If you are losing them as seedlings;
One simple thing that people losing plants as seedlings is over watering. I don’t know anything about that soil but if it is to compacted it causes issues. I add rice hauls or you can use perlite to help.
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At that size I usually have great luck with just cocoa and worm poop. If they need food just sprinkle a little more worm poop. I usually don’t give anything else until first up pot. This is just my opinion by you have to be overdoing it. It does not make sense to me that they would be under fed.
I see you cannot get seeds shipped to you, but if you find a way I can send you like 50 Afghani auto seeds that you can practice with without wasting money.
As some stated, overwater may be the cause of this problem, use this method: separate by pairs of pots and act diffrently with each set until you find the right way, I would say take 3 days off and then come back to water if and only if the pots are light, other wise keep checking everyday until the pot is light.
You may need to learn how to water a seedling, think of a seedling as a plant with a very narrow root system, if you soak the soil it is a bad thing because we all know that air is more important than loads of water for root developement, if you train them well you can water only once a week with nice results.
Back to watering seedlings, the soil needs to be dry, all mix and light mix already have a nice content of moisture in it.
The first week you just want to dry 1 in radius of the plant and small waterings, just to moist that area, you can use a sprayer with water and lile 3-5 puffs by the plant is all you need to keep them groing up and down, and after 2 weeks you will have a more spreaded padron of the roots, the pots will start getting lighter faster and they will ask you for more or less water, remember that less water after the 2nd week is better because the plant will stretch the roots seeking for water, so in the first 2 weeks less water is better than sofucate the roots or getting them rotten by the moisture.
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I use all mix but I re use my soil, when using virgin all mix, use half the dosage of nutrients from their chart, after you run your harvest remove most of the roots and keep the old soil for later use, 3 to 5 months later I get that soil, add 1/5 of compost and instead of all mix chart, use light mix chart, values spot on. Have been working for me as long as the ph is correct and if using led, calmag may help too but may deppend on your tap water.
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Dear masters of this craft,
I come with… good news. I’m the creator of this topic, haven’t responded in a long time. I am currently at the beginning of day 9 since sprout.
Yes, these are 9 days old, so I imagine we’re on a good run. All autoflowers, the one in the middle was my trial plant (freebie seed), seen more as a test subject on how to water correctly.
The other 4 plants are my main ones, expensive seeds (Mephisto & 420FB, expensive for me!). Here’s what I did - I got 5gal (19L) fabric pots, filled with Biobizz Light Mix & 10% perlite. I pre-watered every pot with 1 1/3 gallons (5L) of PHed water @ 6.5. The 5L of water contained 0.5 grams of epsom salts, 2.5ML of CalMag, some root stimulants, and enzymes. Watered til small runoff (maybe 5% if at all).
1 day before I did this, I started germinating my seeds (24 hour shotglass). Next day, pot preparation as explained above, and seeds transferred to papertowel for another 24 hours. Pots were stored in a warm room to lose moisture and activate. Then another 24 hours in coco plugs.
I then removed the whole substrate out of the pots to remix it and distribute the moisture more evenly, and also to loosen the substrate up again. Back into the pots, coco plugs with seeds into them, ~50ml of water around each plug, done.
78°F, 65-70% humidity, 24/0 cycle. Air circulation, no exhaust for 5 days, but tent was open on top to lose humidity & to collect some CO2 on the bottom. Don’t ask me if this works, let me live in my imaginary world of “it works”. As of day 6, I turned the exhaust on VERY low, and closed the tent. CO2 bag won’t do anything now, probably, but whatever, I still had this one laying around & didn’t pay for it.
And most importantly of all - I did not water yet. It’s been 11 days since I last watered, which was the pre-watering of the pots. As of then, I only misted the top of the substrate every other day or so, with only 50ml of PHed water.
So far I’m pretty happy, but I still feel like something will totally go wrong any time soon, but we will see!
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I am very happy for your success, now once the roots spread and the plants grow a little more and you can give it a real watering with feeding.
Remember that too much care is also bad, as well as too much watering.
I knew because that happened to me too on my first grow and I kind of blamed the burple light but deep inside I know I was over watering. After the first few runs you will get the hang on it, will be more prone to wait and you will visit your grow every two days instead of everyday.
Next step is to find the good ammount of nutrients for your plants, if you use the biobizz chart you will have some burned leave tips. Reduce the ammount of nutrients or in a first approach if you want and can just try each plant with their own feeding and you will be able to see what is best over all.
Welcome to the game!!!
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PLEASE READ, I NEED HELP!
Hello guys,
It’s been a few days, and all my plants are dying again. Apparently, we have found the cause, but I want to pull you guys into this theory we built. I feel like this is the most professional forum of all world wide, even if the community isn’t insanely huge. You guys are the most trustworthy.
