Slowly withering Away... any ideas???

[Ninjadogma]

Well... According to Bruce Bugbee, all macronutrients become less soluble in alkalinity. Otherwise, because I don't grow with salts, I can't comment with authority.


The medium was amended with both lime and gypsum, which I haven't seen before. That seems like it would be a lot of calcium. So, yes. Lockout seems a likely possibility.

You can't grow cannabis without salts. They are simply the minerals in ionized form that plants eat, whether they are placed there by liquid or dry amendments or produced from the waste of microbes. They eat what they can and what they don't is supposed to fall out of the soil. And if you're not watering correctly, it doesn't fall out of the soil correctly. It's not just an "added nutrients" problem. It's an excess of nutrients in the soil problem, regardless of how they got there.

 

[Ninjadogma]

Lime has really screwed the soil I believe, and is Likely why the Ph is so high. Don’t know how to reduce it though, maybe flushing could do it? If it’s dolomite I believe the mag calcium ratios are out of whack and causes lock out.

I wouldn't recommend flushing it out, would require too much water. For the short term you can just adjust your input to a lower pH value, meanwhile you can work on getting some acidic amendments to counter the lime, like elemental sulfer or humic/fulvic so you aren't having to adjust with every watering, and also because the pH in the soil will creep back up in between waterings without a buffer. The soil environment you really want to aim for 6.5 so that it's smack dab in the middle range.

 

[LoveGrowingIt]

You can't grow cannabis without salts.

How about this? You can grow cannabis without worrying about salts.

 

[dangles]

update on this plant... i went on vacation, plants had a babysitter with watering instructions... came back the thing looked near death. I cut off any green in an attempt to clone and the rest of the plant went to the trash =(

 

[dangles]

Old thread, but I found the reasoning for this plants demise and hopefully, it saves someone else if they ever experience this. It turns out, i was NOT using distilled water in my humidifier. In turn, it was spewing out calcium/magnesium. There was a white powder all over the place. calcium/magnesium is in essence "lime", which I already add to my media mix to RAISE pH. Basically, as the plant sits in this environment, more and more of that Calcium/Magnesium was getting into the soil, and thus raising the pH to unhealthy levels!