That video cracks me up every time!!!
Water chemistry used to kick my ass so bad and I'd wonder why I had fucked up plants. It wasn't until I had a full understanding of what I'm working with then my gardens began to take off and do great.
I know just by location you have awesome water. Rain or well, it's great.
I think your meter is accurate because that's how weird it can get!
Garbage eating plants make great filters and can do a really good job pulling heavy metals and all kinds of shit from water to make it pure. Charcoal carbon and sand also make great filters. It sounds like you have an outstanding naturally occurring water filter.
But yeah man around here some wells are damn near brackish at well over 1000ppm. And rain is hit or miss when collected in large cities with lots of air pollution. We get acid rain as a result of air pollution depending on time of year. It's not uncommon for rain collectors here to have to RO it!
And tap water...uughh. When you have a monopoly over water like we do with LCRA, you have humans ripe for corruption at every point and is why our water is so screwy.
My water has gotten easier to work with as it's gone from around 350ppm ten years ago to 150 today.
Really that should be my next experiment is to do a side by side with tap vs ro and see if I can dial back on my needing RO.
It's hard though because RO is a crutch for me. So much so I trust my RO more than I do collected rain.
And when I do get into collecting rain again it's getting UV and at least a carbon filter.
The rinse cycle on the tower did very well. Not too much sludge after but still a very good cleaning.
I've already decided to upgrade the rez to a translucent 5 gallon bucket. It'll take it's 2 gallon rez and more than double it's size. So filling, and gas gauge will be different here very soon.
I got these runners off Amazon of all places!
Most common places to mail order strawberry runners are out of season right now but on etsy and amazon some are still shipping. I didn't check ebay though so there might be some there too. This was an order for 25 runners but it came with 27. There might be 2-3 duds in the bunch but everything else looks alive.
I've done my first batch of nutes and ran the conversion on weight to tsp because weighing out nutes every time sounds like a real PITA.
These are far from organic but IMO safe and good to use. They all dissolved almost instantly when added to water.
I was concerned I might have to use hot water to dissolve like some other dry hydro nutes but all good here.
Not in the pic is Foop pH up and down and while it's not organic either, is really clean and better than earth juice pH adjusters IMO.
I'm using a Blue Lab truncheon which pretty much has every scale for American or Euro nute scales. I'm using it's EC scale since most feed charts I look at also use EC for berries.
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The mix went very well. It came out concentrated at 2x what I need so I cut it with RO and adjusted pH.
The nute solution looks very clean with a crystally green tint to it so it should run very well in this system with little to no salt build ups.
I saw an almost immediate positive reaction from all the starts so that was nice to see.
And yep...we gotta spinner here!!! I need to wrangle the cords a little better and cleaner and use the remote control to slow it down, maybe have it stop and go or something but it's coming along great so far!
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Love it!
