Month: March 2012

Today we came in and were happy to see one of plants growing very well.  It grew about an inch since Monday.  Our plants are showing more of a green color and are looking healthier.  When I checked the pH, it was about 6.5.  I was happy to see it stayed consistent and did not go up a lot like the past few times it was checked.  We added more nutrient solution directly to the plants and to the system itself to raise the water level.

Ever since our system was first introduced to the lighting, it has been blocked by the green giant placed directly in the middle!  The other systems that are placed more directly under the light are not experiencing shadows from the green giant like ours is.  They are also witnessing better plant growth.  In our first attempt to solve this problem we placed some scrap wood under our system to raise it up and hopefully get more direct light.  Hopefully this works out well for our plants.

 

Today we were sad to see that some of our plants are not doing so well.  Some of them are looking died and other are turning yellow.  We are not really sure why this is happening to the plants.  We have done ever thing that has been ask for like checking the pH, putting in nutrient solution, and lighting.  We even tried routing the cups so that way the air pump would not be directly underneath the plant. After doing that we also decided that we should pull the air pump back so that way it is not under any of the plants. Hopefully this helps us!

Today was our first day back from break, so we were really excited to see how our system did for a week on its own.  We were very happy to see that al the plants were still alive and well!! There was some growth but not too big of a difference in the height but they were finally were tall enough for nutrient solution.  We diffidently needed to add more water to the system. Instead of doing that though we decided to add the nutrient solution to the system so hopefully we see more of an improvement in the plants.

 

Today we have to make sure that our system is capable of being left alone for little over a week because we have to go home for spring break.  Some of the things that we wanted to do was check on the pH and make sure that there is enough water in the system to last. We decided to add some more water because we didn’t want it to dry out over break but not to much that it would drown the plants. After we added the water we checked the pH of the water again.  It was agian higher than when we left it, neither of us can figure out why.  So once again Cody added more pH down to get it back to the 7.0 that we are looking for.  Hopefully we can figure out why it keeps raising!

Today we checked up on our plants and we’re happy to see that they were doing well for being in our hydroponic system.  Cody notcied that Amber had put some of the seeds in the rockwool upside down.  Worried that they wouldn’t correct themselves and we would lose some plants Cody took the seeds out of the rockwool and just flipped them over.  This should be an easy fix to the problem! Also, we checked the pH just to make sure that it was at our desired level.  It was a little high still so Cody put a small amount of pH down in it and that got everything back to normal.