God Particle

After two grows, I solved the stupid mystery. Bear with me while I tell the story. Hopefully this post will come to somebody in their time of need. I started out by growing two bag seeds that turned out great. The only problem was I did not wait long enough. No deficiencies, no problems. Using MaxSea 16-16-16 and filtered tap water. I thought to myself, hey this is working out really well. I’m gonna keep doing this. So I got a tent and I got some more seeds and I got some bloom fertilizer. I started using the RO water that I use for my carnivorous plants and just making 10 gallons instead of 5 every week. I kept reading that reverse osmosis water is a great thing to start with because it’s a blank slate. No additives or anything and you know exactly what’s going in your water. This is where things started to go poorly. In light flower, I started to see deficiencies. I tried adding more fertilizer. It got worse. I tried raising the light. It got worse. Only in late flower. Everything leading up to that looked great. What the hell. Someone suggested Cal Mag. I got cal mag. I added the correct amount. It got better, but still there. Maybe I’m under fertilizing. I raise the amount of fertilizer and the cal mag. That was a terrible idea. It gets worse. I can’t figure out what’s going on, the pH is between six and seven. I’m growing in soil. My PPM is a shocking 1300. That’s when I found out that you can get locked out from your EC being wrong. I start rethinking the whole thing again. Obviously I’m over feeding. I’ve added calmag. Idk wtf is wrong. Now I’m deep in the weeds and I can’t figure out how to get out. So I fill up my reservoir with dechlorinated tapwater. And I start reading again. At this point I have considered switching nutrients, which would be a big pain in the ass because my houseplants require MaxSea, it’s the only thing safe for them. Wait why is it safe? I start scouring Reddit again and I find a post that says “why is MaxSea safe for carnivores?” Because it has no calcium. None whatsoever. Fml. And then it all falls into place. This didn’t all start until I started using RO water. Tap water was working great because I’m the Ohio valley our water is like 350 PPM. LOTS of minerals. I was using the same fertilizer mix that I used for my house plants which was less than half of the normal dose. And I was using tapwater. Once I started using the RO water, it stripped out all of the calcium, the fertilizer that I was using, did not have ANY added calcium, so when I hit flower things started to fall apart. I just have to stop using RO water. And feed less. I’m still going to add a little cal mag, maybe a half dose so I know it’s there.