The seed has now developed 3-4 sets of leaves; it’s got a nice root system in the bigger rockwool block. At that point it’s ready to be transferred into your system which basically means you have to get your system ready to receive them.
Now, you have the medium which is clay pebbles. Clay pebbles through transit and the original process of the manufacture of them, they end up quite dirty, quite dusty. Ideally, you want to get rid of all the grit, all the dust, all the debris before putting them into the pods themselves. Now the easy way to do that is simply stab some holes using a big screwdriver into the bottom of them, hose pipe on top, in your garden for at least half an hour, the longer you do it for the better. The more dirt, the more grit, the more debris you get off of the pebbles the better off the ph stability is going to be in your tank. If you haven’t got a garden, obviously you’ve got to use the messy method which means take it into the shower, open the top up, stick some holes in and shower it, or even stick it in your bath and sieve them out. It is fundamental that you do wash the clay otherwise you end up with a hell of a sediment on the bottom and every time you disturb the sediment, it could alter the ph which is not what you need. So, wash the clay thoroughly. Once the clay has been washed absolutely thoroughly, it’s ready to go into the system.
Before putting it in the system, [picks up one of the pods] make sure that the grommets [points to the pipes in the pods] which are in between the pipes are snuggly sat in place. Sometimes in transit, these grommets can come out. Now if you don’t have the grommets in place and you put the pebbles in, the pebbles can get down the pipes and it can cause all sorts of troubles with the flood and drain cycle. So just make a quick check that the grommets are in the pipes; if all the grommets are in the pipes then fill up the pods with the pebbles. If they are not, find the grommets and put them in their right place. OK, [puts pods down] so we’ve checked that the grommets are there, the pebbles are washed, the pebbles then go in the top of the tank onto the pods themselves; you really want to fill them up to the level of the overflow pipe, [points to overflow pipe] ok which will be approximately about 12 litres of clay pebbles. Now I’m just going to put these out of the way. [removes sack of pebbles from the table] Now, pods are full with pebbles which have been washed; we’re then ready to fill the reservoir up with water.
Now a four pod reservoir holds approximately 45 litres of water. Now these are independently housed reservoirs which means that you can fill it up with a bucket or you can fill it up with a hose. They don’t need to be plumbed in, so you’d fill the reservoir up to 45 litres of water; we recommend filling to the overflow pipes. At that point you’ve got enough space if you need to adjust up and down with water to dilute the solution, you can do so.
OK, we’ve washed the clay pebbles, we’ve checked the grommets are in place, we’ve filled the pods up with clay to the overflow pipes. [picks up pump] Now, we’ve filled the reservoir up with approximately 45 litres of water, we’ve then got our pump. The pump connects directly to the down pipe inside the reservoir. It’s a submergible pump; a lot of people don’t realise that ironically, but that’s the way it works, underneath the water. So what we have is the flow pipe attaches directly to the top of the pump and the pump sits in the bottom of the water tank.
Now, [puts pump down] once that’s done, you can then test the flood and drain cycles and it’s worth doing this because the bigger the pod system you use, the more time you need to flood the system. On a four pod it should take approximately 1 minute to flood the entire 4 pods, on an eight pod it should take approximately 3 sometimes it takes 4, on a twelve pod it can take 4 sometimes 5 minutes. On a bigger system where it’s using outer runs, you can add another minute on because the outer runs have more pipe which means you need more time to do the flood and drain.
What we always recommend doing is an acid test; basically get the pump in the water, then turn the pump on, time how long it takes to wet your finger, put your finger approximately 1 inch beneath the clay pebble surface and physically time how long it takes before your finger becomes wet. It’s a very easy acid test to do but that will give you the precise time you need to do a flood and drain cycle. So, we’ve got the water in, we’ve turned the pump on, we’re timing how long it takes and we’ve discovered it takes 1 minute on a 4 pod. But do test it yourself just to confirm it.
