Mid soil grow contemplating switching to coco

[greenCoffee]

15+ years ago I did 4 soil grows, and I've just restarted growing. I've got 3 clones from an acquaintance. They're currently in 2L platic containers of soil (pro-mix with some amendments I eyeballed in, and about 20% perlite, 10% vermiculite by volume). The next (and final) pots before flower will be 3 gallon (debating 5 gallon) fabric pots.

Reasons I'm considering switching to coco - I'm seeing slower growth than I remember (but I did accidentally heat/light stress a couple of weeks back putting them too close to the old HPS when I got that setup), and just yesterday I discovered my soil came with a free batch of thrips! Fortunately I've only seen juvenile tiny thing wormy things, so it looks like I caught this early, but still soil, come on! Coco's fast growth would always be good, and my middle age life would like the simplicity of just paying for nutrients instead of worrying about soil amendments, timelines and working on super soil over the summer.

I sprayed them last night with insecticidal soap, but saw (and squished/scraped) at least 2 thrips this morning. I'll continue spraying every 2-3 days. Spinosad does not appear to be easy/cheap to find in Canada. I included one closeup of the thrip - really small.

If they were still in starter cups, this wouldn't even be a question of switching now. But 2L pots will have a lot of roots. Possibly complicating things is I think my soil is currently on the strong side nute-wise. I'm feeding only water (two nights ago I measured pH to realize my tap water is about 7.5, I'm currently fixing that with lemon juice), but the leaves without thrip damage are super dark green, and some of the leaves have downward tips - slow growth, dark green, downward tips implies my nitrogen is high (probably too high, sigh). This strong soil might make feeding difficult, with the roots in coco not bringing in any nutes, while there's potentially too much (and a fight) to take in nutrients in the soil. And adding nutes might cause burn.

Lastly, as mentioned they're currently in 2L pots. Trying to disturb the root system by dislodging much/any of the soil before seems to be asking for further stunting/delay. But on that note, I don't *need* to hit a schedule or something; we can easily by legal weed, or semi-legal weed via MOM's in our area... so if the answer is to dislodge much/all soil and transplant into coco and accept that the plant takes 2+ weeks of gentle care before they start getting happy, that's not the end of my world.

Please someone help convince me to either finish this grow in soil (my future grows will 100% be coco/perlite), or switch to coco now/sooner than later.

[9fingerleafs]

Man I don’t really know about the thrips but you can buy some branded bagged coco ready for use and some hydro 2 part nutrients and a bottle of calmag. You take the soil plants and put inside a bucket half full with water and gently loose all the soil until you have only roots(some soil will remain trapped but mostly gone) and then transplant into coco and water with half dose nutrients and half dose calmag at ph 6. In a couple of days they should start to look better

[dphipps1020]

I would say if you plan to switch to coco anyway, just go ahead and do it now. You can effectively knock all of the soil off and replace it with the coco. If you do it carefully enough, your plant should suffer minimum stress and should recover in a matter of a few days, not weeks. I've done it a few times successfully and every time my plants were right back within 3 days. As for the thrips, not sure if you can get it in your area or not but this is what I used when I found out I had thrips. Sprayed once, let it dry and sprayed again. I haven't seen any since and that was over a week ago. In any case, I hope you can find something to get rid of them. Hope this helps and good luck.

[greenCoffee]

Part of the thoughts of delay the switch to coco was putting off the buying of ~$150 in coco+nutes. But ultimately it will get bought, and money isn't tight to the point that I need to structure things, so now I've got a pickup order waiting for me at the hydroponic store. And I added the stuff I'll need to do future cloning, so I should finally be good for supplies.

dphipps: I've come across Monterey Garden during searching for spinosad, but it doesn't seem to be anywhere in Canada. There are a few .ca sites that list it, but searching apparently it's .ca sites of US companies that ship cross border... and likely get hit for $20 customs charges, large shipping charges, and if by UPS there'll be an extra brokerage charge. I once had to pay ~$35 to UPS to get a $10 gift from a friend who didn't know how bad UPS can be for international stuff. Getting stuff from the US in Canada can be problematic. It looks like in 2018 Canada started a re-review of spinosad, and with it all products seem to have disappeared from store shelves. I could probably get a container for about $80 CDN - I'd try making soup (warm water bath) before that.

Since I'll be conditioning on Sat, and transpotting either later on Sat, or early on Sun, does anyone have strong thoughts on repotting in the 2L containers that they were transplanted to last weekend, or go big in the 5 gal pots? Thanks in advance!

[9fingerleafs]

I think 2 liter will work fine. Once you get the soil out the root ball will be small