Soil plant to hydro. Good or bad idea?

sup dudes,

i have a plant that is growing in soil right now in a 3 gallon filled pot. she is about 2 feet tall and ready to be flowered. fairly decent sized bush.

now i have been doing a lot of testing with hydroponics lately and seem to want to stay with that grow method. so i think imma try switching this plant to hydro. a 5 gallon bucket with a net pot and airstone should be enough to support this plant.

now the tricky part is how im going to wash the soil out of the roots before transfer and if its even worth the risk. i would probibly fill a bucket with RO water and dip it repeatedly untill most of the dirt was gone. then spray with water to rid of whats left. put it in a big ass net pot filled with hydroton. and stick it in a system....

Now has anyone ever done this with a big plant? am i just gonna kill this bitch?

thanks-bently

I have done this and what you stated is exactly what I did, No you will not get all the soil off and dont try too. You might damage the roots. Just take another bucket fill it will water and sit the plant in there, come back 5 mins later and just shake the bottom, rinse and repeat until little or no soil is left.

okay niice. did u have any problems with shock or root damage?

i think ille add the airstones in my clensing buckets to help break up soil and to circulate o2 so i dont drown her.

I would water them with a little garden B1 before you do it. B1 will ease shock.

You may wish to consider using the plant as a mother plant for cuttings. Always nice to have a steady supply of females for your grow.

Having said that, I will be doing something similar next week. Someone gave me some 8 inch rooted cuttings growing in dirt. What I will do is soak them overnight in B1 at one tsp per gallon then rinse off all the dirt and transplant them into hydroton in the morning.

Hope this helps.

Peace V

-GTS

I have some that i want to go the other way FROM DWC to DIRT, will they live or not? I was just gonna put the netcups and roots in a large hole, spreading the roots gently, and cover with good dirt. Are water roots and dirt roots the same?

doobiee said:

I have done this and what you stated is exactly what I did, No you will not get all the soil off and dont try too. You might damage the roots. Just take another bucket fill it will water and sit the plant in there, come back 5 mins later and just shake the bottom, rinse and repeat until little or no soil is left.

Click to expand...

(^^^surprisingly good advice.^^^) i have switched from both mediums both ways, but i have never done it as late as you're considering, so i can't help you there. i would guess that it's a bad idea, but may work. imo, the less time out of some sort of medium, the better. what i do is to have 3, 5 gallon buckets ready, (with properly ph'd water.) to rinse off the rootball. as mentioned, you will not be able to get all of the soil out. don't spend a lot of time trying to get things clean, you can do that later. the important thing is to get it into the medium/rez, and get things back to normal. i reduce nute strength for a short time too....

fer sure.

ille prob just buy some FF nutes and flower her in the dirt. dont wanna risk killing her.

I used to do this all the time back in the day! I used super thrive to relive the stress, and it works great! I am also still doing it with A select few that I take clones and root in dirt and then off to my SOG tray's. Some people have said that you need to taper off the PH since the diff between soil and hydro, but I never did and never had problems.