Blue City Diesel Platinum

May 11: nasty nutrient burn and/or frost damage. Still working on balancing things out a bit better... May 12: overnight lows are now reliably above zero. Woohoo, hopefully the plants start looking better. Growdiaries database limit is 10 C but overnight lows here are still only about 5C with some nights near zero. May 13: bought Cal-Mag to try and fix nutrient burn. Combination of cold temps, high sodium well water, FPJ, LAB and barley sprouts was obviously way too much. I stopped LAB and FPJ a few days ago now, and things improved for some plants, but today I concluded it had to be the excess sodium and lack of calcium that is the main problem. Not just frost, and not just barley sprouts/FPJ cuz even new seedlings were showing the same kinds of distress, and (likely) not the soil mix. Excess sodium is ugly and can even be enough to kill the plant. This water is exceptionally sodic (95 %meq/L) and that means the sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) is about 20 which is impossibly bad. Cal-Mag to the rescue (or at least a short term fix until the water hardener is working). May 15: still burnt but I think (?) it’s recovering. And the water hardener looks like it is going to work. 😎 May 17: the water hardener is completely effective at exchanging sodium for calcium and magnesium. Red Sea Reef test kit used to measure Ca and Mg confirms 100% sodium replacement by Ca and, surprisingly, Mg. That is surprising because limestone is CaCO3 and would not be expected to have much Mg available. Anyway, 11 meq/L of Na (250 mg/L is replaced by about 5 meq/L of Ca (100 mg/L) and about 6 meq/L of Mg (80 mg/L). The plants like this hardened water much better than the super soft well water. Now if I can just get this plant looking better.