Moving seedlings to aeroponics

[zeitate]

The question is this:

When do you know that the seedlings/young plants are ready to be moved into the (aeroponic) system? Is it when they have a certain number of nodes? Or a certain height? Or when roots cover all of the rockwool cube? Or when the roots are a few inches long? How long? About as long as the height of the cube?

I ask because if you move them to soon they drown because of the high debit of water. If you move them to late then you risk not watering enough the plant and the roots dying.

Maybe some pictures of how developed the roots should be before moving them into the system would be helpful.

Thanks.

[The old dog]

I'll be starting seed germination soon and I'm going to use the paper towel method. I understand that as soon as the root gets to 5mm in length the seed should be moved to a growing medium like rockwool before transferring to the aeroponics system once they get to a certain size, so I have the same question. Did you manage to find an answer?

[xinfinity]

[xinfinity]

I dont use rockwool and never had any problems

[xinfinity]

[waterdawg12]

I am trying to find alternatives to the rock wool as well. I have issues with the seedlings getting to wet when started in anything I've tried to date except when putting them directly into the hydroton and that is hard to do and they also had a hard start. Next thing I will try is rapid rooters. Also the spray times are cut way back until solid roots are formed. I have only ran one run of the sprayers and nutes are another struggle as its much different from my rdwc setup, I run around 1.8ish now and never went over 1.2ish.

[ironjustice]

root riots mate, best starter plugs for seedings bar none... you can paper towel them first, i sink mine in tepid tap water and then into root riots... root down and the seed shell just bellow the surface.... i have recently started putting them in the X-stream aeroponic cloner as soon as i see a root out of the bottom, this normally gives me plenty of roots within a week of being in the X-stream and are ready for moving into a new system.. i just did it twice and transplanted 9 seeds into two nft tanks, both took just fine even though they were tiny plants...

the way i see it is that as soon as a root is out of the plug then you can stick in an x-stream prop or aeroponic system from that moment on, the cubes will be saturated, but i give them a squeeze a couple times a day and make sure the inner roots are getting oxygen, but the root or roots out the bottom go searching for the oxygen, so you end up with multiple roots coming out of all sides of the cube...

i have just set up a slightly modified aeroflo 10 site aeroponics system, and as soon as they had a root out into the x stream the went this morning and are now in the aeroflo system.... im expecting to see roots out the bottom of the pots in a few days and then its all systems go... would be very surprised if there was a problem..

tomorrow im changing the 50l res to a 84l really useful box tote so i can spread the plants around more.. im only using 4 sites and have covered the other sites with correx and silver foil tape... only time will tell though as its my first crack at a full aero grow and by all accounts starting seeds in this system is the done thing if not going from cuttings...

Peace.. IJ

[waterdawg12]

Just started my second run and this time I put the seeds directly into RW cubes and into the netpots. I only put enough hydroton into the pots to hold the RW upright and in place. Sprayers were timed to come on every 4 hours to keep things moist. The seeds popped in three days out the top. This was a bit of a worry as I get seedlings in 24-36 hours using PT but they all popped and actually now after 2.5 weeks seem to be a bit more vigorous than PT germing. I keep the sprayers timed for every three hours until roots are established, add more hydroton, and then tighten up the cycles to every hour. After a couple of weeks I run cont. spray for a couple of reasons, one it keeps res temps at just below 70 (would be below 65 if cycled), and also the plants seem to like it lol. I would really like to try the root riot plugs but there hard to find here.