lol Im happy to have hurt your brain
Grab a coffee, cuz here comes a long post on how brix works, put into an easy to understand format.
Commercial guys are gonna hate this but...
Some will argue the finer points but I'm dummying it down to help you understand the basics here, not start arguments on the fine details. You can experiment as you learn and progress to dial the fine details in. Trying to prove things wrong is a huge motivation towards getting things right.
I used to check brix quite frequently but I'm not one for plucking leaves, other than stripping bottom larf, so I really backed off on the brix readings.
I only do it now in veg. If I try something new I definitely monitor the brix, sometimes even daily to see the effects, but brix is about more photosynthesis. Its photosynthesis that creates the sugars, so plucking leaves reduces photosynthesis.
In veg you are always growing more leaves so its not as detrimental. Now that being said, trying new things and plucking a few extra leaves is a good sacrifice in my thinking, because what you learn this grow can be built right into the soil on your next grow, and you can always start another grow.
Also if the plant gets into a funk its the 1st thing I check, and I will monitor daily until either the plant turns around or the worms get it.
Don't be afraid to do it frequently if you are learning from it, or even just having fun doing it, as growing should be fun and interesting.
12 is a great number. Don't let others with higher numbers intimidate you or your methods. 12 is the threshold.
Your plant is at the point where it can keep itself healthy and can support some soil biology to offset the need for soil carbon.
That means your a good Dad with a healthy kid. Keep doing what you are doing and if you want to raise it higher you need more photosynthesis.
Your light is a set variable, it is what it is, so you need to fine tune the rest.
So if you can improve the environment, thats a good start because you don't have to adjust anything in the plants feeding regiment or soil biology, but after that its mainly the 5 big ones, Calcium, Phosphorus, Oxygen, Carbon, and microbes/fungii.
Usually its carbon and calcium that are the factors that are low for folks just learning, as they get over looked, and there's a lot of effort put into not making either very well understood because low Cal and Carbon can be easily remedied with commercial products. Yeah theres a message between those lines.
Checking calcium is very easy. If your brix line in the refractometer is crisp and well defined, calcium is low. If its fuzzy then Cal is currently good.
A fuzzy line is actually more important than a high reading as good Cal automatically means good Oxygen, they go hand in hand, so 2 of the 5 are checked off the list.
Carbon is easy, just mix up a jar of Blackstrap Molasses (BSM) and unchlorinated water and pour it in. The BSM is pure carbon and some trace elements, with a fairly balanced dose of magnesium in it to guide the calcium.
Check brix right before you pour it in and then check daily for a couple days, always about the same time of day, to see if you get an improvement.
If you do, then soil carbon is low so add more coco, or whatever soil carbon you use, on your next grow. I constantly recomend 1/3 of your mix be coco, prior to adding your perlite. As you get better at brix you can reduce this so the pots have more room for other nutrients, or you can reduce your pot size. 1/3 is safe in a big pot over 8 gallons. I use 10 gallon pots.
Adding BSM isn't directly for the plant, it's for the microbes/fungii. Microbes, to be healthy and robust, need Carbon. Plants pull it from the air (CO2). Soil carbon is for the microbes.
Everything they do in the soil is done for the purpose of finding Carbon. Their bodies on average, are comprised of over 50% Carbon.
All the other goodies they mine are collateral damage in their quest to find the Carbon.
By increasing carbon the microbes get healthier and more robust, and that explodes their population.
Then there is the fungii.... It is your microbe management system.
It takes orders from the plant and then takes plant sugars (Carbon) from the plant and buys the needed nutrients from the microbes in exchange for the sugar, and because fungii is similar to a plant in that it has a circulatory system, it can move those nutrients from the farthest corners of the pot to the roots for comsumption, in a matter of a few hours.
Fungii live underground and can't photosynthesize so they can't make their own sugars, they are the plant's bitch, but the plant is the microbes bitch too, so it works very well.
Now by adding calcium you have also increased Oxygen, and by adding BSM you have increased carbon and microbes, the only thing left is the ever elusive Phosphorus.
