Well, I killed it

[TommyinCville]

My first autoflower.
It was doing ok till about 10 days ago. Now starting week 8. pH 6.5, the correct amount of light according to the Phoptone app (PPFD, DLI) I was told it was a Calcium deficiency and treated it with a cal/mag solution but has gotten worse.

 

[Cannaficionado]

My first autoflower.
It was doing ok till about 10 days ago. Now starting week 8. pH 6.5, the correct amount of light according to the Phoptone app (PPFD, DLI) I was told it was a Calcium deficiency and treated it with a cal/mag solution but has gotten worse.

How often are you feeding and, what are you feeding it? Also what medium are you growing in. Looks very similar to mine from my last run. Fed way too much nitrogen and completely locked out potassium and calcium, and it takes a long time to get to where you are at meaning your feedings may have been heavy from the start. I would back off feeding quite a bit. Try feeding at like 300ppm for now. Depending on your medium, like a peat based soil only needs to be fed once every 3rd or 4th watering, its different for coco, that needs more regular feedings, and the total ppm of the feed should be less than 800ppm and at 800 thats pretty hot even for photos. You also wanna make sure you follow the feed guide with your regimen. If the ppm is high when you mix, add more plain water to lower it.

Also make sure you're adding mycorrhizae regularly. They need to be replenished every once and a while or anything organic isnt getting used by the plant like at all.

 

[Lil Dab]

My first autoflower.
It was doing ok till about 10 days ago. Now starting week 8. pH 6.5, the correct amount of light according to the Phoptone app (PPFD, DLI) I was told it was a Calcium deficiency and treated it with a cal/mag solution but has gotten worse.

What is the grow media and nutes being used? more details would be helpful along with some whole plant pics if possible under 5k lighting.. Sounds like too much of something more then likely N, Ca, or Mg locking the other out

 

[blue]

My first autoflower.
It was doing ok till about 10 days ago. Now starting week 8. pH 6.5, the correct amount of light according to the Phoptone app (PPFD, DLI) I was told it was a Calcium deficiency and treated it with a cal/mag solution but has gotten worse.

I've taken worse looking plants through to harvest! ..

I doubt you'll fix the spotty problem this close to flowering, but there's some good advice above. For the next grow, i'd keep an eye on PH ranges, and keep the nutes light and simple. Veg nutes for the first 30 or so days and then flower nutes to finish.

A tiny bit of cal mag could be introduced (half a cap for 5 lites of water) during feedings to help with the N uptake and a similar amount of PK could be introduce for flowering to bulk up the buds.

I wouldn't sweat it too much - it's always too much love and a load of nutes that can quickly sour the grow.
Ultimately, even if the leaves are ugly .. we don't smoke em just the buds!

Good luck with the final run up to harvest!

 

[TrichomeAssassin]

I've taken worse looking plants through to harvest!

Same with me.

 

[Bill.de.Cat]

@TrichomeAssassin and @blue are right, you should be able to nurse it along to a harvest.

 

[Mañ'O'Green]

@TommyinCville Welcome to AFN You have not killed it. You have made it use reserves of phosphorous that are stored in the leaves because too much calcium in the root zone has locked up the phosphorous in the soil. When the plant cannot uptake any given nutrient it will use what is available for the flowers. This also happens when there is not enough in the soil or when the plant cannot transpire because the RH is too high or too low. When the RH is out of range the leaves stop transpiring, this means that no water carrying nutrients can move up into the plant.

The nutrients that get locked out by too much of something are listed in this simplified chart.

Stop feeding Cal-mag and then try to feed only balanced nutrients going forward. The leaves may get worse before this gets better but these plants are unbelievably resilient and you will still get to harvest.

This is a primer on feeding salt based nutrients to help you understand what I mean by balanced nutrients.

Tutorial - A word on Nutrients

The proper use of “salt” based fertilizer to grow Auto Flowering Cannabis. Salts: Natural and man made any chemical compound formed from the reaction of an acid with a base, with all or part of the hydrogen of the acid replaced by a metal or other cation. Learning how to use salt based...

www.autoflower.org

 

[TommyinCville]

@TommyinCville Welcome to AFN You have not killed it. You have made it use reserves of phosphorous that are stored in the leaves because too much calcium in the root zone has locked up the phosphorous in the soil. When the plant cannot uptake any given nutrient it will use what is available for the flowers. This also happens when there is not enough in the soil or when the plant cannot transpire because the RH is too high or too low. When the RH is out of range the leaves stop transpiring, this means that no water carrying nutrients can move up into the plant.

