Diary White Rhino & Friends. Fall 2021 Grow.

[aliceklar]

Experimenting with different compost mixes. Newest repottings have between 40-60% perlite - and a control 100% pure perlite (C6, a spare from my auto project). Interested to try a coir mix too, & some mixes with even less compost.

Flowering space nearly done. Just ran some power in there, and hung a SF1000 - all fits snug. Much better for the extra headroom.

 

[aliceklar]

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[aliceklar]

When I rebuilt the flower space I did a general repaint/clear out which unfortunately evicted the existing spider population. Just found this little fella in the sink and gave him a better home in the flower space.

 

[0j4Udcfr8z]

Heh heh. Doing a great job.

 

[0j4Udcfr8z]

Simple Hydroponics can be confusing. This article gives a comprehensive range of ideas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics Ebb and flood are one of the most reliable methods.

IMO, you make hydroponics simply using a garden water pump. Put a small hole in a garden tray 0.5cm to 1cm depending on your water pump. The water pump then fills the tray quicker than it can drain water. Use a hose from the water pump. Not complexly engineered projecting fittings.

IMO, your little pots can be watered hydroponically right now using something a bit like the 'Wick method'. If you put your plants over a container of water, this will help keep them moist.

Check this out!!!

Where soil is concerned, the water permeates upwards. Try watering from the container below the plants to see this happen. Don't overfill, so the plants are too immersed.

When you want nutrients for hydro, these can be obtained cheaply too. Use half the stated dose of liquid tomato fertilizer. Replace the other half with seaweed fertilizer. This has minerals, but low nutes. This is all specialist fertilizers are. Keep the nutes static. Specialist VEG, BLOOM & BOOST nutes may have some credibility in science. But where things like heat compound growing problems indoors, static nutes help keep plants from disasters like leaf drop.

Hydro example here:





Keep that perlite plant watered every day. Give it more light if possible.

 

[aliceklar]

[No message]

 

[aliceklar]

Getting worried about the RQS Green Gelato fem & the two Sherbert Queen x Afghan F1s. They were repotted over a week ago, from 1litre to 2litre pots, but have hardly grown since. Their roots are growing - all visible emerging from the drain holes at the bottom. I've given them very little water since the re-pot, as I;ve been worried about over-watering. Wondering now if I need to repot again, but with less compost/better drainage. They are in a mix with c.20% perlite at the moment. Considering potting them up into 5 litres with a perlite/coir mix, around the existing rootball. On the one hand I dont want to kill them with too many transplants, on the other they seem really unhappy where they are, and I really dont want to lose any of these.

 

[zif]

It is worrying that the new growth is still so pale and severely curling under.

I’m wondering about those roots. Seems like they might be escaping the pot/looking for better soil conditions. Any plants that are looking ok with that little perlite in the mix?

I’ve lost plants when desperately transplanting that didn’t look too much worse - but they generally had almost no root system. If you do go for it, you might take that into account and remove some leaves if the roots end up really sad looking.

I might lean on foliar feed, otherwise. You can also sometimes help by physically aerating the pot - making a bunch of holes with a screwdriver or chopstick. You won’t damage the root system, but it can provide oxygen to roots in damp medium or water to overly dry, compacted medium.

Hope they turn around for you!

 

[aliceklar]

It is worrying that the new growth is still so pale and severely curling under.
I’m wondering about those roots. Seems like they might be escaping the pot/looking for better soil conditions. Any plants that are looking ok with that little perlite in the mix?
I’ve lost plants when desperately transplanting that didn’t look too much worse - but they generally had almost no root system. If you do go for it, you might take that into account and remove some leaves if the roots end up really sad looking.
I might lean on foliar feed, otherwise. You can also sometimes help by physically aerating the pot - making a bunch of holes with a screwdriver or chopstick. You won’t damage the root system, but it can provide oxygen to roots in damp medium or water to overly dry, compacted medium.
Hope they turn around for you!

Thanks dude. Yeah, they've been baking my noodle. Am trying to figure out wft I have done so wrong this time - as I'm mostly growing strains I've grown before, or offspring of plants I've grown before, and they did much better previously. Some plants in a denser compost mix (5-10% perlite) seem relatively less affected, but none are really thriving. Last couple of grows I used no more than 20% perlite, and all were fine, but I'm interested to see if the improved drainage with higher levels of perlite is an improvement. Have kept on with a lighter watering regime and used a paint brush handle to aerate the GG & SQxA pots. Gave C6, the AKMMWR 100% perlite experiment, some dilute seaweed tea. Have been keeping it well watered.

