DobeWan's First Grow! LA Confidential & 24K Gold - LED - 3x3 - Coco

[DobeWan]

Thanks for the votes of confidence guys. I'm still puzzling over my issues but making positive progress. New growth on 24K #2 and both LA Confidentials looks good, tips slightly pointier than I would like but not enough to cause panic. However, new growth on 24K #1 looks mostly good but a few leaves are damaged looking - misshapen at the edges on a few of the new leaves. This is the more sensitive plant from the beginning - my "rippled leaves" plant - so I'm not surprised it's still the most affected.

I tried using LA Confidential #1 as guinea pig and did a second flush. I ran about 12L of 25% nuted solution through the LA Confidential #1. I set it up over the laundry sink on a grate and just slowly poured it all through. What went in was 5.75 pH - what came out was initially 6.5-6.6, and in the end 6.4-6.5. I don't get it - shouldn't my runoff steadily come down? Can I (or should I) even attempt to dramatically correct the pH at this point, or should I continue to be diligent about checking before every watering? If I pH down lower than the 5.75 I thought I was getting from the beginning, do I risk shocking the plants?

Current plan is for all 4 plants to get full strength nutes tomorrow, plain water Tuesday, then 2 days on full strength followed by 1 day on plain water through the rest of veg. I'll make sure I'm putting in 5.75 every time and keep monitoring runoff to see if it works its way down.

 

[DobeWan]

Bumping this in case any of the daytime crowd sees it.

In a nutshell: pHed too high early in my grow. Even flushing seems not to bring the pH down markedly. Should I try something more drastic, or be diligent about watering at the correct pH and allow it to correct itself in time?

 

[DobeWan]

31V pics!

LA Confidential #1: The signs of stress on her last leaves are not there on the new growth. It's a little spindlier looking than I'd hoped but not the end of the world as long as I stay on top of pHing and feeding correctly.

LA Confidential #2: She's starting the turn nicely, although I hold my breath when I put a new tie on the leading part of the growth. Strangely the break on the main bend of her main stalk never closed over, but growth continues both around the stalk and from the growth tip.

24K #1: I'll be reminded of my mistakes every time I look at this girl! The new growth is way better than the last sets, however if you look closely you'll still see two of the leaves on the upper part of the new growth have small notches near the end of the leaves. So the new growth is still not completely free of damage.

24K #2: Very little sign of the earlier stress on her. New growth looks good and there's little lasting scarring. Funny to think about how great she looks now when a week ago she had a branch snapped right after topping. Now she's a bush with tops everywhere!

 

[Lady Antheia]

Your plants are looking good, so I have to wonder if the PH meter might be off. If the ph meter is calibrated and working correctly, then it might just take some time for the PH to slowly come down.

 

[Old TimingMan]

Bumping this in case any of the daytime crowd sees it.

In a nutshell: pHed too high early in my grow. Even flushing seems not to bring the pH down markedly. Should I try something more drastic, or be diligent about watering at the correct pH and allow it to correct itself in time?

I have been adjusting my PH to 6.0 since day one in the coco grow, run-off is right around 6.3-6.4 area, and I have never flushed them with straight PH'd water. The nute line I am using recommends PH in soilless to be 5.8 -6.8, and hydro at 5.5-6.3 in RO water. The only thing that I notice is the color difference between the new and old growth, with the newer being lighter and slowly turning darker as the get bigger, and the flash from my camera seems to exaggerate more that it is when in regular light.

Your plants appear to be pretty even in color between the new and old growth.

Today mine are 5 weeks old from the day I started soaking the seeds and what I consider to be the start of the 4th veg week, one in coco is getting the same type of LST that you are doing and the other is getting a manifolding style treatment, it seems that all of the bud sites in the middle are thriving and I have also topped a few of those to see what happens.

Would you think raising the PH slightly would help, or not flushing as often? To me your plants look great, they are filling out nicely and seem to be growing daily, I also have a slight difference in the textures of some leaves (wrinkled looking in areas) but as long as they are not turning brown or starting to show spots I am not to worried.

 

[DobeWan]

Your plants are looking good, so I have to wonder if the PH meter might be off. If the ph meter is calibrated and working correctly, then it might just take some time for the PH to slowly come down.

My pH meter is somewhere between the cheapo $10 Amazon ones and the fancy $100 ones. While I wouldn't rule out it being slightly off, it still wouldn't explain why what goes in is so much lower than what comes out.

I'm going to give it some time - new growth isn't so bad that I need to do anything drastic and at this point it's more the 24K that gave me issues from day one than all 4 plants.

