salo99

Hi there. I'm a total newbie to hydroponics - I transplanted 8 plants from soil to an 8 pot drip system with a 10 gallon reservoir. They are under 4-foot flourescent tubes (4 of them). I cleaned the roots carefully in running water and put the plants with their plugs in hydroton. I left about an inch of the roots exposed to air, above the water, and the rest below. I ordered a tds/ph meter but don't have it yet, so in the meantime I put in 5ml per gallon each of GH floragrow, floramicro, and florabloom. Also put in some hygrozome (10ml/gallon) and some Floralicious that came with the system (I noticed that this stuff seemed to create some kind of slime around the drip feeds). Anyway, they drooped for a couple of hours after transplanting and then came back strong and grew well for the next two days. I had a problem with the ph - put in too much ph-down at first, then corrected with some NaOH I had lying around. Then I noticed that the ph kept slowly rising since applying the NaOH, so I've had to keep adding ph-down every few hours to keep the ph around 6. Anway, on Tuesday they started drooping. Two of them are still looking ok, but the rest are drooping badly. I've been keeping the drip running 16 hours straight, then 8 hours of dark, no-drip time. Might be making some obvious mistakes here, since I don't really know what I'm doing yet. Thought maybe the problem was high tds, due to all the ph correction I had to do. Any assistance appreciated - thanks.