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My very first grow. RIP: PH issue. ✞ ✞

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a year ago
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FarmBox Standard 180cm x 80cm x 80cm
Indoor
Room Type
Monkey Pro Light Mix
Grow medium
14 L
Pot Size
Germination Method
Directly In Substrate
Method used by growers
Statistics by method
Avg. success - 93%
Method popularity - 20%
Blueberry XXL Auto
Avg. success
BSF Seeds - 88%
Blueberry XXL Auto - 105%
Nutrients
ml/l
ml/gal
tsp/gal
Commented by
HakunaMatata HakunaMatata
2 years ago
Starting this diary just to document my very first grow and learn from my mistakes :) (and hopefully get some help if everything goes south) Anyway, let's start! First, why Autoflowering strains? After a lot of reading, I decided i wanted a simplified first grow. I'm a bit afraid of messing with light times and stuff like that yet and I wanted first and fast run so I could get a grasp of how these plants behave. On the other hand I've also read that autos may be a little bit more trickier to grow... So yeah... I'll just take a leap of faith on this one. My setup: I got a starter kit on my local grow shop. I built the kit (which didnt include the humidifier nor the hygrometer/thermometer), and gave it a dry run. Luckily I did add the hygrometer/thermo since I discovered the 400w HPS light raised the temperatures to 35 Celsius inside the tent and it also dropped the natural humidity of my house from 63% to 40%. I bought a Xiao Mi Humidifier (not sure if it was the best decision but it was the only thing I had available). I also got an intake fan and an extractor (110mm each). Tested again (turned on everything for 2 hours) and got the humidity back to 65% which I believe is ok for germination and the seedling stage, and the temp raised to 27 Celsius (I'm a bit afraid it may go up after an entire day). I also have an autopot easy2grow prepared for irrigation. I may be out of the country for a week, so I've got one of these systems to keep my plants irrigated. Germination and grow: Im following Tourette Grower in YouTube who specializes in Autos. He did a grow using autopot and Autos too. He started by saturating the soil with water, and 24 hours later planted the seeds. That first irrigation of the soil was enough for almost 2 weeks of growth. At that point he turned the autopot system on. I'll be following almost the same process. I filled two 14 liters pots, one with custom substrate from my local growshop and another one with Monkey Pro Light Mix and saturated them with 3 liters of water and 1.5ml of Plagron Power Roots (0.5ml per liter). I'll leave those pots overnight in the tent and the same time I put 2 Blueberry XXL Seeds between soaked paper towels inside a tupper (in a drak place). I'll leave them there overnight and then move them directly to the soil in the morning. Wish me luck!!! (and if somebody reads this feel free to leave any tips or feedback; if you think Im butchering these seeds please let me know!!! 😬) Day 1: everything quiet Day 2: everything quiet Day 3: one sprout appeared with white cotyledons; slowly opened and turned bright green; the other blueberry hasn't sprout yet Day 4: the seedling stretched a bit. I lowered the HPS light to prevent further stretching but this caused an increase in temps from 24 celsius to 25.5 (kinda dangerous) Day 5: (a brief power outage left my humidifier went offline, humidity dropped to 57% almost the entire night); the seedling was a bit down probably due to low humidity and the soil got a bit dry. I sprayed the seedling, turned on again the humidifier and irrigated the soil with 250 cc of plain water (not sure if thats too much) Improvised a dome to keep humidity for the seedling and stop relying on the humidifier so much in this critical stage. The other seed havent germinated yet; I got anxious, dug out the seed, found out it was barely beginning to open so I replanted it with more water and less depth (maybe that will help if i didnt kill it with all the handling). Im stressed and anxious :/ Day 6: nothing new Day 7: i finally managed to get an acceptable disposition fo the items in the tent (humidifier, plants, hygrometer, etc). The tent in the pictures, the light, etc, was a starter kit i bought at a local growshop. There is not too much information on the internet on how to use/prepare these kits, but nobody seems to talk about how DIFFICULT is to nail the disposition of each piece of hardware in order to get the right temps and humidity. I believe I may have stressed the seedling a bit these last few days. I now have a constant reading of 60% humidity and 22 Celsius at "night" and 65% humidity and 24 Celsius during the day. I also managed to keep my fan constantly on to keep the air flowing. Until today, turning my fan on caused the humidity to drop below 55% down to 45% sometimes and my temps to climb up to 28 Celsius. Also the 400hps light heats a LOT which causes that i cant lower the light as much as id like to. I believe this was a poorly planned kit... Im a bit angry and disappointed at this growshop. I had to spends extra money to get smart power sockets, smart hygrometers, just to be able to keep a constant monitoring and control of something that was supposed to just work OOB. DO NOT BUY KITS... get a a growing sensei and ask for guidance...