 

[DobeWan]

Would you think raising the PH slightly would help, or not flushing as often? To me your plants look great, they are filling out nicely and seem to be growing daily, I also have a slight difference in the textures of some leaves (wrinkled looking in areas) but as long as they are not turning brown or starting to show spots I am not to worried.

Thanks. I'm not going to flush again at this point. I'm going to ease back up to full strength nutes for the LA Confidentials and to 75% for 24K #2, and to 50% for 24K #1. I figure between that and adding water only days as recommended, and checking my pH closely every time, things will ease down further and further over time.

I want everything to be perfect, so it's hard to relax and let nature take its course sometimes!

 

[Old TimingMan]

Thanks. I'm not going to flush again at this point. I'm going to ease back up to full strength nutes for the LA Confidentials and to 75% for 24K #2, and to 50% for 24K #1. I figure between that and adding water only days as recommended, and checking my pH closely every time, things will ease down further and further over time.

I want everything to be perfect, so it's hard to relax and let nature take its course sometimes!

I know what you are saying...I was feeling that way as soon as I soaked my seeds, its been 35+ years since my last grow and that was in soil, I always started them indoors with only sunlight and a incandescent "grow bulbs", HPS was very spendy back then, fluorescent was not advanced and LED was 30 years away , I never had month old soil plants look near as good as yours or mine in coco or hydro, I'm more worried about my hydo gals than the coco gals at this point in time!

 

[DobeWan]

Looking pretty good at lights on. Still damage on a few new leaves on 24K1 but pretty good otherwise.

Pennywise, that potassium silicate seems to have kicked in - some of the stalks, like those from the big original fan leaves, have gotten really strong and hard. Thanks again for the recommendation.

 

[DobeWan]

I took a look when I got up this morning and the positive momentum continues. New growth even on 24K1 is looking pretty solid. Still some excess N signs on it and LA1 but things are improving.

I wonder how much pH has been the issue. I found my standing water had crept up about .2 on the pH in 24 hours. Checking every time is vital. A few days of diligence and I see clear improvement.

I'll be back later with some pics.

 

[Lady Antheia]

That's great news!

 

[DobeWan]

33V pics!

LA Confidential #1: Really gaining some height lately. That said, still really tight node spacing relative to everyone else, and there's a bush of younger leaves clustered around the main stalk underneath these big fan leaves now.

LA Confidential #2: Still working that turn. Getting really woody further down in the stalk now.

24K Gold (aka Kosher Tangie) #1: Slowly but surely I'm making progress on taming this beast. New growth looks really good - I couldn't find damage on any of the newest growth.

24K Gold (aka Kosher Tangie) #2: PW and HG, you guys had this girl pegged. She's done nothing but impress since she lost her big branch. I count 6 tops tucked away down there - you can see 5 of them in this shot.

I also realized I hadn't posted a group shot in a little over a week. Here's the last one, 7.5 days ago, for comparison's sake.

And here's the new one from this morning. Note the LAs are in the same spots in both shots, but the 24Ks are flipped between shots - 1 is on top in the first shot but on bottom in the new shot.

Really happy with where things are going after my worry a few days ago!

Thanks again for reading!

 

[Lady Antheia]

I also realized I hadn't posted a group shot in a little over a week. Here's the last one, 7.5 days ago, for comparison's sake.


And here's the new one from this morning. Note the LAs are in the same spots in both shots, but the 24Ks are flipped between shots - 1 is on top in the first shot but on bottom in the new shot.

Wow! They must like what you are giving them.

 

[DobeWan]

Really cool lights on update for a new grower - air pruning has started. I see root ends sticking out of all four pots.

No damage on any new growth. Looks like my recent issues are entering the rear view? Fingers crossed!

To that end, I fed 50% nutes to the LAs and 37.5% to the 24Ks. I expect the 24Ks will end up at 75% which initially seemed to be the sweet spot, so tonight was a half dose for both strains. Next feeding will likely get me back to 100% for the LAs and 75% to the 24Ks where I'll likely stay for the rest of veg, as long as things cooperate.

I think my municipal water is behind my pH issues, and in fact I'm now wondering if the problems I saw last week came from hastily used water. After potting up my water needs increased and I allowed less time before using the water because I didn't have enough prepped. For the last few days I've been checking the pH of the standing water after initially bringing it down, and I'm seeing it rise not insignificantly for the readings for 3 days afterward - seems like .2-.3 per day. 3+ day old water is seemingly stable. This wasn't so much a problem in seedling / early veg because my water was so much slower to be used.

