A trick my grandpa used to do when i was a kid, line your garden with exposed copper pipe or strips. He never had a slug or snail problem. We are from the pnw fyi.
Use silver stabilised peroxide to fix the res issues. I use it and don't need any kind of cooling for the res, even when its quite warm (even in black res). Also it's easy to check the res and top it up with water, just make sure the res is big enough. I use 25 L buckets for single plants. For the water issue, drill a hole in the side at the top to allow the excess to run off, and cover the top of the pot with duct tape/silver tape. Also if you use a high EC to begin, it being diluted is less of an issue. You can also buy nutes that are more ph stable, such as master blend, and use ph stabilisers like phosphoric acid/phosphorus pentoxide to prevent drift.
Wind! Thanks for reminding me. Last year was my first year gardening and a storm blew over plants and broke stems off my tomato plants. I learned the hard way that I have to prepare for wind.
in my place, we often grow outdoor with DFT system and we just have 2 season, if the problem is sun we can just sprinkle the plant with water and add ice in the resevior
Useful information, thank you. I understand your frustration with MPH/metric...the metric system was created for folks not capable of unit conversion. And it's a little closer to 1,158.728 KPD. ;)
You remind me of Reggie from Star Trek TNG. But, lol, sure that’s not the first time you’ve heard that. Thanks for putting up these vids as we’re all trying to learn.
I do kratky as well and have come to the conclusion that, if you have the space and resources, kratky works best inside. Rain is a pain in the ass as it dilutes your mixture. It might make sense to put your reservoirs on wheels to bring it. Algae is a huge problem outside as well where inside, the cooler Temps help slow the growth. Overall, I'm sticking with hydro inside for the foreseeable future.
Plants don't breathe in and out using lungs, but it is an analogy nonetheless. Oxygen and carbon dioxide pass in and out of the stomata in the plants through diffusion. When the plant is submerged in the water, bubbles of oxygen or carbon dioxide released are trapped and they stick on the leaves or petals temporarily.High levels of dissolved oxygen promote healthy root growth. ... When there's less oxygen in the water than there is in the plant, this reduces the permeability of roots to water, therefore reducing (even reversing) the absorption of nutrients. Roots absorb their own, dissolved, oxygen from the soil. However, since saline soil is largely anaerobic it becomes impossible for the roots to do gaseous exchange through soil and hence form pneumatophores that can absorb oxygen directly from air.the concentration of dissolved oxygen in surface water is affected by temperature and has both a seasonal and a daily cycle. Cold water can hold more dissolved oxygen than warm water. In winter and early spring, when the water temperature is low, the dissolved oxygen concentration is high. In summer and fall, when the water temperature is high, the dissolved-oxygen concentration is often lower.
Thank you for all the info. I am starting my first hydro garden outside this year. Luckily I won’t have to worry about rain or hail. I have a back deck that is completely covered. I get morning sun and by the middle of July the sun is no longer an issue on the deck. It does get hot. I live in North Carolina just south of Raleigh and summers can be brutal. I am planning on using totes with sprayers and buckets as DWC. Do you recommend insulating the totes and buckets and adding air to the totes? Should I use a sprayer system in the buckets? (I believe an NFT type system.) Thank you for your help.
I would think that the totes with sprayers would be ok in the heat. I have heard of people doing a Kratky setup in the middle of summer without problems. I have not tried it. I would think that anything with moving water would probably be safer than something without. From my experience, I did a dutch bucket setup in the summer. It was 95-100 degrees in July. The temperature of the reservoir was warm to the touch. But since the water was just flowing over the roots I had no root problems. The only problem I had was that my reservoir was too small for the size plants I had.
Which is about 14 m/s - far from the metereological definition of a storm which are windspeeds above 24,5 m/s, or >88 km/h, or >55 mph, or >10 Beaufort, or as most people say >2100 km per day. Those are windy days.
