Watering While Away Holiday For 4-5 Days Early - Mid Veg

[MidgeSmith]

Hi,

 

TL;DR

The Mrs has sprung a surprise holiday on me and I need an automated watering fail-safe to keep my young plants alive til I return after 5 days.

 

The Situation Deets

The problem is that I have 2 seedlings popped and another 2 or 3 germinated and waiting to appear above ground.  I have about 3 weeks before we go away.  So I have watering to think about and don't want to rely on my mate to do it for me.  (He's the other side of town and is a beardy dreadlocked guy with mental health problems.  My neighbours on my dead end street are all pretty straight and would probably watch his activity like a hawk, if not challenge him or worse still, call the cops lol.)

 

Currently the seedlings which have popped are in peat plugs buried in 500ml soup pots and the germinated seeds are below ground, but in similar. I will have potted up once or twice by the time 3 weeks comes around but was not expecting to be in the flowering / final pot for another 2-4 weeks after that.

 

So I am after watering recommendations for 2-5 plants in my 1200 x 600 grow room. I know that is too many, but at least 1 is hopefully a male that will leave the tent just before dropping pollen as I plan to do a little pollen chucking to get some nice combination of Afghan / Ketama and Afghan / Cindy 99 and some more Afghan seeds.

 

My thoughts:

I am planning to keep the temperature around 24C or thereabouts while away to avoid too much evaporation.  If so, I plant to ramp it up to ~28C for early flowering and then bring it down again as mid-late flowering approaches to max out the terpene content as I think I get less aromatic plants if I hit them with the higher temp to the very end.

 

1) I could pot up early into the large - even final -  pots before I leave, which are either 14L or 20L depending on how I feel, though they are all shortish plants so the smaller of the two is probably fine.  If I do this, I could give them a reasonable drenching as I leave, knowing that they'll only just be starting to dry out entirely by the time I am back and should be able to rush in with a liberating watering that evening.

 

2) I could make sure I am in a large enough pot to use my small ceramic Hoselock watering spikes, which go into the soile about 2 inches and are around an inch wide at the top - like a poor man's Blumat that you screw a waterbottle onto. These are untried, so I dunno if I can trust them. If I have drenched the plants before I leave and the pots are large enough, as long as there are no leaks, this should merely work as a backup.  If there is a leak it is probably not the end of the world.

 

3) Another solution I haven't thought of yet.  I don't really want to start hooking up wicks or anything I haven't tried before and will disrupt my system.

 

Is there a pump and dripper setup I could get for < £60 or something that I could rig up to make sure they are getting some moisture each day, or is that overkill / likely to go wrong on an unmonitored first usage?

 

I did do a brief search, but have so much on my plate at the moment, I can't do completely exhaustive searching at the moment and need to set things in motion soon, so... Any ideas very, very gratefully received!

 

[Slippy One]

Blumat Tropf with beanstalk here. No runoff, no mixing, no ph adjusting. 

 

 

[Abbo52]

Check out nedis water pump (Wi-Fi) on the big river site. 

[MidgeSmith]

Thanks guys

 

Are both methods pretty plug and play?

 

Abbo52 is your solution a cinch to set up?

 

Slippy, I'm a little concerned with Blumat that unless my pot is big enough, I'd be disturbing the roots dangerously when I remove the blumat and if I didn't it could cause a problem, are those fears unfounded?

[Shumroom]

Your option 1 idea sounds good to me  

 

Pot them up and water them in fully  

 

 

Perhaps turn the lights and heat down just a wee bit too 

 

Atb

 

 

 

[MidgeSmith]

Yeah, the only reason I am wary of that is that I was told that progressive potting up has a profound effect on plant health and yield @Shumroom. Coming from a hydroponic photoperiod and soil auto background, I didn't know and went from small pot to final pot last time.  I got a good yield, but did veg to 7 or 8 weeks to be sure.  I  guess its a tie between method on and a watering system.  Everything Hoselock makes is a bit pants imho, so I am not sure I trust their ceramic poor man's blumat bottle watering system too much.  I imagine I'd come hoem to them waterlogged and sad :/

 

[Slippy One]

With the blumats, yes you could pot up slightly and add some material above the current level. Only the carrot needs to be buried for the valve to work. 

[Lux_Interior]

It depends on your substrate. If you are growing in a compost or coco, composts tend to hold moisture better. I'd water/feed your plants tomorrow and leave them four days, essentially a dry run, and see how they do.

 

Potting up before a holiday is also a good idea and a trick I have employed myself in the past if the roots are established you should be OK.

 

If it is only four days the beardy dread would only need to visit once and as long as he doesn't bring a sound system everything sound be fine. If not your community gets a cultural revival.

 

 

[MidgeSmith]

I reckon they'd be good without his visit, it's actually more that next door has us look after their cat while they are away and look after ours, when we are away.  It's as much political and weird.  Next door will come in daily to feed the cat see...  If they see him they'll be like "What can he do that we can't? He looks sketchy, do you think blah  blah blah!" and watch, they're a bit curtain twitchy, well due a cultural revival  they are indeed

They weren't keen as I was far less straight looking when we moved here years ago, but they're convinced I'm a good chap and perfectly straight now.  They've even expressed their worries to me that some in the road might be 'using weed' and concerned that it could affect their kids.  There's only so much educating you can do without being the obvious stoner, but eh...

Potting up and drenching before the off is the winner so far, they are in soil @Lux_Interior but dont need feed at this stage.  My plants are currently only 3 inches tall, so not representative of final potting or resilience heh heh

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by MidgeSmith

[Lux_Interior]

Just now, MidgeSmith said:

Potting up and drenching before the off is the winner so far, they are in soil @Lux_Interior but dont need feed at this stage.  My plants are currently only 3 inches tall, so not representative of final potting or resilience heh heh

 

 

Four days shouldn't be an issue then especially coming into autumn.

[MidgeSmith]

7 minutes ago, Lux_Interior said:

 

Four days shouldn't be an issue then especially coming into autumn.

Thanks dude.

[Shumroom]

Oh yeah 

 

Big jump in pot size isn’t required,

just an ordinary 4 or 5 times the size of the current amount of medium.

 

Atb