Learning by doing - Coco & Soil in 5x5

[Seb]

I feel exposed but I guess I can learn by showing what I'm doing. I'll try to keep notes on lessons learned.

There are 10 plants from seed (week 4). 5 in Coco and 5 in basic gardening soil. 3gal / 11L pots filled about 3/4 of the way. Automatic irrigation is in the works hence the pot sizing.

The girls (femmed) moved from starter cups into their pots yesterday. One doesn't look impressed, the others seem happy. The light is on around 400PPFD according to the Photone app which is reliable as far as I can tell.

I built a rig for the plants to sit on inspired by @Aqua Man. If I run out of space I can cut down the legs somewhat. I am trying to avoid using an additional pump to clear the runoff (which I plan to use to partially water the soil plants - unless somebody can convince me not to?!).

Temps are rather low. Hopefully the room will heat up. Otherwise I might try to insulate the tent. The tent is from SpiderFarmer. It almost came down when I tried to hang the fan & filter. It was cheap and that's where it showed. The metal pipes are significantly weaker than those of my old 2x4 SecretJardin tent.

Here is the dashboard (HomeAssistant / ESPHome => ESP8266 / ESP32Cam for monitoring and automation - work in progress):



And the tent:

I'm trying to move away from stoner engineering - then that DIY drain pipe happened (cut out quarter of an old pipe). I plan to replace the tape with screws at least.

 

[Amnesia]

I like your setup. I particularly like the drainage table idea.

 

[Aqua Man]

Yeah im liking that stoner engineering…. If you toss a cheap condensate pump in that bucket they can pump it pretty dam far and even up a high grab to a drain.

Then all you need to do is mix a res as needed so even less work

 

[Seb]

Maybe not surprisingly I'm having some difficulties.
I just fed them 1.2ec nutrients. I did not water the coco yesterday because the plants are so small but I guess that's not what you're supposed to do in coco. Should I start watering at least once daily even now?

This lady is developing spots on her leaves

And this one even more so

They are both in coco. I use pre-buffered coco bricks. Tap has 85mg/L Ca and 26mg/L Mg.
Are those insufficient amounts of Ca / Mg? Does it look like Insufficient everything?
I'm using some left over T.A. Duo fertiliser. I couldn't find exact Ca / Mg ingredients. It's meant for hard water.

None of the plants look thrilled


The tent is on 75F/24C 65%RH during lights on and 66F/19C 80%RH at lights off. I'll try to exhaust the tent out of the window to get RH under control. Before the repot the plants were in a 2x4 on the ground floor. The big tent is in the basement. Clearly the environment isn't dialed in yet. Before the transplant and move downstairs the plants were very happy. This is how the environment changed:



Looking at that I probably stressed them way too hard with my repot & relocation action.

Any suggestions on what I should focus on?

I could move the whole setup upstairs. That will increase temps (possibly too much so) and decrease RH. I was going to try to exhaust out of the window first. I want to avoid getting an AC or a bigger dehumidifier. I did not use the one I have the last two days. At night I clearly need to.

Cheers

 

[Seb]

Still hand watering. Automation equipment has been tested but not implemented.

The pale girls were in bad soil and pots that were too big. Yesterday they were put into smaller pots with hopefully appropriate soil. They are starting to look better.

Lesson learned: don't combine large pots with bad soil. Who would have thought

I opened a thread in the infirmary for the one unhappy lady in coco.

 

[Seb]

Lessons learned so far:

• Pick soil and coco carefully
• Bigger pots do not lead to bigger plants, especially when young
• Measuring coco runoff is helpful to get dialed in
• Plants may vary wildly in how they respond to identical treatment
• Veg PPFD ranges from 250-600
• Coco feed should start around 0.6ec
• I am very good at reading about how to do something and then not do it that way
• Nitrogen comes in ammonium and nitrate form

Plants in soil have caught up with those in coco. I had overfed the coco plants. I plan on flipping tonight.

 

[Seb]

This is where I am right now. Notes and tips very welcome.
Cheers

tl;dr
Light: 450ppfd @ 26cm/10"
Feed: 1.2EC 5.6ph twice daily
Leaf Temp: 22C (72F) +-1
VPD: 1k (drops at night to 500 at the lowest)

Observations
The two plants at the front are about half the size of the others. The plants in soil look the happiest and have grown better than those in coco, on average. It seems the leaf temps in coco are lower (22C vs 24C in soil).

I am feeding 1.1ec, runoff is 1.3. Runoff ph is still around 7. No amount of flushing seemed to change that for long. I have done a fair amount of reading. Some people advocate to focus on runoff EC and let ph fall where it may. I use buffered Ugro coco. I have not seen anybody complain about it. There seem to be factors that I am not aware of. Automated watering is sub-optimal because plant size varies. In the end some get more runoff...

I mix my tap with RO to get to about 0.3ec. I need a fair amount of phosphoric acid (dry form, Pekacid 0-60-20) to get my ph down (around 0.1-0.2 ec worth).

I may need to shorten the legs on my table to maintain distance from the LEDs. They are looking OK to me but could be better.

I am not sure how to automate the soil watering. Using the coco runoff to feed soil seems like it might cause more issues. I am trying to balance resource usage. My anxiety patterns are on full display again and again. I am using the grow to deal with it.