cal/mag in coco

[Cereals]

dont use gh calimagic for coco, its carbonate based. it may not show problems immediately, but eventually it can build up in your root zone. same goes for go calmag.

This is very interesting, I've never heard anything about this before - anyway you would care to extrapolate on what exactly is happening - perhaps in a new thread?

I am really trying to learn everything I can about growing in coco!

 

[Cereals]

with ro water, using coco specific nutes, you shouldn't need any extra cal mag. try flushing em with clean water and starting over.

This makes a lot of sense. I was using CaliMagic with my H&G Cocos from the beginning - @ >= 2ml per gallon. As I the plants got worse and worse, I kept upping the does of CaliMagic to try to keep up.

Eventually at around > 5mL per gallon I started thinking "fuck me this seems like a lot!". And started researching and then gave epsom salts a shot to see if just Mg (well, Mg and S) would do the trick.

And it did, you can read the rest above

 

[Puscifer]

The Calcium in Calimagic is Cal Carbonate, the same as what is found in hardwater. Carbonate is not easily absorbed and has to be broken down to become readily available. Not a problem in soil and Organics.
MagiCal uses Cal Nitrate and Cal Chloride. Much better. I believe Heavy16 uses 4 sources of Calcium.
Calmag (Botanicare) uses Cal Nitrate.
I use my tap that's loaded with cal and mag carbonate so I add MagiCal for more readily available Cal and Mag.

 

[Johnny Redthumb]

Hey redbeardy, I remember seeing you in my similar threads a couple weeks ago - here is what ended up working for me...

2 grams of epsom salts per gallon of RO, then add nutes!

This will bring you to EC 0.4/200ppm - my girls are loving life again! Nice lush green new growth, COMPLETELY GREEN STEMS, starting to stink again, etc!

In my case, all my girls wanted was Mg - not Ca. By using CaliMagic I seem to have created even more of a Mg deficiency.

I had read a few places that H&G Cocos A+B already has enough Ca in it for most strains, and indeed it turned out to be the situation in my case.

I should maybe also note that I am also using LED lighting.

Good luck!

i wouldn't recommend doing that continuously, only until you correct the deficiency. all that extra mg will throw off the cal/mg/k/na ratios in your root zone.

 

[Cereals]

i wouldn't recommend doing that continuously, only until you correct the deficiency. all that extra mg will throw off the cal/mg/k/na ratios in your root zone.

Yes, I've been worried about this. However I have been playing catch up until just the past few feedings. I will try to start cutting the does back down and go from there - thanks for looking out for me!

 

[Johnny Redthumb]

This is very interesting, I've never heard anything about this before - anyway you would care to extrapolate on what exactly is happening - perhaps in a new thread?

I am really trying to learn everything I can about growing in coco!

what happens in the root zone is the plant will uptake the calcium and leave behind the carbonate. the carbonate will sit in the medium and wait until it will bond to any other positive ion available or slowly leach out in runoff. not a big problem when growing outdoors, because it can leach away. also not a problem in peat based soils because the peat degrades and lowers pH and the carbonate promotes alkalinity, so it tends to balance. thats why people add dolomite lime to peat soils as a pH buffer.

however coco is different. coco's pH stays stable is it degrades. all organic mediums including coco degrade as you grow in them. coco degrades and gives off positive potassium ions, which is why coco specific nutes have more cal/mag and less K. excess k floating around can bond to carbonate in a insoluble form, and this will continue to build up in the coco and your root zone pH will start to go higher and higher until its out of range and your plants can no longer uptake water. you can witness this in runoff measurement. it depends on pot size and plant size as to how long it can take for this to occur. if you transplant to bigger pots on a regular basis, you may never see this occur. but you cant keep a mom alive on cal carbonate in the same pot for a long time.

 

[Johnny Redthumb]

foliar feeding is a great way to fix all of these cal/mg or micro deficiencies without further throwing your root zone out of whack.

 

[Cereals]

Excellent info @Johnny_Redthumb! Thank you sir!

 

[RedBeardy5]

Wow, Thanks Cereal for the update it makes sense. So this is my 4th grow in this room and setup. Every time I have had awesome results but now. If the problem was in fact from the cal/mag supplement then why were my past grow good. I believe you and appreciate your post as I like to get into the science as to why things happen. What would be the best product out there for cal/mag? The problem did start when I added the top booster (p/k) and I looked like a potassium problem along with a magnesium problem. So I guess ill drop the cal/mad and give them Epsom salt. Is that a wise approach?

 

[Cereals]

@RedBeardy5 - I am definitely not the one to give you advice, I lack the experience to justify doing so and certainly don't have a handle on this stuff myself yet, I can only say what has seemed to worked for me and what I have observed so far

That being said, everything that @Johnny_Redthumb and @Puscifier said above is making a lot of sense in my mind right now!