Assuming it takes 1 minute to flood the entire system, you then have to program your digital timer. [picks up digital timer] Now this is possibly the hardest bit of the whole equation is programming one of these little beasties. They’re very similar to programming VCR recorders from 10 years ago where you have to put the time in, the date in, you then have to program it to come on and off. It does come with full instructions and if you persevere with them you will understand it, however, we are only a phone call away and we don’t mind being questioned about it because we’re used to it now. They are not too hard once you get your head round it. Quite simply, what you have to do is if the 4 pod is taking 1 minute to flood, let’s say our light cycle is turning on at 9 o’ clock in the morning, then what we would also want is our pump cycle to coincide with it, to turn on at 9 o’clock in the morning. So at 9 o’clock the pump turns on, you program that into your timer and then at 1 minute past 9, you program to turn the pump off. What we recommend doing on a system of this design, be it a 4 pod, an 8 pod, a 16 pod or a 24 pod is to flood the system every 3 hours. Every 3 hours until your programs have run out. It should do it basically 24 hours a day.
Now, the system only really needs, or the plants only need water during the lighting cycle, however, we’ve found that flooding and draining at night does no harm to the plants, however, it does stop the tank from stagnating. It gets oxygen into the water; it keeps the water in motion. The more the water is in motion, the more alive it is. So program your timer to come on every 3 hours for the desired amount of time and the way you find that desired amount of time out is putting your finger in the system, 1 inch beneath the pebbles and timing how long it takes before your finger becomes wet. Just to recap, on a 4 pod it should take 1 minute, on an 8 pod it should take 3 minutes, on a 12 pod it should take 4-5 minutes. And if you’ve got a 16 or a 24 pod that employs outer runs, you want to add another minute onto the outer run. And that’s basically how you would flood and drain the system, but you do have to turn it on and turn it off, otherwise you end up turning your pod system into a deep trough NFT and you lose the benefit of the flood and drain cycles.
Now, once you are happy [puts timer down] that it’s flooding and draining to the desired level, every 3 hours, you would then adjust the nutrients in the tank. Now, just like rockwool, you would add the Grow nutrient first before adjusting your ph. At this point, you are not using Formulex – the one part nutrient, you’ll be going onto a two part nutrient. [picks up 2 bottles] Now two part basically means you’ve got Part A and Part B. Now, they are dual in nature. The reason that you have A and B in separate bottles is because when they are concentrated, they conflict. They don’t conflict to the same aggressiveness as ph up and ph down - there’s no danger in mixing these 2 together, however, if they do get mixed together in a concentrate, you get nutrient lock which basically means that the plant will not be able to dissolve the desired nutrients it needs to sustain itself, so when measuring A and B out, use separate measurement containers, separate pipettes or separate measuring cups. Never mix these 2 together concentrated otherwise the plant ends up losing out from the nutrients it should get.
Now, what we’ve got is 45 litres of water in the tank, you would then follow the instructions on the side of the bottle. In this case, it tells us that it requires 4 ml of A and 4 ml of B to each litre of nutrient tank. OK. So you would put 4 ml in per litre of water in the tank and you could measure that out and you will get it somewhere right. Now on these nutrients, on all bottles of nutrients, they tell you the full dosage rate, ie if you had a plant that’s 2-3 foot tall, strong, in the middle of fruit or flowering, what they’re referring to is full strength nutrient on the side of the labels. What you have to do is remember that you are only putting seedlings and cuttings in and they actually desire approximately one third to half the nutrient a fully grown plant would want.
Therefore you would half the dilution ratio it tells you on the side of the bottle. And just to confirm you’ve got it right, [puts bottle down and picks up meter] you would then employ a TDS meter. Now what I would personally do is pour a splash in, [picks up bottle again] give it a stir, pour exactly an equal amount of B in and give it a stir. Then I would then test with the CF meter until I got to the desired level. Ideally, where you want it is approximately CF of 12, ok, just like the Formulex. You want that level of 12, that will give you just the right amount of nutrient for a young plant and you would keep it on that CF level of 12 until you got the plant approximately 9 inches to 1 foot in height.
So to recap you would half the dilution ratio, put that into your tank, you would then stir the tank, put the meter in to confirm you’ve got it to the desired level. If you find that the CF reading is too high, you would then add more water into the tank to dissolve the level in order to reduce the CF value. If you find that the CF level is too low, you would then administer an equal amount of A and an equal amount of B into the tank, give it a stir until you got the level to the right number which in this case for young plants we recommend a CF level of 12. You can go to 14, so 12-14 is approximately where you’ll want it. Once you’ve balanced the nutrient in the tank and you’ve got it to the desired CF level, oh by the way if you put too much nutrient into the tank you’ve obviously got to pump a lot of it out to dilute it down. So you would add a hose pipe to your pump, turn the pump on, pump one third of the tank out, then add normal water in order to dilute the level down. So, if it’s too low add more, if it’s too high, take it out add water. Simple.
