I appreciate the reply, so I’ll gladly answer your questions:
I have a plant count limit. I bought the 5x5 recently, and planned to do 3 girls in a big scrog. Popped 5 seeds, 4 germinated and I had them sex-tested. 2 boys (into the bin) and 2 girls. And here we are today.
I’m new to this. Last grow was a coco/peat mix, and I’ve never used real “dirt” before. I mistakenly thought the soil had enough nutrients to carry me through, and I’ll own that.
I was scared to overwater (yes, I understand it’s frequency, not quantity that causes overwatering). I realize now that I made many mistakes.
Honestly, I wouldn’t feel like you have to answer for mistakes made.
We’ve all made them ourselves!
I’m years into do this now, and still making mistakes!
Important thing is that we learn from them, and hopefully others can learn from us too.
@BoldestRoast sonsofavery is right no need to apologize to anyone.
We all have made similar mistakes in our growing journey and anyone who tells you different is more than likely lying or so old they just forgot…
Just learn from these situations is all you can do.
I think noknees was spot on with all he said. But probably went about it the wrong way.
If my plants are to big going into flower they end up yellowing very early and looking terrible.
I’ve found it’s best to transplant them just before I switch to flower so they can use that new soil for the stretch. But I use small 2 gallon pots and flower almost straight from clone.
Yeah, mistakes are mistakes. I continue making them, hopefully they are just new mistakes each time. All you, and we, can do is try to help you figure it out and get your girls feeling a little better. And hopefully we learn too. At least I intend to.
You have a couple different paths you could potentially take right now. Flush and feed is one. It sounds reasonable to me. I’d do some testing on my soil but I already have a test kit so that would be my first step. I’d verify pH, and check my K level.
Potting up sounds like a decent path as well, in conjunction with flushing. You probably are going to want to flush regardless because that 8 pH is pretty screwy.
I’m still very curious why it got so high. Maybe you have used up all your balancing anions and just feeding it N + P could fix it.
I am a beginner as well, so I’m just chucking out my speculation and see if it vibes with people who know more than I do. I had to learn more than I bargained for getting my grow going.
if you add it to the Magnesium I saw in the first pic that means that the plant is not feeding well. That could happen because of a nutrient lockout due to pH being too high so all those nutrients out of range or your soil being depleted because of a long veg time and nutrients exhausted already.
That’s why I won’t go organic, you never know what’s in your soil and it’s hard to mend unless you’re a guru or a sorcerer after years using it. A slurry test can go handy, not only to see if soil is still alkaline but also checking the ppm (or EC) of the remnant water might give a clue of what’s really happening: if it’s too high that means there’s a lockout and plant cannot access nutrients available, if too low plant is just hungry.
I wouldn’t add anything until having that data, feeding more a plant with nutes locked only worsen the situation, if EC is too low it’s easier to manage but flushing wouldn’t be a good idea.
Better to have all info available before making the next step, I believe a recovery is still possible …
I flushed the plants last night with two gallons each. I followed a guide that suggested 1/4-strength nutrients for the flushing water, so I used my Roots products and pH’d to 6.0. PPM going in was 374, and runoff was 1783 PPM with a pH of 7.5. Lastly, I top-dressed microbe charge and then fed a gallon of 6.0 pH, full-strength nutrients.
I hope the last step wasn’t a misstep.
Where should I go from here? I really don’t care for the liquid nutrients I have on hand (not a question of quality, more ease of use/cleanup), and I’d much prefer a dry, top-dress. I see that Kis suggests their nutrient pack for weekly top-dressings, but I’d have to order it. My local shop has just about everything, including BaS products (but not Kis).
Again, thanks to everyone for their help. I really appreciate this community.
I don’t want to be a buzzkill or downer, but it’s going to be tough to fix this in soil. You have a rich soil with stuff that slowly breaks down. You’re not going to flush these things out with a few gallons of water. Top dress it with some more soil, ride it out, and learn from this grow. Either switch to hydro style if you prefer the numbers and being able to ask what to do or get a Blumat system or run SIPs. Best of luck with it and hope you still get some smoke you’re happy with!
After a mild flushing, I would up pot into a bigger fabric pot with some clean promix, perlite, and worm castings. Don’t even bother taking it out of the smaller pot, just bury it in.
When you water, water only the lower pot for a while, let the top one dry back. Give the top pot water every third or fourth watering. Treat the lower pot like a reservoir that can provide access to lower EC water.
I thought these were in flower for some reason. Haha. My bad. Definitely get them into bigger pots. Twenty gallon pots of good soil will get them healthy. Or just take some clones off of those and flower those out.
I didn’t see anyone saying this, but if they went 10 weeks with water only it may be that the soil is tapped out, and the ash didn’t have any acidic nutes to balance it back toward 7ph?
For future grows just top dress it once a month or so. With an extra super soil maybe you could go a little longer til the first dress, but you want to stay ahead of it to make sure they break down and become available by the time they are needed.
Some immediately available liquid stuff is good to have on hand in case you get behind on your top dressing. It takes a while to figure out how much how often if you’re doing all dry additives top dressed because you can’t see the results right away like with the roots organic stuff.
