Slimy roots are a sign of algae growth.
Hey Grunt Brothers! I hope you call yourself that because of all the great *** you’re having and not from a lack of intelligence and the fact that you just learned to speak and type! Your post here was very smart and helpful to new hydroponics growers. I just wanted to add something to your words of wisdom. I hope anyone who has a “slimy root problem” follows your remedy to clear away the slime. After the slime is gone and you’ve flushed your system, start following some preventative measures to make sure this killer problem never raises its ugly head again.
Slimy roots may be a sign of algae growth but this is just a symptom of a handful of problems a new hydro grower can easily correct. There’s a really cool new hydro system I got just to experiment with called, “Current Culture-Under Current”. You don’t have to buy it, but if you go to their website they’ll teach you the basic good practices of hydro growing so you won’t ever have this problem again. (You can copy it and build your own system for real cheap!) Slimy roots and algae growth are caused by several factors you can easily prevent from ever happening in the first place. It’s called “Preventative Medicine”.
Thanks to simple technology, a healthy hydro system has these things happening:
*Your water/nut solution is always 10°F LOWER than the ambient air temp of your grow room.
* Your water/nut solution at the correct pH is always
circulating through your system at a brisk pace like a clear mountain stream.
* Your water/nut solution is always bubbling with fresh air by putting ample air stones in your nute reservoir.
* Your grow room AIR is always fresh with good ventilation and at the correct temperature and humidity levels.
* And last but most importantly, your entire system
under your plants where all the water is, is completely and I mean
COMPLETELY sealed off from your light source. Your plants should be the only thing getting light.
30 years ago when I got my first hydro system I was stupid and didn’t know all this because I didn’t read and learn first and got MAJOR slime! It was so bad it killed off my plants and I ended up taking that system to the dump (thinking it was the system’s fault)! Luckily I realized I didn’t know what the **** I was doing and started reading how to grow right. The shock of my hydro failure was so bad I completely switched to growing in soil and that’s what I use now in my commercial operation and even with soil those same principles I listed above still apply.
New growers also screw up in the harvesting process. After spending good money on super seed strains with high THC and CBD values and they’ve grown an amazing crop, they think they’re in the clear when it comes time to trim their Buds. They either hand-trim or get a trimming machine with blades to make the trimming job go faster. Either way, they end up stripping those beautiful Buds they’ve grown of a lot of their potency by touching up their Buds like crazy, or pulling a lot of the resin and trichomes off as it sticks to their blades, either on their gloves and scissors or to the big bad blades on those bladed auto-trimmers.
As a large commercial organic medicinal grower now, I can’t afford to make these simple mistakes and that’s why I use my auto-trimmer of choice. It’s called a, “Tom’s Tumble Trimmer”--TTT for short. What makes it so special is that all my valuable resin and trichomes never stick to it. The TTT tumbles the Buds with a solid patented food/medical grade mesh that allows the Buds
and trim to KEEP their good ****. The properties of the mesh doesn’t wear off onto my Buds either, so they’re always clean medical-grade certified. We got 5 of them to trim our 5000 plants every harvest (4 times a year!) and they never need cleaning or maintenance cause nothing sticks to them. So my whole operation is solid, healthy and organic from beginning to end thanks to Tom’s simple but powerful technology.
If you’re reading this and you’re just new to hydroponic growing please do your research first to learn the basics so you don’t get slime ever. Slime build up will kill your plants and all that light power energy money will have gone to waste. You’ll not only have wasted 3 months of time but your valuable plants too. Growing healthy means your plants will be huge in yield and as potent as the best pro growers' stuff out there. But it all depends on you with what ever hydroponic system you chose, to learn the simple technology behind it first, so your results will always be kick-*** powerful and potent!