Your roots indicate that it was too wet for the entire grow. Actually it was starved of oxygen to be technically correct with my wording, but too wet is what chokes out O2.
That brown line a few inches from the bottom is where it was under water. A root should never be under water.
That brown is disease, roots should be bright white, or if you have a carbon source that can stain things such as bark mulch, then evenly brownish over the entire rootball. What you have is stage 1 root rot.
Even if you were growing it in my house, in the desert, at 35% RH on a "muggy" desert day, and drier on most, that plant would have had fungal problems, unless the bugs got it 1st.
Because of the water issue oxygen wasn't allowed to be properly assimilated. SIP Syndrome is what I refer to it as. There isn't an actual feeder root in the bucket.
She grew hydroponic roots but you were expecting her to eat LOS style. Her feed in the soil had to be saturated into all that water and then those roots ate the soup.
Other than a few minerals when the PH drifted thru the sweet spot, all she really got was a pure protein diet of nitrogen. Nitrogen requires lots of water. It makes them nice and green, but thats it. Vanity.
In LOS a major element is the carbon:nitrogen ratio. In a perfect environment carbon must far outway nitrogen. Between 30:1 and 33:1, depending on who your listen too. With that much water nitrogen will be way up.
Oddly enough, in humans the C:N ratio, or as we like to call it to sound superior to plants, the carbs to proteins ratio is identical.
Maybe we actually are what we eat?
Myco needs 20:1 C:N or better just to stay alive. 25:1 to get brix up to 12 or 13, and 30:1 to be fully effective at resisting disease.
Minerals will still slip thru to the plant when PH fluctuates thru the good zone, but your carbs and proteins aren't being assimilated properly.
If that rootball were a human it would literally have developed type 2 diabetes and would be experiencing erectile dysfunction and hair loss. Cancer and heart disease are coming, but diabetes moves faster. It's the 1st domino to fall.
Same for plants.
SIPs weren't meant for LOS. You can hack it to make it work, but its way easier and far less work to remove the SIP, or go hydroponic with it, than it is to make it work. SIPs lead to humans deciding how much water the plant should have. LOS requires no standing water ever. Standing water is a hydroponic thing. Watering is meant to hydrate the soil carbon and after the carbon is full all other water needs to be removed.
From google
"Hydro" is the Greek word for water, and "ponos" means work. The water does the work."
In LOS myco does the work.
If you don't have feeder roots your not growing LOS, your doing a soup grow. PH'ing your water will help, but really it's easier to ditch the LOS and dump synthetics in.
The title to the Sip Club says it all. Getting hydroponic results in soil, and thats exactly what you got... Hydroponic roots growing in soil. All you did wrong was forget to feed them.
You won't get healthy myco in hydroponics tho, so high brix won't happen, and I know this isn't your fungal journal, but with low brix you need to toss out all your data as your experimenting with unhealthy plants.
All you have deciphered so far is which unhealthy plant wards off fungals better, and without brix readings you don't know the levels of health, so your best fungal resistant plant could easily be the least resistant strain, it's just healthier with higher brix so it appears more resistant. If you grow it more than once and get very different results, thats what is going on. Brix is higher in one grow vs the other.
If you really want a quick hand up, go read the 400 pages of GeeSpot in my signature. It covers all this and a whole lot more. If you do read it and get stuck just ask, it's a learning room. Lots have turned their brix around in there.
Here is what a LOS rootball looks like when the C:N ratio is correct. The tap root doesn't even get to the bottom of the pot. All it is, is a shaft 3/4 of the way down the pot for massive amounts of feeder roots to manifold into. A feather duster.
This plant had the ability to eat massive amounts of food. It was a 10gal pot that grew a plant that filled a 5 x 5 tent wall to wall and stood 6.5' tall. It ate 1 cup of mineral top dressing and 2-3 heaping solos of EWC every week. You could actually watch the topdressing go down on a day to day basis. The soil level dropped a full inch every week. Thats the power needed to properly grow a plant in LOS. You need to run a hack to get these kinds of roots if you want SIPs to work with LOS.
Note the extra feeder roots top and bottom. That's because that's where the best O2 access is. Also note that their isn't a single water root there, yet she drank a gallon a day in flower, and more in stretch.
If you remove all water from a "healthy" plant, 43% of the dry weight is oxygen, and it all must come thru the microbes to get fixed, and then myco to get into the plant. Only carbon at 47% is greater, and your roots say both were severely restricted.
Hydrogen is another 3%. That's 90% of your health right there. We put a lot of effort into the other 10%, and ignore the 90%. The 90% is actually what needs to be correct for the other 10% to be assimilated properly.
All that being said, it's an easy fix. All you need is a refractometer, a water stik, and some prilled dolomite.
The dolomite will set the proper EC required by the CEC, the water stik will prevent O2 lockout, and the refractometer allows you to monitor both health and calcium levels.
Of the last 10%, calcium is king, that's why it gets mixed in 1st in liquids. It sets the stage for the rest of the 10% to work properly.
So in a nutshell, you need proper oxygen and proper carbon for calcium to run the CEC and then myco will grow you a very healthy plant. Then add fish ferts weekly to keep myco fed.
Now you can start hunting fungal resistant strains.
Your nursery pot did a little better, it looks like it got more oxygen, but it's still 100% a hydroponic rootball.
Please don't take this as criticism or negativity, it's just me being blunt to help you out moving forwards. Grows take a long time as you know, so going in with more knowledge is a huge boost in your overall timeline.
What do your regular rootballs look like. That's where you do most of your growing. Got a picture?
Let's see if there are any quick easy fixes or tweaks that you can get immediate results with.
Also this isn't me telling you what to do, it's a place for you and google to find out if I'm right or wrong, and you will find a bunch of other tweaks as you check it out.
The biggest hurdle in becoming successful at LOS is water, and everyone fucks it up.
It's all in the roots and roots breathe air.
Cloth pots rule supreme in LOS, and I know you have your reasons for not wanting to use them, but this makes them equal to a hard pot for convenience..
Milk crates. Game changers. Yeah she was a little top heavy. Kind of
like a full sized umbrella in a 1 quart yogurt container, but the roots were up to the task.
Sorry for kind of mixing your 2 journals, but the same issue is in both.
Again, thanks for doing this for everyone, it is both extremely entertaining and also of great value to a lot of folks around here.
If you don't mind, I'd like to start following you. I have a feeling you will be doing other cool things.
Also, in the next few years I'll be retiring to an Island in the Pacific, so your issues are my future. I'd love to watch you get it fixed and help out any way I can.
