My first grow and Journal (leap year bud)

My set up...

Grow medium = Soil
PH = 6.0-6.5
Light = 400w MH conversion bulb on 20-4 18-20" above tops of plants.
Nutes = 4-1-1 @ 840 ppm.
Water/Nutes schedule = water every 2 days, nutes ever 4 days.
CO2 = Yeast and Sugar water shaken daily
Temp = 70-85 F
Hummidity = ?

The bad news. Whatever my leaf problem is, well, it's progressively getting worse on my taller plant. The bushier, shorter one seems to still be hanging in there. But this is the pile of fallen soldiers shed in the last three days (and I can see that there are more to come.)



So the plant is in a bit of a state of crisis. From looking at this...
GROWFAQ
it looks to me like either a potassium deficiency, either caused by not enough potassium (duh) or to much Sodium. The other possibility is that it's nute burn.









I have some tools now that I didn't have before. I tested the PH of my soil and it looks pretty good (not great) at 6.0-6.5. I also tested the PH of my water and it looks fine at 6.0-6.5. So far so good. I also to my TDS/PPM meter in the mail from China finally. I tested distilled water from the store and got a reading of 2 ppm. I tested my tap water and got a reading of 119 ppm. Once I add the dechlorinator, then I got a reading of 142 ppm. Then with the 4-1-1 nutes (the non-foxfarm one) it was at 845. Now I know finally what I've been giving my plants all along.

So that's..

PH = 6.0-6.5
Nutes mix = 845 ppm

So what to do? I posted about this leaf problem several times and never got an opinion one way or the other as to how to work on fixing it. So I'm going to assume that it's a potassium deficiency at this point. It seems to fit the description the most and I don't believe that I was burning my plants.

SO the first thing I did today was flush both of the plants with 7 gallons of water each. I want to make sure that it isn't an abundance of Sodium. Let's reset back to square one on the nutes front and go from there.

I got the set of FoxFarm nutes and I'm going to start flowering this weekend. Hopefully the bloom nutes with their higher potassium levels will help end this deficiency. I hate to start flowering with one of my plants in such a weakened state, but I'm not sure what else to do other than feed the plant straight potassium at this point.

The questions that I have right now are these...

1. Do you agree that it's most likely a Potassium deficiency?

2. After flushing a plant, how long should I wait to give it more nutes? Do I wait a few days until the soil dries a little (with the plant having very little to no nutes in that time) or do I give the plant nutes almost immediately after?

3. Do you think the regular FoxFarm nute Big Bloom plus Tiger Bloom should resolve my potassium deficiency or should I still be supplementing it at this point in order to help the plant 'recover'?

4. What's a ballpark on how long will it take the plant to recover?

Thanks for any help in advance.

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Looks like a nute burn to me. Flush it for a week and see what happens. Weed loves straight water.

Hello,

Thanks for your input FatTony!

I switched over the lights to flower (12/12) 5 days ago with the HPS bulb. You can tell from the pictures by the overwhelming amber color.



The plants seem to be reacting well as they gained a lot in height in just the last few days. I'm keeping them on nothing but water for a week to see if that helps with my leaf problem.





Also, I realized that I haven't calibrated my TDS, so perhaps the readings I got before are suspect. I ordered some 1382 calibration solution to make sure that everything is working properly.

Outside of that I don't have much more to report. I can't wait to start the plants on the foxfarm nutes. I feel nervous about flushing and only giving them water for a week. If it was nute burn (or a nutrient deficiency caused by lock up), then it's the absolutely right thing to do. However, if it's from a nutrient deficiency (caused by a lack of nutrients) then it seems like it's only going to starve the plants of that nutrient even more and I can only assume that they will get progressively worse before they get better. Either way, it has to hurt the amount of smoke I will get off of these plants. Too bad they can't talk and just tell me what the hell is wrong.



Oh yeah, I'm not jumping to conclusions yet like I did before, but so far, I don't see any evidence of 'balls' and only small pistil like things growing on both plants. Fingers crossed.





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Lessons learned.

I'm not even remotely close to an expert or anything, but I'm halfway through my first grow and I've learned quite a bit so far. I was writing this up for someone else's post and I decided to leave it here for other people who may wander by. So some advice to avoid the mistakes I've made.

