Nico’s Nuggets: Deep-Water Culture (DWC) Hydroponics

Question from Butter,
Just wondering if you were familiar with the Current Culture bucket system and if you would recommend it for a first time hydro grower?

Greetings, Butter, and thanks for writing in.

Deep-water culture (DWC) systems, or bucket systems as they are more commonly known, offer an excellent solution for first-time hydro growers as they are easy to set-up and fully automated. They also usually boast large yields as your cannabis plants get a ton of water and nutrients delivered to each plant site.

The Current Culture system that you refer to is a variation on the traditional DWC systems, utilizing a constant sub-current of water to create negative pressure that continuously moves water through the plant sites. Most DWC systems use timers to pump water to sites intermittently, thereby flooding the buckets and feeding the roots of plants dangling into the bucket containers. The Current Culture systems keep buckets constantly flooded and keep nutrient solution in constant motion. This motion also helps to highly oxygenate your solution which is a big plus as plant roots breath in oxygen (as compared to above-surface plant which breathes in CO2).

The other great aspect of any DWC system, including the Current Culture systems (cch2o.com), is that they are easily customizable, meaning they can adapt to almost any size grow space. So new growers can start out with smaller gardens of only four- or six-plant sites, while larger format grows can add on plant sites to increase the plant count of their gardens to much larger sizes.

Thanks for reading everyone and remember: Grow… And help the world grow, too!