Week 4 was learning about mainlining.
Week 5 has now become a learning experience about plant health. Growth earlier on in the week started picking up and the plants became very bushy. Almost too bushy. It was tough to keep adjusting the LST ties because of how close all the nodes are. Halfway through the week, the leaves were looking very wrinkly, particularly on the newer growth. They were also looking quite green. I asked for feedback on reddit (microgrowery), but didn't get much response. The responses I got were guessing at overwatering or lack of airflow. I tested this by decreasing from 2x feedings a day to 1x feeding a day, and moving the fan to blow directly on them.
This did not improve. Looking more into it, I started leaning towards Nitrogen toxicity, even though there are pretty much no pictures of N toxicity showing wrinkly leaves like this. That being said, after a day of researching, the plants spoke to me when a large number of them started clawing. I then started acting on my next plan, which was to decrease the PPM in the coco. I went back to 2x waterings a day because the outflow was coming out at 1100 when the inflow was 850. Once I decided it was N toxicity, I gave them a 30% flush with 700ppm. I let them spend the night with that, and then the next morning flushed with 600ppm and about 30% runoff. Hoping they feel better.
I also decided the plants were too bushy, so removed the leaves from the 2nd nodes. My plan is to let the lateral nodes (1 and 3) grow out. I'm not sure if going ahead and removing the 2nd node was bad since the 3rd node is still small, but I did this on 2 of 3 to test (picked the two bushiest ones which were the Widow and the Gelato). I think this will be a good result, as it greatly opened up the canopy to the nodes that I want to grow out. Hopefully it's not too stressful on the plants since they are already coping with issues.