Next, once you’ve got the level to approximately 12-14 you would then check the ph level. [picks up ph meter] You always do the ph after you do the food because food alters the ph so there’s no point getting the levels right with the ph then adding food because you’re going to find that that’s going to skewiff the level. So you always do the ph after you’ve added the food in the tank. It’ll save you a lot of time and a lot of ph up and ph down. So, we’d then pop the ph meter in and again the level that we’re looking for now would be a ph of 6. So it’s slightly higher than the rockwool because the root ball has now migrated through the rockwool and is now looking to live in the clay pebbles. And ideally, clay pebbles to start with, a ph of 6 is approximately where you want it. So, if you found the ph level is high, you would administer your ph down in very small amounts exactly like we did with the rockwool, always adding a little each time until you get it right.
Now, once you’ve got it to a ph level of 6, ok, you would then want to flood and drain the system a few times in order to make sure the reservoir is mixed. There’s an override button on the timer and all you have to do is switch it on [top button on timer]. You then let the system flood and then you would switch it off, give it a couple of minutes and all the water returns back to the reservoir. It will be a fully mixed tank then. You would then test again with your CF level [picks up CF meter] to make sure that the food level is right and adjust up or down bearing in mind what the meter says.
After you’ve done that you would then check your ph [picks up ph meter] and check your ph level, adjusting up or down as you need it. Now because the cuttings or seedlings are very young that are going in the system, if you accidentally put too much ph down in and you end up going to a ph of 5 for example, you’re much better off emptying out the tank and starting again than you are using ph up. Ph up and down should only be used when a plant is strong enough to cope with them. If you use a lot of ph up and down when your plant is very young – 3 sets of leaves for example – it can do irreparable damage to the root ball. So if you do take the ph down too far, empty out some water, put some water in and that should hopefully raise the level up. Start again basically.
Ph up and down are really only to be used for very fine adjustment – never use a lot of it – if you use a lot of it you end up doing the plants more harm than good. So, once you’ve got the ph level to 6, the TDS level to 12, the system is flooding and draining, you’re ready to put the plants in the system.
[take rockwool block from the propagator] What you would do, is have a lovely well rooted plant; now you want to administer it, oh let’s put that another way. What you want to do is plant it in the system doing minimal damage to the root ball. Now an easy way to do that is to turn the pump on, flood the system so all 4 pods are completely saturated with water. At that point, you can bury the whole rockwool block into the pebbles without doing much damage to the root ball. What you do have to remember is to take the plastic off of the rockwool block. [picks up rockwool block with plastic covering on it] If you don’t take the plastic covering off, it will prohibit the root ball from growing out of the side of rockwool. In so doing, restricting the oxygen to the root system. Now that’s one way of doing it, is flooding the system and then burying the rockwool in. The other way of doing it is bailing out x amount of clay and then putting it in place and then putting clay on top in order to secure its position. Either way will suffice; I find it a lot easier and quicker just to push it into a flooded system.
Now once it’s in place, you’d want a pebble mass just to cover the top of the rockwool itself, ie 1-2 levels of pebbles. You do not want the rockwool exposed to the light. Because the rockwool is very water retentive, it ends up holding a lot more moisture and in so doing when the light’s reacting with the moisture you can get algae breakouts which isn’t too sightly; it’s not that detrimental to the plant but it can encourage all sorts of unwanted diseases and bacteria and that sort of thing, so if you bury it beneath the clay pebbles, the pebbles act as a barrier to the light reacting with the moisture in the rockwool.
Now you would then at that point, look to lower the light possibly by 1 foot. Originally you had the light 3-4 foot away from the canopy of the propagator; at this point now you would want to be 3-2 foot away from the canopy of the plant, so you would raise it or lower it slightly, but you wouldn’t want to drop 1 foot instantly ok. If you dropped it 1 foot overnight, the plants could go into shock, so you gradually do it over the course of a week, a couple of inches a day. There’s a very easy acid test to find out exactly how close you can get the light to the plant and that’s simply the back of your hand. If you raise the back of your hand up to the lamp itself as soon as you feel any radiant heat hitting the back of your hand, that is approximately how close you can get the light to the canopy without killing it. However, on seedlings and cuttings and young plants, you have to overcompensate that. To give you an example, if you had a plant that is approximately, I don’t know, 2 foot tall, and strong and bushy and really having the lust of life, you would then lift your hand up to the back of the light until you felt the radiant heat and then you would get that as close as you can get your hand to it without burning your hand, without feeling that heat.
