My can’o worms...

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2RedEyes

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Well some things are going well and some things are not. I decided to give hydro a little try and thought DWC seems pretty simple so why not. I was expecting to have fairly vigorous growth as compared to soil as this was what I had read from others. So I went to my local grow shop and was recommended a very simple one part recipe. Just add GH 7 grams per gallon of maxibloom to your tap water and ph to a range 5.5 - 6.5. Change the water every week or two. Seems simple enough. Well first thing I converted incorrectly grams to teaspoons and added 5 times too much nutes. The plants let me know real quick that I had made a mistake. You’ll see this in the pictures. One plant nearly died or maybe is dead and just doesn’t know it yet. The other lost a lot of lower leaves and the rest have just stopped doing anything at all. So I dumped that first batch of nutes, cleaned everything out and mixed a new batch with my scale to 7g/Gal. Ph’d it and put the plants back in. The smaller of the two continued to shrink while the other just sat there sulking. So a couple days ago I decided to swap the smallest little guy back to soil and put a fresh plant into the DWC. I carefully washed the soil from the roots and put it into a netpot with clay pellets and installed it into the DWC. It perked right up and was looking good. However today it is kinda droopy and sad looking. It has been a little hard to keep the ph in that range as it always seemed to be climbing above the 6.5 mark. Yesterday I added a little ph down and got it to just above 5. This morning I checked and it was 4.6. Im gonna leave it alone and see if it comes back up.
I’m really surprised by the no growth of the healthy plant though. In the dwc box, the small plant in front is growing roots though nothing is happening up top. The larger and new plant in the back of the dwc is not sending roots and is kinda sad looking. Over in the other grow area the two soil plants are thriving. They are receiving earth juice nutes and even the small stunted plant that I moved from the dwc is stating to green up a bit.
Do you think I was sold on a bad idea, using this maxibloom... I will probably try something different soon but what I’m not sure. It seems if you ask a dozen people what is best you’ll get a dozen answers...
Well here are some pics.

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Well after much reading and waiting, I’m believing I have an magnesium deficiency. The overall sickness of the plant is progressing and the yellowing between the leaf veins at the lower end of the plant seem to point there. The plant seems very sad and droopy. I have some cal/mag arriving today so I’ll give it a shot. This is dwc with 6 gallons in the res and using the nutes as described above, I have a ph of 5.2 currently but it has been trending up in the last several days so the plan is to start near 5 and hopefully it will trend up to cover the different needs till it reaches 6.5 or so before trying to adjust it back down. I changed out the res this morning after nuteing and bubbling the new water overnight. My tap is about 27ppm, after adding my nute at 7grams per gallon and adding about a half teaspoon of ph up(to get above 5) I get 1030ppm. At 27ppm it seems there is not much in my tap water so I think a little cal/mag might be a good thing. I reinstalled my top feed. The way I had it setup before was causing it to splash nutes around too much. I’ve got the water level about an inch below the netpot but the top feed is dripping water down the roots from above until the roots enter the water. The reservoir temp seems to stay right around the mid 60’s.

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Good morning RE, i know nothing about water growing, DWC, etc. But i do know about wishing you good mojo. Hopefully someone who knows something will be around to help.
 
Hi Rose, thanks for the helpful mojo. My dwc grow is definitely struggling while the same plants growing in soil are thriving. I’ll try to be patient and give it more time but I can’t wait for spring to start some more plants outside...I’m doing a soil grow inside now also but I though maybe the dwc would be simpler and I’d not have to buy soil and such. Well I’m not so sure now but I keep going...
 
I would hazard a guess that your pH being all over the place is adversely affecting your hydro grow. Plants only absorb nutrients within a narrow pH range. For instance, anything above 6 or under 5.4 or so and your plants are unable to uptake nutes. When I ran DWC, I tried to keep my pH between 5.5 and 6.0. There is also a relationship between your PPMs and your pH. How many PPMs is your nute solution running?
 
It seems that the ph of my dwc did not like staying in that range. I could get it easily to ph5 but the next day it would be 6.5 and after adjusting, soon my ppm’s Are climbing out of sight. To me the plants were dying and I could not get them to respond. I would put perfectly healthy plants into dwc and they would die. I’ve pulled it all out and I’m back to soil. Maybe I’ll give it another try some time but I’m back in the dirt for now...
 

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