My ultimate goal is to try and run ONLY the H&G Cocos A+B base nutes + RO water. No other H&G additives or any other crap. KISS.

Now, my problem is seemingly (in theory at least) that I BEGAN my run with CaliMagic + Base Nutes + RO water (at every watering), and as a result of this - I began some kind of lockout/buildup/unbalance/pH issue/problem in my root zone - right from the start.

I should have been feeding just RO + Cocos A+B base nutes.

I was increasingly having to use more and more CaliMagic (from like 2ml/gallon to 6-7ml/gallon every watering) to combat the Mg deficiency symptoms I was seeing - this was over the course of a couple of weeks.

So then I cut the CaliMagic and started giving them just epsom salts instead, to try and give them ONLY what they needed - since I was not seeing Ca def signs, why keep stoufing them full of Ca from the CaliMagic? I now have come to learn that carbonate was also being left behind and building up the whole time too.

So, I started giving them epsom salts at around .5 grams/gallon of RO to bring me to about .15 EC before adding the Coco's A+B. This seemed to help right away - things were getting greener, interveinal chlorosis was backing off - no more brown dead edges at all. But it still didn't get the plants looking "lush" or whatever - you could tell by looking at them that they were fucked up and not quite right.

So I started doing the same thing I had done with the CaliMagic - slowly increasing the dose at each feeding - and watching what happened.

Before long I was at 1 gram/gallon, and things were still looking better, but still not perfect. As of yesterday, I had hit over 2 grams/gallon, bringing the EC of the RO to about .44 or 220ppm. Again, I was getting the same feeling as I did with the CaliMagic - like wtf man, this is getting to be a lot of salts!! I think!?! This was all over the course of maybe 1.5 weeks or so.

So now I came back here and started poking around again

You and I both need to KISS!

I was just over at a buddies house today who also grows - he uses average tap water and Botanicare Pureblend+ in very finely ground coco (with a bit of perlite mixed in) and doesn't even pH his mix! His ladies are sexy as fuck and I'm currently super blazed on their yummy sisters as well I literally just described his whole op there - it's that simple. I started talking about cations and anions and he was like wtf man hahaha.

So obviously I am overthinking all of this. If I cannot use ONLY H&G Cocos A+B base nutes WITHOUT additives (MOST of the time) - then something is fucked up with the nute line I think - it's their problem, and I need to go shopping.

 

[RedBeardy5]

Funny you say you are overthinking. My first coco grow I did not ph anything, measure ppm and they were great. Just tap, canna A and B full strength! im going to get my RO up to 100ppm of mag and see what happens.

 

[Cereals]

OK, and I think I forgot to mention it in my last post - but I have now cut out the epsom salts completely as per @Johnny_Redthumb's advice - the Mg deficiency seemingly being taken care of for the moment.

So I will keep reporting on how they do - though I suspect I will need to do another epsom salt based feeding or two before I am in the clear with a healthy rootzone environment and can then feed only RO + Coco's A+B

 

[RedBeardy5]

Yes please keep me updated. I may try to cut out the cal/mag all together also. I would feel pretty dump wasting my ppms on cal/mag all this time.

 

[Johnny Redthumb]

If you are in the city, most tap water has beneficial minerals. Only well water should really necesitate RO filtering. I think Botanicare PBP and 2ml Calmag+ is a great KISS combination for coco. H&G is a good company but I felt their coco line had too much N and when just using the base nute, flavors were not so great. And really using a 8 or 9 part recipe isn't KISS anymore.

Good luck, hope you figure it out!

 

[RedBeardy5]

Yeah I went to RO water bc my city water was causing the ph to drift up real fast.

 

[Cereals]

I think my tap water has very high alkalinity - though I should test it again - I was quite n00bish last time.

It comes out the tap at pH 7.5ish, but after letting it sit out overnight for chlorine/whatnot the pH would drift to like 8+ and I remember it taking a TON of pH down to get it to 5.8 - which of course drove my EC too high.

Anyway - girls are looking good still!

 

[RedBeardy5]

Yeah my reservoir for my blumats would need adjusting 3 times a day and it was not practical.

 

[RedBeardy5]

so heres my fruity chronic, you can see a mag, cal, and potassium deficiency. It just wont stop and nothings fixing it. I did the Epsom salt today so im praying now, it hard to tell if it got worse because the leaves are so badly deficient.

 

[RedBeardy5]

The yellowing between the veins is a dead give away. my Epsom salts are years old so I hope its still good.

 

[tsunamy]

all you need to do to refine coco for cultivation is a single flush with calmag for ion exchange between Ca,Mg and K after it will be balanced and no problems will accure...