Yesterday I shut down my hydroponic system after running my first batch of plants for a couple of weeks through it. The goal wasn't to grow them into maturity, but to allow enough time for them to root so they could be transplanted elsewhere, and thrive after the transplant...
And the results are...massively successful! The 'regular' pothos plants are quite...scary looking, I was quite legitimately disturbed at how quickly their roots thrived and how thick they got. They look like large stems, and this was in a few short weeks. Some leaves were burnt, but the plants will probably recover from the shock in a couple of weeks and make it up in no time.
My favourite plants, the velvet pothos, lost most of their leaves to leaf-burn. Though a couple of cuttings survived fairly well without a burn, most did not. They are not completely dead yet, and they've been replanted, so hopefully they'll recover -- seeing as they did eventually take root -- but there was definitely some damage. It's clear that even the cuttings from the same plant...clones of each other, will react differently to the same light at pretty much the same distance, so there's a lot of variability to be expected.
Yeah, my first experiment went swimmingly well, at this point I'm confident enough to start planting tomato seeds and see them grow to fruition. It should be a few weeks I'm told, so it's going to be quite exciting. I might do that over the weekend, or in the week if I'm feeling exceedingly bored, we shall see.
Interesting times are ahead...
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