Today our plants grew a lot since we last took a picture of them. We added more nutrient solution to the plants and tested the pH and it was around a 7. I don’t believe we will be able to harvest anything from our plants on Wednesday but we should be able to fairly soon if our plants continue to grow like they have and we don’t run into any problems.
Our plants are continuing to grow with the help of the direct application of the nutrient solution onto the plants. Our container is staying fairly clean. We believe that another reason of why our plants were growing slow other then not getting sufficient nutrients was that Rich’s plants were stealing the light from our plants. We cant really do anything about this either. We added some more nutrient solution and then checked the pH which has been very consistent lately being in between 6 and 8.
Today we mixed up another gallon of nutrient solution since we were running low after filling up our container since the water level was low. We noticed that since we have been putting some of the nutrient solution directly onto the plants that they have started to grow faster then if it is just poured into the container. We then checked the pH and it was around a 7. We haven’t encountered any more problems as of right now. As you can see in our picture our one plant has died.
Today we checked our plants and we noticed very little growth again. We believe that all the nutrients are being sucked in the first layer of rock wool and not the layer of rock wool in which our plants are planted in. We will give it some more time then decide on whether we need to come up with a solution to fix this or not. I checked the Ph and it was very high so I added some ph down and tested it again and it was a little acidic so I added ph up and tested it again and got it just right. We are running low on nutrient solution so we will have to make more in the next class period.
Today we cleaned out our plastic container because we thought it had a negative effect on our plants. We then filled half of the container with water and the other half with nutrient solution. We then added more nutrient solution onto our plants as well. I then checked the ph and it was around a 6.5 so we just left it. Our plants experienced some more growth but the process is very slow.
The water continued to get cloudy from our nutrient solution. The pH level was very high so we put pH down but by accident put too much in. To counter act our mistake we put a little bit of pH up in it. We noticed that the plant growth is very slow and show almost no sign of increasing in height. If we don,t see sign of any growth by next class we plan on cleaning out the container.
Today we noticed a lot of nutrient solution on the bottom of the container. We believe that this is affecting our plants growth. The plants as of right now are growing very slowly. We measured the pH of our system and this time it was extremely low for our plants. Because of this we added pH up to counteract the pH level. We also believe that the nutrient solution is being soaked into our first level of rock wool and a minimum amount is reaching the actual plant. To fix this we have been pouring some of the solution directly onto our plants.
Due to the field trip we had the week before there was no time for us to check our system. When we observed our system today the water level was very low and the nutrient solution had a clear affect on the plants. Our plants have grown slightly and measured the pH. As usual the level of pH was very high and added pH down to reach a level of 7.
Our worries from day 4 were true, our water level in our hydroponic system was extremely low. The plants had no new water coming into the rock wool. Fortunately the rock wool stayed wet enough till we returned to the class. We then added water to the system and checked the pH level noticing that it was again extremely high. We solved that problem by adding pH down to get the right pH level. Next we made nutrient solution using warm water and then checked the pH level of the solution which was about 7. Next we made sure the solution was completely dissolved and then using a funnel poured about a quarter of a gallon into the hydroponic system.
Plants have significantly grown almost ready to introduced to the nutrient solution. The pH level of the water was extremely high for what it should have been. The normal pH level should be at around 6 to 7 so in this case we added pH down to help our plants. We are concerned that our container would run out of water over spring break.