My conclusion is that given that I'm feeding tap water and allowing it to stand to neutralize, I need to allow it to stand 3+ days before using it. Time to get some more buckets before flower, and start labelling and tracking when it was poured.

 

[Old TimingMan]

Really cool lights on update for a new grower - air pruning has started. I see root ends sticking out of all four pots.

No damage on any new growth. Looks like my recent issues are entering the rear view? Fingers crossed!

To that end, I fed 50% nutes to the LAs and 37.5% to the 24Ks. I expect the 24Ks will end up at 75% which initially seemed to be the sweet spot, so tonight was a half dose for both strains. Next feeding will likely get me back to 100% for the LAs and 75% to the 24Ks where I'll likely stay for the rest of veg, as long as things cooperate.

I think my municipal water is behind my pH issues, and in fact I'm now wondering if the problems I saw last week came from hastily used water. After potting up my water needs increased and I allowed less time before using the water because I didn't have enough prepped. For the last few days I've been checking the pH of the standing water after initially bringing it down, and I'm seeing it rise not insignificantly for the readings for 3 days afterward - seems like .2-.3 per day. 3+ day old water is seemingly stable. This wasn't so much a problem in seedling / early veg because my water was so much slower to be used.

My conclusion is that given that I'm feeding tap water and allowing it to stand to neutralize, I need to allow it to stand 3+ days before using it. Time to get some more buckets before flower, and start labelling and tracking when it was poured.

Have you checked the PH & PPM right out of the tap and then after it sat for 24 hrs? Depending on how big of a batch you are mixing up, I would think the chlorine should evaporate in 24 hrs unless it is heavy chlorinated water.

My PH is around 9.5 and the PPM is 225-250 out of the tap so I bought a $120 3 filter RO system to clean the water, the PH is still high but the PPM is 0 after it is filtered so I don't have to adjust my nutes...besides the coffee tastes so much better!

 

[DobeWan]

Clumsy fingers strike again! I opened up the tent and everything was looking awesome. I went to my usual water and fix up LST routine. So impressed was I with the new growth that I decided it was time to start LST on the next node of LA2, to get it started right. Or, in my case, to pop the new top off! I broke it halfway through the stem right at the point where it meets the next node basically, so that it hung down. Immediately my learnings from 24K2 kicked in, and I got it taped up almost instantly, so we'll see if I have better survival luck this time. In any case, I removed the remaining ties while I wait to see what happens with the top. If it dies, not the end of the world - I'll just send whatever newly grows back in opposite directions, so instead of a line out to the edge then around, I'll have a line out to the edge, then splitting to send a new line two separate ways. My 24K2 experience has me looking at the positives!

Overall though, everything is looking better than it did yesterday, when it looked better than the day before. So I fed a full feeding. Plain water break day tomorrow, then I think I'll go nutes-nutes-plain for a little while.

That said, everyone drank a litre plus today, and the pots were surprisingly light before feeding. I might be looking at watering more than once daily before I know it.

 

[DobeWan]

Have you checked the PH & PPM right out of the tap and then after it sat for 24 hrs? Depending on how big of a batch you are mixing up, I would think the chlorine should evaporate in 24 hrs unless it is heavy chlorinated water.

My PH is around 9.5 and the PPM is 225-250 out of the tap so I bought a $120 3 filter RO system to clean the water, the PH is still high but the PPM is 0 after it is filtered so I don't have to adjust my nutes...besides the coffee tastes so much better!

I expected the same honestly. That said I'm running 14L (about 3.7 gallons) into the bucket and it's sitting in an enclosed basement room with little air circulation, so I could see why it might take longer.

I still don't have a PPM meter, and obviously don't have a R/O system. Plan to get the PPM meter, but didn't plan to get the RO system. I see one like you have for about $160 around here - might be a worthwhile investment, especially since my wife is paranoid about all the tap water we drink and would go for it!

 

[Pennywise]

Sell her on the health benefits!

 

[Lady Antheia]

What PW said!

That's how I convinced mr. man to get one.

 

[Old TimingMan]

I expected the same honestly. That said I'm running 14L (about 3.7 gallons) into the bucket and it's sitting in an enclosed basement room with little air circulation, so I could see why it might take longer.

I still don't have a PPM meter, and obviously don't have a R/O system. Plan to get the PPM meter, but didn't plan to get the RO system. I see one like you have for about $160 around here - might be a worthwhile investment, especially since my wife is paranoid about all the tap water we drink and would go for it!

150 GPD Hydroponics RO water system Koolermax Reverse Osmosis HK-120 Sold by Filterdirect on a popular site that starts with an "E"