Undercurrent RDWC With Compost Tea Grow - First Journal

G

gangadoctor

New Member
Hi guys and gals, i've been lurking for a while and this is my first journal. i've been growing for over a year now and migrated from coco to rdwc. i've had 2 successful grows under my belt with a sterile system but recently i ran into trouble with root rot.

i've been given a lot of advice by other members and they advised me to start a journal to document everything and maybe the information will help others in a similar situation.

i'd like to take this opportunity to thank Village Idiot from the outset as he has been very helpful from the outset... he's the cleverest idiot i know lol!... hopefully he'll come along and input here so you can all gain from his knowledge??

this journal is going to start off on a negative because of the root rot problem so hopefully the only way is up lol!

let me start off by giving you some info about my grow room and set ups;

  • i have a space of 4 foot by 10 ft and a head height of 6 ft.
  • the room is fully airtight and i don't have any inlet or out let ducts bringing fresh air in or out. it's a loser loop room
  • the setup in the room includes a 7 pot (20 litres each) rdwc (the res it outside the grow room),
  • one 800 watt gavita double ended bulb attached to a gavita el1 controller,
  • the gavita light is attached to an agra light mover,
  • above the gavita i have x4 bud master GOD led clusters - i think each one is 150 watts,
  • a 300a water chiller,
  • a 50 litre dehumidifier,
  • a rhino air filter which basically recirculates the air,
  • a CO2 burner and controller,
  • 2 fans,
  • and an air-conditioning unit.
  • i also have an automatic pump the air conditioner and the dehumidifier are attached to which pumps the evaporated water out into a sink outside my grow room.
  • each of the 7 buckets have a 150mm air stone powered by a hilbow industrial air pump.
  • finally, my res is plumbed in directly into my water supply which comes in at 0.7 ec.

my nutrition line
  • the brand is dutch pro and the line includes
  • take root
  • multi total enzyme
  • base a and b grow
  • base a and b bloom
  • keep clean
  • explode

i have a whole load of other stuff too which i'll probably mention as i go along.

the strain i am growing is from barneys farm and called LSD. i'm growing from clones that were taken from flowering plants which were propagated in an EZ cloner then transferred into the net pots.

my chiller was running at 18c and the ambient air temperature is between 21 and 24c.

the humidity is a constant 50%.

i'll upload some more info in after dinner and some pictures.
 
more info...

after my led's rooted in the cloner i transplanted them in to the main grow room then after one week they started to droop and start going yellow. i inspected the roots and found they were slimy and going brown so i took them out and bathed them for 24 hrs in a h202 and pythoff mixture after cleaning the roots. i cleaned the rdwc down and the room and sterilised it for 24 hours. the next day everything went back in again but once again within 36 hours the brown slime was back - this time with a vengeance. grrr

(the reason i think i contracted the slime in the first place was because i forgot to switch my chiller on for 48 hours and water temperatures reached 25c in that period).

repeated the above process a few more times and each time i put more and more h202 and ptyhoff into my setup but it didn't work.

i decided to replace some of the pipe work and quarantine the babies whilst i did some research so i cut away nearly all the roots that kept on getting infected. i was left with about an inch and i put all 7 of them into a single dwc/aeroponics system i built so the roots were continually being sprayed. i put voodoo juice and take root into the solution and within 2 days i saw the beginnings of new roots (today).

whilst that was being done, i researched and with the help of members from this forum, namely village idiot, i decided to brew my own compost tea. i ran this in a separate bucket for 48 hours with the ingredients recommended and a few airstones. i then increased the temperature of my chiller to 22c and poured some of the tea into the rdwc. i then placed each plant into it's own bucket and poured some more tea through the top of the net pots.

...and that's me upto date as of today.

my plan tomorrow is to put some of the nutes in. here are a few pictures (sorry i've got no idea how to rotate them - advice please?)
 
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my tea brewing

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the babies back in the grow room after the tea was poured in - so this is day one again

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my gavita controller for the lights and my blurb guardian controller for the ec, ph and water temperature. my water temperature is now 22c.

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this is how the girls looked in the single dwc quarantine after i chopped the roots and cleaned them up

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...and the roots when they went in

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this is how they looked after 2 weeks in the original rdwc when the slime started

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this is how they looked from looking from my cctv camera on the first day of being transplanted from the cloner

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these are the roots after 48hrs in the voodoo juice and take root. look at the net pot at the back. nice roots again

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this is what the room looks like with just the budmaster led's on

and finally here's a few shots of the girls in their buckets in the tea solution day 1 so we've got something to compare to as we go along...

