What's wrong with my plant?

Ok, under normal light there’s clearly some browning…

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I tried to get a photo of one of the more established plants roots, but they don’t want to come out of the system anymore. These plants have been in veg for about 2 months now. Normally they’d be in bud by now, but i’m waiting for some more clones to root.

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Roots going into the reservoir.

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Reservoir layout.

I appear to have run out of posts for the next 12 hours. I have changed the water and am currently running water and h2o2 to clean the system. Will add nutrients in about half an hour.

So while adding the nutrients, I realized I’ve been getting the micro and the bloom mixed up. Hopefully that helps as well.

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Heath Robinson has a lot of info on the net. All his work is spot on.

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I saw this system years ago. It’s partially what inspired my current system because when i have the funds, i can change it up at some point. However, when i put my system together my income was quite a bit higher than it is now. Now i am working on a budget trying to improve things as I can. As I understand it too, you need a pump that’s moving more like 250 liters per hour rather than 125.

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This is a photo of one of the more established plants. After what i did this morning, it is showing pretty obvious signs of nutrient burn. Guess I should have listened to your advice about cutting the nutrients Larry :smiley: So I’ve now doubled up the water cutting the nute in half. Also, I checked the roots, no smell and certainly no slime. My nute is brown so i think the color on the roots is merely nute stain.

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Nutes dont turn roots brown. Healthy roots are always white. Any brown coloration is some form of bacteria or algae.

Brown roots are less than ideal, but - If there is no smell, or slime, and the roots are not mushy, I would not be too concerned. They should pull off with a crisp, sharp little pop, rather than just mushing apart like a super soggy spaghetti noddle.

That said, brown roots in your condition are probably weaker than ideal and will be more susceptible to less than ideal water or temperature conditions. Think of brown roots are a warning sign.

Do your best to keep water temps between 20-21C if at all possible and yes - lower concentrations are better for nutes :slight_smile:

and dont forget the PH meter :slight_smile:

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So different to the soil plants that i use to get eating 2 liters a day late in bud…

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They are looking kind of sad.

Get that PH meter yet??? :wink:

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We are going out of town next week. That’s when I can get a meter finally. And that little thing is the auto that didn’t root right, nothing i can do for it now, at least it’ll be a tease someday :smiley:

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So yeah, went to a bigger town, nobody has a ph meter, just strips. Trying to sort out something from ebay now cause amazon is buggy as all hell, only gives 7 pages of results.

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If nothing else, get some drops. Strips suck, but drops will at least get you in the ball park.

Check the PH range the drops are designed to read. Some kits are for reading higher PH levels and some for lower. You want the lower range ones.

This one for example reads from 6.0-7.6. Thats too hi for hydro.

Look for a kit thats reads the lower ranges you are interested in - 5.0 - 6.0

Here is one example.

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I’ve found a pen made by the same people as the one you linked. Just waiting to make payment now :smiley: I know the water is high PH. RO water starts out too high for the plants and there’s chlorine added as well so raises it again. Also, amazon charges us shipping and other crap cause of where we live. Things go from 20 USD to 50 really fast. Ebay doesn’t care we not in a major center :smiley:

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Got the ph meter. It was somewhere around 7, didn’t really wait for it to stabilize when it was obviously high. It’s around 5.6 now. Hopefully that’ll stop the plants all wanting to up and die on me.

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I think with proper ph you’ll see a big difference. How often do you change your res? It can be wasteful but doing it more often can make things much easier.

I’ve been doing it weekly. I don’t believe i’ll see proper results till i bud up these plants and start with some fresh ones in a couple of months.

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Do you have any PH Down to lower the PH?

Phosphoric acid is the most popular thing to use, but you can also use several other products.

Next best is plain old battery acid - sulfuric acid. You can get about 1 quart from any auto parts dealer for under $10.

Take a one gallon jug and fill it about 3/4 full of water. RO or distilled is best, but tap will do fine. Then slooooooly poor in 1 cup of the battery acid. Then top it off with more water. That will give you a solution that will drop PH about like commercial PH down.

By the way never never never never never poor water into un-diluted acid. It can flash boil and splatter acid everywhere - which is bad, Very bad,

Other, somewhat less effective options are citric acid or distilled vinegar. Even regular vinegar will work, but the distilled stuff is much better.

My point is - if you drop the PH down now, the plants will start to recover now. No need to wait till next grow. You should see major improvements within a few days at most if you can get the PH down into the 5.5-5.8 range and keep it there.

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I have ph down. I am keeping it around 5.6. A lot of the roots don’t look so great and the bigger plants can’t be pulled out anymore. I think the high temp for so long allowed bacteria to take place.

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