Invest in enough equipment so you know what is going on with your plants and keep records of what you do when. It's incredibly hard (for me anyways) to remember everything and for people to help you online when you don't know what your PH is, temps are, humidity is, nutrients are. Also, when did you water? How much did you water? Keep track of this stuff. Start a grow journal on this website and write it down there. Put a link to it in your signature. Then people can find out about the history of your grow and give you better advice.

1. Be patient! This is a 6 month journey you are embarking on. You may get some great bud out of it. You may get nothing. Its the only way to learn though. It's hard to resist the temptation of mucking around with your plants every day.

2. Mylar - $13 online Don't use tinfoil. Get this stuff if you are going to grow inside for a bit. Or just stick with white walls. That works too.

3. Temps/Humidity - $10 at Target This thing will record the min/max temp and the min/max humidity of your grow area.

4. PH - $5 at hardware I notice these things everywhere I go now. It's good for 10 tests of your soil and water and it worked for me. There are home ingredient solutions to raise and lower PH. Just search on this website.

5. Moisture meter - $5 at hardware Does what it says. You can see how moist/dry your soil is at the bottom of your container.

6. Nutrients - $30-40 at ? I found mine at Longs Drugs for $30. Get these, follow the chart. It makes it easy for you and takes out a lot of the guess work. Chances are you won't over fertilize them either. I started off using "regular" off the shelf stuff. The instructions on most of this stuff is ambiguous. This is probably the most important thing that I've learned. At first it sounded like a lot of money to spend when I didn't even know if I was going to enjoy growing or have any female plants. But now, regardless of what happens, I sure wish I had started out with this stuff.

7. Misc. Get a oscillating fan if your going to keep them inside to make the stems strong, cycle the air and keep away molds. Also, get big enough pots (3 to 5 gal), keep a close eye on them for pests if you are growing outside and be ready to react to pests immediately (already have your solution in hand.)

8. And read the crap out of this website. There is a lot of good info in the GrowFAQ. Make sure to look there before you post. And use your head. Don't trust or rely solely on everything everyone tells you. People mean well, but it's just hard to know when you can't see, touch, live with the plants yourself.

I'm sure not everyone will agree, but that is what I've learned so far and believe to be true. I sure wish I had started with all of this info. It would have saved me a lot of headaches at this point.

I'm still having a great time growing though.

Hello,

I have to admit that I'm starting to get a little bit discouraged.

I flushed once on 4/25, but from a miscommunication, the plants got more nutrients (the foxfarm ones) the next day. I didn't realize what had happened until early on 4/29. So I flushed again on the 29th with plenty of water. On 5/1, I added a tiny bit of lime juice to their water to help with lockout if that is what's going on.

Now I'm having the hardest time waiting for that week to roll on by, especially because I don't see the health of my plants improving at all. If anything, they may appear to be getting worse. It's been 3 days since I flushed. Should I be seeing improvement by now? Do you think I should really wait until the 5/6 to start with nutrients again?

Here is a bunch of photos in their current state.















I have no idea what to do. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.



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Your journal is easy on the eyes



keep up the good work
HH

looks like spidermites

Thanks for the compliment HiddenHammer. I do appreciate it.

Good suggestion jasonlocsouthkorea. I've been looking really hard though and haven't seen any webs or any mites on the underside of the leaves. I'm pretty sure that it isn't spider mites. There is just no evidence to support that at all (other than the poor leaf quality.)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

So I managed to wait the seven days until now to give more nutes. I really appreciate some help that I got on another one of my threads from Incognitto. Thanks man! He assured me that the plants will do fine without the nutrients, they are hardy survivors. It helped me get through the "no nutes" week without stressing too much.





I was watering throughout the week maybe every other day. I tested the pH of my water again. It was 7.5!!! I don't know what the are doing down there at the water utility, but something made it jump up a point. So I retested my soil and got a PH of 7.0. Damn. Well, that very well may have been the key as to what is affecting my plants this whole time.

When I was giving the plant just water, the pH must have been way off for who knows how long. That could explain most of my leaf problems because, as I understand it, it would have possibly prevented the plant from absorbing a bunch of different nutes, so it wouldn't matter if I was giving the plant enough of x or y, the plant couldn't absorb them properly. Ok so lesson learned.

TEST YOUR PH EVERY TIME YOU WATER. Learned for life. I just bought a digital ph meter and its headed to me in the mail right now.

So this time when I was going to add my nutes, I tested the pH of the water after I put in my foxfarm big boom and tiger bloom. The Foxfarm stuff made the pH go down to 6.0. So I bumped it up a tad to 6.6.

