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Does vinegar in coco = bugs?

S

Spanky

New member
My fist coco grow is going well. I water everyday and have to adjust my well water pH every time. As a result, I am going through a lot of PH Down. My last grow was in soil and I got gnats...lots of gnats. If I were to adjust the pH with apple cider vinegar, won't I attract bugs? People make gnat bait out of vinegar.

Have any of you coco growers used vinegar to adjust your pH? What have you experienced?

Thanks!
 
I ph down with vinegar in soil, and it has not caused a problem, but I get the surface good and dry in between, never grew in/ or tried it with coco though.
I think PH down is supposed to have some cal mag in it? So could affect that?
I have used Diatomacious earth, yellow sticky cards, and traps to get rid of gnats before. Drill holes in a plastic jug and put a mix of cheap apple flavored dish soap and water in the bottom, to make the traps. The apple is more attractive than vinegar to them.
The dry soil surface is the best deterant, but don't think you should do that with Coco?
 
So I assume that you are growing outdoors? If indoors, you just need better screening or whatever to keep gnats out in the first place.

If you are going through a lot of pH Down, you will go through a lot of vinegar too. I would think that plain old distilled white vinegar (which is petroleum based) would be cheaper than cider vinegar and that yes, not having the fruity component might help keep pests away. But I think gnats are just attracted to wet soil regardless. You can put a inch thick layer of perlite over the top of your coco to try to keep them away. I have sprayed Bayer Neem Oil on my coco outdoors to get rid of gnats, just FYI...

People do use vinegar successfully. I never have, but I have seen a lot of people on the forums who do.
Just a thought: if your water requires that much pH Down, maybe just switch to RO water? But then you might need to start adding cal/mag. It's always something... ;)

pH Down doesn't have calcium or magnesium, but it is a source of phosphorous. (The P in NPK.)
 
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No, I am indoors. Those pesky tiny critters get in any nook or cranny including vents in my house. I know you aren't commenting on my house keeping!

Yes, I expect I would use a bit of vinegar, but it is cheaper than Down. My coco is always wet and so far I haven't had a gnat problem. Maybe just lucky? You gave me the perlite cover suggestion when I was having trouble with my coco making wells in the surface and it has worked great. So thanks for that! I add Calmag anyway, but RO? Does one buy that? I wouldn't want to put in a whole system.
 
Well I would expect that you should be able to keep the evil little buggers out of your coco indoors with just screening or other isolation measures. One other thought: do you have house plants? They can be a reservoir of fungus gnats. Even a bag of soil stored outside can get infested and bring the problem indoors. And of course if you put your pot plants out in the sun you risk infection.

You can buy reverse osmosis water at the grocery store in jugs, or I see that a lot of people fill their own jugs from a machine at WalMart(?) Cheaper? You don't need to go to 100% RO but can mix it to get the PPM down where you want it. I'm curious how many PPM your well water is. But that's all academic since your water works well for you and you just need to reduce the pH...
 
All good thoughts. No house plants. My plants don't travel outside. I have to lug water from an outdoor faucet, in winter!, to my grow space. Indoor water has a softener system that is salt. My plants don't like that. Outside faucets were by passed. That's enough hauling for me. I could tell you ppm if I knew of what?
 
I use a fair amount of ph down in my well water. 2 tsp for 4 gallons of water for my “plain water days”. My first grow I used distilled water which I believe (and I could be wrong) is very similar to RO water. I ended up using tons of ph up for nute days because the nutes would send it down to the 4’s as there is no buffer in the water at near 0 PPMs. And you have to use a lot more ph up than ph down. It may be just added experience in growing but I feel like my plants are much healthier using my well water than when I used distilled. Just my experience.
 
Hi L. I have a full bottle of Up. Never needed it! Wanna trade!

There are so many interesting opinions about pH in coco. Some are adamant that pH in should be whatever is needed to get 6.0 in your run off. Others feel coco reverts to the pH it wants to be and they don't bother to test the run off. I have two plants right now. Through the whole grow, one needs 5 or so in and always comes out 6.5. The other must have 4 or so in to come out 6.5. If I vary the latter it always comes out 7 or more. I'm not necessarily trying for 6.5, they just come out that way unless I am way off on what goes in. So, I have given them what they seem to want and everyone has stayed green and healthy. These are from March 24. How do they look to you?!
 

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I don’t need it much now that I use my well water, and I only use down much on the plain water days. My nutes typically take me in range for soil anyways. They look good to me. I’m not a coco grower but was commenting on the RO water thing. With my experience using a similar type (distilled)
 
Apple cider vinegar will absolutely attract bugs, it’s commonly used for this. White vinegar is the opposite, you can use it to deter bugs. As far as using it to adjust PH I have no idea but if it works it would be a lot cheaper then down!
 
BlueBudz Hit the nail on the head. I don’t use coco I use organic no till garden soil NTG So pH is moot for me. What I do use is organic apple cider vinegar in a small jar right next to my plants under the light. It attracts the little fuckers and the stupid shits drown in it. Ha!
 
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> Indoor water has a softener system that is salt. My plants don't like that. Outside faucets were by passed. That's enough hauling for me. I could tell you ppm if I knew of what?

The fact that you have an NaCl ion-exchange water softener system pretty much answers the questions "How much?" and "Of what?" at least in very round numbers (as in "Lots of calcium carbonate!"). It's true that your plants would like the sodium replacement ions even less. You may very well not actually need to be adding cal/mag (unless it is all crashing out of solution when you lower the pH).

Anyway, this is all academic since you are having success. Still, if you are the curious/experimental type, a PPM meter is cheap and it would be interesting to know exactly what levels you're dealing with. Anything over 100 PPM is hard, and it's not uncommon for people in places where ion exchange systems are common to have levels over 300 PPM. And levels of Ca++ and Mg++ that high can affect the level of other positively charged ions. That's why General Hydroponics makes a special version of their FloraMicro (called "FloraMicro Hardwater" appropriately enough) just for people like you who have very hard water. It might be interesting to look into that too.

You're using well water, so the water numbers from your local water utility's website aren't immediately relevant for you, but I'll bet they show a lot of hardness too as the region probably has water flowing over limestone rock. Again, if you are the curious type you might want to have a look... You in southern California by any chance? Some of the water there is so hard it's liquid concrete.
 
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I’d love to see a few pics of the amazing plants you must grow doctorjohnson. You sure sound like you’ve got everything perfected.
 
> There are so many interesting opinions about pH in coco.
A whole lotta ignorance and folklore too. What's really important for coco is to make sure that you wash all the salt out of it. I have had two bricks (different brands) of coco that said "triple washed" and all that, and the first wash was still 1000 PPM! Wash your coco thoroughly unless you are positive it's clean. (Again, a PPM meter is a great, cheap way not to be flying blind.)

FWIW, my recirculating nutrient coco system pumps GH FloraSeries + CALiMAGic in every morning at about 315 PPM and pH 5.9 and it runs off at about 215 PPM and pH 6.2. But those numbers vary a lot as the recirculating nutes are used up over the course of a week. What I recommend for the curious and the capable is to keep a logbook throughout each grow. That will teach you a lot about how your system works, what your plant likes and does not like, and how to optimize.

Or you can just give it mild, un-pH'd nute solution, drain to waste, and cross your fingers. If your coco is well washed, you should get great results with that, too. You just won't know as much about what's going on and will be that much less able to optimize and troubleshoot.

Time to go tend to my tomatoes again. :)
 
Locrian99 said:
I’d love to see a few pics of the amazing plants you must grow doctorjohnson. You sure sound like you’ve got everything perfected.
Click to expand...

Snark snark? ;) Hard to tell...

I have never claimed to have everything perfected, and I don't by any means. (For all of my obsessive measuring and record keeping, I just burned the tips of the leaves of my White Widow.) I have never had a grow in which something didn't go wrong, from horses trampling a guerrilla grow to dropping lamps on plants to mixing fertilizer wrong to name a few.

Most of why I'm here is to learn from others as equipment, strains, and techniques evolve amazingly quickly (and because I enjoy the grower community--they are an interesting bunch).

I have been growing pot off and on since 1970 (Mexican bag seed under fluorescent tubes or sunlight back in the day..), have a degree in biology (among others), and have designed and built scientific instruments (including pH meters and light-measuring instruments) in a university bioengineering facility (among others), so I do think that I have some ideas and knowledge to offer. I can remember when LEDs were invented...

I don't always have a lot of time so sometimes my posts are a little terse. I hope they don't sound abrupt. I apologize if I come off sounding like a know-it-all. I don't think I do, but your comment makes me wonder. Maybe I should just bugger off and leave the newbs to share their discoveries about the wonders of molasses, 48-hour dark periods, and so on. Nothing wrong with that. We used to pour cognac into our baggies of awful weed because word was that it made it stronger (in the days when you had to smoke and entire joint by yourself to catch a buzz). Or add dried banana peels. Or eat roaches...

