Update: I am totally blown away by the response to my Elevated Pepper Plant post. And for those *checks* 725 redditors asking to know more about my contraption, here is the story of what it is, and why I actually built it in the first place….
by Lazyscrogger
4 Comments
Original Post:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/1p4nebb/my_elevated_pepper_plant_is_still_producing_in/](https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/comments/1p4nebb/my_elevated_pepper_plant_is_still_producing_in/)
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**tl;dr: I built a scrog rig to secure medication for my disabled brother during Covid, and now I can grow a variety of food crops with it.**
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They were strange times. It seems like a lifetime ago. Huddled together in shocked silence, watching the news, wondering how on earth we were all going to wipe our bums.
Strange times indeed. National lockdowns. Supermarket shelves stripped bare. Outbreak top of the Netflix chart. Matt fucking Hancock.
As it turned out, Covid-19 wasn’t quite the end of the world. But for a while, it looked like it might be.
Personally, the biggest concern I had was securing supply of “essential medication” for my disabled brother, whom I had given up work to care for back in 2008.
Most of the stuff he needed came from the doctor. The stuff that didn’t, we got from a family friend. For years, supply had never been a problem. If it was needed, it had always been there.
But the world had changed. For the first time in years, we could no longer be certain of our supply.
By the time the UK finally went into lockdown, I already had my light, seeds, and a very small grow tent. All I had to do was decide upon a growing medium.
The grow tent was situated in the corner of my living room. With limited space, efficiency was the priority. Whatever would provide the largest yield per square foot would be the way forward.
Despite my complete lack of growing experience, I quickly decided that Deep Water Culture Hydroponics was the way forward.
With DWC, plants are grown in a modified bucket with the roots suspended in a nutrient-rich solution, delivering growth rate and yield unsurpassed by other, more beginner-friendly growing methods.
The day after my DWC equipment arrived, I discovered SCROG. Immediately, I was hooked. Here was a way to dramatically increase the yield of a single cannabis plant.
Instead of having to grow three or four plants at a time, with all the legal peril that entailed, I could grow just one.
Oh, hang on a minute.
From my research, I knew that DWC reservoirs had to be thoroughly cleaned every few weeks. If neglected, the resulting build-up of mineral salts could seriously impede plant growth. So, quite what one might do with an enormous plant, attached to a bucket lid and a 3ft x 3ft screen, whilst exposing its roots to the air while you cleaned the inside of the bucket was, well, anybody’s guess.
Okay, I thought, there must be some kind of solution. Hours later, the only thing my Google Fu had uncovered was a whole bunch of other reasons why scrogging was viewed as incompatible with DWC.
I took to the forums, to see what seasoned growers had to say. Mostly, it was, “Choose another medium if you want a successful scrog.”
But I really did not want to do that. Besides the fact that I’d already sprung for a bucket and air pump, the concept of SCROG was so attractive, especially if able to harness the growth potential of DWC. There had to be a mechanism to combine the two methods.
If there wasn’t, well, I’d build one myself.
And so, with a crude imagining of what a solution might look like rattling around inside my skull, I decided to go for it.
The challenge was designing a pulley system that would allow the bucket lid, scrog screen, and plant to be safely elevated to allow reservoir access.
Here is v2 of my prototype. I called it the Lazyscrog.
[**https://photos.app.goo.gl/jTzKx2ZQs6yih2pc6**](https://photos.app.goo.gl/jTzKx2ZQs6yih2pc6)
If you think this looks rough, you should have seen its predecessor. Cobbled together with PVC pipe and aluminium tape, v1.0’s screen was connected to my plant analogue (a four-litre bottle of water), using zip-ties and offcuts from the PVC pipe.
It might not have been pretty, but the way it lifted that water bottle would have made Archimedes proud.
At the beginning of all this, it’s fair to say that I had the brownest of fingers, with many a cactus having come to a sad, desiccated end on my kitchen windowsill.
However, with the aid of my constantly evolving Lazyscrog rig, I managed to transform myself from a complete horticultural novice, into a confident, intermediate cultivator, capable of extracting over half a kilo of medicine from a single harvest in just a matter of weeks. That’s right. 589g. Oh, yeah.
This is so cool
Absolutely amazing 🤩 years ago dh and I also did a medicinal grow. We didn’t do hydro but he also made a grid like yours for the very same reasons you mentioned! Wishing you and your family all the best. It’s never easy caring for a disabled loved one. Good thing he has a loving family member like you on his side.
I always scrog and dwc my medicine plants. I dunno why people had a problem as the cleaning isnt hard at all and just requires a bit of planning. I did it a few times to vegetable plants….got way to many tomatoes and peppers. Ill just save the scrog dwc for my other plants. I never suspended them like that and just used a 20 gallon tub that i would drain and pull out and had a temp rez with just pH’d water to let the roots chill in so i could do my every two weeks cleaning.