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Hey, XLR8! First, let me tell you again that my thoughts are truly with you on the basement flood issue! I'm glad I could at least bring a smile to your face with my post. I was hoping you woudn't take the joke wrong but knew you had read enough of my posts to get my sense of humor!
I have NO intentions of abandoning the waterfarms and, I agree with you, the plants just love them. But, since I have only two waterfarms, and numerous plants & clones in a very limited space, hempy will need to stay part of the equation. Now, that I have the multiple plants in veg and have been starting them in the hempys, I just need to figure out how I get the Waterfarms back in the loop!
I think part of the answer is in getting down to two strains and the staggered harvests. This will give me better control of when to take the clones and how long they veg.
On the first grow, I was given the clones, just as the PE seed was sprouting. So, the PE and hempy haze were both vegging for over two months while the waterfarms were in flower. By the time the AK was harvested, BOTH the PE and Haze were just too tall to put in the waterfarms.
So, the plan now is to flower one plant at a time and maintain the PE and the Haze. Each strain will essentially get its own Waterfarm for flowering.
The way I'll handle this (or, today's plan to handle it!) is:
- A week or two (depending on flowering times) after the PE goes into flower in WF#1, I'll take some clones from the haze and start them in hempys.
- Then, when the haze clones are four weeks old, I'll transplant the best one into WF#2 and move it flower.
- A week or two later, I'll start clones from the PE in hempys.
- Four weeks later, I'll harvest the PE from WF#1 and move the best PE clone to WF#1 and put WF#1 back into flower.
- A week or two later, it's time to start haze clones in hempys.
- From there, it's just "wash, rinse, & repeat"!
Res changes are not that bad, at all, and IMHO beats replacing a 35 gallon res. Some tips are:
1) If your buckets are elevated, you can use the drain tube to drain into a waste bucket, then just refill the nutes through the top.
2) You can also set the lid on an "extra" bucket while you clean and refill the original bucket.
The only "setbacks" I see to the Waterfarms is that they're not really conducive to doing a SCROG unless option #1 above is viable for res changes. And, especially because I run higher temps, I am very religious about maintaining a clean system, so every week when I do res changes, I also pull and disassemble the drip tube and soak it in bleach, then rinse thoroughly. I would say that it's this drip ring maintenance that's the biggest PITA, but as you noticed, the plants love it and we all do crazy things to see our plants happy!