So, what are the differences between this and my previous grows?

1) different lights for veg. Vegging under a pair of SF1000s instead of a bunch of low power LEDs - but I've got them dialed down to 60% and at 60cm off the plant tops, so that should be fine.
2) Added what I thought were fairly small amounts of organic ferts (bonemeal, blood fish & bone, kelp meal) to the compost mix on first potting up.
3) Different batch of compost to last time - I've just bought different brand to try next
4) overwatering.

As I have a bit of spare space in veg, and lots of seeds to spare, I've started another couple batches of seeds in 7cm pots with a vanilla 50/50 coir/perlite mix. Plan to give ph'd tap water or rainwater for the first couple of weeks after emergence. No nutes. No paper towels or anything, just straight into the pots. Temp at the top of the room is a fairly steady 25-26c. These guys are expendable because I have plenty of spare seed & no biggie if I end up having to junk most of them. Wil be interesting to see if they display any of the same symptoms - if not it will rule out the compost as a cause.

5: Medical Mass x Johaar#1 (F1s)
10: Medical Mass x White Rhino F2 (Maternal line #1) - planted these two to a pot. Will select quickly down to earliest emerging healthy seedling.

 

[zif]

Thanks dude. Yeah, they've been baking my noodle. Am trying to figure out wft I have done so wrong this time - as I'm mostly growing strains I've grown before, or offspring of plants I've grown before, and they did much better previously. Some plants in a denser compost mix (5-10% perlite) seem relatively less affected, but none are really thriving. Last couple of grows I used no more than 20% perlite, and all were fine, but I'm interested to see if the improved drainage with higher levels of perlite is an improvement. Have kept on with a lighter watering regime and used a paint brush handle to aerate the GG & SQxA pots. Gave C6, the AKMMWR 100% perlite experiment, some dilute seaweed tea. Have been keeping it well watered.

So, what are the differences between this and my previous grows?

1) different lights for veg. Vegging under a pair of SF1000s instead of a bunch of low power LEDs - but I've got them dialed down to 60% and at 60cm off the plant tops, so that should be fine.
2) Added what I thought were fairly small amounts of organic ferts (bonemeal, blood fish & bone, kelp meal) to the compost mix on first potting up.
3) Different batch of compost to last time - I've just bought different brand to try next
4) overwatering.

As I have a bit of spare space in veg, and lots of seeds to spare, I've started another couple batches of seeds in 7cm pots with a vanilla 50/50 coir/perlite mix. Plan to give ph'd tap water or rainwater for the first couple of weeks after emergence. No nutes. No paper towels or anything, just straight into the pots. Temp at the top of the room is a fairly steady 25-26c. These guys are expendable because I have plenty of spare seed & no biggie if I end up having to junk most of them. Wil be interesting to see if they display any of the same symptoms - if not it will rule out the compost as a cause.

5: Medical Mass x Johaar#1 (F1s)
10: Medical Mass x White Rhino F2 (Maternal line #1) - planted these two to a pot. Will select quickly down to earliest emerging healthy seedling.




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Hah - those meters are great!

That experiment is a really good idea. Maybe it’s just a bad batch of the compost. For a couple of seasons out here, stray persistent herbicides were wreaking a lot of havoc on the compost makers.

 

[aliceklar]

​​​​Was wondering about herbicide in the compost. Next batch will at least initially be in a pure perlite/coir mix, so that will give a clue.

Just repotted the Green Gelato & 2 x SQ x Afghan into 3 litre pots with coir/perlite 50/50. Man they are still looking sick The root growth on the SQxAs tho.... spectacular. All that energy under the surface and No Growth!



Lets see what a more neutral medium does for them. I tried as gently as I could to loosen the soil without wrecking the roots. Watered in with plain tapwater & 1ml/litre maxicrop seaweed extract.

 

[aliceklar]

Been looking at my water again. I got a new pH pen and it was coming out with completely different readings than the tester strips I've been using previously (aquarium stuff, but it has pH ranged from 6 up to about 8.5). Whereas the test strip has my tap water at an 8, the pen says 6.4. I tested a mix I was going to use on the high-perlite plants that are just going into flower, with 1ml of liquid tomato feed (4-5-10) and 1ml maxicrop to 1.5 litres tapwater, adjusted with about 1/8 tsp citric acid. The strips said 6.5, the pen said something crazy low, like 3 or 4. Tap water here is hard. Kettles quickly fill with limescale. The water company reports pH 7.5. Gonna have to check this all again! What if I've accidentally been poisoning the plants with acidic water? Every day. Is a school day.

