Get a look at the AutoPot Tray2Grow System Unboxing and setup!
Natural Roots Hydroponics and Organic gardening supply provides helpful videos for both soil and hydroponic growing. We show you how to setup the award-winning AutoPot Tray2Grow system to grow lettuce and bok choi in both soil and hydroponically. We offer both retail and online commercial gardening supplies. Natural Roots in Nashua NH offers tax free hydroponic and organic gardening supplies including soils, fertilizers, seeds, netpots, hydroton / LECA, Lights, mushroom grow kits and so much more!
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What’s up folks this is Eric from natural Roots Hydroponics and organic garden supply here in nashille New Hampshire and I’m here to show you the autopot tray to grow system amazing system here it uses a reservoir and will automatically flood this tray and allow your plants whether it be pots or you
Can grow seeds with it you can do micro greens with it you can even do uh lay a big bag of soil on it and grow tomatoes by just cutting X’s right inside and put the tomato plants right inside the grow bag it’s a very unique system out of the
UK we’re going to show you how to unbox and get it all set up and some of the cool ways you can grow this black seated Simpson here a bok choy right in your own home or on your patio with very little uh interaction once you get it
Set up so before we begin the unboxing we’re going to show you the different methods that you can use with the autopot tray to grow the first method here shown in the upper left corner is with micro greens or for seed starting the other method in the bottom left
Which shows the tomato plants is actually growing out of a grow bag and that’s what the spikes and the capillary strips are included for and then in the upper right that is the raised bed style and that is a very popular method for indoor gardeners and lastly we’re going to show
You the pots method um and that’s the method we’re going to go into detail here and show you some of our results this is a a wonderful system for indoor or outdoor Growers and right now we’re going to show you how to get it
Set up we just took it out of the box and all these cool parts and pieces come with it depending on what you want to do the most important piece to this is the float valve here this is a patented float valve and it literally allows the
Tray to flood the plants will soak that up and then when it needs more water it’ll automatically allow the water to come in from the reservoir here now the reservoir does not come with this but you can pick this up here and you can also pick up the domes for these seed
Trays so there’s a lot of different options if you want to use it for micro greens or sprouting seeds these trays are very beneficial we’re going to actually use it for growing some lettuce here and right now we just are wanted to show you what what we have here to get
Set up but we’re going to actually take our Rockwell lettuce cubes use the Happy Frog soil and the hydron Leica on top and then have a tray where this will automatically grow here under our T5 lights so again it comes with the float valve it also comes with this is a
Reservoir tap if you decide that you’re going to use a reservoir with a tap system um and a valve system so to speak right now we’re tapped directly into our Reservoir with this this hose here that comes with that um and then we have a
Turn off over there if we decide we want to turn off the water which it is right now for setup so I’m going to move these trays out of the way and then show you what else it comes with so these are some of the parts again you
Got your shut off valve it also comes with it something that’s very important is a levelers these bubble levels will get put in and I’ll show you that now is it’s really important since it’s a flood system to make sure that it’s level first and foremost the tray if it’s not
Level you’re going to get all the water and nutrients to flood down on this end and then the float valve will cause it to flood so there’s also a filter that allows you from your Reservoir it’ll filter the water to make sure we’re going to install the bubble levels right now and
They just snap in to these spots right here and if you zoom in there you can see that that bubbles right in the middle showing a nice level tray and we’ve already put one in down here and there’s another over here so again we’re looking nice and
Level the other thing we want to do is since we’re using this indoors there’s an overflow valve here that is in case you do have it in an outdoor setup the this plug here will automatically drain so it doesn’t over flood if it’s outdoors since I’m
Indoors I can put this plug in here and I don’t want anything to leak out so all I do is you can wet that and then put this solid plug right in here to make sure that it’s not going to leak if you use this Outdoors you definitely want to take that
Out and then now that we’ve we’ve got the plug in this end in order to get the valve in here we want to make sure we put in this grommet into the hole here this is our and what happens is our hose is going to thread through that making a
Tight Water Seal Connection so it can fill up this Reservoir here all right so we’ve put this in you can already see we’ve already mounted it if you look inside there all right and then what we’re going to do is take the hose and then feed the hose
Through and it helps if you wet the hose a little bit all right and then we’re going to pull the hose through here as you can see we pull the hose through so we have enough to hook up the pump all right and then now we or to hook up the Val valve
The flood valve and now this is the important Half Moon and then this goes right down on top of this little guy here this little T that sticks out all right and all we do is we snap that down here before I do that I’m going to connect the
