My OBBT Bucket Build

[h.h.]

This seems to be exactly the problem I keep getting. Clogging of the airstones, and flexible airwands also. When I try to blow out with compressor I end up blowing the airstone off the end of the line. I am still running them that way since I cannot access them on the bottom of the bucket. They have turned into a kind of hempy bucket. Yield does not come close to my soil plants, and every one of them got hermies.

I did more of a 2 part bubble bucket that I can take apart. I ran my air hoses into a small tupperware container full of small holes at the bottom of the reservoir. The bottom of the top pot is cut out with fiberglass cloth inserted to keep the fines from dropping down.
The smell comes from using alfalfa in the reservoir and a less than perfect seal.

 

[rrog]

Per MrFista's comment, you're right. You have to percolate the raw soil mix in the OBBT for a couple weeks. I did 3 weeks

 

[RipVanWeed]

Hey RRog, glad to see activity here.

I've been plugging away here, I'm gonna upload some pics from yesterday. Be right back



Rip

 

[rrog]

RVW! How's our man?

 

[RipVanWeed]

Hey Rrog,

Sorry for the delay, had troubles uploading ther latest pics.

To catch you up a little bit, the current line up is quite varied.

As you can see, I made a set of small OBBT's to wedge inbetween the biggies. I'm lollipopping the smalls, flowered them straight from clones.

Super Silver Haze



Master Bubba Kush



Jack Herer



3 of the smalls are Purple Kushes, 2 are OG, a White Russian, a SSH, and a MBK.

Trying out the Kush's on the request of my patients, Master Bubba is awesome....Purple K doesn't grow or stretch!

These pictures are at 33 days of 12/12.

I've been busy increasing the size of my operation, building a room around the crate I've been rockin'.

I'm gonna upload some pics of the project, I'll be starting a thread for a growlog...I'll contact you when I do.

Much Respect

Peace out,

 

[Strains]

Plz post it here, i wanna see to

 

[rrog]

I'll be getting pics later today. In the meantime, I have an issue with very new leaves being quite light green. Veining. Like this:

That's not my plant but they look like this. Added a bit of epsom salts. Did a flower foliar with fish and seaweed. Also a tea of fish, seaweed and lacto.

This happened a couple weeks ago and seemed to clear up. But not sure of the exact element that's missing.

The environment is very stable. No temp swings other than normal when lights are off.

 

[RipVanWeed]

Hey Rrog,

I've seen some of that yellowing before. I think it"s a Cal/Mag def. Could be caused by a lack of, or Ph locking out uptake.

My current buckets are on their 2nd crop. I gathered the materials and fabbed up another set of buckets, but became to impatient to wait for the innoculation period bad move. Things did not run effortlessly like the 1st go. I'll finish these plants up OK, but I won't try that again.

I've begun reading the Ph of the Water/Nutes I add, as well as the runoff. Then I adjust things a little...usually lowering the Ph a skoosh. My Tea's tend to run a little to high in Ph for my taste, so I add a little Earth Juice Bloom. My little square OBBT's were started up correctly and have performed without a hitch.

The set of buckets I was too antsy to wait for were emptied, Hydroton washed, and soil stored till about 4 days ago. There's a set of 8 percolating right now!

I moved the Harem into their new digs this morning at Lights On.



In the next coupla days the old flower crate will be the new veg cab with a 400mh. Then, if all goes as planned, another 1k will fire up next to the current circle. I'm looking forward to growing a couple of 2 sided plants! Long term shootin' for 6k flower, and 2 400w mh for veg....we'll see how things go.

Much Respect,

 

[rrog]

I've thought about the pH, but also remembered DrunkenM's many posts about the stability of the pH. "Can't change the pH if you wanted to..." sort of thing.

Plus my beautiful pH test equipment needs a new probe, since I haven't used for a year now.

I've added in a bit of Epsom Salt to correct a possible Cal-Mag issue. I also use 1/2 well water 1/2 RO water, since I have very hard well water.

So not thinking I have a deficiency, and also not suspecting too high Ca+, which I understand can lock out nutes.

It looks like a Zinc deficiency, which can also be locked out. I bought some vegetarian Zinc supplement which I previously ground up and delivered. Not sure that it's bio-available to the plant in that form, though. I'm also not sure of a good organic bio-available Zinc source.

Zinc is toxic in too high levels, so I've been leery of adding too much.

Just the newest leaves are affected.

Rip, I love the grow pics. My grow has been pretty effortless so far also. Plants are going through almost 1/2 gallon of water each a day...

 

[h.h.]

Epsom salts will probably do the trick. I've noticed the water ph in my buckets climbed through the roof as well. I've seen it caused by a leaky hose bib (well water) constantly adding salts. Though organic, it was a ph problem.

 

[rrog]

Two Weeks into Flower:

This is a 600W HPS Blue Hortilux bulb. The big dome in the front is a UV-B bulb.

Shot with lights still on:

Lights off and incandescent bulb for the pic.

