Unfortunately have encountered a pretty serious looking plant problem. See picture below:
Background:
- I use tap water ~150ppm as the source for my reserviour.
- Keep pH around the 6.0 mark.
- GH nutrients, kept in the 700-800ppm range.
- 1x 300W LED, 1x 400W MH
- 4 weeks into flowering
- No obvious plant problems up until this point besides more previous issues with LED light being too close
Places where I know I've gone wrong recently that could be sources of plant issues:
- A few times I've gotten lazy and let the reserviour levels drop too low causing the ppm to shoot into 900-1000 range.
- Have the LED 300w too close (12", running out of vertical room or would have it higher)
Additional info:
- There was a direct correlation observed that the spotting was occurring within the sweet spot of the 300W LED light.
- Has happened previously but to such a drastic extent and not on colas, only lower growth
My own hypothesis (from my reading online):
- Spotting looks close to Cal Mag deficiencies, but shouldn't be an issue with tap water, only RO?
- Could possibly be pH related, I only have been relying on pH colour indicator for analysis (room for error). Has been fairly close to 6.0+- 0.2.
- The main source of issue I believe is a combination of letting the nutrient ppm get too high and stress of having the LED light too close. The only problem is this current hypothesis doesn't fit with Cal Mag deficiency symptoms.
So my questions are, could a nutrient ppm spike + light stress manifest itself as a Cal Mag deficiency? Should I be supplementing with Cal Mag just incase, even though I use tap water?
Current plan of action is to keep on top topped off reserviour levels to avoid ppm spikes. Also I have done some musical chairs in the room to get a smaller plant under the LED light so it is not as close to the light.
Would appreciate advise.