Hose so we loosen this put the hose on here after we put that through wrong way all right and then we make sure we get this over that little valve here over that opening and then you make sure you do not tighten this too much just until
You start to feel it getting snug this is a compression valve all right it’s snug right there do not overtighten that and then now what I want to do is pull this hose back until this half moon is lined up so I don’t have too much
Extra hose and then I’m just going to snap it down on that little plastic piece and now my flood valve installation is secure nice and firm all right and then again now that’s my lift valve so when it floods the table this will lift up and stop the fluid from coming in the
Most important thing about this tray is that we have these capillary mats and this there’s a there’s a couple things this is a root control mat this is a copper laced mat this will actually stop the roots from the plants getting down and clogging this area over here
It’s very important that the roots don’t get into the valve or you can have a catastrophic flooding and your Reservoir can be all over your floor you do not want that so before we put the root control mat in we want to put in this capillary mat and this matting is a
Wicking type system so it will draw when the table floods it’ll draw the water and so soak this mat up and then of course the plants on top of that will then as long as you have some exposure here on your pots all right the wicking
From this wet mat will then allow the plants to drink up and when it’s dry that will fall the reservoir will flood the table again and allow again the plants to take a drink so you can literally grow indoors or Outdoors leave this unattended as long as you have have
A reservoir with your nutrients in it already and you can leave it for several weeks at a Time come home and harvest so before we can put this in we need to make sure we soak the mat and this is a very important part you do not want to put this in without
Soaking it you’ve got to make sure that you tuck it into these channels so what I’m going to do is I’m going to soak this in my reverse osmosis water that I used I have a stealth Hydro reverse osmosis we’re going to take this and then soak
It so here we have our capillary mat and we have our bucket of reverse osmosis water and we’ve gone ahead and we can we add nutrients in here and right now we’re going to keep our lettuce and nutrients and all that at 600 PPM we’ve also made sure that our
Reservoir started with our water and then we brought it up to 600 PPM and we’re using the Maxi grow General Hydroponics mix this is a great General fertilizer for seedlings plants house plants Etc but it’s also great for um a single onep part liquid powder fertilizer for Hydroponics aeroponics
Etc so now what we’re going to do is take our capillary mat and we’re just going to soak it and you want to get pretty much all the air out and you want this to soak up the water before you flood the table and actually you know right now
Once we soak this and tuck it in and get it get it prepared and we put our plants on we’re not going to turn on the reservoir for a few weeks and that’s because these we’re going to top dress top water all of the everything once we
Put it in we’ll water the plants they won’t they will automatically when they need the water again we’ll go ahead and turn on the reservoir should be about a week or two week and a half and then it will be a self watering it’ll it’ll take care of everything you can turn the
Reservoir on if let’s you’re doing this a pinch you need to go on vacation or something but we always recommend waiting uh one or two weeks and then turning the system on all right and then this will also snap over that to keep the roots out of the the pump Bay once
We’re done so right now we’re going to leave that off just to make sure we don’t have any crazy leaks any leaks here we’re going to make sure we leave leave that off for a minute now we’ve got our capillary mat that we’ve soaked and again this is a very critical
Step it’s also very useful for making sure that the mat is easier to fold into these channels um without doing this a dry mat will just not allow you to prep the table properly you want the black side up and then you place the matting in all
Right and it’s again oversized for the table and now you want to tuck it into these outer channels all right and make sure the mat once it’s tucked in is Touching The Edge and you can pull it back a little bit all right and then now we’re going to go over in this
Side and do the same thing and again tuck that all the way down without this if you don’t do this and put this in this channel here it’s not going to do the capillary action to pull the nutrients and water up to the second level here all right so make sure that’s
All tucked in like that and again we’re using this is the method for for this right here okay for planting our lettuce and then we’re going to end up putting that right on top once we put the root protector down so so now we’ve got this tucked in and that’s pretty firmly in
There now we take our copper root mat the root protector and we lay that on just like that and now we’re going to take this once we double check it we’re going to turn our reservoir on just to make sure even though I say we’re not going to
Flood it for a few weeks I’m going to go ahead and flood it right now just to show you how this works so I’m going to move my my other PPM water here that’s at 600 and right now I have the valve marked for off and I’m just going to
Simply turn it on all right and now if you look down here you can start to see it flooding out so here comes the water and again this is this unique valve once it floods it’ll come up and it will stop the table from flooding once that comes
