Variety Grow - Perpetual, "Mini" ScrOG's, DWC in a Cabinet (First Timer)

What the fuck is this?!? This is one of the fuckers infesting my roots. It's really tiny, about the size of a large grain of ground pepper.

All of my plants have them! I'm in the process of emptying as much hydroton out and rinsing the shit out of it while trying to leave the roots in place. When I use a mild jet spray on the top of the roots near the root plug, a bunch of these buggers came out and I stopped this guy before it went down the drain.

Is there anything I can put in the water, that won't hurt the roots/plant (maybe Neem oil?) that will kill these guys! I'm losing a lot of root mass going through this process but I'll lose more if I don't!

I need to know what they are before I know what to do. Help?

jsgamber said:

What the fuck is this?!? This is one of the fuckers infesting my roots. It's really tiny, about the size of a large grain of ground pepper.

All of my plants have them! I'm in the process of emptying as much hydroton out and rinsing the shit out of it while trying to leave the roots in place. When I use a mild jet spray on the top of the roots near the root plug, a bunch of these buggers came out and I stopped this guy before it went down the drain.

Is there anything I can put in the water, that won't hurt the roots/plant (maybe Neem oil?) that will kill these guys! I'm losing a lot of root mass going through this process but I'll lose more if I don't!

I need to know what they are before I know what to do. Help?

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Its the air conditioner, I bet they were in there. I may know something, be right back!

Long time no see master gamber

I think gumball is right u may need to sterilise the whole damn garage . i would personally clone whats left and then bomb the garage, start fresh afterward . Try make it into a completely sealed and sterile environment, much easier said than done though i'm guessing i cant even be bothered to raise my lights haha ! I'm still watching though and dying to see you make some buds still

SM-90 may work, the neem flushed through the net pots may work, I would try it before pullin more roots. Here is a link from cruzers thread, he just had a root infestaion in a flood system, this is to page 202, check out 201 too!

https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/327580-my-growitup-greenhouse-grow-2010-a-202.html

gumball said:

SM-90 may work, the neem flushed through the net pots may work, I would try it before pullin more roots. Here is a link from cruzers thread, he just had a root infestaion in a flood system, this is to page 202, check out 201 too!

https://www.rollitup.org/grow-journals/327580-my-growitup-greenhouse-grow-2010-a-202.html

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Gumball thanks for the point. First thing this morning I'm out to get some SM-90. Even after all I did yesterday I can't believe I eradicated them but despite everything they grow.

pH spiked overnight, probably due to root injuries. But it appears they've grown overnight and no signs of nute burn.

SOG #1 and #3. Can you believe #1? What a great comeback!


BD and SOG #2. The brown edge leaves on the bottom i believe are from the bugs. They'll fall off soon.


Last trip to the Hydro store I found these spigots and they had the right threads!! A 3/4" tube fits right on, and when I open the spigot I can check water level, bend the tube to empty water out, insert a large funnel to add water, nutes, etc. in. Then when I'm all done, I cup the tube in my hand, blow air through my hand into the tube while closing the spigot and thus emptying the tube, via pressure, back in the tank and I can remove the tube!


Sometimes the simplest measures to prevent light leaks. Just cover them with a towel!


I remounted the fan that was pulling air through the mini-fridge. It does a really good job moving air throughout the cabinet at 133 cfm.

Hey gambler, I haven't had a chance to read the whole journal yet but that pic looks like an Aphid to me.
The SM-90 will work, Treat you res for two weeks and that should do it.

glad to see everything lookin good Gamber!!! i bet you and cruzer are almost neighbors!!! glad a resolution was found!!!

cruzer101 said:

Hey gambler, I haven't had a chance to read the whole journal yet but that pic looks like an Aphid to me.
The SM-90 will work, Treat you res for two weeks and that should do it.

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Is that what they call "root aphids?" I was reading about those as well as thrips. For all I know I have a multi-infestation because many of them had wings!

I went and purchased a bottle of SM-90 at the hydro store. I added 5ml to 8L of water then mixed a spray bottle at 5:1 and soaked them down pretty good as well as on top of the clay pellets and on all the wet towels I placed in the cab for humidity. This stuff raises pH pretty good so I readjusted back down to 5.7-5.8 and now we'll wait and see!

As an FYI, while searching, I ran across an interesting link regarding using "Good Bugs" to fight "Bad Bugs" and at what rate (bugs/area) you should release good bugs (aka Lady Bugs eat aphids) to eat bad bugs. This was for prevention and not a cure!

LINK

Oh by the way, if you read my journal, you can avoid all the drama and start reading around October. Bad personal times.

gumball said:

glad to see everything lookin good Gamber!!! i bet you and cruzer are almost neighbors!!! glad a resolution was found!!!

