New Grower SPZ's Sour Livers Triple Automatic Grow

[SPZ]

Here's a few pics:

WHAT NOT TO DO! Here's what happens if you overwater and screw up the pH. I've watered these guys with water pH'd to 5.8 this morning and I plan on transplanting them to small containers with properly pH'd media/water this afternoon, but I doubt they're ever going to live up to their full potential

 

[SPZ]

MAKING LEMONADE OUT OF LEMONS.

I tried to salvage the best two plants and put them outside. To plant them, I dug a couple holes about the size of a five gallon bucket, filled them halfway with VermiFire, and topped it off with a mix of 70% loam / 15% perlite / 15% compost, then a layer of bark mulch on top. This pic is about 15 hours after transplant, they seem to have taken very well!


Here's Audrey IV. You can see the wavy leaves as a result of the pH issue, but she has gone a shade greener since transplant and I think (hope) she is super happy outside. To transplant I carried the autopot out to the garden and scooped her out with both hands. It seemed to go very well with little disturbance of the roots. I watered with a weak compost tea solution pH'd to about 6 and kept her under a germination dome to harden off for her first night.

Here is Audrey V. She sprouted I think last Monday. She was fairly root bound in her peat pot. I cut the bottom off the pot and found her long tap root spiraled around and embedded in the peat. I was able to gently pry it out of the peat and placed it in the ground where it ought to be. She stood up and greened up overnight so I'm hopeful that I didn't do any damage!

 

[jelly0]

Oh man I'm sorry to hear about your grow but I like the optimism you have towards your girls. Once you dial in all the factors from the grow you'll do great I'm sure. I bet you learned a few things here. Overwatering is a bitch lol and coco can be complicated. Good luck with the reset and second grow, what seeds will you be dropping this time?

 

[SPZ]

Oh man I'm sorry to hear about your grow but I like the optimism you have towards your girls. Once you dial in all the factors from the grow you'll do great I'm sure. I bet you learned a few things here. Overwatering is a bitch lol and coco can be complicated. Good luck with the reset and second grow, what seeds will you be dropping this time?

Thanks for the kind words, Jelly! Trust me there were some moments this weekend where I was not so sanguine about the situation! But I told myself that the seeds only cost about $30, I'm still going to hopefully grow two Sour Livers plants to maturity, and I learned a ton for my next triple auto attempt. It helps that there is some really top shelf smoke making the rounds, so I was able to finally RDWHABT (Relax, Don't Worry! Have A Big Toke!)

I have five seeds each of Man Bear Alien Pig and Northern Cheese Haze. I think I'm going to drop the Cheese and give the MBAP seeds to my buddy @:-p who was really keen to try that strain. As a bonus he actually knows what he's doing so we're likely to get some top notch smoke out of it if he grows them!

 

[bad dragon bzzz]

coco can be funny,some makes need rinsed some need precharged with calmag.watering is slightly different from soil.ph is know to go a bit strange depending how wet/dry medium is.
Blue if im not wrong has wrote a very good how to or a getting started.
it can be easy to fall into the overwatering trap even for the experienced.pot weight i think is the best/easiest judgement to make.even easier if you have a spare pot potted up with dry medium as a reference.
good luck and keep er lit.

 

[:-p]

Hi all, I've got sad news to share. The overwatering and pH problems have only gotten worse and I don't think I'm going to be able to salvage this grow

My theory is that as I attempted to dry out the autopots (which are still quite moist at the bottom despite my best efforts), the remaining water became more and more concentrated, raising the pH and EC to unacceptable levels. Audrey I, II, and III still look like seedlings after two full weeks of life, and the yellowing of the leaves that started on Audrey I is now apparent on all three of these plants. Audrey IV, whose pot had less moisture to begin with, grew to the size of a one week old plant and essentially stopped growing. There is some waviness to her leaves which I believe is a symptom of pH problems, but not yellowing or other trauma.

SO I made some executive decisions.



Rather than trying to keep these girls on life support to see if they develop further, I transplanted Audrey IV outside to a secret garden with her fifth sibling who was started outside. I know autos don't like to be transplanted but they obviously don't sitting in stagnant alkaline water either, and I feel like she's too young to withstand aggressive flushing. I'm trying to salvage the other three by putting them in small containers and flushing them with properly pH'd water, but I'm not hopeful. At this point I'm going to call it a win if I can grow out two of the five Sour Livers and quickly reset the indoor operation for the next run.

Not doing hydro. But my thoughts on it are flush and hit them with a half dose of food.

 

[:-p]

Not doing hydro. my thoughts on it are flush and hit them with a half dose of food.

distance from light actually also probably played a big roll. you mentioned the one that was doing better had the light closer

 

[SPZ]

coco can be funny,some makes need rinsed some need precharged with calmag.watering is slightly different from soil.ph is know to go a bit strange depending how wet/dry medium is.
Blue if im not wrong has wrote a very good how to or a getting started.
it can be easy to fall into the overwatering trap even for the experienced.pot weight i think is the best/easiest judgement to make.even easier if you have a spare pot potted up with dry medium as a reference.
good luck and keep er lit.

Hey Archie! Thanks for the tips, I'm now learning all about buffering media and the cation exchange property. Down the rabbit hole, lol. But I am starting to understand why Hans' recipe works and how I deviated from it.

 

[SPZ]

Not doing hydro. But my thoughts on it are flush and hit them with a half dose of food.

Yup, I'm pretty sure transplanting to a smaller container and flushing would have been the cure if I'd figured it out early. The pH of the coco was going crazy like Archie said, cause I screwed up a few of the key steps in the preparation of the media like managing the amount of moisture and buffering with cal mag which I'm starting to understand is pretty important.

Ah well, the only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing. Or some shit like that.

 

[SPZ]

distance from light actually also probably played a big roll. you mentioned the one that was doing better had the light closer

That was only while the seeds were in their baggy, see this picture. Once I planted them I kept the lights at the same height. I think the plant in that pot grew successfully because the soil dried out more than the other pots before I started. I'm pretty sure this all came down to preparing the media properly before I started.