First grow, not doing well.

[Brugge]

I've been trying to grow some bag seeds. I'm on the third or fourth round. They're all dying. I've made all the mistakes. This last time I got a pH meter and did everything well. Had 3 beautiful seedlings and then my pH meter broke so while waiting for a replacement I'm stuck with some paper strips to measure with 0-14 so not very accurate. Trying to go for a little lower than 6, but not quite 5.

I am growing in Canna Coco and using Bio Bizz Grow + root juice. First time I fed them with nutes about 5 days after they came up I gave them 1.5 ml Bio Bizz Grow with 1000 ml water and about a week later 2 ml with 1000 ml and 1 ml HESI PowerZyme (enzymes). Then they started to go yellow. See picture. They're a month old and I figure it's either nute burn or the enzymes that's killing them. Too early for enzymes?

I've read so many posts and I've got an EC meter on the way and as soon as I get that and the pH meter back I'll get things right. What I really wonder about is if you folks here think there's a chance in hell they'll recover or if I should just kill'em off now?

Another thing I'm a bit unsure about is whether I should water / feed them every day or wait 4-5 days (which it takes for the 0.7L containers I've got them in to go dry on top)?

 

[Brugge]

Oh BTW the plants are just shy of 2 inches tall after a month now...

 

[Coconutz]

Pics arent working
1.5ml per 10000 ml = to about 6ml per gal
Thats a lot of food for a plant thats 2" tall.
Id skip all additives until you have healthy plants

 

[Brugge]

Pic should be working now. Yeah, I'll stick with the root juice and grow. For my next try. Do you think they'll recover though?

 

[Coconutz]

New growth looks ok, but it could deteriorate if you dont get it under control soon.
Not sure when your pen will show up, but Id suggest sprouting some more if you have them, just in case

 

[stoneybud2]

5 days after she broke ground u fed it. ??
That to be woukd be your mistake. And at a that dose.
Some water will get that going lol super thrive if ya got it.
Try some plain water fer a few days till you start to see more growth healthy growth then start feeding it 2" after a month is crazy. Small.
SB2

 

[Tonygreen]

What medium are you using? A decent bag soil should get you through the beginning with just water until its time to transplant.

 

[Brugge]

What medium are you using? A decent bag soil should get you through the beginning with just water until its time to transplant.

Canna Coco

 

[RonSmooth]

I have had seedlings die from underfeeding when I started with coco and with only perlite.

You need to provide nutrients with media like coco. The symptoms look like fertilizer "burn" or overfeeding but in reality they are showing deficiencies.

I have 4 sour kush seedlings going right now. They are a few inches tall and not even on their 5 bladed leaf set yet. I am feeding them Maxibloom @ around 1.8EC. Prior to that they were getting half that. They are healthy and vigorous.

Try giving one of them a higher dose of fertilizer. Closer to full strength. You may be surprised

 

[Brugge]

Worth a shot. The BioBizz Grow box says to use 2-4 ml per liter. Then again it says in various forums to start off with half or a quarter of the lowest.

 

[Tonygreen]

Im not buying the deficiency theory myself, I have popped beans in plugs and fed em nothing but for a week or two and they never showed that. I could be wrong though as I often am! GL!

 

[Coconutz]

I have had seedlings die from underfeeding when I started with coco and with only perlite.

You need to provide nutrients with media like coco. The symptoms look like fertilizer "burn" or overfeeding but in reality they are showing deficiencies.

I have 4 sour kush seedlings going right now. They are a few inches tall and not even on their 5 bladed leaf set yet. I am feeding them Maxibloom @ around 1.8EC. Prior to that they were getting half that. They are healthy and vigorous.

