3rd Grow, Indoor photos 2x2

Disclaimer: I fill my diaries on the go and update them during the week. So if you like to get all the information and pics of innocent plants getting the herbie101 treatment, always check back on the last week to get the FULL picture (of a grower trying hard not to kill his plants). Thank you, have a wonderful week and happy growing! recap and plans for the week: Welcome to week 10! The last two weeks i had a lot going on and could not tend the plants as they deserve. Due to that i the girls suffer from yellowing lower leaves and reddish rust on the leaves (especially on cap). I could not find any pests and they should have enough nutrients. So i suspect PH imbalance, cal mag issues and/or bad watering habits to be the culprit in this case. I gave them a weekly dose of cal/mag, so rule this out. That left me with watering and ph imbalance. Because of my experience in my first grow, i decided to free them from the bamboo cage and give them a nice flush to reset the soil. And started with fresh nutrients. So thats where we come to the theme of this week. Regaining control and see the girls happy again. To achieve this, we will do ... nothing. Just observing how the flush impacted the ladies and react to this. Best case scenario would be that they bounce back and the yellowing/rust stops. We will feed them less but more often. I hope that allows me to react faster if things go south further. But life happens, and sometimes your plants have to suffer for it. Good thing is, i should have a bit more time for them till christmas and i hope i can give them proper care to make the best out of this little mess. Its a bad timing for issues to rise, but we make the best we can and learn the most out of it. We have at least six weeks left for this run and i'm still pretty confident that we can come out on a good note here. Exciting and nerve wrecking times! Day 71/21F: First day of the week! The ladies produced a lot of hairs during the last week! I plucked some leaves and cut some underveloped branches. This week will be the last week of defoliating, but i guess i'm on a good way. There are still a few bushy spots, but i will clear them a bit during this week. Daisy has gotten some burnt tips. In a way i guess this is a good sign. I interpret this as a sign that they are able to take up nutrients again and overdosed a bit. On the other hand she got some dark spots and i have no idea what that could mean. I need to do a bit of research on this topic. We'll see! Day 72/22F: Opened the tent today, took a look, closed it again and went for a smoke. These are the moments that hurt the most during a grow. Boy, they look even worse than yesterday. The spots started spreading, burn marks around the edges and it was very hard to see that development. Sigh... So what is the best option here? At the moment my theory is that this is, that there was a problem with the EC in the soil, because of a salt buildup in the rootzone (thanks for educating me once again nonick123). This assumption was made because of the weird signs of the plant. It looked like a nitrogen deficiency first (which was impossible) and then they showed signs of a wrong ph. Which is weird, because Biobizz Allmix has a 6.0 PH initially and i PH my waterings always at around 6.5 - 6.8. So from my perspective it should be impossible to get the ph so far off that it causes nutrient lockout. But because i saw no other options, i decided to do a flush to reset the soil. So at the beginning of this week they were freshly flushed. Therefore ph should be in the zone and and the ec should also be right (because it should have flushed away builtup salt, right?). The water itself should not be the problem, because during my autorun everything went fine. But i ordered a EC-meter to check it soon. Just to get some detail. So: I assume EC/PH is right, they had a lot of water due to the flush but got some nutrients after. There are no visible pests, environment is okayish (bit cold during lights off). I also assume they were locked out of nutrients for some time until sunday. So they were deficient in nutrients, because of the lockout caused by too high EC. But i gave them nutes after the flush which they should take up now. This was "verified" yesterday, because Daisy showed some burned tipps yesterday and clawed a bit. I interpret this as burn from too much nutrients. This is a good hint for the lockout theory and a sign that they take up nutes now. And a sign that there are more than enough nutrients present in the soil. So based on these assumptions, we got this situation: PH/EC right, environment okayish, no pests, the ladies are able to take up nutrients, they maybe are overwatered due to the flush. There are actually more than enough nutrients present. And the ladies got rusty edges, these may be nutrient burn that spreads. Which would be explainable when they were locked out for some time. The purple spots got brown and crispy. So at the moment i could explain that again with a heavy burn. Its unusual for me that this starts at the middle of a leaf and not around the edges. But i'll see what i can find online about this symptom. But that leads me to do absolutely nothing... If they are "just" overfeed and all of that rapid development is based on toxicity because of the lockout, then i guess it would be best to just let them be and wait for them to drink up. And then be very cautious with further feedings. I guess they just get water this week (if the assumpions are true). Phew... Sorry for this wall of text guys. But it really helps me to sort out my thoughts. So we'll see how it continues! Quite a thriller at the moment! Day 73/23F: Today, Daisy is looking a bit rougher than yesterday. She got two leaves that are very rusty and quite a lot that are burned around the edges. BUT although it is worse than yesterday and she looks pretty unhappy with her droopy leaves i think we may have hit rock bottom of this run. And that would be great! Cap is going strong again and looking a lot better! Even if it looks bad overall, i think its quite possible that its going up from here on. Its a good day! Day 75/25F: It looks kind of the same as yesterday. The burns did not get much worse, cap is looking quite okay. Daisy is droopy and unhappy. John is just surviving. So Cap is totally dry, so she gets a light feeding with just 1.5l of plain water with 1ml bloom. Daisy looks dry, but the pot still feels a little heavy. So she just gets 1l of plain ph'd water. Johns Soil is still pretty moist. She gets absolutely nothing. Day 77/F27: Sooooo the ladies were pretty dried up today, so i gave Daisy 1l of plain water and cap got 1l with 1ml of grow and 1ml of bloom. Cap has some yellowing of the lower fan leaves going on, so i think its a good thing to add a little n to the mix.