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Yeah. A couple more yellowing leaves near the bottom, but everything else looking good. Screens are back on and it's starting to look like a ScrOG. I have no idea how much growth to expect from each of these new branch sites not only in veg but in flower and I have roughly 16" from screen to the top. I say start them conservatively at an average of 4" of vertical height across all branching nodes but if some knows better feel free to speak up.

Hey Cruzer no shit?!? I'm in So. Central OC. If you are close by and ever need anybody to help trim let me know! I'll work for beers and :: and would love the experience.

Ha! could have used the help last year. Na, I'm in the south bay, about 400 miles north of ya.
Talk about a prevention and not a cure I deal with spider mites a lot, I like the idea of predator mites. I didn't have much success with ladybugs. In the cab they only lasted a couple days and died. I think some went kamikaze into the light. Not enough water maybe. I don't know.

cruzer101 said:

Ha! could have used the help last year. Na, I'm in the south bay, about 400 miles north of ya.
Talk about a prevention and not a cure I deal with spider mites a lot, I like the idea of predator mites. I didn't have much success with ladybugs. In the cab they only lasted a couple days and died. I think some went kamikaze into the light. Not enough water maybe. I don't know.

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GB has to get a geography lesson. 400 miles up is still only halfway to Oregon. GB must live in Rhode Island, where your neighbor lives all the way across the state! j/k with ya GB!

Actually I have a client in Fremont. Haven't been up there yet to see them. I grew up in the Monterey Bay area and was born in the So Bay area. We're closer neighbors than you think!

close Gamber, in North Carolina, so y'all are more neighbors than i am with either of you i did forget how big Cali is, my state is like half the size of y'alls!!!

but i thought cruzer was by the Bay for some reason still youre both somewhat close

plus cruzers trimming parties last weeks, maybe months. hell he's still finishing making hash out of trim!!

gumball said:

plus cruzers trimming parties last weeks, maybe months. hell he's still finishing making hash out of trim!!

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Boy that would be a problem I'd love to have!!

The daily plant update. I'm now in ScrOG and hopefully will resist the temptation to take the screen off again! I'm liking the hands on aspect of ScrOGing having to turn branches in different directions, straightening out leaves, etc. The few yellowing leaves I'm attributing to bugs and they are yellowing quickly and will probably fall off within a few days. All new growth is solid green. Last night all the tips were under the screen so anything pointing vertical below is all new. Since I'm currently at half strength nutes and no signs of nute burn I'm going to bump up the nutes to 3/4. I need these ladies to start stretching out more! Lastly, the SM-90 seems to be doing the trick! Last night all of the dangling tap roots sprouted out those cool looking feather roots! All purdy and white! 67* Water temps, 82* Air Temps constant, 48% RH. Rock and Roll!!

Skywalker #1 - I'm so happy for her! Her bottom 2 nodes are taking off as separate branching nodes and each one of them are starting to grow.


Skywalker #3 - She was the second most infested plant. The other day when cleaning out the roots, I pulled her completely from the netpot. There wasn't any way to get the roots to go back through the slots in the pot so I just coiled them up on top of the first layer of hydroton and carefully filled the netpot. I'm happy to say two new tap roots have already found water over night!


Blue Dream - After whacking off all her roots, she's still going! No new roots have emerged but if she continues to look like this I'm not going to worry.


Skywalker #2 - A few yellowing leaves. Maybe stress. But she's getting longer. So I'll just keep monitoring.

Some more tweaks to the AC unit. I ran the PVC ducting along the ceiling over and down to the AC unit and attached it to the Heat Exchanger exhaust. The blower easily pushes 400CFM. Now all of that hot air is pushed directly outside, putting negative pressure on my garage which causes cool air to be drawn in through the lower external vent on the same wall. The cabinet exhaust is still flowing into the garage which keeps the garage at 72*, with outside temps at 65*. I don't want to Tee into the ceiling ducting because the blower will back flow! So my plan is to dump the cabinet air down under the staircase and we'll let the house HVAC deal with it!

Ducting running up, over......


....and out to the external garage vent. The garage has a corresponding vent down at floor level where air reenters the garage at 65* this morning.


Here's a pic of the exhaust portal of the cabinet. I plan on mounting a booster fan here and then running this exhaust down.....


...to a duct portal cut in the wall leading to under the stairs.

I figured I'd document my water maintenance procedure for upping the nutes in my tanks. Maybe it'll help others help reduce labor for their grows.

The other day I purchased 4 paint buckets with lids at Lowes. This way I can mix larger batches of nutes and have some left over to add water throughout the week since it's already been dechlorinated. The right bucket is water storage and the left bucket I will use for mixing. An interesting note on dechlorination. After treating the water and letting it sit for a bit, the PPMs drop from 410 to 290 which must be the chlorine and ammonia breaking apart and dissipating!


Let's go! Rather than changing the tube from tank to tank, I slipped one on each tank and then covered it with a towel. I don't allow any water to stay in the tubes normally. Here they are covered and uncovered.


