Please Help!

Thanks for popping in for us Shed and Em. :cheer:
 
the 2 plants that gor mild flush with phed aerated RO water are showing symptoms of drooping leafs...

PLAIN RO WATER SUCKS :)

The best is to buffer ro water with your tap water and bring it to EC 0.3-0.4

Im waiting now for a good dry, propably another 2 days, so i can give a nice buffered water with nute micro & grow @ EC 0.3+ 0.3 water EC = total Ec 0.6 with stabilized ph starting at 6.3 and moving up the scale while in the soil the next days.

Bobrown opened my eyes with the tests he told me to perform.
 
bobrown14 said:
The thing with RO water and adding in nutrients you know EXACTLY whats going into the soil. Tap water ours has 290ppms of something I have no idea.


Once I switched to RO - all my plants turned around.
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The downside is that you lose your trace minerals. Most have to supplement with calcium and magnesium.
I try to stick with spring water but it gets expensive.
If you use tap, add a 1/4 teaspoon of ascorbic acid vitamin C and let sit for 24 hours before use. That will get rid of the chlorine and chloramine.
 
I make my own soil, run no-till and have my soil tested annually.

I add in a fair amount of rock dusts to my soil mix so the trace minerals are there as well as make kelp teas which has every trace mineral plants need along with N-P-K in the proper proportions.

Good point tho for folks that buy bagged soils. I looked at the OPs soil he is using and it looks decent enough.
 
Adding 5 litres of tap water in 20 litres of RO brings the minerals back @ 150ppm = 0.3 EC

No need for cal mag or anything.

I changed a lot of things in this grow. You cant even imagine the things i did......

I will stick to my old school schedule 0.3 nute EC and ph 6.3 for veg....

The person who put me into this schedule is doing amazing things with his plants...

I just got into run off ph, run off ppm etc and started modifying everything, end up giving plain phed aerated RO to them for gods sake....

Doing the test BOB showed to me, i realize that my 150ppm water (ro+tap) can be adjusted to 6.3 and be the next day is on 6.7-6.8.....

I think as long as there is water in the roots, they absorb in that range....

I hope im right in what i think and say now...
 
If you mixing in tap, you might add Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) to take care of the chlorine/chloramine. Roughly 30mg per gallon. I do 1/4 teaspoon for 5 gallons.
 
Known said:
if my soil bag says ph 5,7 on the bag, what ph should my watering be?
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You’d want to put in 6.8-7 so it can catch the drift downwards and hit all uptake levels I believe. (Check out my pH chart in my sig)
Am I correct on this thought @Emilya
 
AdaminCO said:
You’d want to put in 6.8-7 so it can catch the drift downwards and hit all uptake levels.
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noooooo..... there is not a drift downwards.... drift is always upwards unless something is drastically wrong with your soil. The base pH (that number on the bag) is the pH that that soil tries to assume when dry. It is designed to be at the top of the pH range so that when you water at the hot spot of mobility (the point where the most minerals are the most mobile) 6.3 pH, the pH of your container is just that, 6.3. Then as the water table begins to drop and the soil begins to dry from the top down and in a cloth bag from the outer edges toward the center, the pH begins to drift upward toward the base pH as the soil loses the influence of the water. This allows your nutrients to drift through the entire pH range, of 6.2 or 6.3 all the way up to the upper end of 6.8 pH.
 
So, what you saying is that the soil states its ph at 5.7 but if i give it 6.3 watering it will stay 6.3 and when is drying out it will move up? So basically when the soil is wet is using the ph of the wet agent (water) until its dry???

@Emilya
 
Emilya said:
noooooo..... there is not a drift downwards.... drift is always upwards unless something is drastically wrong with your soil. The base pH (that number on the bag) is the pH that that soil tries to assume when dry. It is designed to be at the top of the pH range so that when you water at the hot spot of mobility (the point where the most minerals are the most mobile) 6.3 pH, the pH of your container is just that, 6.3. Then as the water table begins to drop and the soil begins to dry from the top down and in a cloth bag from the outer edges toward the center, the pH begins to drift upward toward the base pH as the soil loses the influence of the water. This allows your nutrients to drift through the entire pH range, of 6.2 or 6.3 all the way up to the upper end of 6.8 pH.
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He said his soil is a 5.7 though. That’s what threw me off. I thought he’s need to come in high, and as it dries it would drift back down to 5.7.
I thought going in at normal 6.3 would only catch 5.7-6.3, no?
 
Known said:
So, what you saying is that the soil states its ph at 5.7 but if i give it 6.3 watering it will stay 6.3 and when is drying out it will move up? So basically when the soil is wet is using the ph of the wet agent (water) until its dry???

@Emilya
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yes, exactly right. it is all about molecular weight and the amount of influence the water has because it totally swamps out all other factors. There is a little bit of interaction with the 6.3 fluid and buffers within the soil too, mostly the lime that is mixed in as the upper level buffer. Some of that starts mixing with the fluid as soon as it hits... so the fluid itself doesn't stay at 6.3 very long. So there are two factors going on that create the positive drift.
The same sort of drift happens in hydro.. the nutes are acidic and the mix is set to 5.8 pH. As the hydro system uses up the water, the pH 7 water's influence on the pH becomes less and less.... and the pH of the mix steadily rises.
 
Im really confused here...Emilya quotes ''as the water table begins to drop and the soil begins to dry , the pH begins to drift upward toward the base pH as the soil loses the influence of the water. ''

Question: The base ph is 5.7...So as the water gets less and less the ph will move from 6.3 to 5.7! BUT as we know when you ph the water + nute to 6.3 the next day is start to climbing up towards the water's base ph....So when it will start drying it will allready be around 6.8 or >6.8....Then it will start drifting back to soil base of 5.7....So if i understand there will be 2 x times the roots will benefit from the 6.3-6.8 range...

Is this valid?
 
AdaminCO said:
He said his soil is a 5.7 though. That’s what threw me off. I thought he’s need to come in high, and as it dries it would drift back down to 5.7.
I thought going in at normal 6.3 would only catch 5.7-6.3, no?
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oh... yes he did. That is some very acidic soil then, not even designed for growing regular houseplants or cannabis. Most proper soils are set to 6.8 pH. Egads... 5.7 soil?? That probably would set up a negative drift and your previous advice was probably closer to what is needed than mine.... @Known, can you confirm this? Did you buy some soil made for planting orchids?
 
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