My “First” Grow

This is my first grow kinda! I started a week before this but messed up really badly! I’m growing in Coco and Pearlite mixture and using Reverse Osmosis Water. What I had no idea was that both Coco and RO water have basically NONE ZERO ZIP NADA Nutrients! My seedlings did not like that. they turned yellow in a couple of days and I had no idea what was going wrong. EVERYTHING I read said not to start nutrients until weeks 2 or 3 and so I listened! However what I found out is that growers don’t always tell you the minor small steps they take before their grow such as....Buffing their damn Coco! So the 2nd time around which I’m still saying it’s my first time I soaked my Coco in RO water with 4ml per Gallon of Cal-Mag Plus with a PH of 6.2. Because the Coco was pre-buffed this time, which means that it was still pretty moist upon planting the seed, of course I ended up overwatering the plant. This caused the leaves to curl down and inward so I took quick action and I fixed the drainage by drilling more holes in the pot and tapping the pot on the saucer to drain excess water. A decent amount of water came out and a couple hours later the leaves were back to normal and even looked like they’ve grown (a great sign)! On Day 6 I decided to transplant to 1 gallon pots instead of those cheap small green pots I was using because I seen some good growth (YES! I know DO NOT TRANSPLANT AUTOS! Lol). I figured I’d rather transplant now and if the plant didn’t recover then at least I only wasted a couple days and not weeks or months due to this being an autoflower. I really wanted to grow in 3 gallon pots but the larger size quite frankly scared me because I know I’m a heavy waterer. I sprinkled some mycorrhizae in the hole before transplanting because I ripped the hell out of some of the roots on the plant and I needed it to recover quickly. Did it work? We’ll see next week!

The plant seem to take the transplanting pretty well. It still was showing signs of overwatering even after the Coco dried out a bit. This made me scratch my head because I wasn’t sure what was causing the leaves to curl. Not sure whether or not the plants growth was stunted or slowed down because this is my first grow and have nothing really to compare it to. It looks ok with exception of the curling leaves. Towards the end of the week the plant began turning a lime green color looking like it was on a fast track to yellow. I quickly did some research and found out that my plant needed some nutrients and badly (read my week one comment to understand my situation with Coco and RO water). Apparently I wasn’t giving my plant enough food. My PPM initially was around 200 but from my research I found out that I actually need to double that number. I always read people say to give your plants 1/2 of what the nutrient bottle recommends as a dosage but because I’m in Coco and using RO water that has a PPM of 3 I decided to give a full dose instead of 1/2. Did this work out? We’ll see next week. The plant is also starting to give off a nice dank smell when sniffing up close but I actually noticed the smell upon watering the plant so it’s pretty strong already and only 14 days old which is exciting.