Man, salt buildup is the number one reason of nutrients lockout. You are right about not putting a lot of nutrients, it isn`t needed, you must put what the plant need and that is all.
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Plant leaves feeling dry/paper like
- Thread starter Rtaym22224
- Start date
Hi, salt build up is a problem with organics too as it is an irrigation problem usually. Amendments are slow release, but he is putting a lot of other stuff too. About minerals, if you irrigate correctly you won`t have that problem. It is an extense topic, a great one.
Hi, it is me again. Let`s go, keep it simple, man. I suggest you start again instead of wasting your time assuming things and trying to fix the unfixable. Remember, when you have ONE parameter changed, you must change everything else to adjust that. Example: you have high CO2 concentrations and you can control it, so plants will need more temp, more HR, more LIGHT (which you reduced at 18%, I don`t now the exact PPF you are having), etc. I think you are having a heavy imbalance in your soil, worsened by adding more fertilizers which aren`t needed. You control a lot of things but you don`t control your soil at the moment which is VERY important. Problems like this take time to show on the leaves, so the problem is from at least some weeks prior to this thread and will take some more time to solve it by the plant itself because there is not much you can do at the moment, to be honest.
I would love to have what you have to control my growroom, you have the edge here, man, use it!
And don`t pay attention to people who say is CaMg problems, that is always the ignorant people`s response when they don`t know where the problem is.
Remember the 9 parameters you must control to have a nice grow:
1.LIGHT is the most important, because the more you put, you will have to change ALL other parameters according.
2.Air velocity
3.Temperature of the grow room
4.Humidity
5.CO2
In the substrate:
6.O2
7.Nutrients
8.Water
9.Temperature
This is easier to control when you use coco coir, rockwool, peat, etc. But when you use soil, you better know what you are doing because it is almost impossible to control amount of nutrients & temps if it isn`t composted correctly. And this is just an overview, we can talk it more in depth if you like. My opinion, and it is just an opinion, is you have everything to make it work, just adjust your parameters and I reccomend you to start again so you don`t lose your time.
Sorry for the testament here, and bear with my english, please, if you want to correct me on my redaction I will be please to learn a little bit more your language.
Chers and lets go!
Topping and bending plants will cause stress and for some strains this will stun the root growth quite abit, so i recommend you avoid topping them or LSTing them till they look better.
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Yellowing leaves can be caused by over or underwatering and led/heat radiation stress which dehydrates plant tissue. Cold and windy conditions can also do this, so, it’s not always a sign of nute deficiency.
Nitrogen deficiency starts at the bottom of the plant, not in the middle so your plants aren’t running out of N.
If your soil is hot to begin with and you have added worm crap it’s quite safe to say your plants aren’t running out of NPK nutrients for a while. The whole plant will start going abit pale green if they lack N and K but clearly your plants are quite dark green.
The yellowing sun leaves were caused by your leds and your fan direction dehydrating them – perhaps also the soil going too dry for a while, not because of nute deficiency.
When people are using good soil and bottle nutrients that are designed for cannabis growing, usually – if your water isn’t super bad or your pH isn’t way off – plant issues are many times based on over or under watering or environment issues (temps, RH%, led lights) but not NPK nutrient issues.
NPK and micronutes shouldn’t be a problem with bottle organic nutrients. Salt build up is a problem with mineral nutes but with organic stuff it shouldn’t be a problem.
Nutrient issues are mainly for people who mix their own soils/feed.
I use regular potting soil from a super market, not any fancy stuff, and i use organic BioBizz bottle nutrients and i have never ran in to NPK or micronute issues.
What i try to say is..
Since you’re abit lost with your set-up and your soil mix, you should stop analyzing things too much and trying to make conclusions about every small issue you see on your plants.
- You know your soil is hot
- You know your plants feel dry to in your fingers
These are the problems you should focus on.
= if your soil is hot then you don’t spray extra stuff on your plants, cause they don’t need it.
= If your plants feel dehydrated, then you need to do something about the environmental issues related to this = air movement in your tent, temps, rh% and the heat radiation out of your leds.
Stop over analysing things cause you’re clearly abit lost and it’s likely your analysis isn’t going to be correct. So stick to basics. Don’t think about what you’ll feed your plants 8 weeks from now, focus on the present issues only.
I know it’s frustrating when you’re fucking things up - been there. Many times - but trying to make conclusions on stuff you’re not too sure about is not wise right now and may complicate things even more if you end up going into the wrong direction.
Focus on the basics, and getting your set-up working is one of the main tasks right now.
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If your plants won’t look any better in a week and the run off is still too high, then maybe it would be better to repot your plants into fresh soil, like @Ca++ recommended . = shake all the old soil off that you can without damaging the roots too badly and then re-plant them into fresh potting soil and don’t add in any extra nutrients in the soil this time– Maybe little seaweed extract and little calmag when you’re watering them the first time but no extra NPK nutrients.
But if you get the run off to come down fairly fast then it’s not necessary to re-pot them.
Salt build up or nutrient build up with organic nutes?
I can understand nutrient build up if the soil dries out too much too often but usually people don’t talk about proper salt build up issues with organics. ..it won’t very happen easily anyways.
I can go week after week with my BioBizz nutes without any watering with just plain water and i don’t get any lockout issues. Usually i try to give them plain water every third time, thou, to prevent nute build up
I’m not claiming it won’t happen. You might know better. I’m not very experienced organic grower. I’m too lazy to try too many new things. I have been using BioBizz for a decade cause it’s fairly cheap. But i have to make my own blends with it + PK13/14 to make them work better = Too much Nitrogen for cannabis if you follow what BioBizz recommends.
Ca++
Well-known member
Most organic grows are a farce. Being pedantic with terminology that doesn't suit the job anyway, is mute. The guy is using feed that doesn't claim to be organic, and even if it did make such a claim, it has a clear NPK quantity. So how these were sourced makes little difference. They can burn and block like any other. People get lost in the idea they are organic growers. Rockwool is perfectly good for organic certification. It's all just crazy
Well, nutrients without solvent are salts, aren`t they? If organic amendments release nutrients for the plant and the plant doesn`t take them all, where will all those nutrients go if there is no water on the medium? What you say is anecdotical, there is a lot of parameters on your grow that I don`t know. And I use an A+B typical nutrient formula on coco coir with most of the parameters controlled and never needed anything more, not PK, not CalMag, not biostimulants or whatever. Plants don`t make a difference between organic and synthetic, they just see anions and cations. TBH, didn`t use or see the BioBizz recomendations, usually I don`t trust any company`s claim about their nutrients. They even lie on the formulations (OFC nobody wants to be reverse engineered that easy, right?) and lie about the results of the use of their formulations.
To resume, I think (opinion) salt buildup is the same as nutrient buildup, and it can happen in organic or syntethic nutrients use, soil or soilless system. If I am wrong I would like to read an explanation for that, not anecdotical.
Bear with my english, please.
That is because they made it a moral issue more than a real life results thing. When you are obscured by beliefs not based by anything more than the word of someone, it is more a cult than science. And it is perfectly fine too. People choose what they want to believe, the problem is when you show the data and they refuse to accept they are wrong, but it happens with almost everything in life when your long time established ideas are confronted with opposite real evidence.
I still see it as more of a ph problem because when you add nutrients the ph goes up or down depending on what you're adding and I see a whole bunch of people on here always fighting against the idea of checking the ph. It's like they think if they check the ph it's the same as saying they're not a good grower when in fact, according to my view it's the exact opposite. I guess it's kind of the same thing though as which came first, the chicken or the egg? Salt build up only really happens if you're giving the plant too much though. If you give the plant the right amount of nutrients and the right amount of water there won't be salt build up because it will all get used up by the plant. If however you give way more then the plant needs, trying to force it to get bigger, faster then yeah some nutrients get left behind and you'll get salt/nutrient build up. Then if you add more nutrients the next feeding, even if that batch is ph balanced the additional salts still in the soil will throw the ph off. Avoiding that build up is also why you want to have at least one watering a week were you're just giving plain water with no added nutrients. That gives a chance for any additional nutrients left behind from a previous feeding to be used up. Of course this gets even trickier if you're using soil with the nutrients already built in and then adding more nutrients on top of that. If as a grower you want to be adding nutrients when you water, so you have more control of what your plant gets and when then you really shouldn't be using soil already pre loaded with nutrients. I'm not suggesting soil with nutrients built in is bad, in fact if you use a well designed organic mix it's the best way to go, that's closer to how it is in nature. With the right organic mix you should almost never need to add nutrients from a bottle except maybe certain micro nutrients that most soil mixes don't have enough of. Even then you only add it when the plant shows signs of being deficient.
I am confused now, I never said anything about the pH. I don`t think pH is the major issue when we talk about nutrient lock out or salt build up, or whatever, in my opinion is more about the irrigation. PH is important, of course, noone is saying the opposite, you must check what you are providing. You can give a lot of nutrients, I even have had some plants running at 4.5 EC without an issue, but that means you MUST adjust the other parameters accordingly. There is a lot of examples where you just give them 1.5 EC all along the cycle but as you fertirrigate continuosly, it isn`t really a problem. If you let your substrate dry, you probably will have some issues, specially in coco coir which is my choice. In this case, he doesn`t only have a soil mix which he didn`t even care to analyze to know what he needs to provide to the plant, but he also add a lot of nutrients on top of it without adjusting the rest of the parameters.
So, to resume:
I don`t think adding more nutrients is a bad thing if you know what you are adding is needed by the plant and you have parameters adjusted according to that change. And there won`t be a lockout if it all is adjusted. He has the controllers as I understood, so he only needs to adjust his soil, analyze it and then fertirrigate accordingly.
Bear with my english, please, as it isn`t my native language.
Well to be honest I didn't go back and look to much at what was said previously. By the time I came into the discussion it looked like an environmental issue especially since there appeared to be some light bleaching. I noticed the comment about directing the fans away from blowing on the plants directly and that made a lot of sense especially with the topic being that the leaves felt like dried paper. So mainly I was just trying to reinforce the notion about blowing the fans more at the lights and let the air movement hit the plants indirectly. But then in one of his replies after that he started talking about foliar feeding which I thought was a bad idea because the bleaching I saw in the one pic looked more like what you get with foliar feeding and the droplets end up working like tiny magnifying glasses. I also got into the ph issue because he seemed to be suggesting he would give nutrients via the foliar feed until the build up in the soil works itself out, except it's not going to work itself out if you're still feeding it thru some other method. That's kind of like saying "I'm too fat because I eat 5000 calories per day so I'm going to stop eating solid food but until I lose weight I'll give myself 5000 calories via an IV" I mean it's not a great comparison but I think you get the point. If he's got to much nutrients in the soil he needs to make sure the ph is right and just give plain water until the nutrients are flushed out/used up. The ph will insure the plant still gets what it needs from the soil but using just plain water will flush out the excess. Now mind you when I say flush in this instance I'm not talking about giving a large amount of water to literally flush or leech the nutrients out, I mean just giving plain water and let the plant work with what is already there until it gets worked out over time.
I'm not saying you said anything about ph, the person running the grow kind of said it by saying there was a nutrient lock out issue, in my experience nutrient lock out is caused by a ph imbalance. In soil if you go too high in ph (above 6.8) then certain nutrients get locked out mostly just manganese and iron until you start getting up around ph 8.0 then every thing gets locked out. Conversely if you let the ph get to low in soil (below 6.3 then mainly phosphorous, magnesium and calcium gets locked out until you get down around 5.0 then again every thing starts to get locked out. For soil to have good nutrient uptake you need to be between 6.3 and 6.8 with 6.5 being the sweet spot. Given that he mainly seems to think there is a CalMag problem I'm going to guess he let his ph get a little on the low side. If it dipped below 6.0 he might have even had Nitrogen locked out, phosphorous would have been locked out too if the ph went low but phosphorous isn't as important until you get into flower and so he likely wouldn't see any phosphorous deficieny at this point in his grow. Really we're both saying more or less the same thing we're just each saying it in a slightly different way.
Ahhh ok, ok, the problem is if he doesn`t analyze the soil it is impossible to know what the real problem is (if it is really the problem). At this time, I only saw two people who make soil analysis to know exactly what to feed. And there is thousands of threads without it.
Definitely active exhaust/passive intake is almost always the best way to go.Part of the problem right there.
Yeah, soil analysis doesn't have to be the primary thing but it's at least equally important in solving problems as an examination of the environment. There's to many people quick to cite nutrient deficiencies without confirming those deficiencies exist and so you end up with people making the wrong adjustments and when those adjustments don't give the results the hope for they panic and start making all sorts of changes and often times they leave the initial wrong changes in place and so they end up actually creating new problems. It can very quickly spiral out of control. The problem is there are a number of plant health problems that can look like deficiencies and so it's critical to try to rule out what you can which is why I'm a big advocate for always staying on top of the ph levels. If you know your ph and you know what your feeding you plants it becomes a lot easier to properly diagnose problems more accurately, IMHO. The biggest issue I see getting in the way of this is the message many growers put out there that they never have to check their ph. That's something that comes thru lots of time an experience though. Unfortunately many growers new to the game see that and they think measuring ph is a complete waste of time. Which I get, it's an added hassle and if you want accurate ph testing equipment it can be expensive both making it easy for a new grower to just think they don't need to measure ph and they can save time and money.
Ca++
Well-known member
As this soil is a well regarded 50L sack, I wouldn't do a soil analysis. Though I would like to see one in this instance, it would be purely academic.
An analysis is great in a field, where you must work with the soil you have. The results are not perfect though. It could count calcium and phosphates, with little regard to how they exist. The pH could of gone out, making the unavailable calcium-phosphate compound. The count may still be the same. Different extraction methods are more suited to different circumstances. The results are not the holy grail, but rather a very useful tool. $30? why not..
That sack of well regarded soil has had all the testing it needs. There could be a bad batch, or a bad result from polluting it. Testing would be interesting for future recognition of the issue. I suspect excess K. However the answer is always going to be the same. That soil works, so not messing about with it is the best way to know it's not the problem.
I take one look at the plants in this thread and the last, and see the same over fertilisation problems, while pushing hard with the lighting. Water movement is being restricted by high ec issues to my eye. Everything I have then read, has just been confirmation. Though I still might be wrong, it does seem logical when all the pieces come together.
People using this soil and messing up their grow by feeding it or amending it is very common. I really can't move on until this is addressed. If I claimed to be 100% sure, I wouldn't be worth listening to. I think it's the only place to start though, with a very high likelihood of success.
An analysis is great in a field, where you must work with the soil you have. The results are not perfect though. It could count calcium and phosphates, with little regard to how they exist. The pH could of gone out, making the unavailable calcium-phosphate compound. The count may still be the same. Different extraction methods are more suited to different circumstances. The results are not the holy grail, but rather a very useful tool. $30? why not..
That sack of well regarded soil has had all the testing it needs. There could be a bad batch, or a bad result from polluting it. Testing would be interesting for future recognition of the issue. I suspect excess K. However the answer is always going to be the same. That soil works, so not messing about with it is the best way to know it's not the problem.
I take one look at the plants in this thread and the last, and see the same over fertilisation problems, while pushing hard with the lighting. Water movement is being restricted by high ec issues to my eye. Everything I have then read, has just been confirmation. Though I still might be wrong, it does seem logical when all the pieces come together.
People using this soil and messing up their grow by feeding it or amending it is very common. I really can't move on until this is addressed. If I claimed to be 100% sure, I wouldn't be worth listening to. I think it's the only place to start though, with a very high likelihood of success.
You just keep repeating the same thing over and over again. I bet he gets it now = he made his soil too hot.
But one important part you didn’t take in account in your magnificent analytical thought was the AC near the intake fan blowing cold air into the tent while he had a circulating fan blowing straight at his plants. He already told not using the AC and redirecting the fan away from the plants helped improved things.
You seem to have the habit of missing alot of stuff people are writing about their situation and then you go on rants assuming you know it all. You did it with me few weeks ago, i’m sure you remember.
..this asshole just kept arguing me that i have a 20% RH in my tent even after i told him/her my RH is around 65-70%, because this two-bit remembered me talking about 20-30% RH in some of my older posts!!..just kept insisting my RH i around 20% even thou i told him/her that it’s not that low. What a character!
You have a strange smug attitude alot of time and you start talking people down for no reason.
The dude messed up his grow and he seems to be fully aware of it and seems to be upset about it. Maybe your shit talking isn’t making him feel any better.
..now repeat the hot soil-thing few more times, like we haven’t read it already, two bit.
Cause you just can’t move on, can you..
Wow, I never thought I would read someone saying this... How isn`t useful a soil analysis? How do you know exactly what to provide to the plant? Did you read what he put on his soil? You are just guessing, man, and it is fine, but we try to give a way to stop guessing and have facts to fix the problem. Without knowing exactly what is going on on the soil, it is impossible to say "it is over fertilization", "high ec issues"... Obviously there is something wrong, but when you try to figure it out, you need to check everything. And, where are those soil analysis so proven? If you can provide me with that info I would love to check, please. Open fields or pots, you better know what you have to make the better from your grow. The same way you guess K, high EC and the lights, others claim CaMg, others the exhaust fan, the CO2, etc... And it is just guessing, again.
I am not being sarcastic or mean, I am serious.
Ca++
Well-known member
Yeah, you did make that 65% claim the other week, then days later said something quite different. I'm not on a crusade though. I liked it when you said you were ignoring me tbh. I have seen your posts here, all about the drying effect of the LED heat lamps as always. I just ignore it. As I have ignored the AC. These are your focus. I don't really care if he has AC or not, his numbers are what matters. Not how he got there. You may think I'm not seeing these things. The fact is, I'm just not talking about stuff like what time his postman comes, as it's not my focus. You can see my focus. That is the important thing. Can I move on? Of course not. There is nowhere to go.You just keep repeating the same thing over and over again. I bet he gets it now = he made his soil too hot.
But one important part you didn’t take in account in your magnificent analytical thought was the AC near the intake fan blowing cold air into the tent while he had a circulating fan blowing straight at his plants. He already told not using the AC and redirecting the fan away from the plants helped improved things.
You seem to have the habit of missing alot of stuff people are writing about their situation and then you go on rants assuming you know it all. You did it with me few weeks ago, i’m sure you remember.
..this asshole just kept arguing me that i have a 20% RH in my tent even after i told him/her my RH is around 65-70%, because this two-bit remembered me talking about 20-30% RH in some of my older posts!!..just kept insisting my RH i around 20% even thou i told him/her that it’s not that low. What a character!
You have a strange smug attitude alot of time and you start talking people down for no reason.
The dude messed up his grow and he seems to be fully aware of it and seems to be upset about it. Maybe your shit talking isn’t making him feel any better.
..now repeat the hot soil-thing few more times, like we haven’t read it already, two bit.
Cause you just can’t move on, can you..
Ca++
Well-known member
What type of soil analysis do you recommend.
What do we need to figure out that we don't know already. Then what would we do about it.
Lots of talk going on. He has a commercial soil available to him, that is known to work. There has been more testing done on that soil through actually using it, than any nutrient profiling can equal. Lets say we do it my way... it would be done by now. Lets say we test it, get some results in a week of so, then fix it. Fixing it will probably be doing what I said anyway. How do you see yourself being a winner here.
