Sorry I'm late. Got dropped from this thread a while back but I'm all caught up now. Too late to be much help this round but thought I'd share some thoughts on your posts for you to consider going forward.
So the process has become a bit more involved as I'm now just pouring buckets into the plant.
I'm very curious what happened inside the pot, can't wait to have a look at the root system and where they entered the res.
And I'm also not sure do I prevent this.. or do I run with it as soil dwc seems to work fine
No need to try to prevent it, but you might reconsider your pot build. Having a full layer of hydroton on the bottom will encourage the water roots to take up residence and mostly by-pass the soil as you've seen, but I don't think that's much of an issue though you do lose some of the buffering that soil can provide.
The way I use the hydroton is to place it in between the dome I use to define the reservoir and the overflow hole. It looks like you are using a hydroton layer to define your reservoir? That structure works too, but you get a different type of root development as you've seen.
Just shows how flexible and robust this SIP concept is.
Well no technically the roots should be kept out of the res for a sip, the medium should wick, not the roots themselves.. but when a plant develops water roots it's clear that they don't mind being in the res and just slurp it up.
If you keep the same pot structure in your next grow, you could try putting some pockets of soil all the way down to the bottom of the container, say in the 4 corners. Doing it that way would give you a root structure more typical for standard SIPs.
But the roots will do what they do. If you have something in the reservoir other than air and water, that agregate will give the roots something to take hold of and they
will populate the reservoir. Then they just mainline the nutes you pour down the fill tube.
Still works great though as you've seen.
All in all.. SIP-ping is highly recommended.. I'm getting quite the collection of pots now, regular pots, air-pots, smart-pots, I have two different styles of hydro pots, and now a SIP pot.. and I must say growth is indeed comparable to hydro as it is quite vigorous, but the effort is very different, there's a nice soil buffer and there's no run off or a recycling res to deal with.
All I measured was the PH and I dosed according to the bottles and filled the res.
And the results are better than watering with a wet dry cycle as this plant has had way more access to water and nutrients than I could have supplied in a regular pot.
And it shows as all the buds are pretty girth-y and well developed.
Agreed.
Im sooo excited for you and for SIP-ping my way through my next grow!
Do it!
I've started the cut, cause I want to grow more buds! I want to see a fresh set of leaves popping out next week. And I'm in week 11 after flipping I believe.
Ummm, after the flip and stretch the plant doesn't add much in the way of new roots or leaves, so what you've got at that point is what you'll have to work with all the way through harvest.
I really need to focus a lot on mainlining & scrogging.. equidistant spacing.
Have you had a look at Quadlining? One cut and then some LST. Faster than many training methods and produces a very nice looking plant. Link in my signature if you want to read up on it a bit.
And looks like underneath it all she cast a web of water roots..
Now there was no penetration into the res, but I do suspect since she clogged up the entire water channel with roots and these biocanna nutes are a bit caky that that is what messed with the metering.
Yeah, that's the "downside" of defining the reservoir with a substrate rather than a void. All good though as you've seen.
I've cleaned out the SIP, that's looking good, I'm not looking forward to washing the hydroton.
I'm gonna reuse everything, only a fresh sprinkling of soil to replace what was lost.
If you're concerned about any nasties in the hydroton, put them in a pot on the stove with some water and boil them to sterilize. The great thing about those balls is you can reuse them forever.
Congrats on your successful grow.
Are you stating a new thread for the next round or planning to continue here?
