Can't figure out what's wrong...

I personally would drop the superthrive....you have grow nutes and I think that should be enough along with your CalMAg. LK is good stuff....I myself would like it out of the picture until the problem is pinpointed but its up to you. I like to start with very simple and work up.

40 gallons of water is alot....hope its next to something easy to empty and fill it from.
I actually had a 25 gallon res for my 8 plants and even that got to be too much hassle with the water so I moved down to about 1/2 size growing area because of it.

Buy yourself a nice LARGE plastic trash can and lid and you can store your RO water in there. We keep our huge barrel of RO water outside with an aquarium heater and that works great for us. At some point if your hydro systems leaks or becomes contaminated or something (god forbid) you may need to have 40 gals of good water ready in a hurry. This will probably help if you have a place to put it and keep it ready.

I was cruising around trying to find more info on rockwool and came up with this link.
Might be worth a look through in regards to watering times, ph etc....

Hydroponics - Rockwool as growing substrate

I hope you don't think that I'm trying to be negative, but also consider that you stressed your plants from the very beginning. (Not sure if Weedhound knows the history.) Often when plants get stressed they slow down or even appear to come to a stop for a few days. Another thing to consider is that this sometimes happens with seeds. I wouldn't expect such a high percentage to be slow growing, but it is possible with seeds. If those were from scarified clones, they would be a foot tall and a foot wide or more by now. Notice how in one of your photos you see only one root? Perhaps being stressed during initial root production hindered the ability to make a huge healthy root mass, and the plant could only concentrate on the important tap root. If you scarify a clone you get dozens of roots instead of one. And to make matters worse, once a plant starts growing with poor root structure it will never have a chance to come close to growing properly.

The good news is that they are still alive and kicken. Just try to do everything correctly from now on and they will probably start taking off (perhaps slowly) sometime soon. I believe that a bunch of the problem was from the RW being too wet in the beginning, but now you know not to do that. And whatever changes yo make at this point, try to do it gradually or in stages. By all means see if you can get a mother or two going, so you don't have to go through this again. And listen to Weedhound, except for her biased views on SuperThrive due to a bad experience, she knows her shit. Good luck.

OK, maybe not quite dozens.

Thanks Opie...i needed a positive e-hug right now so thank you. :)

Having said I know things I almost hate to ask this but I'll hide behind the know-nothing-about-clones defense and bite the bullet.

What does scarified clones mean?

And ps....it wasn't the superthrives fault....:D muahahahaha :wtf:

weedhound: very comprehensive link on the rockwool, thank you ;]
The next reservoir change (basically once I can collect my 40 gallons), Ill stick to just the grow nutes, and calmag (and probably 15 drops of superthrive heheh)

40 gallons seems ridiculous for 4 plants.. Too late now however but next grow I think I'll be sticking to 5" net pots, just a little bit over the tray so that will only use about 20 gallons or so.

Great idea on the trash can for water storage, I was thinking of saving each milk jug I had but that would take way too long to save 40 milk jugs.

Opie: I'll consider anything that could be concieved as negative well deserved. I made a lot of mistakes early on due to mostly impatience. I'll just try to do things correctly from here on out. Good news is, the one thats showing a root has maybe 3 or 4 tiny ones still in the netpot that are about to pop out. I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that they will explode pretty soon.


Oh yeah, the 250w HPS light is about 16" away, I'm thinking I could bring it down to maybe 12"-14", thinking some of the slow growth is not only contributed to my mistakes early on, but also possibly not ideal light strength.

Illusion:
That's good to hear about the other roots on the way. And yes, it might be a good idea at this stage in the game to start slowly bringing the light closer in stages. Watch closely for any signs of heat stress while doing so.

Weedhound (and others):
To scarify, take a clone and an exacto knife, or something really sharp, and scrape off the outer membrane of the bottom 1.25" (roughly) of the stem. Then re-cut the bottom 0.25" off of the clone at 45 degrees. If the cutting was taken from a proper place on the mother, you will see a white bark-like material when you have scraped deep enough. You just go slightly deep, enough to scrape off the outer green membrane. If the cutting is from a real new shoot, there will be no white bark-like material to see, and it's easy to go too deep. It will just sort of turn into mush as you start going to deep, but these usually still hatch roots. Both of these kinds of cuttings will root, but the cuttings from brand new shoots, unless from the main stem, will take up to 2 weeks longer to root, and sometimes have less than optimal scarification results.

Without scarification or 45 degree cut: 2-5 roots
Without scarification but with 45 degree cut: 3-7 roots
With scarification and 45 degree cut: 5-10 roots

I'm just guessing based on experience, but that seems about right.

I highly recommend scarification for your clones. Some people even scarify two sides of the stem, but I have not tried it. Before scarification was popular, some people swore they got more roots by smashing the end of the stem with a hammer. Similar concept I guess. There is a scientific explanation, but if you are interested further there are a couple threads on this forum that go into a little more detail.

Hey Weedhound, it just dawned on me. Where did your little dog go, and what kind was it?

She was on vacation...lol......I was thinking of another pic but it just didn't have the right avatar look....then forgot all about it and never put the original back.

That was actually a brussels griffon puppy (about 10 weeks if I remember) and quite the sweetie so we had to snap a photo.

You know I was at my hydro store today and saw some SCALPELS for sale there....couldn't figure out why he would have scalpels in his store.....but I believe you just explained it. ;)

Illusion: an impatient stoner? Say not so. :D I'm obviously missing parts of the story here but no worries since Opie is following up. :thumbsup:

Man I need to get enough money to get a little dog like that. I've got a black lab and a Chesapeake bay retriever outside, but I want a little lap dog for inside. Potty trained.

The cat's not going to like this.