This is a picture I took of one of my air bubblers the other day before I sanitized everything with bleach including the plant roots. It is about 36 hours after a full water exchange in the tub. Water temperates were about 66-68 and I was stabilizing PH with Citric Acid. You can see in the water that there are quite a few other blooms in there as well. I wish I had taken more pictures of this mess but I was more concerned with not losing everything. The original thread is HERE.
I am planning on switching from DWC to Ebb and Flow since they tend to be more resistant to fungus and bad bacteria. My Myco bacteria gets here on Monday and it will take a bit to brew it but then that should help to control it until I can make the switch.
I would suggest hempy buckets. They are the simplest and most educational form of hydro growing, get hempy buckets down and you will be able to successfully grow using any hydro method ,except maybe advanced aeroponics. That crud you see on your airstone is yucky, but that stuff could be turned in to food by an army of enzymes and microbes by using some worm poop tea. Honestly hempy is the beginners way in to hydro, yet produces the same great results (or very close to) as the more advanced techniques. Hempy pretty much removes the fear of root rot while still allowing you master your nutrient formulas, once you get those dialed in you can switch systems if you like. There are battles to be fought with other systems but once you figure out the whats and hows, for example root slime in dwc, jets clogging in an aero system, etc; You will be the master of your game. If you haven't abandoned DWC yet you may want to try adding a little pondzyme to your res, I have read a few places people have had great success with it. The one thing you must not do is get discouraged, because really this stuff is pretty easy and fun! Not to mention the plants provide you with clean air, are very nice to look at and eat. There are just too many positives gardening indoors or out to not do it, with cheap t5 lighting, cheap nutrients and you can build virtually any kind of system using household left over products. It is worth sticking it out.
It can for sure be hard to not get discouraged with so many crazy things happening already. The way I look at it is that I am just learning the lessons early and getting them out of the way. That Heisenberg tea you recommended is brewing in my basement right now and will be ready on Tuesday to add into my reservoir. Until then I have been doing a full flush every 2 days to keep the bacteria under control. If it really lives up to its name, I am going to keep using it long afterwards to improve the overall health of the plants. A sticky post would be nice that outlines the advantages and disadvantages of each type of grow system. It could include basic diagrams of each as well as parts lists and links for those of us that want to do it custom or links to manufactured setups.
Yea, it can be hard if you run into a lot of different problems at the start. Look at the upside though: you are going to be an expert at troubleshooting problems because you're running into a lot of them! I'll see what I can do about working up a sticky post, though if I do that it might go on a normal blog so I can get some search traffic from it as well. If I do that, I will definitely make a sticky post with choice links from the blog. I'm going to be devoting a lot more time to xPonics in the coming year, so you guys should be seeing a lot more cool shit coming from me soon That said, I'm really happy that we've got this crew going right now and I think that a lot of exciting things can come from this