 

[aliceklar]

Tap water
Pen: 6.7, Strip: 7.8-8.4
Bottled mineral water labelled as 7.8 pH
Pen 7.86, Strip 7.8
Black coffee
Pen 4.58, Strip <6.2 (6.2 is the min)

1.5 litres tap water with...
1ml tomato feed - Pen 6.64, strip 7.8
2ml tomato feed - Pen 6.6, strip 7.8
2ml tomato feed + 1ml maxicrop - Pen 6.6, strip 7.8
2ml tomato feed + 2ml maxicrop - Pen 6.6, strip 7.8
As above + 1/8 tsp citric acid - Pen 5.85, strip 7.2-7.6

These readings all taken with a more careful (sober) head, and carefully recorded (rather than remembered!)

Still wondering about these readings The pen is giving suspiciously low readings for the tap water - which historically has been v hard. The water company is untrustworthy (they recently got into sh*t for dumping untreated sewage into the rivers, because it was cheaper than treating it & they only care about their shareholder bonuses) and their last reported average pH (7.5) is from 2020, so its possible that there is something else in the water currently causing the drop in pH. More research needed, as they say... but in the meantime the plants are stagnant - hardly growing, necrosis slowly progressing, still pale. Weirdly, they both give the same reading on the mineral water, which I was hoping I could use to calibrate. The strips are a blunt instrument - v limited range, and not easy to judge subtle colour differences. As the pen tested accurate with the mineral water, and the local water company are greedy sharks, I'm inclined to trust the pen rather than the aquarium strips (which are 18 months old, although still within their best before). Will collect some rainwater...

In other news, the first of the new batch has emerged (Medical Mass x White Rhino F2) and looks perky.

 

[exploziv]

Hello buddy!
Sorry I did not catch your thread earlier!
To me they look "burned" but I can't tell if its too hot compost or ph troubles/overwater.
Cold roots could also be it if you don't have any insulation under them and the floor is cold.
As I was instructed to do to save mine when they started to look bad, I recommend you to flush them well with water ph'd just under 6 and very low nute load (about 400 ppm). To help them get some nutrition till the soil can give some to them, a horticultural foliar spray would be a lifesaver. You would see results imediately. Search for one that has full range of nutes needed, NPK + micro.
Also, ditch the ph strips and get ph (reactive) drops (used for pool water or aquarium water testing). But search for some with wide spectrum, you need at least 5 to 7 PH range. The top aquarium supplies makers even have some that are 3 to 10 PH. Costed me 10 euro for 100 tests. Much easier to read than strips.
With eyes good enaugh reading within 0.5 PH error is easy. And you don't need to think about meter calibration or having calibration solution ever. You could even use this to check the accuracy of your meter, but once you get the hang of it you might find yourself throwing out your ph pen.
Hope you manage to fix them! Will watch on!

 

[PCBuds]

I tried all kinds of PH testing stuff.

I started with this, and I'm sure you know that the thing is kinda useless.

It is still useful in that it can tell you if something is really wrong when the needle is pinned one way or the other, but it is far from accurate and you can see the needle bouncing if you push on the meter a little bit.


My next purchase was the yellow PH pen on the right...

It was a $10 piece of crap that had no consistency and gave different readings of the same solution when tested at different times.

Then I bought the strips and had the same issue as you in not being able to judge the color.
It has 2 test squares and they wouldn't match up to the color chart as a pair.
The darker square would match with 6.5, and the lighter square would match up with the 4.5.

Then I bought the second yellow meter, that was supposed to be auto-calibrating but I couldn't get the damn thing to work and it was stuck in calibration mode.
Then I ran out of calibration packets and had to wait 2 months for new ones to ship from China.

Then I bought the Hydrion strips (you tear a piece off of the roll) and had the same color judgment to deal with and nothing I had agreed with anything else I had
I had no standardized solution to test so I didn't know what was right.

Then I bought the drops and had the same issue trying to judge the color.

All the colors of the strips and drops looked different in daylight, sunlight, and my room lighting.



The dark red meter is a TDS meter and is also a $10 piece of crap.

You're better off guessing.


Then a fellow forum member mailed me his old PH meter which is a much better quality meter.
(Thanks again @TdotGonG.)


I had my new PH packets when the meter arrived and it was dead on with all three PH values and I didn't need to calibrate it.

