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Budsbunny
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These are the seedlings when they were just put in the drum yesterday. I will try to make a similar picture every 3 days so we can see the difference. (hopefully....)
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October 23, 2019
Not going well......
Yesterday evening I saw that the leaves started curling again and one of the two small seedlings that I put in yesterday already died…..no high temperature so it had to be something else.
So I took the 3 RW cubes out and they were heavy and soaking wet. I put them on the scale and they almost had the same weight as after I put the cubes to soak for the night. Clearly the seedlings were drowning. This means there is far too much uptake of liquid during the short time that the cubes pass through the top reservoir. I have put the cubes on some kitchen towels to suck out some of the liquid and have to come up with a solution.
Solutions?
- I cannot speed up the speed of the drum but it would be possible to lower the level in the reservoir but the cubes pass through the liquid only 6 mm deep and that is really not so much. I hesitate doing that although it is the easiest and fasted solution.
- I could cut the bottom of the RW cubes with 15 mm but leave a square of 50 x 50 mm as contact surface for the uptake of nutrients (small green square at the bottom of the cube). In this way I hope there will be far less uptake and I can always adjust to more by adding a strip of RW besides the 50 x 50 mm (yellow in the drawing)
I will have today to think about it as the cubes are still draining out liquid.
Maybe you guys have a better idea?
Thanks Remy, I keep the seedlings in the 4x4 cubes, the cubes are standing on a bunch of kitchen towels and the weight of the cubes went down from 750 grams to 400 grams. I keep them like that for now but give a little liquid/nutrients with a syringe every 2 days.
Heres a question. What happens to the roots once they do grow through the rock wool cube? The roots on my hydro plants are four or five feet long when streatched out.
I hate to be a debby downer but I'm having a hard time understanding the benefits of a rotational garden with LEDs. With traditional HID lighting the bulb emitted light in 365 degrees so half the light was wasted shining up and away from the plants. LEDs solve that problem in their design. Dont get me wrong I commend you for a job done amazingly well, but I just wonder if you're better off either A without all the extra work, or B (and I prefer B) switch the LEDs out for a smaller watt HID.
What about some kind of cam system where every 12 hours it dips the drum down to soak the rockwool then tilts it back away from it. Or look into a garden hose reel type setup and you could run an irrigation system to each cube. All you would need is a timer to run a pump. www.wish.com sells one that hooks up to a hose. I have one for when I grow outside this spring.