C
ChebbyFlowers
- Posts
- 65
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- 78
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2024
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- 18
Hi there everyone,
I've got 6 plants in first week/transition into flower. I've grown them out larger than I normally do. Five of them are doing fabulous, but one just seems to keep having issues with Calcium/Magnesium deficiency. I'm getting speckles on some of the leaves and lower leaves get splotches that get brown and necrotic and begin to die.
This started happening a couple weeks ago and I initially thought that I was not feeding consistently enough. The plants are all in CocoLoco mix which is supposed to have enough nutrition to last several weeks so I was feeding salts sparingly and just doing pH adjusted water with some CalMag mostly.
After I noticed the deficiencies I began just feeding on a schedule. Every other day I would feed at an EC of about 1.00-1.10. The medium would dry back well enough, but it wouldn't be totally dry. This seemed to fix the issue and I went ahead and did a slurry test on the plant in question as well as another couple. The pH of the one in question seemed a bit low, around 5.3... the others were closer to 5.9.
I started keeping the feed water pH a bit higher between 6.3 and 6.5 and thought that this would definitely fix the issue. The plant has been stretching nicely and the new growth looks healthy, but today I noticed some more speckling on the interior leaves as well as more necrosis on the lower leaves. I decided it would be a good time to flush this plants medium with pH adjusted water.
I ran 5 gallons of water through it and then replenished nutrients with another 2.5 gallons of feed solution. Here's where I am confused: my feed solution was 1.1 EC at 6.5 pH....I checked my runoff to make sure I wasn't teaching a lot of salt and as I suspected it was pretty clean, .9 EC, however the runoff pH was all the way down to 5.1-5.2. Even after leaching whatever salt buildup, if any, how can this pH be so low? Should I be concerned about this or just try and let the plant be and continue to monitor it?
If I am treating the CocoLoco more like a hydro medium at this point I know the pH should be between 5.5 and 6.5 and this has always worked for me in past grows, but as I said I always kept plants much smaller, in smaller containers. These girls are all in 7 gallon plastic pots. I'm used to 3 gal. root mass and plants about 2' tall at harvest. These girls are already almost 2.5' tall and only just started stretching.
Really I guess my question is how low a soil pH is too low when growing in Coco? If you're feeding salt based ferts in "soil" what makes that any different of an approach than coco other than how long the heavier media takes to dry back?
I've got 6 plants in first week/transition into flower. I've grown them out larger than I normally do. Five of them are doing fabulous, but one just seems to keep having issues with Calcium/Magnesium deficiency. I'm getting speckles on some of the leaves and lower leaves get splotches that get brown and necrotic and begin to die.
This started happening a couple weeks ago and I initially thought that I was not feeding consistently enough. The plants are all in CocoLoco mix which is supposed to have enough nutrition to last several weeks so I was feeding salts sparingly and just doing pH adjusted water with some CalMag mostly.
After I noticed the deficiencies I began just feeding on a schedule. Every other day I would feed at an EC of about 1.00-1.10. The medium would dry back well enough, but it wouldn't be totally dry. This seemed to fix the issue and I went ahead and did a slurry test on the plant in question as well as another couple. The pH of the one in question seemed a bit low, around 5.3... the others were closer to 5.9.
I started keeping the feed water pH a bit higher between 6.3 and 6.5 and thought that this would definitely fix the issue. The plant has been stretching nicely and the new growth looks healthy, but today I noticed some more speckling on the interior leaves as well as more necrosis on the lower leaves. I decided it would be a good time to flush this plants medium with pH adjusted water.
I ran 5 gallons of water through it and then replenished nutrients with another 2.5 gallons of feed solution. Here's where I am confused: my feed solution was 1.1 EC at 6.5 pH....I checked my runoff to make sure I wasn't teaching a lot of salt and as I suspected it was pretty clean, .9 EC, however the runoff pH was all the way down to 5.1-5.2. Even after leaching whatever salt buildup, if any, how can this pH be so low? Should I be concerned about this or just try and let the plant be and continue to monitor it?
If I am treating the CocoLoco more like a hydro medium at this point I know the pH should be between 5.5 and 6.5 and this has always worked for me in past grows, but as I said I always kept plants much smaller, in smaller containers. These girls are all in 7 gallon plastic pots. I'm used to 3 gal. root mass and plants about 2' tall at harvest. These girls are already almost 2.5' tall and only just started stretching.
Really I guess my question is how low a soil pH is too low when growing in Coco? If you're feeding salt based ferts in "soil" what makes that any different of an approach than coco other than how long the heavier media takes to dry back?