day 13 of hydroton clones, they looking great, expecting roots to pop by day 20-30. I have 14 clones rooted in my dwc cloner, which are waiting for netpots to be acquired before they can go into their permanent home in the dwc bubbler on the bottom left hand side of my unit. Both these clones and the ones in hydroton will have a full 68 days days before any of them need to be moved into the flowering chamber, so that should work well with my current cycle. Ill veg them both and then throw the ones that are more developed (as the hydroton clones are starting out larger then the dwc bubbler clones) into flower on april 17th. Then they move up to the HPS on may 13th when i harvest after 27 days of cfl flower for 30 more days of HPS flower. That should start my 30 day cycle. There will be room for experimentation too since the plants will be different sizes each of these first 3 runs, i'll be able to see what works best yeild wise for me.

My currently vegging plants are doing excellent under the HPS. Two or three have exibited y branching exactly as if they had been topped, these seem to be clones that had no grow tip when they were cut, the ones that sort of ended in preflower. Two have exibited major branching arround a main stem, one has like 9 branches coming off the bottom. I'm still going with my plan to lollipop them, so i'm going to wait till i can use the removed material as clones, so early next week these ladies are being pruned. There really isn't enough space in my 2x4x7 closet to grow bushes .

I've got a couple spare clones veging in my mother area right now to become new mothers. My old mothers werent topped at all, so they don't really have enough branches to keep up with the cloning demands. I'm forced to use smaller branches that aren't ideal. I'm going to be topping and retopping this new set of mothers so they are short little bushes. I'll be supercropping them too to train them to the space; i got good at supercroping with my old mothers, and i wish i had trained them from the beginning. I'm hoping to end up with a mother that has a couple inches of thick main stem and then horizontal branches all coming out in a circle that have been supercropped flat with the top of the pot. Then clones just grow like seedlings off of them. Playing with plants is fun

Also, i have a small 35cfm computer fan wired into one of the spare net pot holes in the top of my aero res. I mounted a peice of reflectix above it to block the light, and it now sucks air out of my aero res constantly. I was having trouble with ambient res temps because im using plastic sheeting to leak proof the res. It was acting like an oven, or something saran wraped; all the humidity and heat was staying in the res. Now it is staying at least 8 C cooler and im not even using a waterproof fan or anything, just shit i had laying arround. Im very pleased with the result.

plants looking good, gonna grab netpots on monday and transplant these dwc clones into some hydroton. The hydroton clones are still looking great, although my experience with dwc cloning is pretty much twice as long as bubbler cloning, but i still have high hopes for them to start showing roots within 21 days. My current dwc clones that were just suspended in the water without any medium have taken 28 days to show 2 inch long roots. It'll be neat to see the difference with the hydroton as a medium.

I'll also need a pump for my bubbler cloner which will henceforth reside in the closet with my mother plants. The chamber on the bottom of my veg/flower unit is finally coming fully online, with two sets of plants vegging under cfl. The ones that thrive better during the 40 days of veg will be flowered for 20 days in the lower chamber so they can begin the 30 day cycle once my current plants are done in about 70 days. The others will get the full 70 day vegging time, then 30 flowering, becoming the third generation in the perp cycle. Height may become an issue for this particular run of plants, but i will just supercrop them and stuff.

soil clones looking fine, i guess, fucking cloning so many techniques and it's so stressful to not know if it will succeed. Pruned mothers showing good new growth. I'm definetly going to put one or two of these mothers into my hps flower unit once it's swapped over to 12/12 to flower them; they are old and sad. They are being replacced by some of my rooted dwc clones that were showing a touch of algea on their roots, dipped in h202 and then soiled. They are looking great under my t5 fluorescents.

lots done today;

-swapped bubbler cloner water and sterilized it and clone roots
-repositioned all the viable rooted bubbler clones to one side of the res
-took about 20 clones from the hps aero vegging plants, reducing them to lolipop.
-those clones are in the bubbler cloner on the other side.

so really i took clones off of 5 of the 10 plants. The rest are just beginning to bush out and i'm snipping the grow tips at the nodes before they become branches. Three of my plants are perfect y split, so i would have to pick a stem if i wanted to do that. One plant grew a branch stait out to the side to about where an absent netpot would be, now it's growing strait up from there. I'm going to leave it and th y's alon, train them to fit and see what technique is best for my system.

the tallest plant is now 10.5 inches, then i have two at 7.5 inches, one at 6 (a y plant, so two stems at 6 and at 3), and then 5 at 4-5 inches and one runty y plant at two inches (jsut beginning to pick up i think, pygmy plant!)

day 16 for hyroton clones, roots within 5-7 days i hope. they still looking good, and i removed their humidity dome to no ill effect.

tallest plant now over 11 inches, all plants looking great.
day 17 for hydroton clones, still looking good.
great root development on bubbler clones, need to get em into hydroton soon.
soil clones looking good.

wow so as of last night i had 5 clones in jiffy pellets rooted. Thats like 8-9 days! Twice as fast as any of my hydro methods have ever been. I am fucking flabergasted. They have been transplanted and are veggin under fluro.

Plants looking huge. Hopefully netpots today so i can start vegging the other clones. Tallest plant pushing 11.5 now. Need to flower soon lol.

got netpots and another pump, so i've now got two sets of 15 clones rooting (19 days) and or vegging in two dwc bubbler units in the bottom of my cab. Then i have 10 plants on day 19 of vegging. Then i have another 20 clones in a dwc bubbler cloner in my closet, with about 30 rooted jiffy pellet clones. I have clones coming out of my ass right now lol.

moved the plants around today to get the smallest ones under the most intense light.
my rooted clones look a little sickly, they are vegging and will hopefully recover. They went almost 30 days without nutes so they are probably mostly just hungry.
Soil plants look great, it's all looking good.

did a shitload today.

changed out the res on the vegging aero plants and the hydroton clones. The clones are rooting officially, first root showed today out the bottom of the net pot. I don't know what i'm going to end up doing; i may go back to my old bubbler cloning method or i may stick with this cloning directly to hydroton. Certainly i know my plants will root WAY faster in soil then they have ben in dwc or even the bubbler. Doesn't really matter though; i have the next three sets of plants allready cloned, so i won't need more clones for weeks. I killed three of my mothers today. Two were sickly and old and one was allready dead pretty much. So i have one mother left showing excellent new growth and then about 10 rooted soil clones, any one of which can become a mother. Another 30 or so soil clones still rooting and then 20 or so in dwc rooting.
the bubber clones which are now vegging in hydroton were given nutes today, starting at 500 ppm. They can take up to 1200 no problem, so i'll slowly move them up. I'm almost certain they will be the third set of plants, and not the next ones to go to flowering. The hydroton clone have less root development, but look much healthier and I think they will recover quicker and veg larger in the 30-40 days they have. We shall see.
I'm going to try and get some pictures up today. stay tuned.

here are the promised pictures. lots of them lol.

the roots look TERRIBLE in those pictures, but they are bone white lol. Not horrible zombie roots. pic 7 is the most up to date picture of the vegging plants, the first two pics are of the vegging plants from about 10 days ago. The tallest plant is now 13 inches. The cfl chamber is directly below the hps chamber. pic 11 is of how my res is covered in a double lining of plastic tucked in to prevent leaks and the refelctix on top to keep the light out and the heat out.

ok, well, finally got my fans and duct work set and fixed in its final position. Cab is staying at 28-30, and i can lower that by lowering the room's temp with ac in the summer and outside air in the winter. glad to have it done; the tallest plants are showing signs of heat stress through leaf curling because cab has been going up to 35 with the ducting all fucked. Not the end of the world, but need it stable for budding, and now it is.

day 23 on hydroton clones, and 4 or 5 are showing roots, so good to go on that. The other clones are looking sicker, but not dead, so i have hope for their recovery. soil plants look good, no dead clones from damping off this time because i sterilized the jiffy pellets with boiling water i think.

eeep just got home after leaving the plants alone for 7 hours and found them wilting. A cable had fallen and had nocked all the on settings on the timer to off. Luckily they look ok, as soon as i turned on the water they started to perk up, actually it was pretty cool to watch them straiten back up and extend their leaves in real time. I'm letting the pump run for the next 3 hours then going back to 30 on 60 off. I will be more careful of the stupid timer in the future.

ok so plants look perfect again this morning, phew that was scary last night. Tallest is 15 inches, shortest is 5 with some pretty much at each different height in between. I'm keen to flower them because the tallest is getting really tall, and since i just had to add spacers to keep my res off the shelf with the cfl's now under it, i've lost a couple inches of growing space. I should still be fine i think, these plants barely stretched last time, although i do suspect they will do substantially more without horible pythium owning them. So hopefully none will stretch over the Res is maxing at 71-72 in 12 hours, wich is ideal for me, i can keep it between 65-72 forever since the ambient room temp is now what it will be all summer. Ambient is maxing at 28-29 C, which is higher then i'd like, but still acceptable. At night with the light off during 12/12 it will drop substantially, like to watever the room temp is (20C perhaps). It might even meen i won't need to ice as often. We shall see.
day 24 hydroton clones. 5-6 showing roots, i'm assuming the others are on their way. 30 days for clones is too long. I'm seriously consdering using jiffy pellet clones next time, sterilized and resting on a layer or two of hydroton. I may have to experiment again.

day 25 on hydroton clones, still only 6 showing roots, jesus fucking dwc cloning is slow as hell.
I trimmed the lower leaf growth of the plants today to allow more airflow, so the larger plants had anything under 3.5 inches. The tallest is pushing 15.5 inches lol and i need to flower them soon. 5 more days and it's 12/12 for them!
here is some pics too, look at the second one, those cfls are bright lol. The fifth picture has a roll of duct tape in it for size reference. There's two pics of the comp fan im using to vent the res.

edit- sry pics had to be sacrificed

tallest now pushing 16 inches. I know that that clone was the tallest to start with, it was about 3-4 inches long, the others were smaller. So 4 inch clones will veg to the size i need in 30 days under hps. under cfl we'll have to see i guess lol.

day 26 hydroton clones, 7/14 showing roots. The HPS vegging plants look great, i have swapped over to 30 on 30 off on my timer since the rootmass is so large. They are going going into flower on wednesday, and then we can start the harvest countdown! Im thinking 54 days till harvest from today.

also, battlestar gallatica was bad. I liked the rosalin ending and the Helo/Athena ending, but that's it. Cavil, Kara, Adama, Tigh, Ellen, Apollo, Baltar, Six, all of them got shitty endings. And why did the answer to all the difficult questions have to be god? If god sends angels to earth to physically provide us with unknown solutions and information so as to make his plan work, then why did god need the entire plotline of the show to get Hera to fucking Earth2??? FUCK. what a copout imho.

ok so the largest plants are pushing 16-18 inches, need to flower lol. The swap over to 30on/off seems to have increased the growth of the plants if i were to be comepletely honest. Now that they have a large root mass i guess they can probably uptake more.
Some of the sickening dwc clones were sacrificed today. Most were developing root systems, but all their foliage had died so they weren't going to be able to grow fast enough for me. So right now they are half living dwc rooted clones and half jiffy pellet soil rooted clones now in hydroton. The jiffy pellet is in there too. It's an experiment i think will work. I'm kept a tiple layer of hydroton in the bot of the netpots, then jiffy rooted clone and more hydroton arround and on top. The water level is a couple centimeters under the jiffy pellets, touching the bottom of the pots to wick water up through the hydroton. I'll be really pleased if this works, my soil clones have ended up being FAR more reliable and speedy then my hydro ones. Once i have some $ i'll build a stinkbud cloner, but the one on 5 off tomier is crucial and expensive.
Soil plants still looking great, the one mother i have left has at least two rounds of clones in her right now, so i don't have to worry about clones. I have been topping the vegging plants thqat have exibited enough new growth to do so, and i have one i'm lsting to the side to create a horizontal branch that is growing brances (ie clones) straight up off of it.
Good roots on the straight to hydroton clones, not all have popped but i'm sure they will by day 30. I think this process is going to be pretty relialbe, if a little slow. The rooted plants look reasonably healthy and apart from the time taken it's a good method. No transplants required, less stress allround and lack of an oversaturatable medium such as rockwool. So if i end up hydro cloning because my jiffy pellet scenario fails then ill be sticking unrooted clones into their final hydroton homes and then just waiting 30 days.