When they’re this big [about 8 – 12 inches high] you still want the light a good 3 foot away from the canopy of the plant. The plant will then grow up, as the plant is growing up you want to be bringing the light down, so the plant’s growing up, the light’s coming down till you get to the point where you can’t get the light any closer to the plant without burning it, then the plant goes up and so does your light. Now at this point what we recommend doing is raising the plant to approximately a foot, a foot and a half tall on your Grow A and B nutrient, [picks up nutrient bottles] ok, you’re on a photo period of approximately 18-20 hours a day and you’re using the Grow continuously through that period, always keeping the CF level to around 12-14, always keeping the ph level to approximately 6. You can let the ph raise to 6.5 and then knock it back to 6, then let it raise to 6.5 and then knock it back, but always maintain it at around 6.
Now, [picks up bloom bottles] once they’re a foot, a foot and a half tall you can then basically change your nutrient solution to Bloom, or it’s also known as Floras, it’s also known as Flower which is a different stock solution, but you would also then change your lighting period down to 12 hours on, 12 hours off. Twelve hours on, 12 hours off in most species of plant will induce the fruit or flowering phase. What the plant thinks is happening is the summer is coming to an end, the nights are drawing in and they are forced to reproduce, so what you are basically doing is tricking the plant into the thinking that the summer and the winter is coming on strong, ie, the summer is ending, winter’s coming we better reproduce our fruit or flowers and a 12 hour photo period in most plants will induce it to fruit or flower.
Now, when you’ve gone onto the 12 hour light period, you will then want to go onto, instead of Grow nutrient, you’d go onto Bloom nutrient. [picks up bottles again] Bloom nutrient. You have Bloom A and Bloom B. Dual pack nutrient. Again, you would administer the exact amount of A into the reservoir and the exact amount of B in the reservoir. Now you would only use Bloom A and Bloom B when you’ve got to a plant at least a foot and a half tall and you’re on a 12 hour photo cycle, or if the plants are showing signs of fruit or flowering.
Now, at this point the plants need more nourishment, ok, we’ve been underfeeding them on purpose in order to make them hungry so at this point they can suck up more of what they need. What we would recommend now is to raise the CF level in your tank [picks up CF meter] to approximately 18; so you’re going from 12-14 to approximately 18 –20. OK. So what you would then do is administer more A and more B into your tank. You’re almost on full strength as per the instructions on the side of the bottle, but not yet. Almost. Probably about 80-90% strength. In so doing, you would then still maintain the ph level to 6 – 6.5. OK.
Now, it’s good practice every now and then, approximately 3-4 weeks to do a nutrient tank flush. To put that in layman’s terms, to empty out the tank, put fresh water in and start again. It’s not a necessity, however, it is highly advisable. Easy way to empty out the tank is just to attach the hose pipe to the pump, turn the pump on and empty it out. What a lot of hydroponicists would also recommend is running nothing but ph adjusted water in your system for a day. In so doing, it flushes any dead salts, any unused salts out of the media back into the reservoir, but you do have to adjust the water, ph adjust it to approximately 6.
So, let’s say on this bloom cycle 3-4 weeks in, you said let’s get rid of the tank, empty it out and start again. (that make sense?) Right, now it’s good practice to do that at least once a month, however, we’ve known situations where; we’ve even done it ourselves, where we’ve not flushed the tank at all, not for the whole crop, not even for 2 crops. You can get away with not doing it, however, puritan hydroponicists would say, aagh, do it every 2 weeks, do it every 3 weeks and it’s not a necessity, but it is, well it can help the plants but if you are lazy, you don’t have to.
Now, we’ve put Bloom A and B into the tank to get to a CF/TDS level of 18-20, we’ve then adjusted the tank to 6 ph level and we’re still flooding and draining. At this point, we’ve the got the light as close as we can to the plants without burning them. Now what you will find is that some plants are going to grow quicker than other plants. It’s the law of nature. You always get some that are stronger than others. The ones that are taller, we recommend highly, pinching them out. Either chopping the tops off or taking the centre 2 growth, the centre tip out of the plant. In so doing, it encourages the side growth of the plant instead of the centre growth. That will allow the smaller plants to catch up in height and again keep on doing it.
