Except my waste, like everything else that is biodegradable, goes into my outdoor compost bins. With a passive solar, net zero home, heated by a masonry heater (sourced locally!) with fuel from our 32 acre woodlot that we manage for bear, moose, birds, amphibians, conserved forever against development, and indoor grows powered exclusively by the sun, we are a little aware of environmental concerns.
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Does vinegar in coco = bugs?
- Thread starter Spanky
- Start date
DoctorJohnson
New member
Moose! Your life sounds wonderful...
DoctorJohnson
New member
Hi Spanky -- Like Paracelsus referred to, growing in coco is generally thought of as hydroponics but in a non-nutritive matrix (coco fibers) that lets more air get to the roots, and I have really got religion about letting air get to the roots! Air pots! Perlite! 
I had amazing results using hydroponic deep water culture, but the pH in the reservoir was all over the place. (I mean dropping into the 4s overnight--emergency type instability) I think now that was because my reservoir was too small, but the people who use Advanced Nutrients pH Perfect line tell me that it really does keep the pH stable so I'll try that if and when I do another hydroponic grow.
Anyway, in an effort to get around that pH stability problem (and just out of curiosity) I decided to try drain-to-waste coco, and it worked wonderfully! Dead simple! Just mix a batch of nutes and pour enough on the plant every day to get about 10% runoff and that's it! I didn't even bother to pH the nutes since the GH FloraSeries mixed up at about pH 6 all by itself.
Oh I did make one change, Nebula's coco article (which is great, as always) says to fertilize one day and then give a day or two of just water. From my orchid growing days I remembered the mantra of "fertilize weakly weekly"--that is, give them a steady diet of diluted nutes rather than a feast-or-famine regimen. I did the same with my coco grow and fed every day but with very dilute nutes (200 PPM from Ca/Mg for our very soft water here, plus GH FloraSeries per Nebula's feed chart but diluted down to only about 400 PPM total--any more than that was too much for daily feeding. That worked great.
The two downsides to drain-to-waste, as I mentioned earlier, were that a) you have to water EVERY DAY with coco, so no vacation, no business trip, dairy cows never know it's Sunday... And b) I didn't like pouring all that perfectly good fertilizer down the drain every day.
So as I said, I put the plant on top of six gallon reservoir (made out of a plastic storage container) and used a cheap, in-aquarium water circulation pump on a timer to pump water up to the plant every day. I knew it would work since it's essentially the exact same thing as DWC hydro only the plant has its roots in coco (so more air I'm thinking?), not the reservoir. I was even able to use the same nute mix as I had used for drain to waste.
Here are my last few reservoir readings. 200 PPM of each reading is from Ca/Mg, so you can see that it's really diluted. 400 PPM is the highest I can go, where tip yellowing starts, and 270 PPM is the lowest it can get, where a pH crash can occur and (I suppose) deficiencies can appear if left long enough. [TABLE="border: 1, cellpadding: 1, width: 200"]
[TR]
[TD]Day[/TD]
[TD]pH[/TD]
[TD]PPM[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Thur[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]322[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Fri[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]316[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sat[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sun[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]300[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Like everyone, I have worked out a system that works for me over a multiple grows. It may not be best and it may not work for everyone, but I'm getting good results.
> Do you collect the runoff and give it to the plants over and over?
Yes. I change the GH FloraSeries nutes weekly (advancing to the next feeding ratio in Nebula's chart ("Early Bloom," "Mid Bloom," etc.), though as the plant gets bigger, I find myself having to top off the res mid-week sometimes. I"m at six gallons now and would like to use 10 next time... (The spent nutes go on the houseplants sometimes.)
> Does the pH change when this happens?
Yes, it rises slowly, but not a lot (see chart below). The PPMs steadily decline, though, which is pretty cool to watch! The plant steadily extracts the fertilizer from the nute mix every day!
> Does any salt build up go into the water and hence, back into the plant?
Well, the nutes are salts technically speaking, but no, they stay in solution and I see no "salting up" of the coco and as I said in the previous paragraph, the nutrient levels go down every day.
> Do the nutes "spoil" if kept for more than a day or two?
In my opinion, a clean mix of nutes (which are just salts, right--nothing organic to break down) should be stable for weeks if kept clean, cool, and away from light, but the manufacturers all seem to agree that you shouldn't keep mixed (i.e. diluted) nutes around for a long time. But more to the point, nutes in a dark, aerated/mixed reservoir, are perfectly stable for a week. That's exactly what hydroponic fertilizer is made for!
> How do you control the humidity when keeping so much liquid in your grow space?
That's a big issue this time with a six gallon air pot in a small tent! I have an intake fan, a circulation fan, and an exhaust fan, so I'm constantly turning over and circulating the air. I was giving it 24 hours of light when it was in veg and watering it three times a day. Now it only gets one watering in 12 hours in an attempt to get the RH down. I am curious to see how my flowers do ripening at 60% humidity. I think I have enough air circulation to be OK, but I don't know. (I had a prize bud full of mold once and it broke my heart.) Oh, I have also lollipopped the understory and defoliated the flower layer of the SCROG, so that helps circulation and limits leaves from touching leaves where droplets occur.
> 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 follow Nebula's recommendation exactly for cal/mag, which is 5 ml per gallon (like you) for the first 5 or 6 weeks and then cut back to half that. That seems to work well. (And I thoroughly wash my coco and pre-treat it with cal/mag.) I tried using less in an earlier grow, but rapidly ran into Ca deficiency (our water here is super soft).