The nutrients that get locked out by too much of something are listed in this simplified chart.

View attachment 1580363

Stop feeding Cal-mag and then try to feed only balanced nutrients going forward. The leaves may get worse before this gets better but these plants are unbelievably resilient and you will still get to harvest.

This is a primer on feeding salt based nutrients to help you understand what I mean by balanced nutrients.

Tutorial - A word on Nutrients

The proper use of “salt” based fertilizer to grow Auto Flowering Cannabis. Salts: Natural and man made any chemical compound formed from the reaction of an acid with a base, with all or part of the hydrogen of the acid replaced by a metal or other cation. Learning how to use salt based...

www.autoflower.org

Thanks for all the info. I did a plain water flush adjusting the tap water to 6-6.5ph. Cut the nutes to 200 ppm. It continued to lose its bigger leaves and then most of the leaves in the buds dried to a crisp. I pulled all the dead leaves from the buds. They came out with no resistance and with the stem. It's still alive and the buds are sticky but not a really strong smell. I'm at week 11. It's Durban Poison. last pic is zoomed in and cropped. Time to harvest?

 

[TommyinCville]

I've taken worse looking plants through to harvest! ..

I doubt you'll fix the spotty problem this close to flowering, but there's some good advice above. For the next grow, i'd keep an eye on PH ranges, and keep the nutes light and simple. Veg nutes for the first 30 or so days and then flower nutes to finish.

A tiny bit of cal mag could be introduced (half a cap for 5 lites of water) during feedings to help with the N uptake and a similar amount of PK could be introduce for flowering to bulk up the buds.

I wouldn't sweat it too much - it's always too much love and a load of nutes that can quickly sour the grow.
Ultimately, even if the leaves are ugly .. we don't smoke em just the buds!

Good luck with the final run up to harvest!

I did a plain water flush adjusting the tap water to 6-6.5ph. Cut the nutes to 200 ppm. It continued to lose its bigger leaves and then most of the leaves in the buds dried to a crisp. I pulled all the dead leaves from the buds. They came out with no resistance and with the stem. It's still alive and the buds are sticky but not a really strong smell. I'm at week 11. It's Durban Poison. last pic is zoomed in and cropped. Time to harvest?

 

[Mañ'O'Green]

@TommyinCville it looks like the trichomes are all cloudy in the picture, so yes you can harvest. Before you do you can try fertigating with a tablespoon of molasses/gallon to see if you can improve the terpene profile. I use Advanced Nutrients Bud Candy 2 weeks prior to harvest and molasses the last week. I don't think you want to wait 2 weeks so just the molasses will do and give it a few days.

You really should not flush soil, it usually causes more problems than it solves because soluble nutrients get flushed easily and the more durable minerals remain behind. This gets the pot even further out of balance than it was to begin with.

When my plants look like yours it is usually from the environment getting too hot and the RH too low. There are other things that can cause the same look so diagnosing from pictures is a crap shoot at best. When you say that there is not much fragrence to the plants that leads me to believe it is this too hot too low RH you could be looking at.

The other thing to think about is how you water. What you need to learn about watering will come with practice. Here are the basic rules: Never let the soil dry out. Soil and or coco can become hydrophobic if allowed to dry. This means it repels water. This in turn will create dry pockets in the soil and the roots and microbes will die there. If your soil - coco have accidentally dried out use a surfactant to help re-wet it. I like yucca powder. Don't let soil remain soggy by watering too much too often. Root rot, damping off, molds, fungus gnats and other problems start in soggy soil. When you do water water the entire pot. How to learn when to water starts before you plant the seed. Fill your container with fresh soil/coco and weigh it (heft it) this is the lightest weight and consider it a dry pot. Now slowly water until the soil/coco will no longer absorb the water and run-off begins; weigh the pot (heft it) this is the maximum water, the wettest the pot can get. The difference between wettest and driest is the maximum water weight, for ease of explanation lets just say the water weighs 20 pounds. When the pot loses 10 pounds (half of the water weight) it is time to water again. Slowly wet ALL of the soil until run-off begins. There is an art to watering. Make sure there is an air gap under your pot, you do not want runoff to be reabsorbed and if no air then anaerobic microbes can grow. This is a cause of root rot. Coco can be fertigate many times a day if you want to continually present fresh balanced nutrients to the roots. Begin fertigation 2 hours after lights on and end it 2 hours before lights out.

It is not easy being mother nature.