Another strange thing, when I mixed my nutes according to the foxfarm chart, I got 1350 ppm. I think 150 or so of that is my water alone. But 1200 ppm still seemed too high for me. So I diluted until I was around 950 (800 from nutes.) That was a good thing to do, right?

Oh crap, I almost forgot the most important news, I'm 100% certain that THEY ARE BOTH FEMALES!!! WhooooHoooo! It's hard to tell from the photos, but in person it is very clear. It could have easily gone the other way and both have been males and then I'd be crying all over this journal begging for pity. I realize now that it was pretty risky growing only two plants. So a big sigh of relief that all the money spent on my electric bill and all the hard work may still pay off yet.



And I'm starting to see some flowers! They aren't big bud porn yet or anything, but they look beautiful to me.







I noticed for the first time that I'm seeing some roots coming out of the drainage holes in my pots. I'm not sure what this means. I guess I wished I used bigger pots (5 gallons instead of 3) and I wish that I had filled them up to the top with dirt. Also, I now realize that I wasted a lot of space, like two inches tall or more of root space. That, and I only expected the plants to reach 3' in height. One is almost already there and I think it's going to be a lot taller still.





I also got my thermometer/RH meter for $10. It works great as it records the min/max temp and humidity. Now I can finally get a better idea as to the grow room conditions for my plants. All in all, I just keep thinking about how the next time I do this, I'm going to kick so much more ass at growing. I can't wait.

So here are my numbers...

Day 11 flower / 65 days into grow
Lights = 400w HPS 12/12
Min Temp/Humidity = 64.5*F / 38 RH
Max Temp/Humidity = 79.1*F / 54 RH
pH of soil = 7.0 (too high)
pH of water/nute mix = 6.4
ppm of water/nute mix = 800

So here are my questions that I need help with/need to look into for this week (not too many.)

1. Is the temp fluctuations I'm getting a problem? I'm worried that it gets too cold. I can put a space heater in the room that is controlled with a thermostat.

2. Should I worry about humidity changes? If so, how do I stabilize my humidity. I already keep a 5 gallon bucket of water in there.

3. What about when I mixed my foxfarm nutes and got a ppm of 1350 (so 1200 cause 150 is my water.) Is that too high? Or should I trust the foxfarm chart?

4. Are the roots poking out a problem? If so, should I transplant into something bigger at this stage? Sounds a bit traumatic for the plants, but I'm still pretty early into flowering, so I dunno.

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Hello,

I realized that a cleaning up of my grow space was long over due. It was getting a bit sloppy in there. I've gotten rid of the ghetto CO2 stuff. I've been spending a lot of time in the room that feeds the air into my grow space. There should be plenty of CO2 at this point.

Also, because of the height difference in my two plants, I boosted up the shorter one on an upside down pot so now the tops sit about the same distance from the light.

My light has a glass cover and really isn't very warm. I can put my hand almost right up to the glass with it not being uncomfortable. I decided to put the outdoor temp probe from my thermometer about the same height as the tops of the plants so I can see how hot it's gettting up there. If you look at the pic closely, you can see the stick and the proble.



There really doesn't seem to be a significant temp difference between the floor of my space and seven inches below my light (1-2 degrees.) I think I'm going to try to keep the light much closer than I have been.

Day 18 flower / 72 days into grow
Lights = 400w HPS 12/12
Min Temp/Humidity = 61.8*F / 34 RH
Max Temp/Humidity = 84.0*F / 63 RH
pH of soil = ?
pH of water/nute mix = 6.2
ppm of water/nute mix = 940 ppm / 125 ppm from water


Hello,

The grow goes on much better this week. I think that the leaves have stopped degrading as fast as they were before. All of the new growth looks green and strong with nothing showing up on the edges anymore. So hopefully it was that my pH was off and it was causing nute lock up. Or perhaps it was that fish fertilizer I was using and it was burning the plants. Not sure.

I'm still losing leaves from the lower part of the plant. I'm not sure if this is normal or not, but I've seen people grow with nothing but the leaves on the cola so it makes me a bit less nervous about it.

