Nematode's not yet epic Hydroponic thread

[Nematode]

Hydroponic tomato pics.
How they look to you guys?
They look ok but slightly off, I'm thinking its the cold nights, been in the 40's a lot at night. Seems like they took a little while to shake off the cold last year as well.
Internode spacing seems short, leaves don't seem full size, some cupping. They don't seem quite as green as they ought to be in person, the photos make them slightly greener.

What I done wrong so far:
1)started them with weak miracle grow solution instead of a complete hydroponic solution.
2) left them too long in the starter blocks(leggy)
3) didn't pre treat the rock wool to remove the lime (that almost killed them)
4) used univ of florida hydroponic recipe which was waaay too weak for cold weather.
probably some more mistakes but haven't killed them yet.

Feed is now based upon univ Arizona generic tomato pepper cucumber formula
N 189
P 39
K 341
Mg 48
Ca 170

Pics are Kellogg's Breakfast (my favorite) and Bloody Butcher (new to me this year)
For reference the Grodan delta blocks are 4" x 4".

Nematode

[luigiwu]

mhpgardener on youtube grows the most amazing tomatoes via dutch buckets - have you checked out his channel?

[bower]

Nematode, I bet hydroponics in cold temperatures is a whole other art form you are developing!

Plants look good, I know what a cold tomato plant should look like.

[Nematode]

Originally Posted by bower

Nematode, I bet hydroponics in cold temperatures is a whole other art form you are developing!

Plants look good, I know what a cold tomato plant should look like.

funny, I have noticed I am positively allergic to doing things like everyone else

Thanks, we have a warm week coming I expect them to shape up pretty quick.

Nematode

[Nematode]

Thanks for the link, Luigiwu he is doing some interesting things, like using clones to get early tomatoes.
might have to try that , haven't puzzled it out yet how it would all work. I'm not a fan of recirculating systems myself because they tend to suffer ph problems and unknown nutrient deficiencies.
Looks like he has it working though.

Nematode

[luigiwu]

I'm sorry I'm not more familiar with hydroponics but how does your system work? It thought all hydroponics involve a pump that dispense fertilized water. Does your plants basically get fertilizer water from a bottom source?

[Nematode]

I have a 55gal nutrient tank a timer and a pump.
The pump turns on for a couple minutes several times a day to pump the solution through drip emitters which regulate the flow to .5gph or about one ounce per minute. Ideally there will be 10% of the feed anount overflow from the bato bucket at each feeding.

[HydroExplorer]

Originally Posted by luigiwu

I'm sorry I'm not more familiar with hydroponics but how does your system work? It thought all hydroponics involve a pump that dispense fertilized water. Does your plants basically get fertilizer water from a bottom source?

Most hydroponic systems use pumps.

You can do hand watered hydroponics which is similar to container gardening. I grew carrots in a trash can like this last year using aquarium water as my nutrient solution. It was fun.

You can also do something called Kratky hydroponics where you don't aerate the water and you don't change the nutrient solution. The plant will form high O2 absorption roots above the water line and nutrient absorption roots below it so you don't get root rot. It is easiest to do with short lifecycle plants like lettuce. If you refill your res and cover the high O2 roots you will drown the plant in about an hour. The nice thing about kratky is that it's completely hands off. You set it up and you go back for harvest. It's also cheap and zero energy required. I only did it once and it worked great. The rabbits really loved that cauliflower.

Other forms of hydroponics include:
Nutrient Film Technique where you run a stream of nutrients by your root zone and drain back to the res.

Deep water culture where you run aeration and have the roots grow down into the nutrient solution.

A variant form of deep water culture uses a foam raft which floats on top of the nutrient solution. Some people say that's another kind of hydro... It's raft DWC.

Aquaponics where you use the waste from fish to grow plants. The plants filter the water for the fish. The fish make fertilizer for the plants.

Aeroponics where you spray the nutrients onto the root zone on timed intervals. This one is the ferarri of growing. It is possible to cut plant maturity time in half with this. A clogged nozzle or pump fail results in catastrophic failure in hours.

Fogponics is the ferarri of aeroponics. You fill the root zone chamber with a dense fog of nutrient solution. The fine droplet size makes the roots get all hairy and EXTREMELEY efficient. It is insane what can be done with fogponics. NASA and a lot of people growing illegal plants do this.

Ebb and flow is where you have a bunch of pots sitting in a basin. You fill the basin up to some level and then drain it on timed intervals to feed and water the plants.

Drip style hydroponics uses drip emitters to drip nutrients into the root zone. This is often done using dutch buckets to drain the runoff back to the res. This is what MHP Gardener does and he is a master of this.

I feel like I'm missing one but that's most of them.

[Nematode]

I definitely had one good ph swing.
Should be under control now. If anything they look a little over-fertilized at the moment.
It's a drain to waste system.
Our tap water has chloramine, thanks for the vitamin c tip I'll check it out, think I was putting in a little molasses last year for chloramine... Can't remember.
Once I tried an aquarium water conditioner. It was a complete disaster, plants went yellow immediately from nutrient deficiency.

