Edit: blanket apology for phone predictive’s fucktardness. Oh, and my cursing.
sick today can’t stick around. But, Re: air pumps/air stones/air injection in SIPs.
I’m feeling my way through this essentially at same stage as Axios and Bud, haven’t taken a cannabis harvest but did run 10, 27 gal tomatoes last year and 3 this year and currently have 4, 27gal weed SIPs in 2 5x5s (excuse the repetition but I don’t want to leave some mistaken impression I have more of this under my belt than I do.) I didn’t realize last year or most of this that these were ‘somewhat’ novel to 420 grow culture. Anyway, I dove deep into the reading research and in the last ten years the preponderance of forum writing re SIPs has been by LOS no-dig growers trying out DIY methods and although air injection doesn’t come naturally to that crowd it was chased down by a few dedicated people doing “just add water” grows and I couldn’t find anyone that kept up with it steady. Thing about forum research is you just know people had ‘problems’ you don’t know why, even if they claim to know there’s no data, so it’s hard to know if they just didn’t grok it or had actual issues in LOS SIP air injection. Definitely ’problems’ led all to pulse-timing the air, but for sure big grow bumps were recorded by guys from the air. It’s just in most grower’s nature I think to start shunning inputs they don’t understand and cannot well control, for rational, fair and positive reasons.
I will make a research post on my thread as soon as I can but I’m up against it over here lately.
Octopots appear to be the most well thought out cannabis-targeted SIP system but the results from 5 gal bucket are very similar to octopot, I wouldn’t stress the detail differences too much with respect to leaving any money on the table with the buckets or earth boxes, yeah, the cloth pot is a change, one I’ve adopted in my DIY SIP, but I think it’s incremental. I think size is still king.
Anyway, because Octopots are successful as a company and grow system I have been writing a lot of my ‘grow rules for my SIPs’ cribbed from their user manual/info. They recommend peat and fertigation for the first run. Check. They recommend never watering from the top but for transplant day. Check. They also recommend no air pumps. Mmmm, sorta check. I give Chris at Octopot major weight in this space because he has a PhD and a successful company. Skin in the game and professional cress., I dunno, tell me what’s better than that? Anyway, their testing shows that running air stones swings pH, both in LOS and fertigated peat mixes like mine. They recommend that if you want (must) experiment to limit pump time to 1/4 of the time, Max.
In the pic here is my reservoir, or one of two types I run, same footprint, different wicking foot, anyway, I’ve put an aquarium water pump in that on the outlet side has a hose with some holes in so it stirs the whole rez really well. But it also has a Venturi attachment, it’s just a little air line that passively takes air from atmo (I ran it up the fill tube to keep it clear but that was dumb, just run it up the matrix, use good stuff that won’t collapse) and injects it into the pump’s final output. Lots of cheap pumps even come with one spare. I’ll show the best pics I currently have.
Go to Octopot, and if you don’t want to invest in their system, you can still invest in their knowledge. Download the user guide PDF, have a read. I refer to it daily. I run those water pumps that stir my rez and inject air (keeping dangerous anaerobes down) for 5 minutes every hour. I also monitor my reservoir pH with a new Bluewhatever PH pen and EC pen, taking everyday without fail. You don’t need to do all this, I’m just trying to learn and understand this method because it’s just plain off the hook. I’m telling you, it’s nuts the bio mass these things create.
Hmmm, I wonder why ?
and your not even in flower yet jeeezz
Tag me please
