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Organic yields
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CrushnYuba
Well-known member
The plants only take up what they are going to take up no matter what direction it's coming from. Giving a plant more water won't force it to drink it. Giving a plant more water then It needs just makes the medium soggy.
I don't like to over saturate my plants and let them dry out like hand watering. I like to water every day. Only as much as they will use. I choose how wet the medium is. Not the capillary action on a medium that breaks down and changes over time. You can run a drip system like you would hand watering and you will get the same results as hand watering. You can dial it in and run it how it should be and it will out perform everything else.
It isn't hard at all to dial in drip. Yes you have choices. You can water your plants inefficiently. I feel like sip is apple, drip is android. But it really doesn't take a rocket scientist to stickyour finger in the dirt and see if it is getting wetter or dryer every day. Or staying the same
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Cool story bro... got any photographic evidence of your superior techniques?
Those are some awesome plants Thailer posted
CrushnYuba
Well-known member
Cool story bro? Man that's a little hostile. I don't have any superior technique. I basically irrigate my plants the way old ladies water their bushes around here on drip. I'm not trying to put anyone down or say the way someone grows is inferior.
He said "can say for sure that everyone who switched over has had nothing but positive things to say about it even if some things aren't equal. i think it would be rare to meet someone who didn't think it was a good choice to make".
Im just saying i experimented with it and i didn't get it.
This is another experiment i did recently. 2lb ish plants in only 20gal of soil. Soil was probably about 3 years old. Sprayed from the top 2 times a day. I don't usually grow like this. Just another experiment. Doesn't really prove anything is better. It's a light dep run so completely different.
He said "can say for sure that everyone who switched over has had nothing but positive things to say about it even if some things aren't equal. i think it would be rare to meet someone who didn't think it was a good choice to make".
Im just saying i experimented with it and i didn't get it.
This is another experiment i did recently. 2lb ish plants in only 20gal of soil. Soil was probably about 3 years old. Sprayed from the top 2 times a day. I don't usually grow like this. Just another experiment. Doesn't really prove anything is better. It's a light dep run so completely different.
Replies in red.
thailer
Well-known member
i think my original point was that it's more about skill level. example: keeping the soil at optimal moisture levels, which is why i compared my hand watered fabric bags that were 20 gallons of soil to a similar sized container that is on an irrigation system called a SIP to explain what i was trying to say. yield is dependant on a lot of factors which are common for both salt and organic growers like pruning and such but the main difference i've noticed from previous salt growers was watering habits. I really can say tho that almost everyone is really happy with the change and rarely people regret it; except for CrushinYuba who prefers salts or hates SIPs. i hope that is better stated.
here's my original post and what i said so we are clear.
here's my original post and what i said so we are clear.
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So very true. I got some of my best info on improving plant health (And thus yield. It goes hand in hand with quality imho), from the thread Coco's trees by DJM.
The discussion about environment, humidity, temp, VPD etc. helped me a lot and it is a thread about growing in coco with salt based nutes.
thailer
Well-known member
i really haven't read much about growing in coco but i've noticed yield is great and they have a lot of discussion about dry downs, dry backs and how that influences growth as well as using that to manipulate plants. so for them i don't think that keeping moisture consistently the same throughout the grow works to their advantage like it does for organic soil growers.
roots uptake water because of osmotic pressure which is influenced by how much water is held in the medium and the amount of salts gets higher the dryer the medium gets. this video explains everything and really ties it all back to plants in the end of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-osEc07vMs
so after i learned about that, i became curious if that is why the hand watered design seems to work better over the auto top off where the water level is always the same. at first, my hypothesis was it had something to do with the water table below creating some sort of pressure or force which pushes water inside the plant which is sorta true and called root pressure but this pressure can only drive water upwards a few feet, so it is not the main way water enters plants which is called water tension cohesion theory. most of the plants grow great in the irrigated design and it is soooo helpful when you have a stuffed room full of SIPs to be able to add water to all of them outside the room via the reservoir. i can also just add so many gallons to the reservoir and then each sip will get an equal part of the water, so i can still control the moisture if i wanted but still have the option to fill up the reservoir to go on vacation. its really just this fussy mac1 plant that grows ok in the irrigated SIP but when she is in the handwatered design, she prays more. it is also cold here 9 months of the year and with the water table below, inside the pots, it can be more difficult in winter than warmer seasons to get plants to pray and such. the other plants don't seem to care but i really like this plant so that is why i started redesigning the SIP system recently. i think i can do things to the design which will influence how high the water will travel up in the soil so there will be more air in the root zone. it will be a while before i can test my theory with the rotation of the plants right now.
roots uptake water because of osmotic pressure which is influenced by how much water is held in the medium and the amount of salts gets higher the dryer the medium gets. this video explains everything and really ties it all back to plants in the end of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-osEc07vMs
so after i learned about that, i became curious if that is why the hand watered design seems to work better over the auto top off where the water level is always the same. at first, my hypothesis was it had something to do with the water table below creating some sort of pressure or force which pushes water inside the plant which is sorta true and called root pressure but this pressure can only drive water upwards a few feet, so it is not the main way water enters plants which is called water tension cohesion theory. most of the plants grow great in the irrigated design and it is soooo helpful when you have a stuffed room full of SIPs to be able to add water to all of them outside the room via the reservoir. i can also just add so many gallons to the reservoir and then each sip will get an equal part of the water, so i can still control the moisture if i wanted but still have the option to fill up the reservoir to go on vacation. its really just this fussy mac1 plant that grows ok in the irrigated SIP but when she is in the handwatered design, she prays more. it is also cold here 9 months of the year and with the water table below, inside the pots, it can be more difficult in winter than warmer seasons to get plants to pray and such. the other plants don't seem to care but i really like this plant so that is why i started redesigning the SIP system recently. i think i can do things to the design which will influence how high the water will travel up in the soil so there will be more air in the root zone. it will be a while before i can test my theory with the rotation of the plants right now.
