DAY 18: Early Vegetation (Day 8 /14)
One is growing faster than the other but they’re both slowly making progress day by day.
I’m thinking the cooler ambient temps (from AC) may have kept them from sprouting as quickly as some of my others have, some strains seem to care less about that. Next time will also go back to just planting in the cocopod without germinating in a warm shot glass first, as that is probably a better way to acclimate them to my environment and would be my guess as to why it’s the recommended way. I think there was a bit of shock from the initial transplant that caused them to take a bit longer to grow after they emerged from the ground.
When I first planted these seeds there’s a chance that the cocopods were soaked in water that had too high of a pH than it should’ve; next time will use properly pH’d water. That might’ve also contributed to the transplant shock when I moved the seeds from shot glass to cocopods.
Last week when doing a water change I also mixed up a very small pinch of recharge with some properly pH’d water and put some of that through the coco pod and put the rest in the res and that has seemed to help invigorate the root and upper growth in both. It clouded up the reservoirs slightly but that’ll clear up after a couple of drain/fills – I probably won’t be adding any more recharge from this point on, it was just used to get some help balancing the pH in the cocopods.
So far they’ve only been fed distilled water mixed with about 2-3mL of sensi cal/mag xtra and 12-15mL of a dr marijane mixture (substitute for hydroguard I’m testing out). Haven’t been looking at pH readings myself, but the bottle levels aren’t budging much and the probes are calibrated; have just been trusting that the grobo is watching that.
The majority of the time the water temps are 69-70°F with the temps inside grobo around 75°F, and humidity is relatively stable between 40-50%, although sometimes the inside temps of grobo need to be kept around 72°F in order to keep the water temps down. Some of the initial days of this grow the water temps crept up to 73-74°F and were left that way for a few hours at a time in an effort to stimulate some more growth.
I have noticed some extra funk down below that looks like caramel or mud in some spots or like fuzzy dark powder coating the roots, which also appeared in my last grow when my hydroguard seemed to stop being effective. I don’t think it is the recharge causing it, as it was already starting prior to that drain/fill and wasn’t even used in my last grow. My suspicion is that (once mixed with water) the Dr Marijane doesn’t last more than 2-3 months, or at least where it’s currently being stored.
The way the stems are twisting is also telling me that there’s a struggle going on down below, so there’s even more evidence pointing toward the (nearing-4-months-old solution of) dr marijane solution potentially losing its effectiveness.
The plan is to mix up a new (smaller) batch and apply it to see if a similar treatment as before gets rid of that brown stuff again. It’s also possible that it works to clean up the res but doesn’t actually do much to protect in high temp scenarios, that’s still yet to be determined. For now will mix a new batch every month to keep it fresh and see how that works out.
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