This may sound gross, but I’d rather use diluted urine over vinegar.
I’m an old dirt farmer who’s recently switched to coco and I’ve had more ph issues in soil than I care to remember.
As soon as I saw that short slow growth and yellowing leaves I thought ph issue. Those probe meters are useless in my opinion.
LOL
Whee!
Well, what kind of water are you using? That’s the easiest starting point, especially since they’re not big plants & you can buy some if needed(presuming). City tap water varies a lot and often… usually sucks.
I have no fancy water filter but do use a BRITA type kitchen filter to help with what we’re talking about. The tap here is about 7.2pH, 200-280ppm. The Brita comes out 6.0pH, 80ppm; MUCH closer to rain water(a new filter will actually give 5.5pH for the first couple of days).
Then there’s quantity & delivery rate to consider too. Also the soil may be accumulating salts & raising the pH(even if the water applied is acidic). Water can be made “wetter” with a surfactant. Crazy stuff.
If you plan to do this with any degree of certainty, you need a better way to tell whats going on with your water/nute mix.
I know budget can be a problem, it is for me. You can start by getting a PH test kit for spas/pools. They are cheap and will get you in the general ball park as far as PH.
If you want to do it consistently, and accurately, you need to spend around $30-$50 to get a decent PH meter. Forget the $10-$15 ones. They are worse than the meter you have now = useless.
Its also a good idea to know what is in your tap water. For sure you need to know the PH, but its also good to know how much other crap is in there. Thats where an EC or TDS meter will help. It can also help you check exactly how much nutes are in the water by measuring EC/TDS changes when you mix it up.All those meters do is measure conductivity of the water, but that can tell you a LOT. Again, you are looking at $40 or more for a good one.
As far as what to use to lower PH, vinegar will work, but its far from best. It doesnt last long. You can buy commercial PH Down. Its phosphoric acid.
Or you can go to the auto parts store and get regular battery acid - but - thats not something for everyone to try.
You need to be very very careful if you mess with battery acid full strength. It needs to be diluted about 1 cup acid to 1 gallon of water. You also need to be absolutely sure you add the acid to the water. NEVER add water to acid.
In other words, you always poor the 1 cup of acid into the 1 gallon of water. Never ever poor the water into the 1 cup of acid in a container. If you do, you risk the acid exploding and splashing acid all over the place. Actually, its the water that can flash boil and blast the acid all over.
Yeah, questioning whether city water could be causing problems. In fact there’s a discussion going on lately in town about the water being “off”–brown or bad tasting. I haven’t seen this myself, but it does seem like the water could be not as pure as before. I’ll keep my eye on this and test it if need be.
I’ll use a diluted plant food. I have Miracle Grow but I’m wondering about orchid food. It seems to have a lot of good nutrients in it. Yet there aren’t many posts about people advocating orchid food for cannabis. Anyway thanks for the tip and the importance of keeping it diluted. Seems like cannabis doesn’t like strong concentrations of nutes considering how many problems are attributed to overfeeding.
An easy, cheap “test” would be to start watering one plant with bottled drinking water or even distilled. If you see an obvios improvement in that one, then there we have it.
I too am interested in the orchid food technique; I used on my first crop & thought it helped but who knows, this year it definitely was too much/too strong (as i applied it), a 10-30-30, and it whacked the available Nitrogen, I think.
My dad said 70s cannabis growers turned to orchid cultivators for advice in the early days of weed in a greenhouse & whatnot, but I haven’t found any examples yet. A couple of months ago I made an experimental orchid potting mix(5 parts orchid bark, etc.) and it was no good. Now I’ve cut that in half with a 1/2 peat/perlite/10%wormshit blend for some recent transplants as another trial.
What attracts me is the pH “stabilization” created by the bark’s slow-release acidity. We’ll see pretty quick.
It’s probably too high in P and K for veg. Curious if it would work in flower though