Try giving one of them a higher dose of fertilizer. Closer to full strength. You may be surprised

Usually Id agree with you, but it looks like hes been using just short of full strength for veg plants.
Bio calls for 8ml per gal during veg and hes using about 6ml on these seedlings
Ive never used bio... it looks like its 3-0-8
Id be using something more like canna strart that is 2-1-2 or 6/9 diluted to almost nothing.
The seedlings dont need much N at all in coco.
They just need a little bit of juice in there to prevent them from turning yellow
I didnt take the time to look up the composition of the additives hes used, but I would not use any adds on plants that small.
Water for the first week seems to work well for me and then I hit them with 1/2 strength 6/9 for a week and they seem to want full strength after that

 

[RonSmooth]

Usually Id agree with you, but it looks like hes been using just short of full strength for veg plants.
Bio calls for 8ml per gal during veg and hes using about 6ml on these seedlings
Ive never used bio... it looks like its 3-0-8
Id be using something more like canna strart that is 2-1-2 or 6/9 diluted to almost nothing.
The seedlings dont need much N at all in coco.
They just need a little bit of juice in there to prevent them from turning yellow
I didnt take the time to look up the composition of the additives hes used, but I would not use any adds on plants that small.
Water for the first week seems to work well for me and then I hit them with 1/2 strength 6/9 for a week and they seem to want full strength after that

IMO the OP isn't feeding them often enough.

Its hard to get a good idea of nutrient strength without an EC reading. For example, one tsp of maxibloom in a gallon of water gets me close to 1.8EC. I have used other nutrients and at that same tsp/gal, I get pretty substantial differences anywhere from 0.5 EC to almost 2.0 EC.

If his nutrients are diluted and at the low end of the EC spectrum, feeding once a week is probably not enough to sustain the plant.

I lost a few seedlings in the past and they looked just like the OP's pics. I also believed it was over feeding so I backed off the strength and it got worse until they died.

After some reading and experience, I started feeding seedlings earlier, more frequently and with a higher nutrient concentration and I have had no problems since. I have noticed substantial growth even on a daily basis.

The infrequency of watering may also lead to dry pockets in the coco. Also can mess with the coco's ability to store and buffer nutrients. I do let it get a little drier between waterings when the plants are very young so that they send more roots out looking for water but I never let it dry completely.

After starting and losing so many seedlings I think hes got little to lose in feeding a couple of them more.

good luck

 

[BlackBuds]

This happened to me when I over watered too early.

 

[Coconutz]

I did not notice he was only watering once per week.
That will do it for sure!
The pot is pretty big and should stay moist for quite some time.
Letting the salts dry is a bad idea

 

[bushed]

Wow lots of bad advice here, I really do question if half the people who have replied have actually used coco....

First of all good job for making the plunge Brugge you will make lots of mistakes along the way, hopefully I can save you from some of the mistakes I made as you seem to be going down a similar path.

Use a nute range specifically made for coco, I use canna, im sure any premium brand is fine, the enzimes you have are fine, I also fed at first according to the canna feed chart, this gave me great plants no drama...

To answer your question Ph 5.5-6.2 anything inside that is fine.

I don't think its nute burn as the numbers sound low.

I also feed seedlings about once a week to encourage the roots to spread out, then once per day once they get a bit bigger. They look very small for a month.

To me it looks like you have your light too close, what bulb are you using and how close is it?

 

[Brugge]

To me it looks like you have your light too close, what bulb are you using and how close is it?

I've got 6 x 23W CFLs 6400K spread out above the plants. Been varying them from about 3-5 inches away as I try to keep the temperature at the plants around 24-25 degrees C. Any closer and I easily get above 27 deg.

It's about 3 feet x 2 feet and mylar on the walls. Good ventilation and a little fan on the lights to keep the temp down.

 

[Brugge]

Anyways. I flushed them last night with pH'd water and then I fed one with full strength nutes (7 ml per gallon, well you can go to 14 according to the bottle). We'll see who makes it.

Allow me to speculate, the leaves on top of the plants seem to be coming out nice and then the lower ones start to die as you see from the image. That kinda makes me think the plant is using nitrogen from lower leaves to feed the new leaves.