Phosphorus is so misunderstood that its not funny. It's a nutrient thats in every cell in the plant, which we all know, but here is the thing about phosphorus, its a dump truck.
It comes in from the soil loaded with food stuck to it by static cling, flows through the plant, and the plant eats the nutes off the Phosphorus.
If the plant itself needs to consume the Phos it will, but mostly it strips the nutes, and returns Phos to the soil with exudates so the dump truck can reload and return.
The more dump trucks the more nutes.
Phos is hard to mine by natures design because if you have too many dump trucks delivering non stop the plant really has no need for fungii so it will decide it doesn't need to pay fungii anymore and everything crashes, and you are now responsible for all the feeding, so nature made Phos both hard to mine and electrically sticky.
Pouring it into the soil will crash myco fungii, but having it available in a locked up form, such as rock phosphate, keeps it locked up until needed, and then the plant tells myco fungii it needs more, and fungii bribes microbes to eat some rock phosphate.
It introduces it gradually until it has exactly the right amount of dump trucks on the roads. If your soil is nutritionally balanced in micro nutrients, which most soils are, you are off to the races.
Then there is priming the pump.
If brix are low, or stalled out, the system needs a boost.
If Cal is good, and you built the soil so you know there should be enough Phos tied up in there, its likely a Carbon issue, so using BSM primes the pump and gives the system a revving from the bottom up by making the microbes more robust, thus increasing nutrients, thus increasing photosynthesis, thus increasing plant sugars, and now myco has more money to do business with. Its a cash injection to the business model.
You can't rely on just endlessly dumping BSM in as it will make the plant think it no longer needs myco, as the microbes are healthy from you for free, but its a great primer to start the process.
If you are reading about brix and you see a lot of talk about foliars, they are priming the pump through the leaves instead of the soil as that works too, but do you really want to smoke weed that has stuff sprayed all over the leaves?
I'm not knocking foliars, they work. Period. But they leave residue is all.
Nature doesn't have a sprayer full of nutes.
She invented brix, we should study it from that approach, not by looking for a hack.
You want a long term fix that you can build into your next grow.
At least thats my approach.
So here is the pay cheque for your efforts...
You spent 10 bucks on a seed that you researched out, to find a strain that is described, and you decided that the description is exactly what you are looking for.
The only way to get that result from the seed is to allow the seed to fulfill its maximum genetic potential.
There are only 2 ways this can happen.
One is to feed that plant exactly what it requires, in the exact proper amounts, at the exact proper time, and we can't talk to plants, so other than a fluke, its statistically impossible to do, as we don't really know what it wants, so we just pour in our best guess.
The other way is to get brix high enough (above 12) so the plant is in charge and has enough sugar to buy what it wants when it wants, and can support the entire team by reinvesting its profits (sugars) into the business model to grow the empire.
Phos is hard to mine, so start it on day 1.
Here is the big No-No warning.
Nitrogen.
You need it, but not too much. This is why synthetics are almost impossible to achieve high brix with.
Nitrogen, whether it be synthetic or organic, requires combination with water to work inside the plant. Too much nitrogen inside the plant means too much water inside the plant.
A reading of 12 brix means the sap is 12% sugars and trace solids. If you add a massive amount of water the sap gets diluted and simple math tells you the 12% gets diluted too.
The "best guess" wasn't accurate.
OK maybe my disclaimer at the top should have stated to grab a whole pot of coffee....
Now you are probably thinking " Well if thats true then raising brix is a really simple thing, just have nutritious soil with enough carbon in it to get the plant above 12, and make sure Calcium and Phosphorus are adequate, then just add microbes and fungii"
You are correct.
Fungii loves hydrolysed cold pressed fish fertilizer at a low dose on a steady basis. Not fish emulsion.
Yeah thats a hint.
️. I got frostbite from the blizzard of 79 on my fingers and toes and now whenever they get cold they hurt bad. So I go through hell shoveling the sidewalk being outside for long stretches. CL
. Ended up with so many in the basement that I had to do something. Two ended up outside in enough time to get the benefits of the shortening days and the starting of flowering.
Carbon was the biggest one, and boy did I waste time on that lol. Now, every chance I get I mention the tub of coco I keep outside