Greetings All,
I’m reluctant to post this because I’ve just been using it to take notes as I worked through a recent problem. I think I’ve resolved the issue, but in the hope that the process might be useful to others growing in octopots, and at the request of my pal @SaintAliasKnife, I present “The Troubling Event!” Apologies in advance for self-indulgent rambling… I was talkin to myself mostly.
For the background to make sense of this refer here:
Frankie’s Daughters: Unpacking a Frozen Genome - #71 by GrouchyOldMan
I had been spending so much time on a sequential series of selective pollinations that I neglected my patient’s daily health checks in their hour of need!
I had a Hilda meltdown on my hands this week. Mature leaves yellowing and dying. Dozens. Both Hilda plants. Something has gone badly wrong here.
[There are a bunch of pics below]
Gads! What if I have kooked entirely and murdered the entire batch of Frankie’s Daughters; seed moms, F1 crosses, back crosses? I’ve got almost a year into this project already. WTFH went WRONG???
Unthinkable. That was my mindset until I observed the progressive rapid onset of a serious looking leaf problem that was common to both of my Hilda pheno plants. Yellowing, followed by brown spots, gray patches and finally death as the leaf tip dries and curls.
Those signs had developed over the course of a few days and I first considered the possibility that this was just the natural leaf fade and dieback as the plant nears harvest.
But at week 5, day 6 of flowering, Hilda didn’t look near ready, although the first red pistils have appeared and they are both bulking up sugary colas. The leaf damage appeared to progress upwards on the plant, with the oldest leaves having the most damage.
That progression suggested that this wasn’t a pest. I also ruled out mildew and fungus after a detailed inspection of the leaves top and bottom. Nuttin.
I considered a deficiency or excess in the nutes I was using, but it was a tried & true Jack’s early flower mix that I had used many times earlier as well as the other plants in the room. I pH each batch gallon by gallon and shoot for 6.0 until I hit it.
Yellow leaves also hint of a plant that is starving for more nutes. That leads to yellowing and death of the leaves from the bottom up. Right?
The problem is that the measured EC hit 2.1 on the most recent batch as I pushed these Frankenstein Daughters expecting them to be heavy eaters reflecting their clone-only parent. If anything, I might of been pushing their growth stage, but I’m pretty sure they were getting enough CannaCalories in their diet.
They were also getting their photons raining down from above. Each plant has its own 250watt ViparSpectra XS 2000 LED dimmed down to a solid 950 PPFD, on the top buds, the lowers were still getting a respectable 500. These lights can crank up to 1300+ I think, so dimmers and an 18" minimum distance were both in force.
The other environmentals were all in bounds, daily averages: Temp 68F, RH 46%, VPD 1.3. Right where I wanted them.
Oh yeah, runty little Olive, our other dominant phenotype plant, is completely unaffected. Both Olive plants are happily filling in small but very healthy looking buds. They haven’t missed a beat.
The first time I put all that together I came up with nothing. Because nothing explains all of those symptoms completely. On the other hand, there are half a dozen things that could be causing it.
To Be Continued…
I now know what happened but I welcome your analysis and the specifics of how you, my elite OG growers, would approach this problem?
I’ll follow up with my outcome in a few days. Maybe we’ll make a game of it… nail the problem win a pack of seeds?
-Grouchy
The very first stage
Top Down View, Yellowing and deficiencies, oldest leaves, all the way up
Second stage, pH and or Ca / Mg? Or just necrosis as the leaf gives it up?
Any attempt at diagnosis should explain why neither of the Olive phenotypes show any sign whatsoever that they even notice what’s going on. They are a week or two younger from seed, so I only recently upgraded them to early flower Jacks, otherwise everything is the same.