I also bought a better TDS/EC meter with the help of some opinions of fellow forum members.

HM digital is a mid quality brand that you can feel more confident in trusting.

The $68 version is probably better quality and accuracy and it automatically adjusts for temperature for a more accurate reading.


Bluelab is considered to be about the best you can get, and I'll probably buy one if Iever need a new one.

One thing to keep in mind is the temperature of what you're testing.


Maybe as an experiment, you test your mineral water when its cold from the fridge, room temperature, and warmed up to see what kind of readings you get.

The PH packets are supposed to be tested at 25°C, my old TDS meter is supposed to test at 20°C, and a lot of lab equipment is supposed to test at 15°C.

 

[aliceklar]

PCBuds
exploziv

Thanks for the advice guys! My new meter looks like one of your pieces of crap, PC Am torn now about what to do next. The water is either too low pH or too high, the mix is either not rich enough or too rich... Aaagh! The C6 plant in pure perlite is starting to look better than many of the others, which suggests it might have been something to do with the compost or the amendments... I've been watering it daily (whereas the others are only getting water when they are dry). Not sure whether to just revert to what I did on my initial grow last year and simply use plain tapwater, unamended. Might try this for the higher compost mixes, and just use the 1ml maxicrop/1ml tomato food per 1.5 litres on the perlite-heavy ones (works out at c20% recommended dilution of 15ml to 4.5 litres for the 4-5-10 tomato food, plus micronutrients in the maxicrop) - minded to drop the citric acid amendment and see what happens.

And the new batch are starting to emerge - 1/10 of the MM x WR F2s, and 4/5 of the MM x Johaar F1s. These are in a 50/50 perlite/coir mix. Hopefully I will get better success with these... I'd worked out I had about enough bud from the last grow to last me, but the way things are going may well run out

 

[exploziv]

Without proper calibration on that ph meter.. you'd be better guessing. My piece of crap meter (probably same hardware as what you guys have on yellow ones) needed calibration before each measuring. So after a friend said to try drops.. I threw it out. I mean I was planning to throw it away even before I found the drops work. That's how crappy it was.
Good luck fixing them. A good EC meter is probably what you need to figure this out. Check runoff..

 

[zif]

I've also ditched a couple of those boxy pH pens (though the similar-looking TDS meters are much better, in my experience). Even careful calibration wasn't enough to make them trustworthy. Moving to a budget Apera meter (likely cheaper elsewhere) made a world of difference.

Even so, that pen looks better than the strips in your tests. At least it moves...

Citric acid is 'weak', but a little bit sure goes a long way. About 0.2g per liter of distilled water makes a solution with pH 3.2. It could definitely be contributing. If you don't have calibration standards on hand, measuring a citric acid solution and a baking soda solution (pH 8-9 when saturated) would give you a quick way to check all of your readings.

The catch with pH problems is that they show up as deficiencies and excesses! Some nutrients get locked out, while others are not affected or even become more available.

The plant in perlite still 'reads' like it's seeing too low a pH, to me. It makes sense that it would be happier, though, as inert media favor lower pH feedings.

Hope the stash holds up! It seems like you're narrowing in on the culprit(s)!

 

[PCBuds]

I've also ditched a couple of those boxy pH pens (though the similar-looking TDS meters are much better, in my experience). Even careful calibration wasn't enough to make them trustworthy. Moving to a budget Apera meter (likely cheaper elsewhere) made a world of difference.

The better quality meters have a sealed cap so you can put storage solution in it to preserve the sensor.

My cheap meters didn't have a sealed cap and didn't mention anything about storage solution or storing them wet in the instructions.

 

[aliceklar]

Did some more tests. Tapwater was (pen) testing at 6.7 when it went in to some of the pots with perlite/compost mixes, and the runoff was 8 (collected from the tray, not direct, so it may have picked up some precipitated chalk from previous dried runoffs). With the AKs in flower, feed went in at 6.3 (2ml maxicrop and 1ml tomato feed with a tiny amount of citric acid) and came out at 7.3. So even if the pen is off, its showing that the runoff is about 1 pH point higher than what goes in - so that must say something

Some of the AKs in flower are actually flowering already - I guess they've had such a shite time of it they want to get it over with . Also seeing new dark green leaf growth along the stems of some of the plants in veg, at nodes where the previous leaves had dropped off. Happy to see that they are drinking, too. All getting dry only one day after watering. Result.

Applied 2nd dose of nematodes (for fungus gnats).