My top drip setup...

[T'Mater]

Well it's that time of year for me again. Going to try my hand at doing this Hydroponic Tomato thing again and see if i can't have better luck. This year tho i plan on asking 10x's the ?'s as i did last year. And i figure by starting out and asking ahead instead of after the fact i should have much better luck.

As the weeks come i'll take some picture's of my set up and what i'm doing.

This year since they no longer make Floramato i'm going with the Maxi series and giving that a shot. Figure the less i have to mix atm the better off i'm going to be.

[Pineywoods]

Looking forward to seeing your set up

[fintuckyfarms]

Tis' the season I'm looking forward to following your experience.

[GpsFrontier]

I haven't used them myself but I cant say I have ever herd anything bad about the Maxi series nuts, and I would trust anything made by General Hydroponics. Just a little tip I forgot to mention in the other thread, I always start about twice as many seeds as I want plants. I'll grow them all as if I were going to put them all in the hydroponic system. But I'll just take the quickest growing, and strongest looking seedlings to put in the system. The rest I just stick in the ground somewhere, or give away.

Ya, by all means ask all the questions you can/want. You never get a reply if you don't post your thoughts. Don't worry about if it was already covered in some other thread somewhere, the forum wont run out of space to post new threads. I'm sure you'll have a lot more success this time around, simply because you've learned so much from last time. That's the way it is for everybody. My first year didn't yield much produce at all, but I learned a ton of problems to fix. Then I learned how to fix the problems I had for the next go around (both in my system designs, as well as growing the plants). Even though some solutions weren't easy for me to do (dealing with our extreme summer heat), it was a learning experience (I'm still learning things). Look forward to seeing your progress, and glad to hear your growing again.

[T'Mater]

Ya i've learned a lot from last season. This year i've started 20 seeds so i can pick what i believe is the best 12. If they all end up looking good i might actually expand my set up to handle all 20 plant's. Atm 4 have already came up and are looking good.

Atm i'm set up to grow 12 plant's. About how many gallons should my nute tank be?

I think this was another of many first year problems i was having. Not knowing what size of a tank i actually needed. Another was i def. wasn't following direction's on how much nutes should be in the water. This year i'm attempting to stick to a solid game plan as possible.

Will have some pic's of the seedling set up soon.

[GpsFrontier]

12 large plants, 12 plants x 2.5 gallons (minimum each)= 30 gallons is the minimum reservoir size you should consider. Me personalty I would want to double the minimum recommendations. A 50 to 60 gallon reservoir is what I would use. It dosen't need to be filled all the way while the plants are young, probably even less than 1/2 the way, but it will need the full water volume when they get to be full size.

P.S.
This may or may not help visualize things. Let me ask this question. If you had two children the same age, would they eat less food if they had separate rooms, or shared a single room? The room size wouldn't make a difference in their individual nutritional needs. The same holds true for plants, regardless of how many plants are in each bucket/container, or even the size of a central reservoir they all draw their nutritional needs from. Accommodating them all the same is important, unless you want them to suffer.