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

3 weeks from bagseed,
1" rockwool cubes (pH buffered) and hydroton,
8" net pots in five gallon buckets with bottoms cut out.
Flood & Drain / Ebb & Flow,
40 gallon reservoir. (res temp 71 F)
RH = 40%
Growroom temp = 75-78 F
250watt HPS light, with two 48" Floro tubes as side lighting, and a CFL for good measure.


for the first 2 weeks, no nutes, plain RO water with a base ppm of 25
then last week changed reservoir to 100 ppm.
maintaining 5.5-5.8 pH

Showed signs of yellowing on the cotyledons today, bumped ppm up to 175.
Extremely slow growth... using GH microgrow with liquid karma, hydroguard, calmag, and superthrive, all in miniscule amounts as my ppm is only 175 currently from a base of 25.



The plant that is drooping's rockwool cube was farther down on the flood line, which is why I believe that it was overwatered. (the cube was very moist on the top when I checked). None of the other plants show signs of under/over watering

So I raised the rockwool cube on the droopy plant so it was higher up, so only the roots below the rockwool cube will flood, not the rockwool cube at all.

It has been about 3 days, and has not improved. Can it still be in the position of OVERwatering, but actually be underwatered now since the rockwool isnt getting remoistened?

Why are they growing so slow.. I know it's not just in my head
Only one of the plant's has roots below the net pot, which is amazing because these net pots are SO deep, and the plant is SO small.
I was not expecting to see roots at all.

advice please !! i would be greatful

Here are pictures of the drooping plant, which shall now be known as Mr. Droopy

the last picture is trying to show how far the HPS light is away, about 16" or so.

The only thing I can guess....if your ph NEVER strays....you need more nutes. Those things look about 3 days old vs 3 weeks.....I think you are low on ppms

i'd stop everything you are doing and do this.....RO water.....Cal Mag 200ppm and Grow nutes 200 ppm....ph 5.6-6.2. You've got everything but the kitchen sink in there.

Mr Droopy looks like he is circling the drain there so maybe you shouldn't have named him.

Water him with new mixture as well. I think you dried him up....hopefully not too much.

Good luck.

hah. Naming it was probably a horrible idea. I will be devistated if it doesn't make it.

Ill concentrate on having Mr droopy's cube nice and MOIST, not wet, by hand watering, even though it looks over watered.

What's in my reservoir is mostly cal mag, and grow nutes- besides the 1 drop per gallon of superthrive and WAY miniscule amounts of liquid karma/hydroguard

So basically i shoudl just add 100 more ppm of calmag, and 100 more ppm of grow nutes to take your advice


I think I can smell a burn coming along....

Well let me put it this way.....you've had three weeks with almost no nutes and where are you?

The problem is either nutes or ph. As far as I'm concerned.....you don't have enough of ANY of them to help a plant at all

I start my seedlings at one drop superthrive per gallon....for one week. Second week....100 CalMag and 100 Pro Grow....after that the numbers will starting hitting 500 and 600 very quickly once I starting using LK and Sweet (usually around the third week)

They are your plants.....you are free to treat them any way you wish. You asked...thats the only reason I said anything. Its alot harder to troubleshoot a problem when you have 16 factors involved rather than 2 or 3.

Good luck.

How many tiimes a day are you watering them? Is the RW mostly drying out between waterings? That's the ONLY other thing I can think of besides nutes or ph.....soggy roots not getting enough oxygen.

Hope you figure it out.

Good luck.

you don't have any idea how much i appreciate your help! I would be going crazy... (okay i still am)

I water them 3 times a day. The pump runs for 8 minutes. it reaches the top of the flood line at about 6 to 7 minutes. Its a friggin HUGE flood tray, fitting five gallon buckets completely, and takes about 20-30 gallons to fill the entire tray.

lights come on at 8AM, turn off at 2AM

1st Flood: 8:30AM
2nd Flood: 5:30PM
3rd Flood: 12:30AM

Only the very bottoms of the rockwool is touching the flood line (if at all?) the tops of the rockwool cubes are compeltely dry. The reason why i moved Mr Droopy, was because the top of the cube wasn't dry in addition to the overwatered symptoms.


Im using the General hydroponic PH test, where you drop 3 drops of liquid into a vial, and compare to the color chart. the PH will raise from 5.5 to about 6.0 in a couple days, and then i reset it back to around 5.5


Also, When i have been checking the ppm of the reservoir, when i had it set at 100pm, the next day I would check on it and it would be like 115, then the next day, 130 ppm.

This would make me think that the plants were using more water than nutrients, and so I wouldn't have to bump up the ppm anymore... very confusing stuff.


sorry if i'm bringing too many variables into the equation. Just very confused. I gotta be patient...

Ok....sorry and I'll put my fur back down too. :)

It HAS to be one of those three things. Your light is good from your photo and your room temps are good as well. You're doing everything right from what I can see except for your low ppms.....and the rockwool. I've heard of issues with it regarding both holding too much water (overwatering) and having a low ph but don't use it myself so have no real personal experience with it.

Your ppms may be rising but not necessarily for the reason you mentioned. When was the last time you changed the rez completely? I would make that a weekly thing if you can....complete res change.

When the plants eat they pick and choose what they want from the nutes available. They may snarf up TONS of nitrogen and leave the potassium behind....but it won't show in your numbers which simply reflect the TOTAL of ppms in your water....not the ratios of each nute. Do you see what I mean? Thats one of the reasons a res change is so helpful.....to restore the correct balance of nutes.

Checking ph with a liquid test is fine....but DONT use any ph adjusters for aquariums...they are way too high in salts for your plants. (just fyi)

its been about 2 weeks since the reservoir was changed. I'll start filling up RO water tomorrow. It's going to take a really long time to get 40 gallons, the tank fills around a gallon an hour.

i didnt think about the nutrient uptake before, that makes perfect sense. so the more reservoir changes, the better. '

When i top off, in addition to the grow nutesshould I use the liquid karma and superthrive? Or just have those in the beginning when i fill the res?

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.

now all besides mr droopy have roots, and the one that had the root yesterday now has like 20 little tiny ones poking out :0

ooo that sounds good.....now go get a claw hammer for mr droopy....:D...j/k

Any news?