your ph should be at 5.8 (ideal). this is what your goal is, to keep the water close to 5.8.

for ca deff, you'll notice something similar to a nute burn on the edges of your leaves (not the tips specifically). it will progress to rust spots in the center of the leaves, and can be fixed easily enough with cal/mag (which every hydro grower should have, imo)

sorry for not getting back to you sooner, if your nutes are for hardwater, and your water is soft, you will deffinitely have a ca deff eventually.

kp

KP what would you use to add cal / mag can you buy pure cal or mg and add it stright to water or do you just buy nutes thats high on cal/mg

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Thank you for this again. I am seeing small faint rust spots now. My grow place doesn't stock cal/mag I can't seem to find it, what else could I use?

looks like nute burn

I think it's epsom salts sir.

in soil, you have organic choices. for ca deff, you can use blackstrap molasses, on tablespoon per gallon, for mag deff, use epsom salts, one teaspoon per gallon.

for hydro, most 3 part formulas are made for certain kinds of water. if you have soft water, you'd get the regular formula, if your water is hard (tap water) then hw micro nutes are usually purchased.

cal/mag is a product available from botanicare. great stuff, i think it's one teaspoon per gallon? don't quote me on that... anyway, here's a link...

Cal Mag Plus - quart | Plant Nutrient Enhancers - General

hope this helps.

kp

i think i got your q up above, if not, pm me...

love, kp

GreenGro

The more I read through this thread and the more I think about it the more I think my initial post to you was correct - your ph is wrong and it's this that's causing your Magnesium lockout, along with your water. As kp says, your ph should ideally be around 5.8 and certainly no lower than that, if it were me I'd have it more 6.0-6.2 personally at least until the Mg problems go away and then you could drop it back to 5.8 - just watch for other possible lockouts occuring.

It's not calcium deficient, calcium def's are extremely rare in potted plants and I'd say Mg def's was probably either the second or third most common deficiency for indoor potted plants - usually because of the dissolved Calcium Carbonate salts in the irrigation water. Even at 200ppm excess Calcium Carbonate can start locking Mg out.

The only real long term solution to this (as I'm having to do) is get an RO machine to remove all that Calcium Carbonate from the water.

I think the reason you're seeing slow progress is twofold, as I've already said your ph is too low, secondly your dosages of epsom salts are also on the low side and it can take anything between 2-6 days for changes to start showing in the plant. I usually use 1 teaspoon per Litre of water for epsom salts (either level or heaped depending on how much I think they need) or 1 level-heaped tablesoon of epsom salts per gallon (4.5 litres).

In my opinion foliar feeding Epsom salts at a slightly less dilution rate than for root feeding is probably the fastest way to get results from it because the plant can access this directly through the leaves and ph is taken out of the equation.

Just don't overdo it and make sure you use a wetting agent with the foliar feed to help the water droplets penetrate the leaf surfaces. Also make sure you do it just after lights out so the light doesn't magnify the water droplets and burn the leaves.

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What do you mean by a wetting agent?

Also you could well be right about the Ph causing it, in the beginning and everytime I dumped the tank I was going for a PH of about 5.2 - 5.3, following some advice I read somewhere else, this is obviously much lower than the range you and KP have been saying.

Thanks again

Green

Firstly, I wouldn't have thought that an irrigation water ppm of under 200 would cause lockout, so it must be your low ph really that's causing it or it could be a combination of the two.

Wetting agents are basically Surfactants which lower the surface tension of liquids and allow easier spreading and penetration. Washing up liquid is a basic wetting agent - add one drop of washing up liquid to your foliar spray solution at about 1 drop per Litre or so.

Well the problem is, Magnesium availability does reduce significantly at lower ph levels, and combined with the Calcium ppm could be the cause. If you look at the chart I've attached, you can see that at a ph of 5.0 you get about a 1/3rd of the Magnesium availability that you get at 7.0. 7.0 is obviously too high for hydro but you can see from the chart that the best ph for maximum availability of all nutrients is 6.5-7.0 - this applies equally to hydro as it does to soil.

Attached Images

smallnutrientchart.jpg (31.0 KB, 24 views)

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Mandala Seeds Kalichakra and Satori Grow
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