Oranje's Adventures in Vegging

Indoor Growing Growroom Diaries
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I’ll complain in my own thread a bit, because my Great White Hope seedling is starting to go down the same path as every other unhealthy plant I’ve got.

Here’s my ChemD x Sunshine Daydream, transplanted into 1 gallon pot, Coast of Maine Stonington’s Blend soil (water-only supersoil formulated for cannabis).

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Here’s its life since transplant and move to veg tent:

  • Mist morning and evening using RO/DI water with 12 drops CaMg+ per gallon (The Rev’s recommended re-mineralization). Finally got a TDS pen, and my RO/DI reads 3ppm – in other words, filter now pretty solidly confirmed to be in good shape.

  • Aug 19: Transplant, 1 gallon pot. Coast of Maine Stonington’s blend + 25% perlite. Soil was moist in the bag, so only misted the surface and foliage after transplant.

  • Aug 26: Water, 150mL distilled water + 100mL spring water.

  • Aug 30: Water, 200mL aloe with a dash of CaMg+ in distilled water (1/4tsp aloe powder + 1mL CaMg+ per gallon distilled water). This is what I’ve been giving my seedlings and they seem to respond well.

  • Sep 03: Water, 50mL aloe with CaMg+, same strength as above.

… so 500mL of water into the soil since August 19, and soil wasn’t wet to begin with. For an 8" plant that is actively growing, this really doesn’t sound like a lot of water.

If I let this girl dry out completely, i.e. wilting territory, isn’t that going to do awful things to the soil microbes? I can’t imagine super soil is very super if there’s no life in the soil to keep the plant fed…

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Maybe the LEDs are too close? It is my understanding LEDs must be kept higher up regardless of lack of heat or plants will experience weird burning…

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Looks like a lockout of iron due to high pH water. Iron is immobile and will show on the top first and will have veins light green with the rest dark green. Iron starts locking out around pH 7 and is completely locked out by pH 8. What is the pH you are feeding at?

It may be too intense of light as well, do you have a dimmer on those lights?

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LED is 29 inches from top of the given plant, and it’s at the same height as the healthy veg tent back in the original post.

I’m strongly considering dumping the LED I have in there. It’s just a Mars Hydro cheap-o Amazon one, but when paired with T5s in my veg tent, I had lush, vigorous growth from January through May. So, what changed since then?

  • Higher temperatures. Winter/spring my temps were 64-72f, now they’re around 70-77f.
  • Lower humidity. To keep temps down, I had to increase air circulation, and I’ve got the AC on in my house much of the time. RH has dropped by about 10%.

Anyway. Just about the only thing I haven’t tried changing is the LED light, but I’m hesitant to throw more money at the problem if I can’t actually pinpoint the problem.

The good news is that my flower tent is clearing out, so I can veg in there for a while.

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OK, I’m starting to sound like a know-it-all :hushed: but I suggest always watering thoroughly with transplanting - drench the soil. I think watering could be the problem - the roots won’t spread, and parts of the peat could dry out so bad they’ll never wet again. If you’re using that much perlite you should be watering every 2-3 days max.

The rule of thumb with watering is drench the soil until a 5-10% of the water comes out the drainage holes on the bottom. Every time.

Also…K.I.S.S…ditch the calmg stuff. Coast of Maine will have minerals in it. personally I would ditch the aloe as well. If you want to add something, add molasses 1-2 teaspoon per gallon in your water, every other watering.

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Soil is an all-in-one supersoil formulated specifically for marijuana, and I’ve been using distilled (one time with a dash of spring water) to try and narrow down where my problems are coming from (just in case my RO filter isn’t pulling out chloramine or fluoride, but all signs point to “filter works fine,” per TDS meter and my non-marijuana plants not dying).

In other words, at least for the water going in, I should not be throwing off the pH enough to cause lock-out.

The light is a MarsHydro 300W (draws 132W), recommended for a 2x2 foot area. No dimmer. I have 96 watts of T5, fresh bulbs, on the other side of my 3x3 tent. Yeah, the focus of LEDs means there’s not a direct comparison with HID/floro, but the intensity did not seem to be a problem in winter/spring: aside from changing the T5 bulbs, I haven’t touched the lights.

I usually try and get soil to “wet sponge” level for transplanting: I opted to switch it up here because I’ve been assuming chronically wet soil has been my problem. However, permanently-dry soil – or at the very least permanently-dry pockets – might actually be the real culprit. Even giving 250mL/ea weekly (for the Ocean Forest, and Roots Organics plants), I’m probably getting 25% run-off: not 5-10%.

What you described is, effectively, what I know I should be doing, but I have not been doing because my plants are so mad :laughing:

Alright, I’ll ditch it for the CoM plants :slight_smile: I was giving the aloe a shot because it’s supposed to act as a wetting agent – like I said, I’m getting run-off despite watering very little, which either means my plants are waterlogged or that my peat has gone hydrophobic. I’ve been giving the same aloe solution to some seedlings, and thus far, they look not-awful (but not perfect):

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have you tried just a lil humidifier i got one from walmart isnt the best but it defitnatly helps an i got mine for around 25 bucks

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One drop of baby shampoo in a gallon of water will reverse peat hydrophobia… Funny isn’t that what the end stage of rabies is called?

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great suggestion, I never thought of that! Could probably do a couple squirts of Safer Soap spray into the water. I have 2 large bags of peat mix soil that got baked in my garage all summer and are now bone dry, very difficult to get them re-wetted at first.