Up to the proper level it’s really a unique valve here so this is where you want to look at any of the connections on the side make sure all your grommets are in firmly so nothing is leaking make sure your table is nice and level as we
Showed you earlier all right the mat should be beautiful and ready to go now what we want to do is we’ve already finished this one we actually took some wicking mat that comes with this system for grow bags and decided to put this down in our pot just to give a little
Bit more contact and more wicking opportunity for this plant we’re going to do this with half of them and these are some of the wicking materials that come with come with this these are actually designed to do grow bags in this system where you can take a big bag
Of soil you use these and thread them through these spikes you set the spikes up and then throw the bag of soil down cut the x’s in the top and plant your tomato plants directly in the big bag this helps Wick up the the moisture into the Big Grow
Bag so once we have one of our plants done we can go ahead and lay that down now what we’re going to do is put some Happy Frog into this pot we’re going to bring it up about halfway a little bit more and then we’ll take one of our
Rockwell cubes with lettuce put it in and then take some of the Lea hydron and put the that on top now this is just simply protecting the organic soil from gnats and fungus it’s also uh helps keep locks of moisture in it’s a really great substrate for putting on top of your
Plants your house plants as well as great for growing hydroponic in so this will add a lot of opportunity for proper bacteria and air um to to get in and around the root Zone because we have it a little bit further down below as well
Well with some of the soil as you can see here and we’ll show you how we’re going to build one right now all right so we ended up using our Happy Frog and we filled this pot up um about 3/4 of the way all right and we’re
Going to make a little divot in there and let me grab a Rockwell Cube so now we have our lettuce growing in our rock wool you can see there’s some root development at the bottom here you want to make sure that once you get this in here you put the hydron on top
You want to definitely top water it all right and we’re going to end up draining this tray because we wanted to show you how how it goes and that’s the reason if you’re top watering all of a sudden now you’re adding that much more water to
The tray it it obviously is going to be a little bit too full this is designed to stay at that level so make sure if you’re going to top water this I’m actually going to move it off to the side top water it get it all ready to go
And put it right down here next to its sister and then put the rest of them down on the table and I’ll show you how to do that in just a second so we’re going to pour the hydron all right carefully up and around making sure not to
Damage the lettuce plant itself okay it’s not bad if something rolls over the top of it and you want it just bar covering the Top of the Rock wo now I rinsed all this hydron several times um in R water to make sure so I’m not carrying any crazy nutrients in here um
It’s all been rinsed to get all the clay dust um because that will also clog up your soil all right and then once you get that all on there now you want to do your top watering get it watered thoroughly through so you’re not dripping the excess water into the tray
All right and then we’re going to put it down right next to at the other lettuce plant and then we’re going to continue to go ahead and put these all the way through um right now we’re probably going to put 10 plants in here for now um but you could
Go with smaller Pots if you want I think this is the perfect size for a lettuce plant you’re going to get a good head of lettuce all the way down it’s going to look beautiful and we’re going to take the cover make sure you do this put the
Cover on this is going to help with evaporation um but it’s also going to help keep the roots out of of this like I said you do not want to get any roots in here um because these roots will start to grow down through this and will
Will spread out along this mat as the plant grows and gets aggressive looking for more nutrients it will get in there if you do not have this on tightly and that will probably cause a flooding situation which you definitely don’t want so some of the other parts I want
To show you if you’re doing this outside here’s your copper tape this is to slugs out slugs absolutely love fresh lettuce and greens and tomatoes and all their kinds of good stuff so they give you the copper tape and this gives the slug an electric shock if they try to come over
This and all you got to do is just take it and put it all around the edge here and that will keep the slugs from coming up and over into your plants and like I showed you before these are the spikes that would go in if
You’re using grow bags okay there are a lot of other options you can get you can also see here that you can get fabric Planters okay you can do the micro green trays you can do the seed trays here and buy the additional uh domes humidity
Domes and here’s the grow bag I talked about and you have room on the sides um for bamboo trellises or a trellis system if you’re doing cucumbers or anything like that in here and then of course what we’re doing is the pots um of any different size you can use all all kinds
Of different size pots so don’t don’t think you’re stuck to just this size you can use any size you want depending on the size of the plant that you’re going to be growing so thanks a lot for watching everybody we really think that the traded grow system by autopilot is
One of the most unique easiest ways to get into either indoor or outdoor gardening for any type of plant you want to grow
1 Comment
Love the video guys!