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Old 11-23-2013, 12:29 PM
ghostpepperstore ghostpepperstore is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: St. Louis Metro Area
Posts: 3
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Time for an update!

The first round of seedlings have made it from the flood table and into the NFT.

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Untitled by GhostPepperStore.com, on Flickr

The dill is particularly happy

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Untitled by GhostPepperStore.com, on Flickr

Lettuce is looking pretty good too!

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Untitled by GhostPepperStore.com, on Flickr

So here are the lessons I have learned so far.

Rockwool - screw it, let it just be soaking wet all the time, apparently it doesn't matter. In fact, I was only flooding my table once a day at first and I discovered that the roots coming out the bottom of the rockwool would die back as soon as they got dry. Several of the seedlings didn't have roots long enough to hit the bottom of the NFT channels when they were transplanted, so for the first few days I had to hand water those until they got their feet wet in the channel. I am now running the flood table 3x a day during daytime hours and the next round of seedlings are looking better.

Algae - Algae sucks! By the second day of running the NFT I had brown algae all over the channel. Luckily there was very little in the reservoir. I realized that the end caps on the channels had a 1/2 inch gap that was letting in enough light that algae was blooming. Once I blocked off the light, the problem has gotten any worse.

PH - My ph keeps rising and I have been having to drop it everyday by adding about 15ml of PH down to each reservoir keeping it at around 6.3. Everyday is gets back up to about 7.1 - 7.2. I am going to try a different PH down product as soon as this bottle runs out as this one doesn't seem to be very effective.
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