ask
@InTheShed if he waters to runoff or his particular approach.
may make a difference.
I water to some runoff but nowhere near what I used to do with FF nutes.
Pouring through also lets you monitor the process. If you have a PPM meter, catch some of the first runoff. Based on personal experience, it's probably around 2000+ PPM. Run a couple gallons of tap through them and then your gallon of nuted water. Catch some of that last runoff towards the end of your nuted water addition. It should be within a couple hundred points of your input (around 1100-1200 PPM assuming 150 PPM tap water). Reset complete. If it's still pretty high, run another gallon of nuted water at them until your within that couple hundred PPM difference.
This ^
Every 3rd or 4th watering seems a little excessive to me,
This was what was recommended from my ProMix rep, as farside correctly remembered below. Of course, the rep wasn't accounting for the fertilizer type when he said that. Here is his quote:
"When any fertilizer is applied to a container, the plant will take up nutrients leaving some behind. This can create some imbalances in the root zone.
A plain water irrigation leaches out the elements that are not used or any waste ions such as sodium and/or chloride that may have accumulated... Irrigate plants to allow 15-20% of water to flow from the bottom of the container.
Generally, a good practice...is to irrigate with fertilizer solution three times and [do] the fourth irrigation with plain water to leach excess nutrients/salts. This would be applicable to all growing media."
Somewhere burried deep in @InTheShed thread I think there is a conversation he copied and pasted that he was having with the folks at Premier (makers of Pro Mix) that had recommendations along those lines.
He did. But I went with Emilya's suggestion of clearing out the substrate once about 2-3 weeks before expected harvest, and some of my plants did seem happier after I did it. They may like it even more if I did it every fourth watering, but I don't have that kind of time
or water!
shed had a fair bit of experience before stopping the ph and knew his method put the plants in a stable space before doing so.
I didn't stop pH'ing my nutes because of any experience with my plants. I stopped because it was explained how it's not necessary in any buffered media, like soil or ProMix.
Here is the thread. The opening post has the facts, and the rest of the thread is just a discussion about whether the facts are facts.
Greetings all! I recently had a running email conversation with the "Grower Services & Product Development Director" at ProMix (aka Premier Tech). I began the conversation by posting a question on their website, asking if I should be treating ProMix HP as soil or soil-less when mixing...
www.420magazine.com
Here is a paper from Cornell U that backs up the original post, and
here is the post where I explain the info in the paper if you don't have time to read through it.
MC is best used in anything where hydro rules apply. that includes promix.
the obfuscation occurring is simply the same old confusion over inert soil type mixes.
Though ProMix is not hydro, it's soil-less. It contains buffers and therefore does not require nutrient solutions to be pH-corrected as you do in hydro.
I am going to flush this one about every 2 weeks and see if that solves the problem
I'm with farside to say that dunking is not flushing. Nor is pouring 5 gallons through. 2-3x the pot size is necessary to clear the old PPM from the substrate. I know this because I've done it in ProMix with a PPM meter.
I just switched to MC nutes, in 24h my plants grew 2 inches from 7.5-9.5" and fixed my burn problem. Needless to say, imnsold, I put up to auto pots in 2 days then it'll be easy street. Here is before and after 1 feeding of MC
I don't think you can tell anything after one feeding in terms of deficiencies, as things like calcium or magnesium problems start a while before you see them in the leaves. Keep feeding and keep checking new growth for anything suspect!
) and my eight or nine different strains. As they say on the internet, YMMV!