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Grow Questions
HakunaMatata
HakunaMatatastarted grow question a year ago
3 weeks of not growing -> Autopsy: Stem is violet, roots I believe they look healthy (no rotting, maybe im wrong?), and leaves are droopy and lime green. Was a PH issue maybe? (I'll plant new seeds and get a PH meter for this next grow, i shouldn't have saved money on that)
Solved
Other. General questions
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gottagrowsometime
gottagrowsometimeanswered grow question a year ago
Pour away from your stem it promotes roots growth. As they go searching for fluid and can feel moisture near and go in that area. Spread out and so on. Anyways. If you've any issues again. Try and push through it. As there was nothing wrong. And getting them through the seedling stage is the easy part. If you need help. Feel free to mes me or anyone here who respondz
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MalumProhibitum
MalumProhibitumcommentedweek 2a year ago
With pots that massive in comparison to the small seedling I'd be very careful and avoid giving too much water. Any over-watering will deprive the roots of oxygen for weeks and stunt the growth severly. Or you could go with the small peat-cube made for seedlings route. Transfer to bigger pot, once the seedling is bigger to give the plants more opportunity for root-gas-exchange and the soil dries up a lot faster. Good luck on your next grow! 😋
MalumProhibitum
MalumProhibitumcommenteda year ago
@HakunaMatata,Yes Sir!!--👊😎--Spot On! I've noticed a lot of ppl treat the nutrients like it was plant food, when in reality the "macro nutrients NPK, micro nutrients Ca, Mg, S and trace elements all combined added to the water just consists of a miniscule; less than 1‰ of what you are administering "feeding (!sic)" to your plant. Your goal is to stay somewhere in the lower than 0,25‰ nutrient to water weight the initial week for proper root development. Any pimping will just slow down the plants ability to process the basic nutrients; carbon, hydrogen and oxygen that is already avaliable to the plant in sufficient quantities simply through the air, soil and water. Also the roots arent very happy with too much H+ ions around em, so the closer to neutral the water is the first week, the better in my opinion, until week 1 veg is over and the plant is already developing it's 3:rd set of leaves. So unless your tap water is highly acidic or basic, adding pH down / up might actually delay the root develpment of the seedling, a phenomena easilly noticed by those poor bastards who get chlorosis etc the first week from too much "care" when regular tap-water on some other plant in depleted, neutral pH soil would look fine the first week. The real food is the actual water (H2O), the content in the air (Oxygen+Carbon dioxide), then a huge portion the light (photons) pushing the process forward. This in combination with the excess of what the seedling needs, already stored in the seedling itself from seed has made me draw the conclusion that the less effort you put in the grow the first week, the better the outcome. Probably why paper-towel tecnique works so good, yet the seedling might die as it's roots gets burned when being transferred from the moist paper to the hot & pimped-soil, with excess of nutrients, love and what not. I've also noticed how much better the small plants grow, the lower the TDS is in the soil, and how a subtle move, like adding a teaspoon of wet-used-cofee-grounds added as top-dressing to the seedling used in good faith might delay the root development and leave its roots severly stunted and behind in development in comparison to her seedling-sisters, just given neutral water the first week. First week --Less is more.
