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How You Can Cure Root Rot


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Old 10-05-2017, 09:18 AM
The The is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2017
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Default How You Can Cure Root Rot

I've decided to try and provide some value to the community and, hopefully, some people may benefit from the exercise.

I'd like to start out by saying this isn't my original recipe and that feedback is welcome and encouraged.

This post will explain a bit about root rot and what you can do to tackle it. The method proposed is for brewing microbe tea.

Root rot affects a lot of people, it can be devastating and most of the time is extremely difficult to eradicate. Symptoms include a brown slime coating the mass of your roots and it's going to smell bad. As you know, roots are normally white.

Two factors exacerbate root rot - low oxygen concentrations and an overrunning of one or two pathogenic bacterial or fungal species. Low oxygen kills the roots and anaerobic microorganisms digest the detritus. Accompanying them is a rotten egg smell (sulfur).

So, the first thing to do is raise the oxygen levels in the system. Adding more airstones should do the trick. Traditional root rot-controlling techniques involve chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide which certainly will kill the pathogens but these effects extend to potentially harming the plant too.

When grown in soil, plants are surrounded by and interact with billions of bacteria and fungi. These microbes compete with one another for nutrients and, in doing so, self-regulate and control their neighbor's population. This level of competition is diminished in hydroponic systems (I don't believe for a moment hydroponic systems are sterile) leaving the door open for opportunistic pathogens to take hold.

Microbe tea works on this basis. By brewing a diverse culture of bacteria and fungi we can introduce the competition back into the system without harming the plant. This is not necessarily for beginners but if you have root rot, what choice do you have?

What do you need?
- 1 Black bucket
- Hydroguard (product containing bacteria of the Bacillus genus)
- Great White (product containing myco fungi)
- Ancient Forest (earthworm castings)
- Distilled water
- 1 or 2 air stones
- 1 sock
- molasses

What do you do?
1. Fill the black bucket with two gallons of distilled water. Add two air stones and turn them on.
2. Add 15-30ml of Hydroguard and 1/2 a scoop of Great White into the bubbling water.
3. Place two handfuls of earthworm castings into a sock and tie the end, hang into the water.
4. Add one tablespoon of molasses to the bucket for energy, some microbes will consume their neighbors over a couple of days.
5. Bubble constantly for 48 hours and the number of microorganisms will explode. After reaching maturity, it can be kept refrigerated for approximately 10 days.
6. Inoculate the root crown with one cup of tea per gallon of nutrient solution to begin with. Each day after, top up with one additional cup. You're looking for new white shoots to start sprouting.

And there it is. Your microbe tea recipe. I hope this has provided some value to you.

I'd love to hear from people who have root rot at the moment and those who've given this method a go in the past. Wouldn't mind getting a proper discussion going.

Happy growing, The.



Last edited by The; 10-08-2017 at 05:24 AM.
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