Newbie Questions about my mega farm ebb&flow system
 

Hi,

I am new to hydroponics and decided to buy a Mega Garden system by HydraFarm to get started on this learning adventure. I have a 4 tube T5 fixture inches above and have a couple of questions:

How deep do I place the 1.5 inch rockwool square? Will the hydroton draw any of the water upward beyond the level which the water floods? If I placed the rockwool so that the bottom makes contact with the very top of the water, it seems like it would be buried quite deep when planting something like lettuce.

Thanks in advance.

DT4
first, do you have any pictures of the system/setup?

Second, rockwool and grow rocks have two very different property's. Thus by trying to keep the grow rocks moist, you can easily saturate the rockwool, suffocating the plants roots. You only want to keep the root-ball moist, not saturated. Rockwool sucks up and holds water like a sponge, but grow rocks wont.

Your best bet is if you started seeds in rockwool and want to place them in grow rocks, to place them so they stay slightly (slightly) moist (near the top). The roots will grow down towards the moisture (away from the rockwool). If the rockwool remains saturated, you run the risk of stem rot. You want the moisture level to be about 2 inches below the top of the growing media. Even farther down if the rockwool remains saturated.

GPSFrontier,

Thanks for the reply. At this point what I'm doing is trying to plan ahead to avoid more failure. Here are a couple pictures of what I have. It's Hydrofarm's Mega Garden which is an ebb and flow system. As you can see nothing is going on with it yet. I have some thin foam which will cover unused pots and a portion of the flood tray where the nutrients would otherwise be exposed to light during the flood cycle.

Almost a week ago, with the help of my eight-year-old daughter, we (over) seeded some peat pellets with a variety of leaf lettuce. At the time I didn't have any rockwool and I don't think the seeds were planted deep enough. I'm wondering if I could thin this mess out and transplant some of it into rockwool without damaging the roots and starting the hydroponics. I'm thinking tomorrow of starting over germinating in rockwool with only one or two seeds per cube. Or, I may try planting one of these peat pellets with only one sprout and experiment with depth in the hydroton.

In one picture you can see the holes in the white pots where the water line will be which looks to be approximately halfway up the pot.