I'm happy with my organic beds.
yields enough that I don't smoke roach joints anymore...
yields enough that I don't smoke roach joints anymore...
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/b2...8.1964858673.1603088281-1262609389.1603088281
Evaluating the Efficiency of Wicking Bed IrrigationSystems for Small-Scale Urban Agriculture
Evaluating the Efficiency of Wicking Bed IrrigationSystems for Small-Scale Urban Agriculture
stealthnstoned
Member
I have gotten pretty good yields with organics.
this is my 3rd run since starting to grow again after a 10 year break or so.
These are all living soil beds. Custom soil mix i made up myself and nothing but water start to finish. Ammendments i add are just the worms at the start adn then feed them their own leaves and stems 90% of my leaves go back into the beds. Ive gotten 3 runs out of my oldest bed and havent had to reammend yet. theres a solid worm population and always have cover crops dieing/ coming up with tons of leaves and stems decomposing for a mulch. I plant back into the beds the same day i chop
5x5 tent
i also set up a new tent thats currently on day 56.. half of it is SIPS half of it is beds. This is a picture of my beds.. the SIPS are hidden in the back corner.
this is my 3rd run since starting to grow again after a 10 year break or so.
These are all living soil beds. Custom soil mix i made up myself and nothing but water start to finish. Ammendments i add are just the worms at the start adn then feed them their own leaves and stems 90% of my leaves go back into the beds. Ive gotten 3 runs out of my oldest bed and havent had to reammend yet. theres a solid worm population and always have cover crops dieing/ coming up with tons of leaves and stems decomposing for a mulch. I plant back into the beds the same day i chop
5x5 tent
i also set up a new tent thats currently on day 56.. half of it is SIPS half of it is beds. This is a picture of my beds.. the SIPS are hidden in the back corner.
B.T. Herb
Member
may be an OT but sounds really interesting...
my personal experience about has show that i can't really afford to begin a new grow using the same method for different crops.
even if the main the hybrid i' ve grown -not so much, at least-seems to tollerate or even getting advantage, some others don't.
Specifically, i' v noticed that some sativas or sativas's gene-leading like G13haze i've grown so many times recently, really suffer a dry pot,revealing some deficiency not due to a unbalanced diet or to the density of roots inside the pot itself.
the rising of salt concentration that then occours, it's something i get used to manage since could happend that i reduce the total amount of feeding during some phase of the plant's life for different reasons.
i mean, after all, i believe this could be understood like a phenotypical trait. at least
thailer
Well-known member
i never considered that there would be studies on these simple little totes!! just looking through it shortly, i noticed that the more water was consumed, the higher the yield and it also says that the shallow depth containers performed better than deep containers which i am a little surprised but SUPER interested in learning more about. thanks for such a great share!
thailer
Well-known member
i started looking into them because i had this plant GMO that would suck water up all day long and if she went a little too dry she would herm viable pollen all over. when i switched over, i saw how much water they are drinking up daily and was shocked because i was not giving my fabric pots even half of the amount. i asked others if they felt that the amount was the correct amount to be watering and everyone said my watering was fine but i don't think it was. i thought i had some mystery issues and my soil recipe wasn't enough. maybe i needed more calcium or something because the plants sometimes would have deficiencies.
short of dumping water on the fabric bags till my grow room looks like a swamp, i think they let the peat moss get too dry and it is near impossible to resaturate the middle of the peat moss, so water when given soaks into the topsoil but once it hits the hydrophobic middle, it dribbles out the side of the fabric bag about halfway down? the plant looks watered but if you take a hacksaw to the root ball and cut it in half, i found a dry middle inside the ball.
i have switched over to plastic pots which hold humidity better and it seems like the peat can hydrate easier with plastic than a fabric bag.
They are using a bed 50% the thickness of the soil, and crushed rock for the medium.
<Different pots were built to compare the WUE of standard surface irrigation, conventional wicking beds, and wicking beds with a soil column, each with two soil bed heights (300, 600 mm) and two
WB reservoir depths (150, 300 mm). A coarse-grained material (quartzite gravel) was used to fill the reservoir.>
I did some experimenting with a tote and dry perlite last night. The PU truck headlights provided light, and the first thing I noticed when I opened the bag, was the dust that wafts out. Dry perlite needs a N95 mask when working with it, IMO. Once it is wet, the stuff isn't so bad.
Another observation is their soil wick is similar to the Earthbox.
Wicking systems are far older than the modern cannabis movement. IIRC Jute was used to this purpose in older cultures.
I was surprised no one understood this thus the reason I searched up the study.
I was surprised no one understood this thus the reason I searched up the study.
i never considered that there would be studies on these simple little totes!! just looking through it shortly, i noticed that the more water was consumed, the higher the yield and it also says that the shallow depth containers performed better than deep containers which i am a little surprised but SUPER interested in learning more about. thanks for such a great share!
thailer
Well-known member
i poke some small holes in the bottom of the perlite bags and then fill it up with water and let it drain out before working with it. the dust settles on the bottom but i don't think its a big deal; just aesthetically not appealing. the dust is definitely not good to inhale.
whenever i see a bunch of numbers on a study all in one spot, i go cross eyed. lol i'm gonna have to wait till i am not so stoned to go over it.
whenever i see a bunch of numbers on a study all in one spot, i go cross eyed. lol i'm gonna have to wait till i am not so stoned to go over it.
Contextually to the concept of optimal biomass + secondary metabolite output within a given time frame. When people argue various methodology they are not arguing apples to apples. It happens in academic cannabis agriculture. Seems the greatest challenge of all is still cognitive bias.