HakunaMatata
HakunaMatatacommenteda year ago
@MalumProhibitum, whoa!! thanks for the info, I really appreaciate it!!!! I was feeling a bit down after killing the Blueberry so yeah, thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed comment! I potted the blueberry on a Monkey Light Mix Pro. The Tangie was potted on a custom soil. The custom soil seems to be more aireated than the Light Mix. I actually thought i made a mistake when making the custom soil because i felt it didn't have much water retention, and I thought the Monkey Light Mix Pro was better (surely in terms of nutrients is better balanced). However, after a couple of waterings I realized the the Mix wasn't drying at all, the top first inch was drying but the rest of the soil was extremely moist, not swamped though. So I kept watering thinking that was the expected behavior of the mix... Now I think I know what to look for in terms of watering. Probably I can use that monkey light mix but following your advice and mixing with coco. This is key -> "the bigger the pot, the more coco, to compensate for the decreased area to volume ratio of big containers"
MalumProhibitum
MalumProhibitumcommenteda year ago
@HakunaMatata, Yes, autos are a bit more delicate when it comes to development before flower and any changes along the way might affect the harvest in a negative way whereas regular seeds you have the opportunity to extend veg if things goes sideways and can switch to 12/12 whenever you think the grow-room is populated and plants are ready for flower. I think I'd stick with what other ppl recommended and go for one pot, but you could keep the watering in check and there are few tricks to avoid drowning the poor plant 😁 I had same issues too with watering too much until I started adding a dishcloth to the bottom of the pot, and made 4x finger sized holes for the corners to peek through, and then added another 4x dishcloth on the outside to passivly suck out and absorb any excess water (lowers the time to recover and soil to get an apropriate water-content within 3-4 days if I overwater instead of months, when I start a seedling in a 30liter++ pot)😜 Then I just squeeze out any excess water gathering in the dishcloths and remove them when they start to dry out and I know there isnt any abundance of water in the soil anymore. Some ppl want stones at the bottom, big coarse stuff, and I went the other route and added the cloth to be able to regulate the water content, then I add Coconut Coir to the soil to make the texture of the soil more airy, the bigger the pot, the more coco, to compensate for the decreased area to volume ratio of big containers. The soil is like a sponge with massive surface area and ability to exchange gasses, add too much water and the surface area in the soil decreases drasticly and you end up starving the roots of oxygen. If you starve the roots of oxygen, their development halts and within days they start to die, and as the roots is like a mirror image of how the development above the soil is, you want big roots. Try get a feel for the weight of the pots and let the top layer dry out some atleast before adding more water. You want moist soil, not a swamp 😂 Your diary -BSF Tangie XXL Auto- looks promising 👊😊--🍀
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mrmateo
mrmateocommentedweek 1a year ago
same thing happened to mine only i was growing in coco realized i forgot to add perlite and forgot to buffer the coco..... i transplanted into new coco buffered with perlite and hope it fixes my problem or i'm doing the same as you, one time i also had a cheap ph pen with a low battery reading the wrong ph lucky i figured that one out to save the grow😐
HakunaMatata
HakunaMatatacommenteda year ago
@@mrmateo, great you managed to save that one! Yeah I agree. And probably in the next couple of grows I’ll try coco or living soil. I think what was confusing for me here is that the bag of Monkey Light Mix is advertised as already balanced in nutes, composition and water retention. So I didn’t expect to have the need to add stuff to it. I explicitly bought that mix as a beginner because I didn’t fully understand how the plant behaves and all the possible substrates. I’m on a second grow now on the same soil and the same symptoms appeared. And while now I think I understand how to fix it, I’m certainly not happy on how the brand advertises this mix.
love_2_grow
love_2_growcommentedweek 02 years ago
Happy Growing, Buddy! 🌱🌱🌱
love_2_grow
love_2_growcommented2 years ago
@HakunaMatata, Thank you, and I'm happy if you find something useful. Just buzz me if you have any questions.
HakunaMatata
HakunaMatatacommented2 years ago
@love_2_grow, thanks man! Had a quick look at some of your diaries; Great info and awesome results, i'll take a couple of ideas from them.
Terp1
Terp1commentedweek 02 years ago
good luck 💪😎
HakunaMatata
HakunaMatatacommentedweek 2a year ago
This was a PH issue after all. Soil is measuring almost 8. Note for every beginner, get yourself a PH meter, don't be cheap like me.