NEWBIE PANIC!!!

[Del boy]

14 ml per 7 litres, that’s 2 ml a b per litre, I put 10 ml in 5 litres that’s 2 ml per litre, and I don’t use as much of the other nutes as you, so why is ppm double what yours is?

That i do not know what scale is your pen using 500 or 700 and i use r/o water not tap so my starting water is lower ppm then yours

 

[Bill.de.Cat]

Mmm...my guess would be water. What is the ppm of your water right before you add nutes. Tap is probably gonna have a high ppm compared to RO water. Which if I understand right most hydroponics farmers use so they know exactly what is in it. Not too big a problem for us soil rats.

 

[Proph]

There is a good amount of misleading info in this thread.. I know it can get confusing.. But when your car starts to run rough, what's the first thing we do? Check the basics right? That's what needs to happen here. You need to check the ph and ppm/ec of your run off... Read the ingredients of the bottled nutes to see which ingredients are being duplicated.. Coco is absolutely the most unforgiving medium you can grow in. Any nutrient imbalances will show very quickly. It's basically like running hydro. Top that with autos having zero recovery time to recover from issues, things can get murky real fast in coco. At this point you're just trying to narrow down the issues and slow the spread. Once the issues/spots/yellowing start, it's basically impossible to stop. Best bet is to try and slow it down. You can't properly flush without knowing the ppm/ec of the runoff, or without having an ending ppm/ec target. Otherwise you would know when to stop flushing.

The leaf symptoms look like a combination of calcium and potassium issues. Too much magnesium can easily lock out both Ca and K. So look at the labels of the bottles and see how many of them have a source of magnesium in them. Or one with more Mg than the others.

Take a few weeks to read up on immobile nutrients vs mobile nutrients and how they work. It will help you a great deal with diagnosing issues in future grows.

Feeding plants is a delicate balance.. Even more so with autos.. That's why they say less is always more. It's way too easy to over do it, and way too hard to correct it.

 

[Simplicio]

The simplest explanation is that you spilled some fertilizer solution to cause those brown spots.
Chasing deficiencies will drive you crazy, and is probably unnecessary.

 

[Sheriffatman]

Mmm...my guess would be water. What is the ppm of your water right before you add nutes. Tap is probably gonna have a high ppm compared to RO water. Which if I understand right most hydroponics farmers use so they know exactly what is in it. Not too big a problem for us soil rats.

My water is around the 250 ppm ec is .5

 

[Sheriffatman]

Thankyou peoples, a lot of food for thought there. No pun. All I done since december is research research research and still doing it now, I guess I always will be , which is fine, but every question asked gets many different answers, I read a lot of people don’t measure their run off , they just worry about what’s going in and what they said made sense, I have measured run off just for curiosity but it’s not something I’ve been monitoring, then I read another post about measuring run off and it made perfect sense to me, but being a newbie I’m on a knife edge with this grow and my head is already filled with a thousand ping pong balls going off at the same time, I didn’t want to add more confusion to the mix. My plant to me seems pretty healthy and no more worrying defects are appearing. I tend not to change nothing if she is happy, I’ve got her up to 6 weeks now, 5 weeks and 6 days longer than I thought she would last, she has an abundance of frosty white hairs, she’s beautiful lol I can’t be doing too much wrong and I’ve learnt Way more in my six weeks grow than I did in 5 months of research. You can’t beat hands on for learning. I’m getting there peoples, learning every day. Thanks again to you all , I will keep posting and updating so feel free to drop by.
The Sheriff

 

[bk78]

When fed properly coco shouldn't need flushing during the grow. Some people (cough: see above) feed way too high an EC.
Never run plain water through coco or you'll run into bigger issues.

4.0 EC isn’t good?

 

[tronN00dles]

My water is around the 250 ppm ec is .5

Those orange spots may actually be a symptom of a calcium toxicity locking out other nutrients. Your water is pretty hard to begin with, and it probably has a lot of calcium already in it. The interwebs seem to scare people into thinking they need to be adding mad amounts of calcium, so it’s easy to overdo it, especially if your water is already full of the stuff.

 

[Autofire]

Those orange spots may actually be a symptom of a calcium toxicity locking out other nutrients. Your water is pretty hard to begin with, and it probably has a lot of calcium already in it. The interwebs seem to scare people into thinking they need to be adding mad amounts of calcium, so it’s easy to overdo it, especially if your water is already full of the stuff.

Yeah that's spot on. It's a lock out sign. I had the same problem in several grows and then I talked to several experienced growers (and not the tossers on RIU) and they advised that flushing is the key for a healthy Coco grow. I was actually talking to my local grow shop owner about this yesterday. He said that as the plant develops and drinks more water the salt concentration they leave behind in the Coco concentrates. This makes total sense and could deffinetly be what is happening in this fellas grow.

The other approach is to run a lower EC throughout the grow. With a lower EC you don't get the same concentration build up in your Coco but you also don't get the same growth rates in weeks 2-6 that you would running a higher EC

 

[Mañ'O'Green]

The beauty of coco and why cannabis growers use it. It can be fertigated many times a day without much danger of over watering. This will allow you to present fresh in balance nutrients to the plant all day. Start fertigating 2 hours after lights on and stop fertigating 2 hour prior to lights out. Roots continually exude substances to stimulate the root biome (Yes all hydro has a root biome) to make the elements it wants the microbes to produce for the plant. Many of these processes happen at night when the plant is in respiration. When the day starts the plant assimilates the nutrients. If you fertigate too soon after lights on you will rinse these substances out of the root zone and waste them. Even though coco drains very well you still want time for a dry back before lights out.

Coco requires rinsing to remove the natural salt and pre-charging because it has an affinity for calcium and magnesium that needs to be addressed for the entire grow. It will also benefit from additional iron compared to other media. Coco is naturally high in potassium. A nutrient schedule must take these basic elemental starting points into consideration. A nutrient designed for coco will have addressed these baselines. With a starting water that is 250 PPM up to half of that can be calcium and even conservatively that can be 100 PPM of calcium. The common range for calcium in Hydro (coco is hydro) is 80 PPM to 140 PPM So starting with so much already it is easy to exceed the desired levels.

A huge benefit to coco is how easy it is to correct an imbalance in the pot. Without having lab equipment run-off measurements are IMPO worthless. They may tell you that you have 1400 PPM coming out but that is 1400 PPM of what? It is the nutrients the plant is not using. A build-up only happens in three scenarios: 1. you are not fertigating to a proper 20% run-off 2. you are putting too much in to start with and 3. the plant is growing very rapidly and the VPD is out of range. In this case the plant is taking in much more water and leaving the nutrients behind. No matter the reason for the out of balance pot it is easy to fix; slowly Fertigate to 33% run-off by the end of the day for 3 days in a row with 50% strength BALANCED nutrients PH to 5.8 +-. You will replace what is in the pot with what should be in the pot without flushing out the biome. If you have a good PH probe (you should have this as a standard tool) you can and should adjust the PH of your nutrient input to steer the PH in the root zone to remain in the 5.6 to 6.2 range.

IMPE Photoperiod plants can use balanced nutrients as high as 1200 PPM (not counting the starting water) in hydro. I have found that about 550 PPM is the top for autos. If you are fertigating only once a day 2 hours after lights on then you need for that 1200 ppm or 550 PPM to be in the mix that you fertigate to 20% run-off in that session. If you are going to fertigate several times a day then the PPM of your balanced nutrients can be much lower and the plant will still have access to the individual elements it needs (the whole idea behind coco). You must still fertigate to 20% run-off by the end of the day.