By opening the upside spigot water flows into the tube up to the water level of the tank. Left is open and right is still closed.


Here's my little "cess pool". These are the 8 airstones that were in the tanks during the big slime and bug fest. The stone outside is the new larger stones I'm using. They are sitting in a 5.0 solution of bleach and H2O2 and I scrub them up with a brush every few days. Hopefully I'll be able to use these again at a later time. Otherwise, I use this to dump rinse water while doing water changes/adjustments.


Here's my toolkit and all tools are washed and wiped down with alcohol. Cesspool, clean 3ml and 30ml syringe with some rubber tubing, 1 measuring cup of distilled water for rinsing, 1L measuring cup for drawing off water, meter, a shot glass from the hydro store with every known measuring gradation, a funnel, pH down, my nutes and my mixing bucket.


Another pic of the bottle. I'm going from the 750PPM mix existing up to the 900PPM in 7L of water across 4 containers. This works out at .5ml/L more of BC Grow and 1ml/L more of BC Boost. Or overall 14ml/28L and 28ml/28L.


I first draw of 1 liter of water from each tank, test it for pH and PPM and then dump each liter into the bucket and I'll do one full mix and put back the water at 1 liter per tank and hopefully get PPMs from 1300 up to 1400-1600. By the way I don't worry about cross contamination between the tanks because they were mixed from the same overall batch and should all remain identical.


Last night adding the SM-90 caused my pH to rise quite a bit so I adjusted it low to 5.3 thinking the SM-90 would kill the bad stuff and make my pH rise. Not the case so I'll fix that later. But I AM loving the 67.7* water temp. Huh? Huh?


And the PPMs of the first tank


Here's the 4L combined pH...


...and combined PPM


Between dips, I draw in distilled water and air into the syringe, shake it, and empty it into my cesspool.


Draw it up...


...and measure it into the shot glass. The rubber hose throws off the measurments on the syringe anyways and this reduced cross contamination between nute bottles. Do you remember "forward contamination" in high school chemistry where you always use the same order when drawing up different chemicals to mix.


As you can see my nutes bring down my pH. I drew off one more liter from each tank hoping to get the average up a little more, which did happen.


Time to pour back the new solution, 2L per tank. Now we use the funnel.


By covering the tube with my hand, I blow air back into the tube and close the spigot simultaneously to get the water back in the tank on so I don't have to "eat" nutes.


This is a macro shot out of focus but the black spot is dead little fucker! I found while pouring back water into Blue Dream's tank. Thank you Cruzer and GB for getting me onto SM-90!!!



As it turned out 3 tanks ended up at 1490PPM at 5.7pH with the first tank only at 5.38pH which needs to be fixed. I drew off another liter from the tank and disposed of it and added back a liter of my dechlorinated water and enough nutes to get back to 1490PPM. The first tank finished at 5.67pH at 1510PPM. I'll take it!

great write up Gamber!!! things are looking in fine order. im trying to finally get an update too, been a touch lazy lately ::

Great description of how you do it. Plants look good.
Daniels

Here's my evening update. Today's goal was to seal up the plenum and make it leak proof and overall more efficient! In order to get a good seal in the back, I'm going to have to tape up the edges. However this would make it difficult to open up to do maintenance! So to solve the problem, I cut out access panels. When making the cut, I angled the blade so the edge is beveled which keeps me from just pushing the panel into the plenum when closing it up.


None of the cuts were perfect, which makes the panel go back in only one way and the imperfections act as fingers sealing everything back up. I use a couple of pieces of duct tape to hold the panels in place and it's done! Here all the edges of the plenum are sealed with tape, including the edges of the partition separating the inflow side from the outflow side. I'm putting the panels in place getting ready for a test!


Finding a way to direct the airflow from the AC into the plenum was a challenge. It could't be a hard connection because it would make moving the cabinet difficult. Plus it's an awkward shape, so I need something flexible to direct the airflow without creating huge leaks everywhere. The solution is to create a boot out of a black plastic trash bag with a draw string. I cinched the opening around the cold air outlet and then taped it up. Here I'm running a test with the fan blowing on high!


This pic show's how I cut the bottom of the trash bag off creating a tube. Now it's a matter of lining up the AC with the opening of the plenum, pulling the bag through the opening and with a few pieced of tape along the cut edge of the bag against the edge of the opening.


Here's the completed project. Notice that the fan causes the boot to billow up on the inside and the outside of the opening and sealing up any leaks with the air pressure!


So what do I have to show for my labors? I have the thermostat set at 70* for the plenum temperature. As you can see the ambient temps are 67*, temps by the water tanks is 65* and the plants are basking in a balmy 69*. And this without the AC running and pumping 400 watts of CMH wonderfulness!



I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!!!

great work on those beveled doors, that shit is tough to cut straight, so i know angled was hell. great idea with the plastic boot