Each five gallon dose lasts for a week. On my current grow, I did top off the reservoir once (rather than a complete weekly change-out) and thought I'd skip the Ca/Mg and just let it "coast" but I saw Mg deficiency within days. In my experience (again, with essentially mineral-free tapwater) cannabis really needs its cal/mag!
OK, fun time's over. Time to do my taxes.
I had amazing results using hydroponic deep water culture, but the pH in the reservoir was all over the place. (I mean dropping into the 4s overnight--emergency type instability) I think now that was because my reservoir was too small, but the people who use Advanced Nutrients pH Perfect line tell me that it really does keep the pH stable so I'll try that if and when I do another hydroponic grow.
Anyway, in an effort to get around that pH stability problem (and just out of curiosity) I decided to try drain-to-waste coco, and it worked wonderfully! Dead simple! Just mix a batch of nutes and pour enough on the plant every day to get about 10% runoff and that's it! I didn't even bother to pH the nutes since the GH FloraSeries mixed up at about pH 6 all by itself.
Oh I did make one change, Nebula's coco article (which is great, as always) says to fertilize one day and then give a day or two of just water. From my orchid growing days I remembered the mantra of "fertilize weakly weekly"--that is, give them a steady diet of diluted nutes rather than a feast-or-famine regimen. I did the same with my coco grow and fed every day but with very dilute nutes (200 PPM from Ca/Mg for our very soft water here, plus GH FloraSeries per Nebula's feed chart but diluted down to only about 400 PPM total--any more than that was too much for daily feeding. That worked great.
The two downsides to drain-to-waste, as I mentioned earlier, were that a) you have to water EVERY DAY with coco, so no vacation, no business trip, dairy cows never know it's Sunday... And b) I didn't like pouring all that perfectly good fertilizer down the drain every day.
So as I said, I put the plant on top of six gallon reservoir (made out of a plastic storage container) and used a cheap, in-aquarium water circulation pump on a timer to pump water up to the plant every day. I knew it would work since it's essentially the exact same thing as DWC hydro only the plant has its roots in coco (so more air I'm thinking?), not the reservoir. I was even able to use the same nute mix as I had used for drain to waste.
Here are my last few reservoir readings. 200 PPM of each reading is from Ca/Mg, so you can see that it's really diluted. 400 PPM is the highest I can go, where tip yellowing starts, and 270 PPM is the lowest it can get, where a pH crash can occur and (I suppose) deficiencies can appear if left long enough. [TABLE="border: 1, cellpadding: 1, width: 200"]
[TR]
[TD]Day[/TD]
[TD]pH[/TD]
[TD]PPM[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Thur[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]322[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Fri[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]316[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sat[/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Sun[/TD]
[TD]5.9[/TD]
[TD]300[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[TD] [/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Like everyone, I have worked out a system that works for me over a multiple grows. It may not be best and it may not work for everyone, but I'm getting good results.
> Do you collect the runoff and give it to the plants over and over?
Yes. I change the GH FloraSeries nutes weekly (advancing to the next feeding ratio in Nebula's chart ("Early Bloom," "Mid Bloom," etc.), though as the plant gets bigger, I find myself having to top off the res mid-week sometimes. I"m at six gallons now and would like to use 10 next time... (The spent nutes go on the houseplants sometimes.
)> Does the pH change when this happens?
Yes, it rises slowly, but not a lot (see chart below). The PPMs steadily decline, though, which is pretty cool to watch! The plant steadily extracts the fertilizer from the nute mix every day!
> Does any salt build up go into the water and hence, back into the plant?
Well, the nutes are salts technically speaking, but no, they stay in solution and I see no "salting up" of the coco and as I said in the previous paragraph, the nutrient levels go down every day.
> Do the nutes "spoil" if kept for more than a day or two?
In my opinion, a clean mix of nutes (which are just salts, right--nothing organic to break down) should be stable for weeks if kept clean, cool, and away from light, but the manufacturers all seem to agree that you shouldn't keep mixed (i.e. diluted) nutes around for a long time. But more to the point, nutes in a dark, aerated/mixed reservoir, are perfectly stable for a week. That's exactly what hydroponic fertilizer is made for!
> How do you control the humidity when keeping so much liquid in your grow space?
That's a big issue this time with a six gallon air pot in a small tent! I have an intake fan, a circulation fan, and an exhaust fan, so I'm constantly turning over and circulating the air. I was giving it 24 hours of light when it was in veg and watering it three times a day. Now it only gets one watering in 12 hours in an attempt to get the RH down. I am curious to see how my flowers do ripening at 60% humidity. I think I have enough air circulation to be OK, but I don't know. (I had a prize bud full of mold once and it broke my heart.) Oh, I have also lollipopped the understory and defoliated the flower layer of the SCROG, so that helps circulation and limits leaves from touching leaves where droplets occur.
> 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 follow Nebula's recommendation exactly for cal/mag, which is 5 ml per gallon (like you) for the first 5 or 6 weeks and then cut back to half that. That seems to work well. (And I thoroughly wash my coco and pre-treat it with cal/mag.) I tried using less in an earlier grow, but rapidly ran into Ca deficiency (our water here is super soft).
Each five gallon dose lasts for a week. On my current grow, I did top off the reservoir once (rather than a complete weekly change-out) and thought I'd skip the Ca/Mg and just let it "coast" but I saw Mg deficiency within days. In my experience (again, with essentially mineral-free tapwater) cannabis really needs its cal/mag!
OK, fun time's over. Time to do my taxes.
Last edited: