Dr. Mantis Toboggan's Perpetual Tent of Wonder, Dreams, Highs, Lows, Enemies, Friends, and Maybe - Just Maybe - Even You

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Funny tidbit, they actually kinda love it, specially if you do it slowly in a massagey kind of way (cue the sexy music)
joke aside, the beauty of fabric pots is that you can kinda feel from the outside how the rootsystem is developing, and you can kinda break the hard soil chunks. it can be done with plastic pots too, but they lose soil all over the place and it's hard to feel (if you catch my drift ;D)

I don't have a dirty mind, only dirty hands

When I got into cannabis cultivation, no one told me about the sensuality involved.

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Trained the Panama right after taking these pictures.

New growth on the GG #4 is still looking a bit iffy to me, but I'm no expert. It's hard to see the coloring in the pics, though.

GG #4:

Panama back left, GG #4 back right, MN Tangie front right, Blueberry F5 front left:

 

[Entusia]

Trained the Panama right after taking these pictures.

New growth on the GG #4 is still looking a bit iffy to me, but I'm no expert. It's hard to see the coloring in the pics, though.

GG #4:

View attachment 18913976

Panama back left, GG #4 back right, MN Tangie front right, Blueberry F5 front left:

View attachment 18913977

The pots look better now, not bone dry at all, so i think it'll be just a matter of time before they get back to business... it def might take a little while for the roots to get back to full strength after prolonged watering stress, so don't flip them yet

New growth looks a-ok to me... when there's new growth it's almost always good news, might look better but again maybe it's just the stress still lingering.

Keep it going and watered properly

 

[LG/]

Same as above, things are looking alot better! Good stuff

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Fed the Blueberry F5 clone Dr. Earth for the first time today. Continued LSTing the Panama and MN Tangie clones.

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Fed the mothers, and the MN Tangie Panama clones with 1/8 cap (1/2 tsp.) of Espoma liquid fertilizer, and the GG #4 clone with about ¼ cap (1 tsp.). It SMELLS.

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Continued LSTing the MN Tangie and Panama clones.

 

[rindindoo]

hi!
How did clone GG #4 react to the last feeding?

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

hi!
How did clone GG #4 react to the last feeding?

Take a look - Photo dump incoming!

Panama clone:

New growth:

Old growth:

Blueberry F5 clone:

Seeing some clawing:

Close-up. No idea on the sex (still!):

New growth:

GG #4 clone:

New growth:

MN Tangie clone:

Freshly LST'd:

New growth:

Thinking of giving the Blueberry F5 a couple weeks to catch up and begin LSTing and then flipping to flower. Thoughts?

 

[rindindoo]

Blueberry F5 is 99% male, in the place where the pre-flower should be there is a circle with shoots, it looks like a crab claw, if so, then I'm very sorry.
I look at clone GG #4, it is clearly hungry, but I don’t like how the tips of the serrations on the leaves dry out, this is not visible on young ones, but you can see that they are embossed and aggressively prickly. We need to look in the table of problems for the cause; maybe a blockage occurred due to frequent drying out (the soil became salty)?
If it turns out that the Blueberry clone is male, you can do experiments with it, for example, give it 80-100% feeding and see. because sometimes the tips of the leaves “burn” - a sure sign of an overestimated concentration, but at the same time the leaves are dark green, and yours are quite light (if this is not a distortion from the lamp), the tips become discolored, purple stripes on the stem in addition, that’s all this is a sign of hunger.
But I may be very high, I need to wait for the opinion of at least 2-3 more stoned people.

 

[Entusia]

@rindindoo Agreed. Something's up.

Reddish/Purple stems, limp stems and leaves, slowed growth, some burns and splotches (all typical when chronically underwatering) seemed to be solved... for a whole minute that is.

What follows is 100% speculation:
That to me looks mostly like some really wildly low pH.
Distorted growth, touches of P and Mb deficiency and Fe and Cl toxicity (?)

The edges and tips discoloring/drying definitely can't be the lamp, he doesn't have the wattage i think.

The only other thing that could be doing something similar i think is the pH danger zone (5-6), locking out P / Mb uptake while making Fe / Cl uptake toxic (???)

There's that weird new growth "bronzing"... that is definitely really suspicious and very much characteristic of Fe toxicity (!!!) There's also weird "spots" in the new growth, sort of yellow irregular looking...could be whatever basically because at 5.5 there's loads of different uptake problems.



Perhaps what caused it is all the nutes/salts that could've been locking out/drying up before when you weren't watering enough, suddenly becoming available, all at once (or twice), now that the watering has been consistent, and they're driving pH really really low?

Some hydrophobic spots could've been slowly dissolving and if they were really salty they could definitely have brought the whole substrate pH down, making it worse at each watering.
Also seems like last feeding didn't help, it looked slightly better before, so there's that too.

Also the microlife, thanks to water being more available and consistent, should be back for vengeance... might've started working really hard to decompose all the stuff that was put in it but wasn't being used because of it drying up too much and by doing so making it even more lower pH and higher EC. Sorry but i know very very little about organics.

Could tips then be simply burning from too high EC (???)

Without knowing the runoff pH and EC it's really really hard to accurately diagnose and/or prescribe any therapy, but to me all that i wrote above sort of makes sense and tracks what's been happening... definitely wait for more experienced help, i'm just a dude who mostly likes the subject but knows very little and has very very little practice under its belt (6 total runs in like 4 years).

 

[rindindoo]

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that when growing organically, if a problem occurs, it is easier to transplant into new soil than to try to fix an already unbalanced system.
Could you stop using molasses for a while? in my opinion,
Growing organically indoors is a high level of skill, but on a small scale it’s like shoeing a flea.
Your pots are of a very small volume to maintain the microbiological balance (I apologize for the clever words if they are missing) necessary for processing the fertilizer you pour in, these complex organic compounds are not directly accessible to the plant, various kinds of bacteria must deal with them, turning this crap into mineral salts that are available plant. Every time your pot dries out, the bioreactor breaks down and needs time to recover; before you have time to increase the strength of the colony, you pour food into them in the form of molasses, they eat up completely, there are a lot of leftovers and uneaten food around, they get sunburnt, everything goes out, these gluttons they burn in the sun, then you pour more food in the form of fertilizer and so on.
The more different components you use, the more difficult it is to understand why you have problems.
In order not to replant at this stage, you can try to find out the problem experimentally, as I wrote above, test a high concentration, gradually increasing from 80 to 100%, or from 70%, according to the scheme - one watering with fertilizer, the next two with water. - I forgot to say that it is better to choose one clone, which is the least valuable!
Or do it yourself, which is also a very correct option; in any case, the first cultivation involves zeroing in on the sight, establishing communication with the cannabis plants.

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Thanks for the feedback, @Entusia and @rindindoo!

@Entusia, I don't have a digital meter to check runoff, but the pH in the medium is at about 6.5 today, according to my analog meter.

@rindindoo, I love your writing style. I know you use Google Translate, but it nevertheless shines through. I can certainly stop the molasses for a while. I'm kind of scared to experiment on the Blueberry F5 prior to it showing its sex, on the off chance that it's female and I've wasted a plant. Is my thinking wrong?

What do you all think of my giving a 2nd feeding of calmag this weekend? Or should I continue with water-only?

I forgot to add a group photo yesterday. Here ya go:

It's interesting how thin the leaves are for the Blueberry F5, and how wide the spacing of the fingers are. The MN Tangie is so lanky! It might be hard to tame in flowering.

 

[rindindoo]

Thanks Dr. Mantis Toboggan

If you don't want to lose Blueberry, then don't do it.

“What do you think about me giving a second helping of Kalmag this weekend?”
I am in favor of eliminating everything except clean water and liquid fertilizers. I am not a fan of giving nutrients separately. if you provide balanced nutrition in sufficient quantities, the plant will not lack any elements, be it magnesium, calcium, and so on. and there should not be a shortage of microelements in peat mixtures, only in the event of a blockage.
I don’t know how correct this is for growing on soil substrates, but when growing on coconut, if I give a low concentration, the plant will experience chronic malnutrition, even though I will continuously supply a solution with fertilizers, and only after raising the concentration to the optimum will the plant acquire a healthy appearance view. If my memory serves me correctly, the burnt edges of the leaves along the contour is a lack of potassium? I'm not sure of my memory
It seems to me that I see hungry plants, if this is so, it remains to find out the reason. your liquid fertilizer is sufficient for the vegetative stage.
pH 6.5 of the liquid flowing out of the pot after watering? Yes, this is just ideal! and what is the pH of the liquid poured into the pot with and without fertilizers? Sorry if you already wrote this somewhere.
This means that your soil has not become acidic or alkalized, and the absorption of nutrients is not blocked. You need to carefully, like a soper moving through a minefield, raise the concentration of fertilizers if you have a blockage due to salting of the soil, then rinsing the substrate is necessary.
I have no other ideas.

If you are worried about losing the plant, then switch them to flowering after cutting the clones.

 

[rindindoo]

I also looked closely at the last photo, GG #4 looks sad, I would feed the rest of the clones with the same concentration according to the scheme I suggested above, fertilizers - clean water - clean water, and Gorila is much larger and most likely older than the others, she wants to eat more .

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

@rindindoo, the 6.5 pH is in the media, not the water coming out of the pot. I don't believe my meter was designed to measure runoff. Regarding feeding the GG #4 again, I just fed it over the weekend, and the instructions for the liquid nutrients say to use it every 2-4 weeks. Would I risk hurting the plant by feeding again in 1 week's time?

 

[Entusia]

[...] if you have a blockage due to salting of the soil, then rinsing the substrate is necessary.
I have no other ideas.

Agree with everything, but i want to highlight that flushing with organics a) sucks, b) stinks, c) is messy and d) "dumps the baby with the bath water".

If it's blocked due to salting, it's also the only real way to solve it... except if you're up to wait and lose potentially weeks while watering to some % of runoff like 30-50% to gradually replace what's in there... which is basically a delayed progressive flushing anyways.

These are the only ways i know to "reset" your soil and to make sure what's inside of it and what's not inside of it.

Agreed with rindindoo just try and do what he says to see if it's just underfed or imbalanced.

If it doesn't recover, it's then blocked due to salting and you need to flush with tons of pH'd water with a baseline complete nutrition profile to basically fully dissolve the toxic deposits and replace everything that's inside.

 

[rindindoo]

Yes, your device will not show the correct drain values. no need to worry about this.
I can’t say that everything will go well if you fertilize once a week, but most likely the manufacturer indicated the interval based on 100% concentration, is there no specification on the label?
I couldn’t find pictures of your fertilizers in previous messages, if I’m not mistaken, these fertilizers are not specialized for cannabis? Even if you fertilize with 100% concentration and wait for the result, I don’t think it will kill the plant, in extreme cases the leaves will darken and nitrogen claw will appear.
Therefore, I recommend gradually increasing your concentration.
I just looked at the photo for October 15th, and I can confidently say that progress is being made; in the photo for October 24th, the Panama plant looks very healthy. As far as I know, NLD landraces require lower levels of nutrients, Dubi always mentions this in the description of their varieties, this may be an indirect indication that my suspicions about malnutrition are correct.

@Entusia is absolutely right, I did not describe all the delights of washing the soil, because at this stage, if necessary, it is easier and better to simply replant it in new soil.

 

[blondie]

Greetings doc. Some images here suffer from lack of calcium. Epsom salts will not give you cal, only mag FYI. Keep up with cal supplements and I bet at least some issues disappear. An idea instead of removing and dunking an entire plant in water is to water it slowly. Water with a small amount and wait for it to soak in. Repeat.. I use 5-7 gallon fabrics and have successfully over watered so be a little careful. It is possible and easier than one may think. For me, it depends on the time of year in my grow room. Humidity fluctuates dramatically and in the early fall like now, my humidity is nearly the same as temp. In another month, humidity drops very low and I need to step up watering. Knowing your humidity level can help if your grow room is similar to mine. Though I think you are under watering and can afford to add more. Also knowing ph of your tap can help. Your tap water supplier should have PH number that is a rough guideline. Measuring PH using liquids is not bad if you can’t have a pricey pen. Good luck...

 

[Dr. Mantis Toboggan]

Thanks you 3! @rindindoo, regarding the liquid nutrients, the 2-4 week timeline is based on full strength use. I checked my notes, and I've haven't given more than about half strength. It's not specialized for cannabis.

Here's the label again, if anyone's interested:

What do people think about me giving a 70-80% strength feeding this weekend and seeing what happens?

@blondie, I'm using the technique you describe for watering now! While I can find water quality reports, I can't locate the info on my city's pH. I'll continue looking. My humidity is at about 60%, temperature is at about 70 degrees, and VPD is at 1 kPa.