Close up of the yellowing. These are not brown at all, in reality. Only the really tall ones are affected. I wondered if it was the HPS. This was happening before UV bulb.

If it was a nutrient, I would expect to see the issue with all of the new growth. But I just noticed it's only the tallest new growth. Might just be the HPS.

The HPS is in a sealed hood with a blower fan pulling air through. Temps don't get above 84 at the tops of flowers. So maybe a "light" burn, rather than "heat" burn? After taking the pictures, I moved the lights up to maybe 20" above the top leaves.

I have to say, other than these yellow-ish leaves, every leaf if deep green and perfect. No brown tips or wilting of anything. I'm pleased with it so far.

 

[ColoMediCann]

It looks like a Zinc deficiency, which can also be locked out. I bought some vegetarian Zinc supplement which I previously ground up and delivered.

If you have a lockout problem the solution is not to add more of the locked out nutrient, but rather solve the problem causing the lockout.

Since organics is all about having the microherd break down soil amendments to make nutrients available to the plant I think your problem might be in this area. Didn´t you have problems at the start with dry soil and not having the microherd properly established?

I´m really interested in your grow and I can´t wait to see you pumping out the kind in hydro organic. Good luck

 

[rrog]

ColoMed, thanks much for the post!

1- I was thinking it was a deficiency, not lockout at first. The system is quite stable based on other's comments.

2- The dryness was the top 1" or so and was only an issue for 3 day old seedlings. Solved with a little organic starter pellet. I had huge micro-growth established early on, and I still deliver LactoB in with the Teas. So not thinking there's any shortage of micro herding.

I'm thinking this was a slight light burning. Since only the top-most leaves are affected (the lower new growth is fine) I'm suspecting the 600W HPS was too close. So I've moved it and will check on them later today.

BTW, there are three buckets but the left hand bucket had a male. The two remaining buckets each have 1 plant. They were scrogged. I love looking at all those little buds coming up all furry.

 

[RipVanWeed]

Yo Rrog,

I've read before that the combination of the high demands of the plant for Cal/Mag in weeks 3-5 of flower, and the stress of close lights result in the yellowing like you've got. I've struggled with this situation before, and my plants show it now.

I will try to proactively prevent this during the next grow.

I think the Microherd in some of my current buckets was compromised by reusing the buckets without recharging the medium.

I've done some flushing/exchanging of the reservoirs this time, and some of the waste smelled bad. I'm thinking the ratio of fungi/beneficial microbes is out of whack.

41 days into flowering so I don't have much chance to do more adjusting this time.

Much Respect,

 

[ColoMediCann]

Hey rrog,

The reason I picked up what you said about a lockout was I have been reading about deficiencies and lockouts in coco. Since you have all of the bases covered as far as nutrients I think it might be ph or water or maybe the coco itself.

The problems with coco and calcium/magnesium have something to do with the cation exchange capacity of coir causing available nutrients to be locked up, and I seem to recall it involving excess potassium in the coco, too.

I have copied and saved the info somewhere so when I find it I´ll post here.

 

[ColoMediCann]

Here is some of the info I have regarding nutrient problems with coco, followed by quotes from various posts I saw in the coco forum. Maybe this can be useful for sorting out OBBTs with coco.


Analysis of Coco Coir Sample
All figures refer to parts per million (ppm).

S 1978
P 126
K (Potassium) 3700*
Na (Sodium) 2022 *
Ca 119
Mg 104
Cu
Zn 3.2
Mn 3.8
Fe 12.2
B 7
Cl (Chloride) 3498*

Above, is an analysis of one batch of hydrated coco coir. It is easy to see that coco coir contains varying levels of micro and macro elements.

The most significant elements in the analysis are the high potassium levels and the extremely high sodium and chloride levels (sodium chloride = salt).

Potassium competes with magnesium and calcium while sodium competes with potassium for uptake. Furthermore, sodium chloride can be highly toxic to certain species of plants; even in relatively low levels, sodium chloride can have devastating effects on root health and development. For instance, this batch of coco coir caused phytotoxicity (yellowing of leaves, rusting/burning, sick plants etc) when trialled under controlled conditions next to another product that performed well.

Flushing and Buffering

In order to prepare the raw coir product for use it is necessary to flush plentiful amounts of water through the product to wash out impurities (including sodium chloride).

Premium grade coir is then buffered with various elements to prepare the coir for use. This requires flushing the coir with mineral elements in order to compensate for potentially problematic levels of sodium chloride and potassium (and other elements where required).

For instance, Iron is sometimes used to offset sodium chloride while magnesium and calcium is used to compensate for the naturally present, often high levels of potassium and phosphorous (While potassium and phosphorous are naturally used by plants and are beneficial elements, extreme levels of these elements can result in imbalanced nutrition and mineral element lockout).

Typically, most suppliers of hydrated coir only flush the media and do not buffer it. This can prove detrimental to plant vigor and health, particularly in early growth.

