Urgent help needed :D

Hi, to cut a long story short my father is in hospital. I live in one city, him and my mother another city and he is in hospital in a third city.

He has 3 plants back home with auto-timed lights, and normally waters and feeds them regularly himself. However, because he is in hospital none of us will be able to regularly take care of them so I need to set up a way for the plants to be left unattended but still be able to get adequate water and nutrients, enough to be left unattended for say two weeks at a time maybe, or as long as possible

His current set up is just them under auto lights in pots, they are at the flowering stage and in a light/dark cycle as far as I know

So, my questions are:

I have researched growing myself and often saw hydroponic set-ups where the plants would be in some sort of big plastic bucket filled with water and nutrients and the roots would just grow into the water and no actual soil/pots were needed. If this is true, then I was thinking, fill their bathtub up with water, put a big piece of wood over it with holes for the plants and just set them up in there and fill the tub with nutrients to last the two or so weeks (still in the right proportion and right pH).

So my question is, is this a good idea? Will it work? Are there better ways of accomplishing a self-sustained set-up? Can I even transfer them out of the soil into a hydro set-up (sorry, I am pretty newb I have never done my own grow before) Any advice to accomplish a set-up that can be left for two weeks at a time.

tl;dr
Sorry, no cliffs please read it I would appreciate it so much. I don't want the plants to die as my dad is in intensive care unit, he nearly died and would be really happy to come home to healthy plants.

Thank you so much guys!

Firstly, IMHO it wil be better to give little and often rather than full feed and then either drown or dry em out. Get a pump and a load of 16mm tubing from local nursery / hydro shop. run a pipe from one end (resevoir site) of his grow area to the other. T off from the main pipe to each plant and put a tap on each end of each at the plant to control the flow. Your gonna need a decent size resevoir to hold enough water for 2 weeks. remove all the tubing and do a test run adjusting the taps to get equal flow to all sites. Run the pump and measure the output and time. Set the timer to match the amount of feed your gonna give each time. example..... 5 mins delivers 0.5 litre to each site. you will need 2 timers, a 1hr timer to program the amount of feed and then a 7 day timer to program the frequency of feeds.

There ya go, clear as mud. Will take a few hours to set up and a few $ but I can't see any other way for the time scales you have described.

Make sure the lights are high enough so they don't grow into them.

dont let dads plants die...................dont do the hydro thing that wont work............. how big are the pots how big are the plants? maybe u could transplant to some big pots soak em raise the lights and be ok....................but transplanting during flower isnt cool dad wont be happy

Yeah I agree with wayno that hydro crossover your talking about will not work. At all. You could premix some jugs of nutes water shake em good before using and use a marking system. I hope your father is alright. Good luck growing I know he will apreciate it.

Cheers guys, will try what mrgreensaid. Just got to his place now and they're a little brown at the base so I'm a bit worried

wayno30 said:

dont let dads plants die...................dont do the hydro thing that wont work............. how big are the pots how big are the plants? maybe u could transplant to some big pots soak em raise the lights and be ok....................but transplanting during flower isnt cool dad wont be happy

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Plants are about 30-50cm atm. The pots are maybe just over half a gallon.

I will not transplant them, I don't want to stress them further

Yo, I'm just an amateur, but why can't he set up a drip system for feed and water? Obviously he'd have to come around and change the res. now and then but wouldn't a drip system give him considerably longer gaps between visits?

Anyone? He's working with soil and can't switch to hydro, but he could switch to drip feed right?

Can you post a couple pics of the current setup?

drip would work but why can't u just check on 'em and water every 3-5 days would be easier than setting up new system and possibly shocking them with massive feeds.