James Hairston

i dont really agree with the statement coco requires calmag and should always stay wet. it can stay wet sure and calmag could be added if no other mineral rich material is added or if its gonna be treated as hydro maybe. however i just finished a nice grow using 70% coco 15% ewc and 15% manure, bat guano, basalt dust, wheat bran and aeration. i treated this grow as a regular organic soil grow and allowed full drybacks and havent given calmag more than a couple of times during the 9-10 weeks it took for them to veg and flower and that was just to be on the safeside. so if you keep it wet constantly its hydro and coco and 50% perlite can handle that and maybe in those wet conditions calmag is needed as well but if you treat it like soil you can still grow healthy plants in it without hassle. but to get the explosive growth people go crazy about when thinking coco you should treat it like hydro. so its a versatile medium and can be used to substitute for peat and treated as such and when used that way it’ll be similar to peat in yields and growth basically.

Coco is different then soil and needs to be treated as such. I am a coco grower with some pretty good results in my autos. Your ph and nutrition amounts are very important. Going in and coming out in run off. You need to test both regularly. 5.8 vegging. 6.2 flowering. Coco requires cal mag and should always stay wet but not sitting in run off.

at this point not much you can do. if you want you can take those ceramic mushrooms off and grow real mushrooms they would provide co2 :) fresh homemade ewc is the bomb and adds so much live microbes that no bottled product can beat it but it already looks pretty well fed so adding ewc may cause toxicity. also to correctly lst you should break the apical dominance and that means the main stem should be positioned perfectly parallel to the ground and the apical shoot should even be slightly lower than the main stem so the side shoots can gain dominance over it. these are mostly tips for your future grows by the way. on the other hand coco and 50% mix is basically hydro. you shouldnt treat it like soil and not like organic soil either. you should feed it to 25% of runoff each time you water and you should water and feed everyday never letting it dry out. get 2 parts coco nutrients and feed with a sensible ec and 5.8 ph. let it get as much sun as it can and then you may see the explosive growth coco/perlite mix offers. do more reading on the subject but i strongly suggest treating it as hydro and not soil because all the succesful growers i’ve seen using coco and 50% perlite mix basically did hydro with it and grew trees in it. google coco dtw, coco drain to waste. its your best bet of winning this competition imo.