BioBizz they say should work well in Coco. I do have a couple of Canna Coco A and B that I recently bought so if these die off I'll go with that next time.

 

[RetroGrow]

2 inches tall @ 1 month old means lockout due to PH being off. And, yes, you are getting lots of bad advice here. PH should be 5.8. I would trash those and start over, using seed starter mix from Miracle Grow or Foxfarms. Do not feed them anything for the first week. Put them in clear cups, and when you see the cup filled with roots, transplant to coco and begin feeding. Don't guess/estimate about the PH. It is critical, and must be spot on with coco.

 

[Snow Crash]

I will get you through this. We just need some more information before anyone can really make a concrete answer on what the problem is here. My assumption is that it's a little from "column A and a little from column B."

I think it's pretty clear you are working with low light conditions. Possibly fluorescents at too low a wattage just a little too far from the plant? It appears to me that other environmental issues are contributing - like temperature swings in excess of 10 degrees F, or low humidity taxing a young root system trying to provide adequate moisture for transpiration. Cold nights and root zone temperatures under 55 degrees can be a serious contributor to slow growth.

BioBizz Bio Grow is a carbohydrate product made from Sugar Beets. It is not a chemical salt as Coconutz has suggested, while still correct that you don't want to let the nutrients go dry bushed was more in line with the suggestion to change nutrient lines. Coco is an inert medium by default which really defeats the purpose of using the BioBizz nutrient line without also including organic material and microbes to provide nutrition to the plant. While CocOrganics works just fine I don't think it's really all that superior to traditional organic soil and consider coco more of an amendment or base in that purpose. Coco is most effective, with the most vigorous growth rates, when used in true hydroponics and you'll want a salt-based fertilizer to provide nutrition to the plant. Either way, staying with organics or moving into hydroponics, you'll want to add something else to your program.

Everyone has a "brand" favorite with coco coir. The truth of the matter is that none of these brands owns the trees, farms the coconuts, or control the monsoon seasons responsible to wash it clean. It mostly comes out of Sri Lanka, and gets graded and sold to someone with a bag. From brand to brand it's all really similar stuff and I find variation from bag to bag year to year. I've found pristine clean Botanicare CocoGro, and Canna Coco that contained trash, sticks, nuts, flies, and a 2.0ec fresh out of the bag. These products sit sealed up in pretty air tight plastic, on a pallet, in a warehouse, sometimes just in the sun, for weeks or months at a time. It will decomp and it's just impossible to armchair suggest your coco is fine because of the brand. So... After that little rant...

Wash your damn coco. Don't rely on the brand. For seedlings I find that the starting charge of some coco, regardless of brand, CAN be too high. It's not universal but I prefer the peace of mind in rinsing my coco clean and providing it with a healthy 0.6ec charge of a balanced nutrient system from the get go. This is the best way to ensure consistency and success from one grow to the next when starting from seed in coco.

BlackBuds is also onto something with the watering frequency. In sufficient O2 at the root zone (dissolved O2 in the nutrient solution or water) causes Epinasty, or root death. Knowing when to water can be difficult for new gardeners, especially with young plants. I prefer to go by the weight of the container at that size of plant. Water to absolute and complete saturation to the point of runoff, do so slowly to ensure the media is evenly wet. Once drained lift the container and get a feel for the weight. Every day, lift it again and try to feel the weight loss from evaporation and what the plant is consuming (very little at this stage). Once the media feels like it has lost a little bit more than 1/2 the weight go ahead and completely saturate again. This way you won't over water the root system, but you also don't allow the media to dry completely. If you stay with organics you will want to allow the media to get a little less moist between feedings, perhaps just 25% of the original weight before watering again. Always water to complete and even saturation, always.

With a little course correction you can save this plant. It's going to be a long road though and I think if you have more seeds and maybe $40 to dedicate to this I could get you squared with the right stuff and surpassing where you are now in about 2 weeks. Let me know if you want that.