IMO the cure for overwatering is to put enough perlite in the soil. Once there’s enough perlite, it’s impossible to over-water. The roots will always get enough air no matter what.

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… so my flower tent is The New Grow Tent™, as I don’t have anything healthy enough to flower :sob: I moved a few guinea pigs in 2 weeks ago, and…

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Yeah, it’s still not pretty, but new growth is nice, emerald green, and the original guinea pigs have each put out a few nodes of entirely healthy growth. The back 3 in square pots and the middle one in SmartPot were the lucky victims, everything else moved in over the past few days so not much growth yet :slight_smile:

Here’s a seedling I repotted on Sept 1st and left in the Veg Tent of Despair:

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Here’s its sibling, repotted on Sept 10th, and put under the CMH/HPS on the same day:

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Also scale is hard, but the one that looks alive is also 3 times the height of the crispy leaf-ball monstrosity.

The Healthy Tent has higher max temp (86ºf vs. 77ºf), lower min temp (66ºf vs. 70ºf), and lower relative humidity (25-35% vs. 35-50%). Lots more light, probably a more “rounded” spectrum, but definitely weighted towards the flowering end of things…

Anyway, I haven’t learned anything from this, other than “I seem to be unable to veg plants using the same lights/tents I used last winter/spring.” I might have to try out these fun Samsung surface-mount LEDs to see if they give better results, but last I checked, T5s were quite capable of keeping plants healthy :thinking:

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Good luck @oranje. You will figure out what is the culprit sooner or later. I won’t even hazard a guess, you had a string of calamity that left me just puzzled. :upside_down:

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do they seem to good with just water or are they strugling all the way thru have you tried seeing what your vpd is at?

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Ok I’ll bite what are we calling vpd?

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Here you go @Uncle_Al.

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there really is a curse hovering over that tent! Maybe it’s time to think about offgassing - back on OG 1.0 a whole bunch of people got tents that outgassed toxic chemicals and killed plants. But you’d expect it to outgas the most at the beginning and decrease over time.

The temps and humidity look fine to me. Seems hard to believe a light problem could damage the plants that way. But after you’ve eliminated all the other possiblities, it could be one of these two. what else? sabotage? could someone else be messing with the plants.

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I’ve been watching this topic and really don’t know what is causing this. It looks like the leaves are getting hit with nutes when feeding. I think we already ruled out nute burn and hot soil mixes.

The next thing I would look at is transplant shock. I would go back to the basic,sterilize some promix with boiling water. Soak the pots and clean everything in side of the tent with a mild bleach solution.

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In the September 23 pic of all 7 plants all the runts that look like their having issues what was the roots mass looking like when emerging from the rapid rooter plugs? If there were only few roots emerging and not a cluster of good roots emerging ,this could be your problem, if roots are restricted and not flourishing into the new medium ,uptake of nutrients will probably not be there even with normal watering practices granted the plugs will absorb small amounts from the surrounding medium but not enough to flourish I’v heard of growth issues with Rapid rooter plugs from others and had issues myself with them in the past ,might want to try snipping into the bottom of the plugs with some sharp scissors in an X fashion 1/4 to 1/2 deep to if that might help. A root pic would help tremendously here!

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In my now-resting veg tent, looks like 19 VPD-units (aka red zone of death), and in my flower-converted-to-veg tent, looks like 26-27 (aka deeper into red zone of death) :grin: Yeah, I fully acknowledge that my humidity is way too low and slowing down my growth rate, but I’d be fine with slow-but-healthy growth.

It’s actually my oldest tent, so hopefully probably not off-gassing. I think I picked this tent up back in '012.

The LED fixture has (at least) 3 different LED types, and the white ones appear significantly dimmer than the blue/red ones at this point. I don’t recall if that was always the case, but it’s possible that the white LEDs are putting out less light than they used to…

As for sabotage, my ladyfriend seems to like the end results, and I don’t think she’d take a relationship-ending risk like that :laughing:

… so it’s never really been clear to me what organic over-feeding is going to look like. But no, my three active soils (Coast of Maine Platinum Blend, Roots Organic Original, and Happy Frog) seem to range from “good amount of nutrients” to “almost no nutrients” – oh, also pH tested the first two and both were ~6.8, so entirely reasonable.

But I am the transplant master :grin: That said, good advice – I’ll probably give this a shot when I start some new beans, but we’ll see how my active plants do in their new veg home.

Of the 6 babies, only 2 were started in RapidRooters. Over in my All My Seedings Are Garbage thread, I was convinced that RapidRooters would probably be doing more harm than good in my setup, so I’ve stopped using them.

That said, the root system on the non-RapidRooter seedlings was not much better than the RapidRooter seedlings. Shrug.

Complete list of symptoms:

  • Weak root systems
  • Slow growth
  • Very narrow internodes
  • Small leaves
  • Oldest leaves dying back from tips
  • New growth (sometimes) bleaching from veins, particularly after watering

We’ll see how things play out in their new home. If they continue to do well, then hooray, I can stop banging my head against the wall for a bit… until I start some more seedings, but don’t think that’ll happen before Halloween.

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Look up just4growers on YouTube watch his videos on vpd bad vpd is just the beginning bad vpd causes your plant to transpire more water than nutes or to hold on to stuff causing nute toxcity even if your in a good nute place aka not a high ec so a bad vpd won’t only hinder growth rates causes lookouts an more

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Microbes could begin to die off or go dormant but in my opinion not likely ,bacteria can live even the thinnest levels of microscopic water on the surface of organic matter!

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