dustydundee Hydroponic nutrients, such as the General Hydroponics trio you're using, are easily dissolved and will leach out when watering. Whenever you feel like your plant needs more water but still has enough nutrients in the soil, you shouldn't wash those nutrients away, but rather only hydrate the medium so the remaining nutrients can be absorbed until the next feeding. Whenever you feel like your plant needs more nutrients, you should feed them until the solution runs off in order to remove any remaining salts (leftover nutrients) and introduce fresh nutrients in the correct proportion for the growing phase they are in.
If you water until run-off, you're hydrating the soil but also removing nutrients. In your case, since your soil already has some organic nutrients which aren't easily removed, your plants won't starve, but they will have less nutrients than intended until the next feeding.
If you feed without run-off, you're introducing new nutrients on top of any remaining nutrients already in the soil, which can easily compound and reach toxic concentrations (you'll notice its leaf tips will start turning brown if the concentration is too high, or if it's not too high overall but still has too much of any single nutrient, it can lock-out other nutrients, such as with the calcium toxicity in my case, which is locking out potassium and showing its symptoms all around).
From reading what others say, soil growers usually stick to mostly organic nutrients which are incorporated before planting with a periodic organic topdressing, and only occasionally introduce hydroponic nutrients to supplement what is already available in the medium. "Mr. Canucks Grow" on YouTube has a lot of videos on 100% organic grows. On the other hand, soilless growers usually stick to mostly inorganic nutrients (salt-based). In my case, I almost never water my plants, but instead feed them new nutrients whenever the medium is dry. Hydroponic nutrients are good for this, because they are easily displaced, so you don't need to flush them with water first and then feed, you can just feed until some amount runs off (in my case, I check the ppm and pH of the run-off until it registers an amount I'm satisfied with).
Next time, I'll give hydroponic (e.g. DWC) as well as a purely organic grow a try to see what works best. I like reading about plant nutrition and fine tuning things, so both soilless and hydroponic grows work better in this regard, but an organic soil grow has the advantage of being very low maintenance (or so I've been told), mostly only needing to be periodically watered and occasionally topdressed (e.g. to increase phosphorus during flowering).