So here are some pics for your amusement. It's gotten quiet around here, so if you're taking a look, feel free to leave a message, even if it's just to say "Hi".

hi . they are lookin good man. don't worry bout the leafs - they are all goin to die in the next few weeks bro. cheers!!! CheetaH

HAHA thanks for the video, i did chuckle a bit. I'll be watchin this one for sure

Day 21 flower / 75 days into grow
Lights = 400w HPS 12/12
Min Temp/Humidity = 63.2*F / 29 RH
Max Temp/Humidity = 93.2*F / 70 RH
pH of soil = ?
pH of water/nute mix = 6.2
ppm of water/nute mix = 940 ppm / 125 ppm from water

Well, I was having a good day and it has turned into a bad day. I was sitting here typing up a journal post about how I added AC to my grow, when I blew a circuit breaker (because of the new AC.) I couldn't find which one it was so I cycled them all on and off, including the main. Well, the main wouldn't go back on, it just wouldn't click and stick in the "on" position. So I called an electrician from the phone book (because it's the main and I don't fuck with live electricity.)

They guy came out two hours later and showed me his companies price book. $200+ to repair an existing circuit breaker, almost $600 to install a new one. Holy Hell!!!? I've installed a circuit breaker and it isn't nearly that hard or expensive. He said it was because I called a company in the yellow pages and he couldn't adjust the price because it was set by his company. If I had called a private contractor, then it would be next to nothing.

I was in a pinch and my plants had been sitting in the dark for three hours during 'lights on' of their regular 12/12 flower cycle. Every other place I had called said they'd be there in three days. I'm kinda freaked out by live electricity as well as not having any rubber coated screw drivers. So begrudgingly, I told him to go for it, even though it goes against my D.I.Y. cheap-assed nature. He tightened two screws that had apparently loosened with the heat and me flipping the breaker off and on and it was fixed and I was $225 poorer. They say that they don't charge by the hour, only by the job as if it's always going to be a good thing for you. It took him five minutes tops. Man, why does every company in the States have to be such a fucking gangster?

So my advice, get the number of a good electrical contracter (I have one now.) Keep it around, because if your power goes out, you can't look up shit on the internet and aparently the yellow pages will rip you off six ways till Sunday. I feel sorry for all those old ladies out there that just don't know any better. I'm going to have to work long and hard to forget about this ugly incident.

So anyways, I'll take a deep breath and get back to the grow.

Things have been pretty good except for some high temps yesterday. Like I said I got the AC in and now everything is working fine. I think the plants are done, or at least near done, with their growth spurt. The tallest is 36" while the short one is 26". Actually, the short one has just as many buds if not more and they are all closer to the light. The taller plants have buds at the bottom that don't recieve much light at all. Short plants = good.

Oh yeah, I see some sparkles on my leaves and buds. My trichomes have started to show. I need to get a magnifyer so I can have front row seats and share with everyone. It's so cool to see these plants develop every step of the way.

Pics for your enjoyment.

Ok, yeah.

So my question is do I keep the lights on for three hours longer today? Or do I just let my lights turn off at their regular time? I don't want to stress the plants more than I have and I sure don't want 'em to turn into hermies.

Thanks.

stick to your regular time man. dark during day is not as bad as light during night!

Just an update with some numbers. No pics this time. Everyday the buds look frostier and frostier.

Day 24 flower / 78 days into grow
Lights = 400w HPS 12/12
Min Temp/Humidity = 67.4*F / 31% RH
Max Temp/Humidity = 87.2*F / 79% RH
pH of soil = ?
pH of water/nute mix = 6.2
ppm of water/nute mix = 1782 ppm / 125 ppm from water

So I went with the foxfarm chart, which says in week 7-8 of flowering, I add in some Grow Big to the Tiger Bloom and Big Bloom. This is putting my ppm up very high (like scary high at 1600) but I'm trying to have faith that this won't burn my plants. I'm going to be keeping a close eye on them and my hand on the flush button. I will let you know how it goes.

what does ph stand for

how can you tell if its a girle. and why do you whant it tobe a girle.

cronic rules said:

how can you tell if its a girle. and why do you whant it tobe a girle.

Click to expand...

madafucka....read some info before ever atempt to ask somethin stupid like that

cronic rules said:

what does ph stand for

Click to expand...

Hey Cronic,

Welcome to RIU.org! Are you thinking of growing?

At the top left of the screen there is a link for the GrowFAQ which has some amazing information if you are new to this. You should definitely spend some time reading through the basics of growing and about the plant's life cycle. We all started out with the same billion questions and that will answer a lot of them fast for you. You will find answers there about pH and why the sex of your plant is important. It's an awesome resource that I've learned to love.

After you've taken a look there, if you still have some questions about pH and why the sex of your plant matters, come on back and I will see if I can help clear anything up.

Good luck.