Nutrient Burn Question- W/ Pictures- Help! Thank You :)

[sorrel23]

Hey there folks, thanks in advance for your input. I am relatively new to growing despite being a long time trimmer. I was gone for 5 days and had someone else take care of my plants for me. I think they might have misread my instructions and given these ladies much too much cal mag (?) I found a half-full pint size measuring cup with what looks like cal mag in it even though the person should have only used 3 ml. - as well as over-watered them. Or maybe too much of the regular fertilizer I use- house and garden coco a&b. These plants are all about 1 & 1/2 months old, most are elmer's glue, a few are pie face. Normally I give 8ml/gal coco a&b- every watering, which is about every other day, and give 3 ml/gal cal mag every third watering. Room temp is about 67-73, and humidity about 50-56% with a dehu. Fans going as well. I'm using a 4 ft 8 lamp T5 about 1 ft above them. They looked like this when I got home today- they were fine and beautiful when I left. I checked their moisture level today and all but two of them are super wet too, even though normally after two days they're dry enough to water again. They're in coco medium w/ perlite and in half gallon size pots. They're about 1/1/2 to 2 ft tall. I'm wondering if the pots are still really wet because the theoretical over-nutrient situation stopped them from being able to take up the water. Almost all of the plants have upper leaves with curled-under claw like tips. The middle leaves are more normal looking but all of the leaves look dried out and stressed. and the very bottoms leaves, a lot of them shriveled up and fell off. This didn't happen at all when I was here. Here are some pictures I just took. Oh also, they are in a situation where they can drain well, the water doesn't just sit in the pots. Do you think I should flush them with ph-ed water even though they are currently quite wet (measured by picking up pots and moisture meter)?

 

[xavier7995]

Wouldn't hurt to flush them out since you don't really know how much went in, as you said they are already pretty wet so meh, it's just pushing the mystery nute amounts out the bottom. Give them a light feed and let them dry after that. I would imagine they will come out of it, the full plant pics don't look that bad.

Might be a good idea to trim off all the dead leaves. I try and keep plant debris out of my containers.

 

[sorrel23]

Wouldn't hurt to flush them out since you don't really know how much went in, as you said they are already pretty wet so meh, it's just pushing the mystery nute amounts out the bottom. Give them a light feed and let them dry after that. I would imagine they will come out of it, the full plant pics don't look that bad.

Might be a good idea to trim off all the dead leaves. I try and keep plant debris out of my containers.

Thank you! I am such a paranoid person so it really helps to hear that they don't look that bad. What you said about watering them not being too negatively impactful because they're already wet totally makes sense, I'm gonna do that tonight and I'll see how they do. Thanks again for your response, I really appreciate it.

 

[sorrel23]

I'm now thinking it might be a Ph problem- I checked and it was above 7. yikes! I flushed it with Ph 6 water, 2x the amount of soil in the pot. We'll see what happens.

 

[Savage Henry]

Don't worry so much about letting em dry in coco, 7 is way high, I'd flush em with 25% nutrients till the runoff is 5.8-6.0. Don't worry, coco loves a good flush.

When I have to leave I'll mix up as large a Rez as possible so the watcher only has to worry about ph, something that's easily coached over the phone.

Since you're new to coco I highly suggest reading the "beds are for f***ing" thread in the coco coir section. Changed my whole perspective on coco.

But yea, you'll be fine, ime 8ml/gal of the hg cocos is just right, can keep a mom going in that indefinitely.

 

[Seamaiden]

Also, P- going on.

 

[sorrel23]

Does anyone think this kind of damage could be from broad mites?

 

[Savage Henry]

Hopefully not but the sixth and seventh pictures make me not want to rule it out. Probably not, because you've identified other problems. Broad mites cause damage that looks like a lot of other things.

Really depends on where you sources your clones from.

I would get a 60/120x scope off of amazon (like $15) great tool to have around and the only real way to be sure.

FYI, this is early broad mite damage:

Another example:

Note the inward curling leaves and general "crispification"

They like hanging out near new growth.

Not trying to freak you out, you're probably fine but it's a good idea to have a scope to check out anything that looks fishy.

 

[sorrel23]

Hopefully not but the sixth and seventh pictures make me not want to rule it out. Probably not, because you've identified other problems. Broad mites cause damage that looks like a lot of other things.

Really depends on where you sources your clones from.

I would get a 60/120x scope off of amazon (like $15) great tool to have around and the only real way to be sure.

FYI, this is early broad mite damage:View attachment 574440

Another example:View attachment 574441
Note the inward curling leaves and general "crispification"

They like hanging out near new growth.

Not trying to freak you out, you're probably fine but it's a good idea to have a scope to check out anything that looks fishy.

Thank you! That is all really great information. I got all my clones from people who I trust to be on top of pests, but I am in an area of Mendocino that I think has had a lot of broad mite problems this last year and the person who grew here before me was known to be really careless and sloppy with everything so I don't want to rule it out. I did borrow a 100x scope and look at a bunch of the leaves, mainly on the bottoms, I couldn't find too much that I thought looked suspicious but I know they can be hard to find. I did find this one, but it's hard to say if it's even a bug really, but I tried to take a picture of it. Does it look like it could be a spider mite? That would be fine with me honestly, I know they're here b/c of above said bad grower. Also, I had an a-ha moment, realized I did something really stupid with my botanicare plus cal-mag: I was adding to my regular nutrient mixed water, every third watering, 3 ml/gal, but only adding it to one gallon and spreading that gallon out between all the plants instead of adding it to each gallon that I use to water them. So stupid. Especially since I have been so obsessive about everything to make sure it's all perfect. So... hopefully it's also a deficiency of all the various things in the botanicare cal mag plus which can be corrected.