My goal is for this to be a catalogue of my successes, got to get through the mistrakes first

[HydroExplorer]

I just learned about Vitamin C. I'm experimenting with it this year. I don't anticipate problems. The nice thing with it is that 1000 mg apparently can treat 50 gal of water. So 5 cents per 50 gal. It doesn't get cheaper than that.

I had really bad pH swings last year on my chemical hydro stuff. I did a water change to a res that was all distilled water and the problem went away. I can't cost-justify growing in distilled water all the time but it did tell me that it was a problem with my water supply. I kind of wonder if the chloramine is what's causing the pH swings. Not sure, but we both have chloramine and we both had that problem.

My most successful hydro plants last year were growing in water from my aquarium. The tomatoes growing on that system tasted about the same as fresh garden tomatoes. The ones on my chemical hydro system tasted watered down and generally awful. Granted, I was horribly neglectful of my garden last year because of rl stuff.

Regardless, I think I let the aquarium water tomatoes go 3 months without a water change or even a top off and they were still good. Not so with the chem hydro stuff.

I've been journaling my experiments on my youtube channel found here
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgb...R_BCY-w/videos

This year's main experiments are with aeroponics. I've always been afraid to try it because there are so many things that can go catastrophically wrong. I decided to bite the bullet and go for it. I'm expecting everything to die but I should learn a lot when that happens.

I'm going to do an aeroponic barrel garden running on nothing but aquarium water. I'm going to be filtering the solids out of the water but I'm still expecting clogs to really screw me up. We'll see.

[Fiishergurl]

Just curious... I went to a hydroponics store yesterday and they had these tomatoes and eggplants that had the thickest stems. The tomato plant was still in a 1 inch rockwool cube and it was 8 to 10 inches tall with a stem larger than a number two pencil (probably twice as thick). I asked him why it was so thick and he said the Silica Si makes the stemwalls and cells thicker.

Do you use that? I was amazed at how good the plants looked.

Ginny

[Nematode]

Originally Posted by Fiishergurl

Just curious... I went to a hydroponics store yesterday and they had these tomatoes and eggplants that had the thickest stems. The tomato plant was still in a 1 inch rockwool cube and it was 8 to 10 inches tall with a stem larger than a number two pencil (probably twice as thick). I asked him why it was so thick and he said the Silica Si makes the stemwalls and cells thicker.

Do you use that? I was amazed at how good the plants looked.

Ginny

I was going to start this year, I haven't yet. My cucumbers produce moderately but look sickly, I suspect it is lack of silicates, but that is only conjecture.
There are problems with silicates and dripper emitters they clog at high levels.
I was going to introduce silicates at a lower level and see if the plants liked it. My methods are not always controlled experiments. 20ppm SiO2 seems like a good seat of the pants place to start.
Also silicates really move the ph up, so I would have to use acid for ph down which is something I haven't yet had to do.
Thanks for the info It will encourage me to get started!

Nematode

[Nematode]

Running on automatic now, The timer is set to water them several times a day with a couple ounces, no more hand watering.
Saturday afternoon mixed up a 55 gal barrel of nutrient solution
197g yara calcinit
197g Jacks 5-12-26
66g potassium sulfate

element ppm
N 185
NH4 10
P 50
K 347
Mg 60
Ca 180
S 66

Ph 5 without adjustment ok for me

Started the automatic system and ran it for 8 minutes (8 oz per plant) to get things going
went shopping
Came back near dark and the leaves were closed up like venus flytraps!
Checked and double checked formula and it seemed ok......
Next morning all was ok.
I think the roots don't like the cold water in large doses.
Plants look good today, its been warmer.
Bloody Butcher is first to blossom, good timing the temps should be ok for fruit set. Should go get a vibrating toothbrush.......not so many bees around yet.

For some reason had a lot of Sun Gold runts, you can see a couple to the left of the eggplant, going to see if they can catch up or if they are duds, they need to speed up quick or cucumbers are going in that bucket.

Still learning.

Nematode

[Nematode]

Tired of garden looking sickly.
Beans pale and crinkly
Tomato pale tops
Melons pale and stunted

See a theme?
Pale tomato tops a giveaway of iron deficiency, in the past I have added FeDTPA which has a broader ph availability than the EDTA in the pre-mix, but this time checked ph with ph dropper test kit.

Nutrient tank ph 6. Hmm ok maybe at the high end of ok
Checked some of the drain solution, ph 7+. ok that would lock out all the iron and explain the deficiency.

Adjusted nutrient tank down to ph 5 with (100 drops/25gal) muriatic acid.
Lets see what happens over the next couple days.

Things can go bad fast in hydro, but theoretically you can fix them fast too.
if you know what you are doing.... which I dont

Added Zn because the Jack's has about half the zinc recommended for tomato.(per cornell)

Current nutrient per 55gal
*=new

198g calcinit
198g jacks 5-12-26
66g potassium sulfate
*66g sea90 yup i did it added salt 150ppm chloride
*0.5g ZN dissolvine
*HCl adjust for ph 5 approx 200 drops/55gal

[Nematode]

sungold is happy