Preparing a brick of Botanicare CoCo

I have made the switch and have been playing with coco for a bit now, and have some questions on how you would properly prepare a fresh brick of coco.

I have flushed it with Ph'ed water until I could get the EC as low as possible on the run off, tried a heavy dose of Cal Mag and Liquid Karma followed by a flush. And a few other wacky things on a few bricks.

However, I have had mixed results in the early stages. When some of my clones and seedlings where placed in Coco pots to veg they experienced significant trauma and stress. This resulted in deformed and twisted leaves, crazy self topping and braching out, yellowing and all around not goodness of plants.

Then all the sudden the become super strong and healthy, take off and flourish. Any Ideas on what I am doing wrong here? I am sure it has something to do with how I am preparing the coco. As I have another large amount of Coco on the way I want to hear opinions on how to stop this.

I had the same problem the first time I prepared my bricks from GH last time. This time I have had success with; expanding in ph'd water, them flushing 3 times the amount of coir with ph'd water and then soaking in a light ph'd calmag solution. I don't flush or get alot of runoff w/ the calmag. This seems to work for me. I found a thread from jinxie a while back saying the calmag helps to buffer the high levels of K in the coir. This a real pain in the ass. I wish they carried canna around here.

I don't prep Botanicare coco...

-VT- said:

I don't prep Botanicare coco...

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Me either...I just throw a bale in a ~30 gallon rubbermaid and add 5 gallons of RO...give it a while to fluff up and loosen up any remaining chunks and start throwing it in pots. I checked the PPM of the runoff of it once and it was around 100ppm.

No prep here either.

I got a free brick when I purchased some stuff at a Hydro shop and I just let it break up in water and added large chunk FF perlite. They are doing great and I started to see new growth almost right away. I have also used the Botanicare bag COCO with the same prep and got same great results, except for my AG-13, that plant has been struggling, it was a bit weaker than the other clones I placeed in to start though.peace_highst