Beginning of week 7 in flower, only two more weeks left if they ripen like they did last time. Plants are beginning to smell, develop triches and fattening up. They're not going to get any taller but compared to my first grow they're double in size. It's getting really intense. I'm in there every day checking humidity (on the no defol side) and I'm starting to struggle keeping up with the feed. During lights off I've found the plants eat the most food. I topped up the res, added 25% more PK. I try to keep the plants at 700 ppm and in the space of four hours it dropped to 600 ppm (towards the end of lights off). I stopped directly loading with Calcium Nitrate and instead used a regular calmag. I'm about to go overboard with Calcium Nitrate again and bump the ppm up to 1k. Will see how far the ppm drops the next day.
17/02/20 Update: The plants are beginning to smell a lot more, it has that kind of fermenting pungent smell from a red paw paw but applied to a mango. Very sweet, it literally smells like I'm growing some kind of tropical fruit. Still struggling with the feed, I added close to 40g of calcium nitrate and the plants still dropped the ppm lower than when I boosted it. I find it really frustrating that Dual Fuel only sell as a pair. Part 2 is amazing for late flower. Potassium sulphate and Magnesium sulphate, it's the perfect PK boost and I don't know anyone other nutrient like it. The other PK boosters always have too much P.
18/02/20 Update: Still battling my plants and the efforts to keep up with them is still frustrating me. Ran out of potassium Sulphate and bought Bio Diesel Rhino K 0-0-15 as a substitute, talk about expensive but I was desperate.
19/02/20 Update: Uploaded how I pump calcium into my plants this late into flower. They eat more than what I showed daily. That's 100+ ppm of Ca everyday! I don't know how much pectin this plant has now but the Brix would have to be through the roof compared to my first grow.
20/02/20 Update: finally got the feed right for a twelve hour period. I'm using two times the amount of K any bloom booster recommends and I'm probably using ten times the amount of calcium easily. I'm also going to feed as minimal N from now on, I'd cut it out completely if I could but I rely on Micros for the macro nutrients. Spent $65 on that bottle of potash and I used a third of a bottle for one nutrient change, think I'll stick to using powered water soluble potassium sulfate. My main concern is that I won't be providing enough iron with the little Micro I'm giving it. Going to throw a couple of rustry nails into the res. I'm about to do a top up...dropping the Micro super low, putting minimal part 2 in. Along with all the fulvics, humics, kelp and other acids my ppm only sits at 244. Which gives me plenty of room to load up on calcium. Top up the mag cause what was in the part 2 wasn't enough then load K.
21/02/20 Update: The plants finally stalled and took a breather yesterday. Didn't upload any photos cause it looked the same as the day before. By the end of the evening it looked like the explosive growth started back up again and the photos from today will show it. The ppm was creeping up not down this time...finally over feeding them. Dropped the extra loading of calcium and potassium to regular bloom phase levels and bumped the chelators up instead.
Update 22/02/20: plants aren't eating what they were. Ppm is remaining stable at 800. I won't dilute the res just yet. Still holding off to see if it goes up again. If it goes down I'll refeed the same formula as last time that has reduced calcium and potassium.