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i had to cut quite a few dead and yellow leaves off so they look a sorry state for now. let's see what happens with the tea - fingers crossed!
 
today is day 2 of veg of putting the girls into the tea mix...

my initial observations by just looking at them is they seem much darker green and the leaves are no longer sagging which is a great start after all the shit they've been through.

here's so pics...

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this is my daily monitoring log i record everything on. i put the tea in yesterday and it didn't affect the ec or ph. after putting all the above in my final ec is 1 and ph is 5.9. the water temperature was set at 22c but i adjusted it down to 21c. no reason in particular, just wanting to see if that works too. as you can see i put a tiny amount of nutes in to my res. the total literage of my setup is 120 litres.

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shots of 3 of the roots. out of the 7 plants 4 of them have started showing signs of new roots as per the 3rd picture. the other 3 which have had the most trouble and shock still have the same amount of trimmed roots i started with 3 days ago.

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this is one of the runts... sorry about these pictures - i have no idea how to rotate them!!

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this is one of the better ones which has started developing roots

i've got my gavita set to 400w at the moment and from tomorrow i'm going to switch on the leds too. onwards and upwards hopefully.

i just want to say thanks again for all the help and support i've had on this forum from you guys - you know who you are!

below i've got a few more pictures of some clones i took. they were taken from another batch of girls - lsd strain again - in the 5th week of flower. i wanted to experiment and see how clones from flowering plants would grow up to look like and their' comparative yields. they're 2 days into the cloning machine with 24hr cfl lights. i just gave them some leaf green as they leaves are a little yellow - watch this space!...

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by the way, i just noticed i made a mistake with the title of this journal - does anyone know how i can amend it? ... this isn't my first grow... it's my first journal - slip of the old tongue lol
 
From what I gather the rotated pics are an Iphone thing. Rotate your phone 90 degrees when taking the picture and it should work out.

Last time I brewed the tea and measured it I got 800ppm. Not sure what that translates to in EC but not 0.

Good sounding start though. You did a lot of gnarly things to get to this point so from here on we want to tread lightly and go slow. Keep the oxygenation high and possibly do another tea in a week. Is ancient forest soil the only thing you couldn't find? Did you get the alfalfa, Kelp and crab meal in there? If you got the Alfalfa and Kelp in there then you should not need ferts. With a 0 change in EC I am wondering what all you put in the tea.
 
Hi vi. My ec actually went up by 0.1. I'm planning on adding in another half litre in 2 days time as I have some left from the initial tea I made.

I couldn't find a few things actually but I've ordered them for the next batch.


Sent from my iPhone using 420
 
So the bacteria may not be viable if it is just sitting around.

You need to keep the air stone going and add sugars every 12 hours (unless you over do the sugars) to keep them breeding. I don't know that it will hurt but if you let it sit stagnate it may not help.


I was talking to someone about this last week. I typically use it and dump the extra in my yard. The wanted to save it. I said maybe put it back in the original bucket with the residue and keep it going....but I don't know if that would work either.

The typical tea is not made the exact same way. A typical tea people just steep a sock of worm castings in a bucket like you would a bag of tea in a cup. The idea is to leach out the microbes from the worm castings and then in a day they use it. The method we are doing is a bit more aggressive allowing for breeding right there and with the enzymes and other additives we are trying to get a complex plant supplement that has everything the plant needs. So if you follow that recipe it will have broken down the Chitosan and Alfalfa and oatmeal as well as having developed a high bacterial count.

If you add Glomus to that at the very end you have a supper food / root enhancer. I also sometimes add even more enzymes right as I add it to the res. So add some symbiotic Fungi and enzymes independently when introducing the beanies and things should just take off on you.

For the glomus (mycos) there are lots of companies that bag it. They come to you in hibernation. The best thing is to get a Pyrex measuring cup ( I use a 1 liter or bigger one) Fill it with water and place on the stove. get it up to about 28-30C...not hot but warm. then add the Glomus and mix it up to activate it. after a little while you might see the water bubbling then you know they are awake.

Then you can introduce that again through the baskets and the roots will be very happy for it.
 
i've read everywhere that if you put it in the fridge it stays good for 7 to 10 days or until it starts to smell different. have you not seen that too?
 