Symptoms of toxicity include:

Rusting (particularly on leaf edges)
Yellowing
Slow stunted growth
Mineral deficiencies (due to uptake problems)
Purpling of stem


And some quotes by ICMag posters:

"I would stay away from Sunleaves coco products, I have done a lot of trial and error and side by side test and the Sunleaves is consistantly painfull to work with. A lot of salt in there that is hard to rinse out."

"It's the salts stored In the cellulose fibers that get in the way (Coconut palms exist how and where they do because they can store salts between cell walls and K is a mineral salt). It starts off slow but progresses exponentially ... Then the Mg (which is necessary to uptake and use nutrients) gets out of whack and the Calcium (the fulcrum in the Balance) becomes non effective. Tossing in CalMag doesn't help? They're present but rendered unusable."

"Coco's main characteristic which does it different from most other hydro mediums is its very high CEC (Cation Exchange Capacity), from 7 to 20x higher than perlite, rockwool, hydroton, etc. This means coco may store very large amounts of nutrients that are uptaken as cations: micros, Ca, K, Mg.

Practical consequences of that are:

You need to keep cations balanced in the media. Its accomplished by knowing your nute profile and managing the pH according to it: ph below 5.8 achieves higher Ca uptake and lower Mg uptake, thus you reduce the Ca stored in the coco and increases Mg. By using ph over 5.8, you achieve the inverse. Keeping the amounts of Ca and Mg balanced in the coco is the key to heving the best yields and avoiding problems."

"From what I understand with the cation exchange process, as it relates to the coco... Mg and Ca cations exchange with K and Na cations in the coco, causing the deficiencies in Mg and Ca to show up... the mix I'm using adresses this by providing enough Mg and Ca to allow for some Exchange, while limiting the K in the mix... knowing it will be released in the exchange... And of course in a nutrient solution with higher K, when the cation exchange takes place lockouts occur..."

"The excess of K which comes from the Lucas+coco locks out some of the available nitrogen, as well as Mg and Ca... Lowering my concentration of Potassium made a visible improvement in the nitrogen defeciency I was seeing at first..."

 

[rrog]

Rip VW, great piece of info on the CalMag needs increasing.

ColoMC after reading through your excellent post, it seems that a CalMag solution is suggested also.

The premise is that Coco hokds Na and K like crazy. I boiled my big coco and let soak for hours. So much of the Na is gone, and I would expect much K as well. But maybe K holds on better, In any event it seems that high K locking out trace minerals like Zinc.

I've also been adding Corn Cob Ash and even a little Bloom Burst (tiny), both high in K, I believe. And I'm tempted to say these the leaf browning may have been made worse when I added the corn cob. So maybe tje theory is holding. I've essentially added hi K amendments to a potentially already high K medium.

It would seem that a flush with CalMag+ would be in order. My only confusion is that one quote you mentioned that adding CalMag doesn't help? Although that's exactly what they do to condition/buffer Coco.

This is all being discussed on a coco forum? We have one here? I've never wandered over there. I'll go now.

Thanks again ColoMC. That was very cool of you to post that summary.

 

[ColoMediCann]

It would seem that a flush with CalMag+ would be in order. My only confusion is that one quote you mentioned that adding CalMag doesn't help? Although that's exactly what they do to condition/buffer Coco.

I think what he was trying to say is that once you have a lockout problem you can´t solve it by adding higher levels of nutrients. You can correct that specific issue but this might lead to even more conflicts and pretty soon the whole situation gets out of hand completely.

For chem nutes in coco this could be sorted out pretty easily with flushing and Florakleen, but with organic it´s more complicated. You have to make sure all of your nutrients are balanced at the beginning and then maintain that balance until harvest. Coco throws some curves but if you know about them in advance it makes them easier to deal with.

If you have time check out some of the posts by Crazy Composer in the organic forums as he seems to have a solid grasp on organics used in a semi-hydro manner.

https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=152752

 

[rrog]

Thanks ColoMC. Much appreciated. You're very helpful. I'm wondering why we're all using Coco with such the pain in the ass factor, but I realize it's well suited to OBBT.

Crazy Composer has some great posts, just like you said. I'm reading...

The starting organic amendment ratios I believe were valid. I may not have flushed all of the Na and K out, and these things started after my first addition of K rich amendments after flowering started.

So my hope was to flush with Ca+ rich water (CalMag+) to reduce K amounts, then proceed with K sources carefully.

A flush seems relatively risk free. (?)

 

[ColoMediCann]

To be honest I´m just reading around and trying to learn about this myself. I haven´t done a coco grow before so I'm trying to know what to expect beforehand so when I do have one there won´t be any surprises.

I really like the idea of the OBBT because I enjoy the quality of organic but I also really like the yield of hydro. If we can have both that would be a dream come true.

I´m not an expert on nutrient problems (I´ve been lucky ) so I´ll spend some time looking around to see if there have been similar cases and see what the solution was.

P.S. Did you notice any result from the foliar feeding?