Hi All,
I am at a bit of a loss and hoping that someone can help me. I have been growing indoors for about a year now and ive had two very successful harvests but have been struggling with all my plants since then. I am top feeding my plants.
My Setup:
I have about 5 plants in one tent under t5 lights and 3 plants in another tent under 1200W dimmable COB LED's(These are my flower lights but keeping these plants in VEG until i can find a solution to this problem) All of my plants seem to be affected.
Problem Description:
The runoff from my plants is around 4.5PH with some even lower than this.
I used to water my plants with 5.5PH and i had good success with this until i noticed that the runoff PH was dropping too low on my recent plants and they were starting to get affected with slow growth and yellowing of the new growth.
I started watering with 6.5PH and now im watering with 7PH in desperation but when i test the runoff its still around 4.5PH...
Two of my plants look WAY worse than the above. I just havent got a photo of them right now.
What i have tried:
The first thing i tried(BEFORE i checked the runoff PH) was to add Epsom Salts to the nutes because i first thought it might be a magnesium deficiency. I added epsom salts for a while and but the plants started getting worse so about two weeks ago i stopped. They now look terrible.
So recently I have been trying to flush my plants with higher PH water in an attempt to bring the runoff PH back up. But this seems to make it worse??
With two of my 10L pots i flushed the coco with water straight from the tap(~8PH) and i flushed them with probably 4 times+ the volume of the pot, i then tested the runoff and it was about 5.4PH after starting with about 4.4PH.. This was still too low but i flushed the living day lights out of these pots trying to bring the ph up and then gave them a slightly lowered nute solution at around 7PH but obviously this hasnt worked at all and then the next day they look way worse! And at the next watering i measured the runoff again and it was even lower than before..
My Theory:
So after seeing that the plants i flushed looked even worse than before, i realized that flushing may be making it worse?
I now believe that i may have been watering my plants too much to begin with which could have caused the PH to start getting lower and then when i noticed the signs of low PH i attempted to flush the plants thinking this would help but maybe this is actually the cause of the problem??
Reason i thought that i might be watering too much is because i was giving the 5L pots only 1litre of nutes for a while whilst i was giving the 10L much more and the 10L looked really bad and the 5L looked good. Now almost all of my plants look bad after flushing and watering a lot.
If anyone has encountered this problem before please help me. Nothing that i have tried is bringing the runoff PH up at all, no matter what PH goes in the top.
I am at a bit of a loss and hoping that someone can help me. I have been growing indoors for about a year now and ive had two very successful harvests but have been struggling with all my plants since then. I am top feeding my plants.
My Setup:
I have about 5 plants in one tent under t5 lights and 3 plants in another tent under 1200W dimmable COB LED's(These are my flower lights but keeping these plants in VEG until i can find a solution to this problem) All of my plants seem to be affected.
- Clones or Seed?: All plants are clones from a mother plant which recently died due to a completely unrelated mistake.
- Strains: Half are Critical Kush and others are Fruity Chronic Juice
- Pots: Smart Pots (Fabric Air Pots)
- Nutes: GreenHouse Feeding Powder feed all-in-one Veg nutes with calcium added. (I add 50PPM calc to every nute batch) LINK!
- Grow Medium: COCO and Perlite only. ~70% COCO and ~30% Perlite.
- Lights: Veg with HO t5's (6800K) and flower with 1200W COB LED's
- Grow Space: Inside a grow tent with full extraction setup and oscillating fans.
- Pot Size: Some in 5Litres, some in 10Litres and some in 20Litres as they age. (ALL of them are affected)
- Tap Water: Comes out at around 8PH and ~90PPM (Its potable water)
- Measuring tools: I have a relatively expensive and new PH pen metre and a PPM metre with thermometer built in.
- Training: Plants are low stress trained to have a flat canopy and only few bud sites (usually about 3 or 4 buds per plant). I pick off new bud site growth.
- Feeding Schedule: I usually water once every 3 days depending on how dry the pots feel. Bigger pots take longer to dry. I normally water until i get about 30% runoff but i may have been overdoing it recently.
Problem Description:
The runoff from my plants is around 4.5PH with some even lower than this.
I used to water my plants with 5.5PH and i had good success with this until i noticed that the runoff PH was dropping too low on my recent plants and they were starting to get affected with slow growth and yellowing of the new growth.
I started watering with 6.5PH and now im watering with 7PH in desperation but when i test the runoff its still around 4.5PH...
Two of my plants look WAY worse than the above. I just havent got a photo of them right now.
What i have tried:
The first thing i tried(BEFORE i checked the runoff PH) was to add Epsom Salts to the nutes because i first thought it might be a magnesium deficiency. I added epsom salts for a while and but the plants started getting worse so about two weeks ago i stopped. They now look terrible.
So recently I have been trying to flush my plants with higher PH water in an attempt to bring the runoff PH back up. But this seems to make it worse??
With two of my 10L pots i flushed the coco with water straight from the tap(~8PH) and i flushed them with probably 4 times+ the volume of the pot, i then tested the runoff and it was about 5.4PH after starting with about 4.4PH.. This was still too low but i flushed the living day lights out of these pots trying to bring the ph up and then gave them a slightly lowered nute solution at around 7PH but obviously this hasnt worked at all and then the next day they look way worse! And at the next watering i measured the runoff again and it was even lower than before..
My Theory:
So after seeing that the plants i flushed looked even worse than before, i realized that flushing may be making it worse?
I now believe that i may have been watering my plants too much to begin with which could have caused the PH to start getting lower and then when i noticed the signs of low PH i attempted to flush the plants thinking this would help but maybe this is actually the cause of the problem??
Reason i thought that i might be watering too much is because i was giving the 5L pots only 1litre of nutes for a while whilst i was giving the 10L much more and the 10L looked really bad and the 5L looked good. Now almost all of my plants look bad after flushing and watering a lot.
If anyone has encountered this problem before please help me. Nothing that i have tried is bringing the runoff PH up at all, no matter what PH goes in the top.
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