Hello fellow new growers,

I run a hydro system here at home. For the first month my girls were fine. Then, they stopped growing, the leaves turned yellow will brown spots, and generally were not healthy.

I learned this:

PH is VERY VERY VERY important.

at first I thought I had nute burn, basically saying I over fertilized. Then I thought I had been using to much of the PH DOWN liquid, causing a problem. Then I thought I had PH lockout, there for getting no nutes to my girls.

In the end, I ended doing experiments on all of them (4 plants) trying to figure out the problem though trial and error.

What I found was this: My PH meter was reading one point high (so a reading of 7.0 was actually 8.0). I cal'd my meter so i could remove it a suspect for my plant problems.

In the end I learned that I was not keeping my water/nute solution at the correct PH level of 5.3 to 5.7 (this seems best for my girls, and generally is an accepted range by other hydro growers). I was locking out one of the most important nutes during vegitation; Nitrogen!!! Once I adjusted PH to correct levels, and kept it there consistently, my babies are coming back to life. They were yellow, and are turning green again (more so the new growth. the older growth not so much, but did green up a little). also, they had stopped growing and are starting to grow again.

So, if I can give one peice of advice to first time hydro growers, MAKE SURE YOUR PH LEVELS ARE CORRECT. I've been going through over a month of headaches and stress trying to figure out my grow problems. It took a lot of testing/experimenting on each plant, and more importantly TIME to figure out the issue. Now that I have figured it out, I'm good to go once more...

I'm sure that being a noob grower, I'll have more lessons to learn down the road. But I hope that this will save some of you time. Like I said, I lost a month...

Good luck and happy growing!!!

-Snut

So true I also am growing for the 1st time and had the exact same problem took awhile for me to figure out it was PH. good luck

for sure. Im having to deal with a PH drop tester kit...

glad to see a couple of replies.. For sure PH is so important. I just didn't understand how important at first. I fugured that if it got up to 6.0 or even as high as 6.2 for a day or two, or even 3, no big deal....adjust it later and no problem. Not true. It really needs to be correct at all times, at least for my girls.

And having the added problem of buying a PH meter that wasn't calibrated correctly really threw me for a loop. It took me a long time to think of that....once I figured that out, made the correct adjustments, every thing seems to be coming back together for me. My girls are starting to look healthy again, and I couldn't be happier. Talk about being stressed out for a month...hahahah.

If it weren't for the un-stressing properties of the sweet leaf (all hail Black Sabbath!), I may have lost it completely.

Good luck to all!!!

-Snutter