Early Auto 2020

This is gonna be a long one… So things seemed really slow for both plants last week. That continued into this week. In fact, growth almost seemed to completely halt on the blue dream. I started with the IDGAF method and then relaxed even more from there. It started by having no idea what soil I put in which bag. It’s either a combo of leftover soil from last season, or some absolutely terrible soil I got from a local place. Then, to make sure I really messed up, I didn’t do any initial soil testing. Day 63 and I guess it’s finally time to take account of my ways and try to get these plants on track and across the finish line. Better late than never, right? I did some soil testing on both and wasn’t all that surprised by the findings. Here we go… ——— BLUE DREAM Some purple streaks popped up when flowering started. It was around day 37 when I first noticed some purple spotting around the nodes on lower branches. I initially thought it was strain dependent, since it wasn’t happing on the honey peach. But remember, I have no idea what soil is in either bag. Lol! Anyway, over the past two weeks, the buds on the blue dream have really slowed down to the point of almost not even being able to see any growth. They are filling out a little, but barely. Also, I started to notice purple on the tips of the leaves of the topmost growth. It was time to do some test and see what I’d been doing and what I could do for these next few weeks. I tested the slurry with a decent PPM and pH pen, and I tested nutrients with the little color reaction capsules. For the tests, I used distilled water that had a pH of 7.6 and a ppm of 0. SLURRY ppm pen - 103 pH pen - 6.43 pH capsule - between 6.0 - 6.5 N - N1 (deficient) P - P4 (surplus) K - K3 (sufficient) RUNOFF ppm - 1570 pH - 5.74 So the NPK wasn’t surprising. Last feed they had straight Cha Ching 9-50-10. What I did think was weird was that the slurry showed an excess of Phosphorus and Potash but only a ppm of 103… Regardless, the lower pH and high ppm, along with the purple stems and new growth all point to nutrient lockout. So I flushed, with 5 gallons of water pH 7.0 POST FLUSH RUNOFF ppm - 580 pH - 5.9 I’ll do another deep slurry after it dries, before the next watering. Everything looked good the next day. I already saw more pistils and it looks alive again. ——— HONEY PEACH The honey peach always seemed to be doing okay. It definitely didn’t grow at big and bold as when i did the indoor grow over the winter. But again, I used fresh Ocean Forest soil from Fox Farms. This time, I have no idea what I used. But there were never any purple streaks or any other signs of deficiency. Still, I did a slurry because it did seem to be slowing down. Also, the pistils stopped growing and receded on a lot of the buds, but the buds are still growing. SLURRY ppm pen - 59 pH pen - 6.69 pH capsule - between 6.5 and 7.0 N - N1 (deficient) P - P3 (sufficient) K - K4 (surplus) RUNOFF ppm - 534 pH - 6.2 So the NPK wasn’t surprising. Last feed they had straight Cha Ching 9-50-10. What I did think was weird was that the slurry showed an excess of Phosphorus and Potash but only a ppm of 103… I figure this one has about one, two weeks tops before it’s finished, so went ahead and flushed too. With 3 gallons of pH 7 water. POST FLUSH RUNOFF ppm - 392 pH - 6.3 ——— The big takeaway was that I likely have two different soil structures going on. Either way, they got a good flush and we’re in the home stretch.