When I started growing, the only source of information was an eighth-inch-thick, 8 1/2 x 11 booklet you could buy from under the counter at the hippy plant store next to the university. (Canary yellow cover,"How to Grow Marijuana Indoors" or something like that.) For the first 20 years I had to learn almost everything by trial and error (I mean at the level of "girl plant good, boy plant bad.") So a website like GWE and endless YouTube videos (to say nothing of feminized seeds and autoflowers!) seem like a Godsend. And living in a state where it's now legal to buy, grow, and smoke weed? I never, ever would have guessed that would happen in my lifetime back in the Nixon era.

But you wanted to see pics of my plants. Here's the White Widow I'm growing in a 2' x 2' tent here in the corner of my tiny midtown apartment. It's my first SCROG. The six black hoses feed nute solution from the manifold on the right. Six gallons 70% coco coir / 30% perlite sits in a homebrew air pot, a plastic mesh wastebasket lined with burlap on top of a six-gallon reservoir into which the nute solution drains after the pump runs for two minutes every morning. The goal was to free me from having to water the plant every morning and not to waste all those lovely nutes by sending them down the drain every day. So far it's working great, but I still go in and fuss with the leaves and flowers every day--the good thing is that now if I need to leave town for a week, the plant can run on autopilot.

If you were expecting a 1000 square foot facility with flowers the size of 40-ouncers, that ain't me. Even with my very modest setup I have enough bud, tincture, CannaCaps, and rosin for me and a few friends, but then I'm nowhere near the stoner I was 40+ years ago...

That's my story, Locrian. I hope you enjoyed it. What's yours?

BabySCROG.jpg - Training a White Widow for SCROG

White Widow after some vigorous training for SCROG. 6 gallons coco coir with 30% perlite

WhiteWidow.jpg - White Widow budlets

White Widow budlets
 
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Hey my friend my comment was meant to be a bit sarcastic and I may have gotten a bad vibe from you. I apologize for that. I appreciate that you responded, i feel like a bit of a jackass for my previous comment. There’s lots of folk lore in this hobby of ours, I have a dear friend (I’m not kidding when I say since kindergarten) that I got my first clones from that I’ve started not listening to that I have pretty much started discounting all of his advice. He grows some amazing weed though, who knows. Anyways good growing to you!
 
@DoctorJohnson
Thanks for that Doc, it is a good read. That white widow appears intelligently managed. Way to make her submit to your will.
I thoroughly enjoy your mentality on recirculating the nutrients and keeping them out of the drain.
@Locrian99
Very funny just make sure you blaze BEFORE posting lol
 
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Locrian99 & DoctorJohnson
Good tidings for the season, roll away the stoned LOL
I actually enjoy a detailed post, the sharing of information is why we come to GWE. I enjoy both of your posts. I myself am guilty of giving advice to people when I’ve never actually grown indoors, in fact I just started my first indoor grow only 30 days ago. But that doesn’t stop me from giving advice about things I have learned but I’ve never quite put into practice. Like Professor Irwin Corey, I am the world‘s foremost authority. PS I have lived and worked on a 150 acre Biodynamic farm and I’ve been smoking weed more than 50 years. Knowledge is power, give some away every day.
 
Morning Doc,
Is my understanding correct? Do you collect the runoff and give it to the plants over and over? Does the pH change when this happens? Does any salt build up go into the water and hence, back into the plant? Do the nutes "spoil" if kept for more than a day or two? How do you control the humidity when keeping so much liquid in your grow space?

Probably a bunch of dumb questions, but I have never heard of this. Now I am wondering if I can put my runoff water back into my plants and save mixing so much. BTW, I had a few cal/mag deficiency leaf symptoms early on, so I just do 5 ml per gallon with every watering now and no more symptoms. I'd rather use the cal/mag than take a chance on messing things up with only my second grow. If I reused my runoff, how would I know if the plant is getting enough cal mag?

I am not so adventurous that I would try your system anytime soon, but I am curious to hear more about it.
 
Spanky I’ll let Doc fill you in on the details but yes he has a recirculating hydroponic system where the run off goes back to the reservoir. Much like a flood and drain only top fed. We as growers must be responsible for how we impact the environment. Draining to waste is like flushing money down the toilet not to mention the harm to the environment
 
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