Now, if the soil pH is between 6.0 and 7.0, do you need to measure water pH at all? I've stopped checking water pH at all unless it is a suspected problem. Water pH does not affect soil pH. Given the way it works, I'd say a soil pH meter is very useful and a water pH meter is less necessary. Emilya, if I am wrong, where are you getting your information? Thanks
@FelipeBlu for your thoughts on this topic last year... I used to pH every bottle of water, oh boy glad I don't do that anymore.
Greetings Emeraldo! There is a group of growers these days who believe that all they have to do is set their soil base pH to a number within the accepted soil pH range of 6.2-6.8, and they can call it a day. They don't believe that they need to pH adjust any fluids hitting that soil, because the soil will "buffer" it to where it needs to be. They believe that this is the best way to do things because this is the way fields of crops outdoors are handled, and they are throwing around several papers that study this method and "prove" conclusively that this is the proper way to do things in the field, so why not indoors in our containers also? To accomplish this feat, slurry tests are necessary to see what needs to be done to adjust the soil, soil tests are recommended and then the soil needs to be amended or special forms of nitrogen used (like a farmer in a field) to bring the soil to where they want it to be. This all seems like a lot of extra work to me and not something that every gardener of weeds will be willing to do, especially in 5 gallon containers.
I don't get my information from any study or paper so this crowd, you too apparently, think they can discount everything I say, since I can't back what I say up with any "science" that they are willing to accept. The problem is that the method that I speak of has been used as long as we have grown in containers and used synthetic nutrients to do it with. Aside from anecdotal evidence, there are no papers or science backing up these tried and true, developed by years of experience, methods... we just are using common sense.
So I back up what I do by using my always extremely beautiful plants as evidence and I use logic and reason to explain why what I do works. Let's compare and contrast both of these methods using logic and common sense.
When you water a container to runoff and create a column of saturated soil in your container, what do you think the pH of that column of wet soil is? Do you think it is sitting at the base pH of your soil? No, to the contrary, the water that you added vastly outweighs the soil in that container, and it is its pH that takes dominance in this container, not that of the soil. When you water, that entire container of soil has no choice but to immediately take on the pH of the fluid you just saturated it with, although the buffers in the soil do immediately start working on that saturation to drift it up toward the soil base pH. Let's say that you add your nutes to your water and not believing in adjusting your fluid pH you end up with a solution with a pH in the low 5's, before you add it to your soil that you know has a base pH of 6.5. For some period of time, while the buffers in your soil work on moving the pH into a useful range where the nutes are able to break free of their chelated bonds and become available to the plant, the plant can only use the water and for a while your chelated nutes are invisible to the plant. In contrast, I pH adjust my fluids to 6.3 pH immediately before applying it to the plants. My nutes are all immediately available to the plant, chelated and not, and my entry point is at the pH where mathematically we can prove that more nutes are more available than at any other setting.
Your system will allow the pH to eventually adjust up to the soil base pH and since it is set to 6.5, that is where the drift upwards stops. Any nutes that are more available at the upper end of the pH range are not given that advantage and they only get the response that is available at 6.5. My nutes, in contrast, will continue to rise above 6.5, up to the higher end base pH that my soil's enjoy. My nutes travel through the entire range from 6.3 - 6.8, picking up each nutrient in it turn, and my nutes start out mobile and remain available all through the watering cycle, yours do not. Because I take the extra step to pH adjust my fluids, putting a little extra effort into each feeding than the "lets let the soil do it" folks do, my plants can better take advantage of my nutes because they are in contact with the nutes through the entire watering cycle... yours are not. Logic informs me that in a side by side test, my extra step would allow for bigger and more healthy plants as compared to this adjusting the soil only method. Both methods will work to grow pot, that is indisputable, but the taking of shortcuts ALWAYS results in the loss of something in any system, including this one. Since no one will probably be willing to do this side by side comparison, we will likely never know for sure what would happen and this is why today we are forced to rely on logic and reason to give light in this debate for all of us.
unfortunately I haven't got a pH meter for soil, but as far as I know I should be 6,5-6,2 and the water I've been using is 6,5. Got home today and saw that it has gotten worse, with leaves wilting and the spots spreading. (The little piece of leaf missing is my fault) Sprayed her with neem oil and hope it helps a bit, really worried that she's gonna die off and thanks for the replies know that I ask a lot of questions but I just can't seem to find a specific grow journal to follow. Should I try to flush the pot?
