Oh - my buddy used to work overnights at a food processing plant in the summers to afford university… His job, take all the bread that came back from the grocery stores, rip the bags open and throw them in the hopper of the industrial toaster that started the breadcrumb process.

Not to say all the bread was moldy, but plenty was… It was the bread that came back that didn’t sell before their expiry… My buddy would describe a lot of what he’d throw in had a rainbow of mold colors on it.

Moldy bread is used to make bread crumbs for human consumption all day long…

What firmware and version are you running? Marlin? Have you ever reflashed your firmware? Typically you need to tweak the settings in your firmware to turn some features on. For me I had to edit the firmware out of the box to enable mesh bed leveling logic and to add the BL touch adapter. BL touch is used by the printer to measure the distance from the print head to the plate and it auto adjusts the Z-stop… You absolutely need a solid mount for it because it needs to take as accurate a reading as possible…

Oh man… Sounds like when I dipped into the hobby… I quickly learned that there’s different aspects to it. If you just want to print stuff you need to sink money into a decent printer like a flash forge adventurer 5m. Set n forget… It’ll print you want you want with little fuss. If you get in on the cheap then the machine itself is a whole other aspect that you need to learn and tune…and with tolerances being so tight in 3d printing … It’s hard!!! The number 1 thing that fails prints 98% of the time is first layer adhesion.
This can be corrected if you can enable mesh bed leveling… No print surface is perfectly flat. Mesh bed leveling measured 9-12 different points on the bed surface and adjusts for the non-flatness as it prints. The BL touch adapter makes that process easy- but not cheap. As for your print surface get a glass sheet to print on like a borosilicate glass plate from Geeetech. Make sure you adjust your Z-stop!! The other aspect that messed with me and really through me for loop was the feeder motors and if they’re feeding enough material. Others mentions step calibration… definitely do this. For me, the arm within the motor that presses the filament against the wheel had a hailline crack that I couldn’t see… It wasn’t applying enough pressure and the printer kept under extruding even though it calibrated right. I swapped those arms out for metal ones and never looked back… But that cracked arm really left me frustrated for weeks until I just unassembled the motor to discover the crack. It’s only a machine… You can win! Get a few good prints, don’t be too ambitious yet, and get your confidence up… It’s a good fun hobby!

Thanks for sharing - I’m in a 7a zone. I’ve just been using a kelp meal and targeting a 5.8pH for my lettuce but took the system down for cooler times as they all started bolting… I should have put them under some shade…

So that’s all 1 system? What type of nutrients do you use? I’ve only dabbled with lettuce since nutrient concerns and timing of them are minimal.
If you’re growing fruiting plants when do you know to swap to bloom nutrients? Does that affect your lettuce since it’s all the same system? How many seasons have you been doing this?