You want to get your soil ph back in range, 8 is too high. To me, this plant looks hungry due to lockout as others have said. Not knowing those inputs that well, I would err on the light side for inputs (ie castings only for nutrients in the lower pot) when uppotting.
Getting the ph balance right, should allow the plant to start feeding; new growth should start to come in more green.
If getting ph balanced after up-potting doesn’t stop yellowing, then they prob hungry in general as well and it’s time to top dress into the upper pot only. I would get some type of blend for veg and one for flower (Roots organics has a couple options) and top dress at the low end of manufactures recommendations once a month.
If you like Roots Organics they also have a Ca Mg powder, Elemental maybe it’s called, that I would use as well.
I go 10 weeks in veg w water only all the time, but it’s in super soil within proper ph range.
Again, I really appreciate everyone’s input. Thanks so much.
I emailed KiS today and they replied within minutes, suggesting I up-pot to 10 gallons (just like you all suggested), and they also suspected I was out of nutrients due to the extended veg. I’ll probably pick up their nutrient pack to top-dress as needed.
I stopped by my local shop and bought two 10-gallon Smart Pots. I used the rest of my KiS soil, but ran a bit short for the second pot, and had to mix in some FFOF. I moistened the soil before transplant, and I added Mykos. I then slowly watered each with a gallon of Recharge. Note, I really don’t intend to use Recharge more than prescribed, but it’s an “instant” compost tea, and I figured it’s a good way to get the microbes cranking in the new soil.
Here’s some pics that hopefully become my new before…
I suggested you to find out those numbers before taking next step but seems you just moved forward, I agree your last step could be a misstep, those high ppm tell me there’s enough food on soil so there’s no need to add anyhting but plain pH water and maybe some sphagnum peat moss, compost or coffee grounds to make that soil more acidic.
You seem to have a nutrient lockout, take a look on this chart and you will see that an excess of some nutrients can block the rest:
So when are you flipping the lights to 12/12 to flower?
Don’t veg them another month or you’ll run into the same problem.
But then again, you might as well keep going a few more weeks to then upgrade to a big soil bed that covers the entire floor of the tent.
Don’t expect giant plants in tiny pots when growing purely organic, gotta up that soil volume and keep topdressing with a great diversity of fresh mulch as much as possible.
Grass clippings, dandelion leaves, nettle and tree leaves all contain a wide diversity of minerals + nitrogen and don’t cost you anything.
Spending hard earned money on fertilizer is very unnecessary and frankly quite silly, even if you live in the middle of some giant city and don’t have any of this kinda vegetation nearby, fruit and veg kitchenscraps will do the trick too so long as you keep it diverse.
What about making your own top dress, cutting out any lime, oyster, etc? I read through the thread. I’m on the same page that the soil is toast and you probably have a bunch of long term nutes left (lime, oyster, shells of shit that take a long time to break down). I’d just tea it, too. Dump it all on there. The sediment, too. PH check the tea. make sure you’re goin’ like 5.8. Check runoff after a couple days.
You’re using tap water? Maybe try filtering it with an RV hose filter or even just brita from the tap? Any idea what the mineral content is?
Alot of solid advise has already been offered here, but the first thing that came to my mind aside from the obvious lock out was microbes. Bacterial dominance in particular. OP mentioned teas, what is the formulation of these teas? How long are they brewed for? Bacterial or fungal dominant? Before I would have gone to extremes and up poted, I would have first done a soil test to see what elements were present and their values. Cheap NPK test with reagents, around 30 bucks off Amazon.
Off of those results, I’d explore other avenues. It’s easier to take a piece of pvc pipe and extract a core sample. Much less stressful than breaking root tips out of a fabric walled pot.
It’s quite possible nutrients have been exhausted and what left in the mix providing anything, is the biochar, and thus encourages a alkaline environment making things worse. Instead of 1 or 2 symptoms of a deficiency, there’s now a multitude of them from high pH.
From my experience in organic substrates, the vast majority of issues are seen from poor diversity of microbials and consequently poor regulation of rhizosphere pH. Nutrients could very well be plentiful, just not accessible.
I’m with @AzSeaindooin420 on this one. I’d have more than likely based off of the values already stated done a flush to adjust pH, or first tested the substrate with reagents. Likely followed by a bacterial dominance AACT, using worm shit and un-sulfured blackstrap molasses and insect frass. That would cover your Macro, secondary and trace minerals. Gentle is the name of the game with compromised plants.
Remember there is a ton of shit going on beneath the soils surface with organics and it almost every time points to the microbial populations you harbor and proliferate.
Heard! I plan to flip as soon as these are healthy again (hopefully). I honestly thought that 7gal pots were pretty substantial, but that’s clearly not the case! I’d love to do a 4x4 bed once I get some more experience under my belt, and I appreciate the advice on what I can add to my soil. I actually did a banana tea last run, and the plants seemed to like it. Honestly it felt good to hit the grocery store for an answer, instead of Amazon.
I’ve still got lots to learn. I’ll keep testing, and hopefully right the ship soon enough!