I understand. For me it's not the price of it. It's just the extra hassle and extra cleaning and sterilisation that goes with it. I've already got enough to do and I'm all for finding the easiest route to do something
 
today is the 4th day the girls are in the tea solution.i checked on them this morning and the first observation was the temperature of the water on the controller - 23 degrees c - being someone who has been used to growing in a sterile environment for the past 12 months where the temperature of my water does not exceed 18c, it makes me nervous seeing such a high temperature. i opened the lid of my res slowly thinking the slime and root rot was back but to my surprise the water looked nice and clear and smelled lovely.

the ec is still at 1 and the ph is still at 5.9 so i doubt they've been drinking much at all.

the plants themselves look health but i don't think there's been any growth either in height or width and no new leaves either. they just seem happy but stunted.

here's what the root growth is like today...

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really happy with the root growth bearing in mind i thought they were on their last legs 4 days ago. they're nice and white too. i can't recommend the compost tea enough to anyone suffering from slime or root rot. i tried everything in a sterile setup and it just kept coming back.

i'm hoping the plant are concentrating on new root growth hence why they haven't grown up top and hopefully they foliage will catch up.
 
Nice to see it is working out.

You may want to back off on the fertilizer components in the tea and brew it up just to have the microbes and keep dumping it in there.

But just be patient and carry on as directed.

I use living exclusively and my plants are way happy.

:goodjob:
 
And update the post in the DWC section in a few days when you feel like you really have solved it using beneficial bacteria when all sterilization efforts have failed. Good general info for anyone who goes searching in the forums for help.
 
Well multiple aspects are fertilizer even one you can't back off. but the reason I say that is you don't want to burn the pants with too high levels of fertilizers. if it is stunted and not growing really yet (the roots are growing for sure) then we don't want to over do it.

The Kelp extract is fertilizer, the alfalfa is fertilizer. The Ancient forest soil (humic soil) is both fertilizers and some other stuff. You could just buy Humic acid at just about any store and use that directly.

The worm castings have a lot of nitrogen in them but that also is the source of the bacteria that we are using to solve the problem. So we keep using that.

The tea I make is a complete plant food with microbes and bloom boosters. It has to be regulated into your program otherwise you can cause some burn. Once dialed in though you can make your own plant food for almost nothing and use some Cal Mag, Silica and sugars on the side to keep it going. Then all you will might need to add is some basic base that isn't too strong in anything. You probably can't get it but there is a super cheap one in the states I love to use called Eleanor's VF-11. Super cheap and complete micro and macro food. We can get it at Home Depot.


You have started down a new path of learning it will take a bit to dial in your new balance. But in the end you will be happy for it.

I always say following a recipe is a recipe for failure. You need to learn to speak cannabis and understand what your plants are telling you. You can make a recipe that works for you but following others blindly is a path to failure.
 
6th day today and i love this compost tea - best thing ever - if anyone wants to read about it check this out...

https://www.--------.org/t/dwc-root-slime-cure-aka-how-to-breed-beneficial-microbes.361430/

here's some pics of my roots - work in progress but i literally gave up on these babies 7 days ago. now look...

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nothing special i know but believe me they're the best site ever from where i'm standing.

the roots are growing but the plants and foliar aren't at the moment - hopefully soon though now that the roots are starting to establish.

today i added in some more tea which i've been keeping in the fridge and 25ml of A&B plus 25ml of calmag. brought the ec to 1.1 and the ph to 5.9. res temp is a steal 22c.

the humidity was a little low for my liking at 41% so i've put the humidifier on too - i have a feeling the humidity is the limiting factor at the moment re the foliar growth. we'll see in a few days.

i've replaced one of my air stones with a new diffuser branded a norres. it's quite expensive but makes a notable difference in the bucket. see for your self...

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in comparison this is what my normal 6 inch air stones give off using the same air pump...

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massive difference hey?

my only concern is that the bubbles are much much bigger and as the bubbles dissipate at the top of the water they don't 'burst' to give off a spray of water that the roots normally love. i'm thinking the norres would be no good when starting a plant off before the roots hit the water but maybe would be great once the roots are in the water?

it really does feel good to overcome a problem! hope everyone's having a good day!
 
10th day today.

here's a picture from my cctv - massive difference from the first pictures...


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this is a picture of the roots of one of the babies - all i've been doing is applying tea directly through the net pots and a tiny amount of a and b nutes...

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the next picture is of roots from a plant i thought was a goner - it's way behind the others but i'm well happy just the fact it's got root...

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everything seems to be going fine for now - slow growth up above but i suppose that's normal what with no roots and the shock of it all. i'm off for a week on saturday so hopefully i'll come back to a nice surprise!

lastly, here's a pic of some clones - if you recall i cut them off of plants that were about 6 weeks into flower to see what would happen. they look a sorry state and they are just beginning to show roots down below. some of them have lost all their leaves but the roots are still growing - do you think the leaves will re grow or grow t all?

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