The name of the game in hydroponics is to get that light as close as you can to ALL the plants.
If you get a few that bolt, that are growing taller than the others, you have to chop them back. You’ve got to be cruel to be kind. Because if they bolt and you end up lifting the light up, because they’re growing so tall, the others are then going to elongate and stretch because the light isn’t close enough to them, and in so doing, the tall plants will benefit and the little plants won’t be worth growing at all.
OK, now the plants are going to continuously grow and the light is going to continuously go up with the plants growth. Ideally, you want to keep the crop even, the light down as close as you can to all the plants and let the plants grow and the light evolve as the plants grow. Now approximately 5 weeks into the Bloom cycle, into the fruiting cycle, ie the 12 hour lighting scheme, you would want to administer some solution called PK13/14; it’s a bloom stimulant, fruiting boost stimulant.
Now plants only require this PK13/14 during the 5th week of the 12 hour lighting cycle, so when you go into your blooming stage when you start using your bloom food and you first initiate your 12 hour light cycle, you must write down the date because 5 weeks into that cycle, you want to add to your nutrient tank the PK13/14. Some species of plants take longer to fruit or flower. When you administer the PK13/14, it’s approximately 3 weeks before harvest of your plants. You’d follow the instructions on the back of your bottle and go in full strength, but never exceeding a CF level [picks up CF meter] of 22-24. So you’d add your stock solution, your Bloom, you’d then add your PK13/14, get it to a level of around 22-24. If it’s below that level, you’d add more Bloom A and B. OK. If you do end up administering too much nutrient into the tank, bleed some of it off and start again using the PK13/14 first as your primary nutrient. Again, once that’s in the tank, reduce the ph level down to approximately 6. You would have used the PK 13/14 or bloom stimulant for approximately 1 week, ok, so once you’ve added it to the tank, you use it for the 1 week and 1 week only. You wouldn’t administer it again.
You will find at this point, 3 weeks before harvest, the plants are going to be sucking up a whole tank at least a tank a week. So, you’re going to be filling up that tank possibly on a daily, or a bi-daily basis. And once you’ve filled it up over the course of the week, then go back on to your [picks up bottles] Bloom A and your Bloom B and not using your PK13/14 anymore. At that point, when you’re 1 week away from harvesting, 1 week away from cropping your plants, what we highly recommend doing is emptying out the reservoir, filling the reservoir up with nothing but clean water, ph adjust it to a ph of 6 and then feed the plants nothing but clean water for 1 week. This is what they call flushing.
It benefits multi levels. One it benefits the system because it gets rid of any nutrient build up in the pebbles themselves, two it benefits the plant because it actually encourages the plant to take all the nutrient out of it, itself. If you’re growing fruit or veg, or any plant that is consumed, if you don’t flush it at the end in a hydroponic system, you end up [picks up bottles] with an excessive amount of nutrient build up in the plant and that can make the plant taste quite bitter. So it’s fundamental to flush the system and the plants for 1 week before harvest and that point you’re ready to crop the plants and start again. Job done.
Once you’ve harvested your plants, you end up with a lot of root system in your pebbles. Now what we recommend doing is flooding the system, pulling the majority of the root ball out. You can empty out the pods and disinfect it but there’s any easier way round that. You take the majority of the root ball out, you would then add a nutrient to the tank called cannazine. Cannazine has active enzymes that dissolve dead root systems. They turn those root systems into food for the next crop. So if you don’t want to get all messy and sweaty, take the majority of the root ball out, and then put a good strong dose of Cannazine into the tank and flood and drain it every 3 hours like you used to. You can then plant on top of that existing root system as well as not having to worry about changing the reservoir. We do however recommend before you use the Cannazine is to use a very strong H202 hydrogen peroxide bleach to disinfect the system in between crops. Disinfecting it will discourage any diseases of any description. So, firstly, remove the root ball or the majority of it, you then add H202 to the tank, you flood and drain that, you then bleed that H202 off, add new water using Cannazine and then at that point you can plant on top of your existing system. And that’s how you would start again.
An Esoteric Hydroponics Production.
Hydroponics
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