So - First of all, I want to add the basics once again, so no one has to read the whole thread.
I am using Biobizz Light Mix. It’s a peat-moss based organic substrate, with a recommended input PH of <7.0 with 6.3-6.5 being perfect. I use this in combination with Biobizz nutrients. My temps are stable at 75-78°F, humidity also whatever I set it at. My tapwater has an EC of 0.3, with an outgoing PH between 7,9-8,0 (w/o nutrients or anything). It has a natural calcium content of 49mg/L, and 5mg/L of magnesium. Really bad ratio.
The plants in my latest post above were growing like crazy. Seriously, I never had such amazing growth in 11 days from seed onwards. They were scratching the growth of 14 day old plants in some cases, at only 10 days. They were as healthy as they can be. I won’t repeat what I said in just one comment above, so read up on it please, to get some info BEFORE EVERYTHING WENT DOWNWARDS AGAIN.
Now after this side-info, here is where everything turned bad real quick. After 12 days, my pots were 90% dry. I check this with the pot weight method. They were ready to be watered again.
I made a new solution of 1ml BIobizz CalMag per litre of water, as apparently this should have fixed my bad Cal/Mag ratio in the tapwater, with 0.1g of epsom salts per liter. 5 liters for every plant, so 5ml calmag and 0.5g of epsom salts, as I go by the 1/4 method. This is confirmed to work with this substrate, it can’t be the cause. I did this with 1 day old seedlings, and they thrived and thrived, people were impressed by their growth, me too. I added a very low feed of Fish Mix, which set my PH to 6.5.
So I watered, and this sh*t came back. All my plants got yellow new growth, shooting out everywhere. Literally no one understands how this is happening, I’ve been chasing this problem for OVER ONE YEAR now. Not old growth yellowing, it’s the newest growth, the newest nodes, side branches, they come out bright yellow, as if there’s no chlorophyll at all being built. My watering techniques didn’t change anything, I literally let some plants dry out until they drooped, and I still got this yellow new growth.
This was around 5 days ago. I then joined tons of discord servers, this and that, just so I can find as many people as possible as one last attempt to find out what the hell is happening here, and I… apparently found one dude who might have found the fix for all of this.
Sulfur. I apparently have a severe sulfur deficiency, sometimes as early as 5 days from seed. And rather rare, yet I have it every grow, literally every time. No one knew why, or how, as this isn’t something ordinary like an N, P, or K deficiency, nothing like a Cal or Mag deficiency. It’s sulfur for whatever reason.
And then we went on and off, talked about everything, and we apparently found the solution to this hell that’s been chasing me - Calcium. There’s a possibility that I just have too much Calcium, and it’s “eating up” all the sulfur / sulfides in my substrate.
So I grabbed my epsom salts, and did a very light foliar with 0.1g of epsom salts in 1L of water, with some yucca extract to make the stuff cling to the leaves. Fans turned off, light on 5%, so it’s pretty much just shade with no possibility to burn the plants. I then let it dry off slowly, so it could absorb.
I then did a third watering which finally caused my plants to droop. I had so many accusations of overwatering because of the yellowing, yet apparently I have never overwatered and this was a first for me, I finally saw drooping leaves in 1 year of trying to grow successfully. This watering consisted of a bigger dose of epsom salts (1g in another 5L of water), and Bio Heaven and Algamic to protect my roots a bit, with added enzymes, as my watering now really caused a ton of runoff, which was planned.
I felt like I might have fixed it, as some growth came back greener. But my plants are still dying. The pots have dried up slightly, there’s around 50% waterweight left, yet they still look sad, and are dying. New growth here and there is coming out yellow again, and I’m just losing every bit of hope. I am currently at day 17 since seed.
Leaves are crisping up in a VERY weird way, like brown lines burning through the leaves. Edges are turning brown here and there, and the biggest fan leaves are becoming lighter in color, as if they’re losing all the green.
I just don’t know what to do anymore. These are autoflowers, so I feel like I probably have lost them with all these days being lost.
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If there still water in pots they don’t need water, or so much.
You need to feed them right, light mix is very poor in nutrients, see if they like 4mg per litre of biogrow next watering or just a small watering like 10cc.
It is important to drop water ph to 6-6.5 so the nutrients intake is optimized.
That’s a hard one. I get those simptoms when they are asking for up potting but don’t seem to be the case, they look small on the pots so if most is right and these are weeds they probably will recover during vegging.
Sometimes I also get some strange signs from my plants and I just flip and start flowering diet and they seem to like it, maybe trying flowering feed for one watering?
If you have 3 in the same conditions I would give one bioheaven and root juice, other bioheaven and biogrow and other flowering feed 1 week and see how they respond.