OP, how often are you "feeding?" Just by the way you have worded a couple things, I get the impression that it's
possible you are feeding every time? Or every other time maybe?
Here is the thing with feeding, & this is just IME. But your plants will do much better if you feed them too little, vs. too much. It will be a healthier plant.
You say this is your first grow. Often times people will have a nutrient set & they go by what is on the bottle. What is on the bottle is often too much. I start with 1/4 of what is listed, & feed once a week once it has passed the seedling phase. If the plants do ok with that, I will bump it up to 1/2 the next time & see how they do. If they appear to enjoy that, I will proceed cautiously from there. But seldom with the
Nectar for the Gods nutrients I used in soil was I able to use the full dose, even on very large plants. I ran a batch of Sour Diesel which could only take 1/4 of the recommended dose. It's just a light feeder. If I just keep trying to pump nutrients into the plant, not only am I just wasting the nutrients, but I'm also stressing the plant & decreasing overall yield & potency. You are hurting the plant by over feeding it, not helping it.
This is one of my plants I put up for the POTM just so I could vote. It's the last page, last photo. The plant is finishing up this week so it looks nothing like that now. It's just the only pic I had to post.
But what I am looking for you can see here...
I would give you a newer photo to reference but I'm currently on vacation. But if you look closely (very closely) at two of the leaf tips you can see they've dried & lost color. It's only on a couple of the leaves, throughout the entire plant. It's hard to tell because of the lighting but the leaves are a nice green color. Not abnormally dark or blue-ish. No yellow-ing or drying. It was a little humid that day so you can see the fins curling a bit, but on average, the leaves are nice & flat.
That is the line you want to walk. If you are giving the plants a balanced feeding, what I just described above is what you will see. & when I see that on my plants, I know that the nutes are almost perfect. I will either back off a tiny amount with the nutes, or if the plant is still growing a lot, by the next feeding it will probably take the same dose of nutes without any of the bad effects I described above.
Let's use that plant as a reference...if I fed that plant on 6/1/15, the earliest I will feed it again would be 6/8, & then I will again watch for any signs of over-feeding. If I get any more of the effects I described above, I will back off & feed it every 10 days. If that doesn't go perfectly, I will back off to every two weeks.
The biggest mistake noobs make is over watering or feeding. But watering too often is nowhere near as harmful as feeding too much. Excessive nutes will delay the plants growth, sometimes bring it to a screeching halt. Remember, for our purposes, your time with the plant is very limited. Usually, you have 16 weeks or less. So, every time you give it excessive nutrients, you are wasting what little time you have to develop the plant & get the desired results.
If the cause of your problem is over feeding (& I agree with Seamaiden now that it probably is), think of it as losing one of those precious weeks. Therefore, you are WAY better off, to under feed, than to over feed.
