Thanks a lot for the info Buddha.
I have Atami PK 13-14, Bisosevia Bloom and big bud form advanced nutrients that i intend to use during fowering. However the plants dont seem to have entered the flowering stage yet :S . I did transplant all of them 2 weeks ago because the initial pots were of crappy quality, so that might have slowed them down a bit. How will i know when to add the flowering nutes?
No worries. You're good to go with everything you need there. I was under the impression you only had grow nutes but that aside let's move on.
About the watering, what you described is more or less what im doing... water>water>feed. One thing that concerns me though is that i buy deionized water for the plants. The water has a Ph of 6.5 which from what i have read here is ideal for soil. Could tap water help the girls because of the minerals it contains?
Well.. on my other forum this topic has led to members being banned.. hopefully that won't happen here.. so I'll very cautiously give you my personal opinions on the matter and I'm sure some will agree and disagree.. but.. (also the ph issue isn't as simple as it first appears)
If you give them de-ionised water at a ph of 6.5.. that won't harm the plants in-and-of-itself because it's pretty much just water that's gone through a reverse osmosis system to remove most of the mineral deposists. The thing is that plants don't need a specific ph range to absorb water.. only nutrients.
Anyway.. if the plants aren't getting those minerals from the tapwater now (mostly cal, mag, copper and even a a *bit* of chlorine is necessary) .. where are they getting them from? Well.. they can only be getting them from the nutues you add. Thing is is that the manufactureres of nutes expect us to be adding them to tapwater with a higher than 6.5 ph.. so broadly speaking, they don't go overboard on things like magnesium and calcium (which you get a lot of in hardwater). Of course, weed uses a good amount of mag and a reasonable amount of calcium so when you water with demineralised water what happens is that you wash the cal and mag out of the soil that the nutes put there previously, leaving the plant with none or very little left in the soil after its watering. It's a subtle little thing but it can be a fucking headache when you can't figure out what the yellow leaves or brown spots are all about.
The other thing to think about is that if the deionised water is at 6.5.. when we add nutes to it the ph lowers.. so that'll be going down to about 5.3-5.5 (best guess). That's too acidic for cannabis grown in soil, whereas if you started off with tapwater with a ph of even over 8, when you add nutes and boosters etc it can bring it down to about 6-6.3. As the plant uses up nutrients in the soil the ph rises (mostly) and thus gives the roots access to all the nutrients that can only be absorbed at a specific ph range. For example.. phoshorous can't be absorbed at a ph
lower than 6.5, but manganese and iron can't be absorbed at a ph
higher than 6.5... so the trick is to give the plant feed at 6.5ph.. then the plant gets access to all nutrients for a while. Some pros like to ph at 6.3 or whatever so that as the soil's ph changes (rises) the plant gets more time feeding on each ph scale.
Personally.. I think for a new grower the goal is to learn how cannabis grows and don't fall victim to the pressure of trying to get everything perfect first tme. That in itself ruins a lot of 1st grows.
So my advice is to keep it as simple as you possibly can.. learn as much as you can from this first grow and concentrate on the basics. A plant needs food, air, light, and water to grow and produce lots of lovely drugs for us. All the boosters and additives are great
in moderation, but the most easy route for most is to use tapwater that's been dechlorinated with an airpump or waterpump, and give that straight to the girls on watering days. Water that's been bubbled overnight has a far higher oxygen content which is really good for the roots, and it also removes most of the chlorine which is bad for the soil bacteria.
On feed days (assuming your tapwater is within the 7-8 ph range) add nutes to the water, let stand for 20 mins (to allow the ph to settle down) and give to the girls as usual.
That's pretty much my opinion on it in a nutshell (open to debate). Sorry for the essay but the ph issue is so broad that I couldn't narrow it down much more than that.
If I had to really.. really compress it.. I'd say that more often than not I've seen much better results with people using plain tapwater on their 1st grow without any ph adjustment. Changing the ph affects other parts of the grow and then that has to be considered blah blah blah I'm boring the arse off of you aren't I.
But the good thing is that you have the forum to fall-back on (with people far less verbose than me) if things get hairy, and there's lots of good growers here to help out.
