July 15
Hi Carmen
I did some experimenting. I had 2 clones from the same mother in perlite swicks. They did really well until they didn't, and ended up looking pretty much identical to your problem, wet and hungry.
So me being me, I yanked one out and this is what I found.
If I was a hydro/synthetic guy I would have been thrilled to see a mass of hydro roots but I'm an organic guy so I want feeder roots. My plants need to eat their dinner, hydro guys have plants that drink their dinner.
I was going to feed them both to the worms but I had nothing else going on in the flower tent so I decided to shave the roots off of one clone and compare their futures.
So I layed her down and used a razor to shave her private parts below.
The one on the right was shaved. Both were top watering only for 2 weeks. They both did an amazing turnaround but both carry heavy scars from swicking starvation.
If you zoom in on the pots you can see hundreds of feeder roots exploding from the shaved one and none on the perlite one.
Here they are yesterday. The shaved one is still very light but color is returning, the left one that is still in perlite but only getting top watered is much happier than it was but still struggling.
It has a bunch of feeder root tips just starting to poke through the walls of the pot, but they are too small to see in the picture.
This pot was shaved.
This pot wasn't.
This is a rootball that was only top-watered.
My inconclusive conclusion is that swicking and synthetics go hand in hand and swicking and organics are polar opposites.
Organics has no need for hydro roots and synthetics has no needs for feeder roots.
I do think that with the extreme airflow a cloth pot provides, mixed with a synthetic feeding routine, that a synthetic swick will easily equal any synthetic soil grow, and very likely exceed it because of the O2 availability.
I'm very disappointed to be honest, I really wanted swicking to work for me.
It wasn't a total loss though, as I stumbled onto the fact that if you take a cloth pot full of soil, hydrated it for 48 hours on a swick, then remove it from the swick when it is fully saturated, and drop a bare root bubble clone into it, the clone immediately takes to the soil without any stress or hardening off period.
It's my new "go to" method.
I have put a lot of time and effort into cloning and no one single thing I messed around with had an effect this profound.
It was well worth the swicking trials.
Now I just toss cuttings into the cloner, drop them into swick-hydrated pots, and they are off to the races with zero coddling.
I drop clones straight into 10 gallon pots now and they flourish, when before, no matter how well I watered and pampered, I couldn't get them to adjust to soil without at least some stress.
So for now I will flower these 2 out to see how they finish, but moving forward I will return to top watering.
I will still experiment with swicking but to be honest, SWICK nor SIP has shown me a rootball that can compete with the feather dusters I get from top watering. I have seen numerous SIP rootballs that are huge, but they are always hydro roots, so for organics my conclusion is that natures intent was for organics, and natures intent was for rain to water those organics, and I always follow the roots, so its back to dripper lines up top.
I will still post here when I do swicking trials, and follow along what others post here, but my grows aren't going to be swick grows any more. Sip's neither.
No offense to the sippers, but I can grow better plants with top watering.
If I were using hard pots that may be different, but cloth pots already provide more air than any air gap can, and my root balls reflect that.
I do believe that swicking and synthetics will produce unbelievable grows, especially in cloth pots for the oxygen.
I was using synthetic wool. I don't put organics in the res but roots grow down the wicks and pull vegetation and life with them. Algae and such, and the wick chokes off.
