No guesses, so here is the new setup in use:
The seedling is just a spare Fugue State seed, I have lots of them from last year. She seems to be a bit of a mutant so far, but she may grow out of it, not much difference for me one way or the other, I just threw it in some used coco to try the new irrigation idea.
I have noticed a couple of challenges in my solo mischief. Primary among them is the fact that late in the grow when the solo gets compacted with roots, infiltration of nutes slows down to the point where, unless there is enough volume in the cup above the medium, overflow results before sufficient runoff is achieved. Fine, perhaps if you are watering manually and don't mind waiting, but it makes setting up automatic fertigation difficult (so far, for me, impossible without sacrificing a significant amount of medium volume to provide headspace).
With apologies to Floraflex, this plastic thing (let's call it an irrigation cup, shortened just to pvc cup) is mostly just my version of their round matrix thingies. I considered just using their square caps for solos, but the size and shape are wrong, and it does nothing to fix the overflow issue.
My pvc cup deals perfectly with the overflow issue. It holds ~100 mls of liquid before any leaks out the bottom four irrigation holes. Further, since the pvc cup gets seated tightly against the medium, and is tight around the perimeter, nutes get inserted into the medium without having a chance to build up on top of the medium and overflow. In the photo above, the cup is set up for manual irrigation, I just add ~100 mls with my turkey baster. It does not matter how long it takes to soak through since the nutes don't have a chance to float on the surface, no overflow is possible. So far, it works a treat, although the jury will be out until later when the roots build up. However, I expect it will work fine because I get zero surface buildup even if I fill the pvc cup completely very quickly.
One detail that may be important is that before I seat the cup into the solo and onto the medium, I place a circle of two layers of paper towel over the coco. This prevents particles of medium from being sucked into and jamming the four 1/16" holes in the bottom.
Setting up for automatic irrigation is dead easy, no emitters required:
The cup gets filled through an open ended 1/4 inch irrigation tube. I recommend either the floraflex or the Autopot tubing, they are both similar, and a far more pleasant material to use due to their flexibility. The Rainbird stuff and it ilk are garbage for small indoor setups because it is so stiff.
However, if the end of the tube is open, there needs to be a valve on each pot:
The black lines to the manifold are to big pots. Their supply is adjusted by pump timing and duration only, so valves are not usually required. The red things are just plugs (diy with whatever available sort of plugs), and the tube clamp on the green tube is how I adjust flow to the solos. The little ball valves easily purchased are a pain because precise adjustment is nearly impossible. The tube clamp (diy of course) allows very precise and easy adjustment, and so far has never caused plugging.
So, that my gro peep dudes and dudettes, is how I will likely be irrigating my solos from now on. Unless of course, I find later out that it does not work, in which case on to Mark VI. Grow, learn, alter, grow again learn more...
Oh I can't wait to see that
