fishinnutt
Member
I have been doing my mmj thing for quite some time and usually it is very uneventful and leads to high quality meds. I am by my nature a tinkerer and never leave well enough alone (I have tried and enjoyed most styles of cultivation) This latest round I changed everything and am paying the price.
For this round I thought I would attempt and organic, nothing but straight water grow. Everything was really nice all through veg and about the first week of flower. My new soil was a mix of roots organic, ffof, ffo, light warrior, coco coir, fox farms perlite and a small amount of Happy Frog Fruit and flower all watering was adjusted to 6.2 to 6.5.
Deficiencies were becoming apparent and aggressive by week two in one plant in particular. I chopped said plant and when I took the dirt out of the bucket it was only a third wet and the bottom third was very dry and you could see that at one time the plant had nice roots all the way down to the bottom of the bucket. When the deficiencies showed I thought two things immediately: 1) I haven't been feeding so maybe they used up the food in the mix. 2) Maybe PH is wacky with new soil blend and as a third thing I hadn't been watering to run off as I wasn't sure this soil liked being very wet.
First thing I did to the rest of the garden which looked fine so far was to water everything to run off and ph the run off which is not something I usually do (almost never) The Ph was predictably acidic, the buckets of soil averaged 5.3 - 5.2 run off. The PPM was also strangely over 2000 ppm in at least one bucket ( I didn't tds them all) From here I went to bed and gave myself some time to think about what is going on. I woke up this morning and started reading everything I could about PH.
In my ph reading, some people seemed to say that that if your ph in your run off was a 5.0 and your input water was a 6.0, that the real ph of your media was probably a 4.0 (not good if that is true) they also went on to say that if I raise the input water ph, I could then affect the ph of my soil and raise it to some degree. I tried watering with ph 8.0 water for a gallon and testing (nothing right back to 5.2 - 5.3) I then watered in two gallons of ph 7.0 water and measured the run off and still got a reading of 5.3. The only thing that changes was a progressively less tds reading that finally went down to 663ppm.
What can I do to get my run off water (ostensibly soil ph too) to end up in the zone of say 6.2- 6.4? I must also say that I am feeding now with GH Maxi at the reccomended levels per the K.I.S.S. thread as the plants didn't not appear they were going to succeed in the organic water only method with this custom soil build.
In the near future all my new plants are in coco (as I have never used it before and I like to try new stuff and I think it will play real nice with GH MaxiBloom. Any coco advice is also much appreciated.
For this round I thought I would attempt and organic, nothing but straight water grow. Everything was really nice all through veg and about the first week of flower. My new soil was a mix of roots organic, ffof, ffo, light warrior, coco coir, fox farms perlite and a small amount of Happy Frog Fruit and flower all watering was adjusted to 6.2 to 6.5.
Deficiencies were becoming apparent and aggressive by week two in one plant in particular. I chopped said plant and when I took the dirt out of the bucket it was only a third wet and the bottom third was very dry and you could see that at one time the plant had nice roots all the way down to the bottom of the bucket. When the deficiencies showed I thought two things immediately: 1) I haven't been feeding so maybe they used up the food in the mix. 2) Maybe PH is wacky with new soil blend and as a third thing I hadn't been watering to run off as I wasn't sure this soil liked being very wet.
First thing I did to the rest of the garden which looked fine so far was to water everything to run off and ph the run off which is not something I usually do (almost never) The Ph was predictably acidic, the buckets of soil averaged 5.3 - 5.2 run off. The PPM was also strangely over 2000 ppm in at least one bucket ( I didn't tds them all) From here I went to bed and gave myself some time to think about what is going on. I woke up this morning and started reading everything I could about PH.
In my ph reading, some people seemed to say that that if your ph in your run off was a 5.0 and your input water was a 6.0, that the real ph of your media was probably a 4.0 (not good if that is true) they also went on to say that if I raise the input water ph, I could then affect the ph of my soil and raise it to some degree. I tried watering with ph 8.0 water for a gallon and testing (nothing right back to 5.2 - 5.3) I then watered in two gallons of ph 7.0 water and measured the run off and still got a reading of 5.3. The only thing that changes was a progressively less tds reading that finally went down to 663ppm.
What can I do to get my run off water (ostensibly soil ph too) to end up in the zone of say 6.2- 6.4? I must also say that I am feeding now with GH Maxi at the reccomended levels per the K.I.S.S. thread as the plants didn't not appear they were going to succeed in the organic water only method with this custom soil build.
In the near future all my new plants are in coco (as I have never used it before and I like to try new stuff and I think it will play real nice with GH MaxiBloom. Any coco advice is also much appreciated.
