Well I'm happy to have given you something that you haven't seen before. I will say that the smell begining to come off of them is sweet, almost candy like especially the healthy buds on the damaged one.
I'm hoping removing the DI part of the RODI water will start to allow the soil and roots to heal.
This is a picture of the stalks lol far less bonsai now that they've grown out. I've highlighted the main culprits that are holding the budsites with issues.
This is the first time I have seen one of these deficient bud sites pray and not look totally unhappy.
This is going to be a long post, grab a coffee.
Those stalks do look lesser in girth than the others so the plant may be directing nutes as it see's fit, but if the leaves are going up then they are producing sugars, so the plant should cater to them.
Keep doing everything you are doing, and dial your water in. If she likes Calmag then keep it coming. It's a good balance of both cal and mag in perfect ratio. Mixing prilled dolomite in water makes good calmag too.
So you hear all sorts of "veg you should do this, and in flower you should do that" and all that may be true for the style of grow that the sayer was growing, but in living soil it's different. Here's how it works in a nutshell, and toss out all your veg and flower rules you have heard.
What I'm about to say is where most LOS grows go bad, especially ones in SIPs.
1st, you need available calcium in your soil. It is an electrolyte, so it supplies electricity to soil. Microbes run on electricity.
It's magnetic charge is positive, so it causes static in the soil much like rubbing a balloon on your head and then watching dust particles attract to it.
That static, when it gets just right, will make your soil fluff right up. It's called tilth and in this aspect calcium is referred to as a "soil conditioner" .
It's ratio to magnesium sets the degree of active static, so dolomite, which is natures blend of cal and mag is best. Prilled dolomite is the best dolomite for weed.
So lets say you have calcium correct and tilth has been achieved. This is what tilth is... Soil particles are like dinner plates.
They stack up like plates in a cupboard. They have a charge in the center and an opposite charge at the edges, so they stick together magnetically.
When cal and mag get correct, their combined charge alters the charge in the plates and in the exact same way 2 magnets will stick, but if you reverse one they repel. When tilth is acheived, every 2nd plate repels. This causes every 2nd plate to stand on edge, fluffing your compacted soil bigtime.
Now you have passages in the soil that air and water share. If the passages are too full of water then air is restricted. If there is too much air things drought.
This is where soil carbon comes in. I use coco but it's dealers choice on the soil carbon you choose. So lets say we are using coco.
Carbon holds 4 times its weight in absorbed water. So when you water and it runs thru all the hallways that tilth created, it absorbs into the carbon like a sponge. If you can fully hydrate all the carbon but leave no puddles in the hallways you now have lots of moisture but the hallways are open completely for maximum O2. The best of both worlds.
Now microbes can flourish and breath and move about and nothing is dehydrating.
That carbon has swollen tho to hold all that water so the hallways are open but narrow.
OK now the difference between veg and flower... Flower requires microbes to mine more phosphorus, and lots of it. You can't just add high phos ferts, it crashes living soil, the microbes must do it.
The extra work involved is hard work. The microbes require more oxygen to do it. So in flower you need to dry down a bit in order to shrink the carbon thus opening the hallways wider for more O2.
We can talk all day about nitrogen but nitro is simple. More nitrogen requires more water, less nitrogen requires less water.
So to put it all together, veg requires more nitrogen because protein is nitrogen and plants use tons of protein to grow like they do until stretch is done. Veg needs to be wetter.
After stretch is done they immediately require way less protein because they are growing less, so less nitrogen, so less water, but way more air because they are working hard to mine Phos.
So when stretch is ending you need to water often, but much less each watering, going from fairly moist to only damp.
Get cal and mag correct to condition the soil to open the hallways up, then water correctly for veg and for flower. 90%, if not more, of all problems will go away.
The trick in flower is you can't water near as much at once as in veg, but the soil can't go dry either, so you need to find the sweet spot and water far less at once, but far more often, to stop the violent swings of a wet/dry cycle, and settle in on a moderately damp steady cycle.
Organics translates to "of carbon base" and thats because plants require correct carbon in the soil to regulate air and water, and carbon from the air to create sugars, which are mainly carbon. I have tried many soil carbons and coco works best here.
If you take food and water out of the picture plants only require 6 things other than light and water.
Minerals, carbon, calcium (in ratio with magnesium) oxygen, microbes (myco gets lumped in here too) and phosphorus. All soil has minerals and we just covered the rest, mostly by watering properly.
Ensure you have mineralized phosphorus in your soil from day 1 of sprout. Plants need a bit more phosphorus tomorrow than they needed today, every day of their lives. I use the same soil mix in all stages, I just add more carbon and perlite to weaken it's nutitional vale at the seedling stage.
So thats it, get minerals, organic matter (plant food), carbon, and phosphorus into a pot, add calcium to fluff it, water it properly to regulate O2, and introduce microbes and fungii.
If you have all that and your plant goes yellow then your soil is too wet, oxygen is cut off, and the plant starves because all that organic matter needs to be attached to an oxygen molecule in order for the plant to recognize it as food, so even in a pot rich with food a plant will starve if it's overwatered. A starving plant can show any kind of deficiency, depending on it's stage of life.
I hope that makes sense, its the basic system that organics runs on. Once that is established you can screw around a million different ways to customize your grow/art, but you must adhere to these basics. Get one wrong and it all crashes.
Usually it's lack of calcium and too much water, they go hand in hand.
Calcium is extremely mobile in water, and it's the heaviest mineral in the pot, so overwatering literally causes calcium to fall out the bottom of the pot.