Seeing yellowish and deformed leaves after Uncle Ben's Topping

After much reading I decided to go with an Uncle Ben's 4 cola top technique on my 4 Female Seeds Purple Marocs. They were looking great before hand with nice growth up through 6 nodes but it's now a week after the operation and their color has yellowed and some of the new leaves are distorted. I transplanted the seedlings into 5 gallon self water containers at three weeks of age and topped them at 4 weeks. They're growing in Lambert's LM-3. We did have a 3.5" rain storm after they were topped. I've fed them once with Jack's Classic All
Purpose diluted half strength since the topping.




Thanks for any thoughts!

SG1911

A lot of stress. A transplant, topped not long after and then 3.5 inches of rain. Overwater does cause yellowing as well as PH imbalance locking out certain nutes. The distorted leaves of new growth can sometimes be natural, but in your case they seem to have a lot of help. I would allow it to be pretty damn dry before you water again. Make sure is PH'D. Doesn't look like any N def, but I would monitor the amounts still. It could perk back up over time. Of course it's prob highly stressed and stunted already meaning whatever your prob is, might take a sec to recover.

Doski,

Thanks for the detailed and helpful reply. The girls were doing so well pre-topping it makes me really sad to see them so stressed afterwards. Last year I carried out a much more subtle double topping and didn't see such a setback. Then again the 3 .5 inch rain may have had a pretty profound effect.

Cheers

SG1911

So are you feeding/watering from the top or bottom of the container? The reason I ask is the runoff from the nutes would pool up in the bottom. Keeping your medium very saturated with nutes. You might wanna think about that and the possibility of over feeding.

MonkeyGrinder said:

So are you feeding/watering from the top or bottom of the container? The reason I ask is the runoff from the nutes would pool up in the bottom. Keeping your medium very saturated with nutes. You might wanna think about that and the possibility of over feeding.

Click to expand...

I did one very dilute feed from the top. We're now had over 5" of rain since then so any overfeed should be nicely flushed.
Here are a couple of more recent photos.