Drip and Flow

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So I moved our system under the other light.  I gingerly slid a few systems and made room for ours around the edge.  For the first time since we began, our leaves have ridges and look semi-healthy.  Our pH and temperature were again stable and within good growing conditions and our plants are about 3.5 inches tall.  I also added some more water to the system.  Hopefully the new lamp will work wonders over the weekend and maybe we will have harvestable plants by Monday, not very likely though.  Included is a picture of our system and our system compared to other systems.

Once again our system has perfect temperature, water level, pH and tubing operation.  Our plants are looking a little better since decreasing the water given to them each day.  A new development is the fact that there is now green growth on some of the cubes and over the perlite.  Not really sure what that is all about.  We are fairly sure that a main contributor to the poor growth is the lamp our plant is under.  All of the systems under our lamp are doing significantly worse than those under the other lamp.  We would move our system over but, in the good Christmas spirit, there is no room at the inn and no groups really looking to move their system to a less appealing spot or even closer to the edge of the tray to make room for more.    Maybe the decreased water will continue to help the plants.

Even though we tried to change the health of the system and very very slightly improved the amount of water put into the system.  The pH and water are still doing well and we also checked the water level and added more water to make sure that there was enough water to last over the Thanksgiving holiday break.  Since adding more water seemed to make the system even worse, we chose to decrease the amount of water spraying the system to one fifteen minute spray cycle every two hours.   As they are now, the plants stand at about two to three inches in height, hopefully we will see great improvement after break.

So after our plants came back from their first downturn and started looking good and healthy again, they have once again begun to wild and deteriorate.  We checked the pH and temperature and they are both still at optimal levels for plant growth.  In an effort to turn around the problems with plant health, we increased slightly the amount of water the system has been receiving.  Instead of once every hour the plants are watered three times every two hours.  Hopefully this improves the health of our system.

After doing a more thorough check on the system yesterday I saw that the growth is still good at about 3 or 4 inches but the stems are very thin and don’t seem as healthy as they could be.  Other groups seem to have much healthier plants but the pH and temperature are still doing great.  Any ideas?

I did a quick check on our system since we were both at Virginia Beach and our system was unattended.  Everything looked alright during the initial check and hopefully the growth continues.  Our plants were still green but I didn’t get the check to measure them but they did look larger than before.

Our plant growth has not stopped yet but lets not jinx anything.  The heights are now between 1.5 to 2.5 inches and they pH and temperatures are remaining stable at perfect conditions.  The nutrient solution is no longer cloudy like it was in the beginning of the projects, we think this is due to the paper blocking the light from promoting algae growth.

We have finally reached the point where all of our rockwool cubes show growth and leafy green plants.  The heights range from about one inch to two inches and the timer is still doing great. All sprouts are still fairly healthy and pH is also still stable at about 6.5.  We did need to add more nutrient solution to the tank as it was barely above the pump level.

Two of the new seedling cubes have begun visible growth.  Both have reached heights of about one inch and more seeds have started to show green growth beginning.  The timer is still working correctly and seems to be correcting the initial problems that we experienced.  The initial growth seems to have slowed but all of the sprouts appear healthy.  pH is also remaining stable at about 6.5.