Spotting, Cupping, New to growing hydro, Help?

Hey everyone,

I'm all new to this and would really appreciate your help. I've looked at other threads and guides trying to recognize the problems I have with my ladies but am yet to identify it correctly. From matching my symptoms to some of these guides that it seems I have a Calcium and/or Magnesium and maybe a Manganese deficiency?

Pics added below (Not as clear as I'd like them to be).

I'm growing two plants sharing a res with 16 liters of water and using Atami B'Cuzz nutes.

Here are my stats..

-Growing Hydro Drip system
-temp are 25 to 28 C
-RH is 55% to 75%
-Drip schedule: 15 min every 2 hours
-Plant is almost 4 weeks old. Still in veg.
-250 w hps, 30cm above plants, cooltube, RVK extractor, 18/6 light schedule
-pH levels vary, in the morning it's around 6.3 and i bring it down to 5.7-5.8 and it comes back up the next morning.
-ppm 716 (1100 microS/cm)


After reading a lot of guides and threads on plant deficiencies and believing i might have one, I decided to add some nutrients for the first time. Yesterday I added 1.25 ml of nutes per liter of water. So 20 ml of both Atami B'Cuzz A + B formula.

The roots have exploded in growth over night but above ground they are looking pretty much the same as yesterday, before I added nutes.

The first pic is of my G13 Haze that has some scorched dry spots.



This is of my Super Critical Haze from Dinafem and it has some small yellow spotting on its leaves throughout random spots on the plant in no uniform pattern. (Best clarity I could get)






This is the G13 Haze again and this pic shows one leaf with some lesions that show also on the under side of the leaf and it is localized to only this one leaf. Also showing signs of cupping upwars and this is evident on other leaves as well.







This is the Super Critical Haze again and showing yet again some of the yellow spotting. Sorry about the clarity. It really is more visible than shown.





Any help would be great. I'm hoping it's just a matter of the plants needing some nutrients. I only added them yesterday and maybe I should just wait and see if it'll correct itself?

Thanks!

p.H is a lil high, i had issues with it when i did hydro. i added some lime to the water, it helped stabalize it. that could cause some fucked up shit with the fertilizers entering the plant

the other thing that jumps out at me is the drip, 15 min every 2 hours? are you 100% sure the roots are not drying out? where are the roots? in the water reservoir? are they hanging above it? them drying out is bad, them floating in the water is bad. i had a constant drip system, and my roots were in a mesh netting over the water, so they always had moisture, always had air, but never dried out, and were never swimming.

hydro is all root control dude. hope this helps. also, some kinks, deformities, necrosis, bending whatever is normal. i mean the plant is never 100% normal. your taking pics of a twist or bend or whatever that is really realy minor. take a breather dude, its gonna be ok. dont do anything drastic. minor issue = minor change. dont go overhauling everything and stressing them out.

PS, also check and make sure there arent salt buildups on the sides of the reservoir, or on the pump... that can tweek the water quality, starts to happen about a month in.

good luck man

Phew! Ok man... I was stressing out quite a bit and knowing that a little scuffs and bruises here and there wont be such an issue is great.

I didn't mention it but I'm using General Hydroponics Aquafarm.
http://www.hydroponicseurope.com/general-hydroponics-aquafarm.html

I'm using bottled water because my plain tap water (nothing added to it) was coming out at 800+ ppm and was stunting the growth of my plants!

As for the roots, the top bucket of the aquafarm that's holding the hydroton came with really small holes on the underside of it. I went ahead and drilled bigger holes into it and also added an extra air pump and air stone to provide extra oxygen to the roots so that they don't just sit in the water.

The roots have started coming out from the bottom of the top bucket and are swimming around in the reservoir. A few are really long and look pretty healthy and the air stone in there seems to be doing a good job at providing them with oxygen. As for the roots that are growing between the hydroton, I'm not sure if they are dry or not but I'm skeptical about bumping up the drip schedule to 15 min every hour. Do you think it would be better to go ahead and increase the drip intervals?

I try to bring the pH down every morning to 5.7-5.8 as much as possible, using some pH down I got from my local grow shop. Should I be checking it more often throughout the day and bring it down when it rises asap? I read somewhere that it is ok for it to rise up to 6.0 so it can suck up nutrients as needed at different pH levels and that it's not a good idea to be adding pH down too often.

Sorry for all the blabbering. But thanks a bunch dude!

The ph fluctuation could be due to some pathogens in system.Make sure you get H202 high grade to stabilize things and get ph up and down to adjust ph to 5.8.

That's nutrient burn. How long have you been vegging? And how large are your plants?

Drip feeder is a non-issue if your roots are making contact with solution. You could remove it altogether if you want.

When you say that the plant is 4 weeks old, is that 4 weeks from seed? If it is your ppm should probably be closer to 400ppm. I can't tell you what to do, but my past experience would tell me to back off on the nutes a little bit, but add Cal Mag Plus. If you are using bottled, distilled, or RO water all of the Cal and Mag have been removed. It seems that when they formulate nutrients they don't add enough of either as most water supplies have plenty of each.

Using RO or bottled water I will always get the same results your getting there with the cheetah spots.

I would be a little concerned with the rising ph levels. That's aweful fast for your reservoir to rising which would lead me to believe that you may have an issue with pathogens. H2o2 was already suggested and is a good idea, or a product called Aqua Shield. I've used it with great success when I was growing hydro and in particular with DWC. You don't want shit growin' in your reservoir, just above it .

GL

~Laserbrn

Just came back from my local grow shop. Picked up some H2o2 (17.5%) because it turns out I do have some pathogens in my res. One of my roots started to brown with some slime build up. It just started today and hopefully I caught it early enough to correct the problem. Ill post a couple of pics when i get a chance later today.

My plants are 4 weeks old from seed and at their 5th/6th node. Also, I'm pretty sure it isn't a nutrient burn since I only started to feed nutes yesterday and the symptons were there before I ever added any nutes.

As for my water. I'm using bottled water which comes out at 200 ppm without anything added to it.
My nutrients have, as stated on the back of the bottle:
"Calcium Oxide 4.49% (3.2% Ca)"
"Magnesium Oxide 1.51% (0.9% MG)"


Cheers all!

Some pictures from above and one shot of the root that is browning.