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i put my clones in a bubbler system and all looks really good with the plants. my only question so far is if it is normal to have the root have a kind of a brownish color to them. is this normal? is it also normal to have a bit of muck in the water from roots?
Some nutes will cause this, what color is your nute solution?
well, the base has a blue color to it until it fully disolves, and all the other nutes are white. i'm changing to liquid nutes from technaflora
the roots should always be WHITE... brown is bad... unless your nuts are a real strong brown-red and your ppm is 1500+ ..... like dog lover said, "some nuts cause this" but if your roots are brown and not strong.. rather mushy... you are in deep SHIT!!
add Hydrogen peroxide asap.... bring air stones in.. do whatever it takes.. change your water and flush your system...
Dead brown roots are a serious problem.... they (dead matter) severly depletes oxygen levels and make matters worse exponetially
good luck
You might end up with the problem I did. I don't have a RO filter nor do I have 200 bucks to invest in one. Feel the sides of the tub, if it's slimy then it's probably bacteria or that root rot pythium stuff. Bad stuff. They'll do okay for awhile then turn yellow and die, the roots will be coated pretty fast. I believe it's my water quality so I kinda gave up on dro. Maybe it's just in the air around where i live or whatever.
I could have changed out the nutes every single week but that's a lot of wasted nutrients and a lot of friggin work. Too much money would have been wasted on nutes so I gave up on it.
Dump it, wash it with a 10% bleach and rinse thoroughly (you'll need another container for the plant while doing this). Wash the roots with dilute hydrogen peroxide till clean, remove the dead roots or browned roots, rinse the netpots in the hydrogen peroxide, and clean the medium witht the same. Pythium is a bitch, it survives just about anything and most likely you'll have this recurring problem. Try to fix it but if it goes down hill again, you might want to consider a different system, or RO filter, or buy lots of gallons of clean water.
peace
goodluck
thanks for your replies.. it is hard to describe the brown color roots. so i found a thread with lordsoth666 and he has a picture of his roots. it is about the same color as you see in this picture.. except not as much roots at the moment. i have TWO bubble bars in a 3 gallon tub keep water temp at 72 and add peroxide every day. the walls are not slimy. so what do you think now? after reading the replies, i was not wanting to just toss this project away and start over. wasnm't convinced that this brown was bad. cause if this is not good, then lordsoth's bubbler is not good either and he/she i think in their thread have already harvested some.
as for having WHITE roots in a bubbler system... can that really happen? because the roots are submerged in the tub all the time with plenty of oxygen.
If they're getting stinky, definitely root rot.
But from your last post, sounds like you have the usual culprits at bay. In fact, you might be over doing the peroxide, which can damage the roots, although I don't know if it would brown them.
Nutrient burn can cause brown roots. If you've let the TDS get a little high at times, that could be how your roots got their tan.
Also, if it's root rot, the plants should start to show some problems on the top side as well.