Calcium lock?? Help please!

magic

Well-Known Member
Ok, so clearly I'm pretty new at this. Everything I've read has said its better to underfeed nutes than to overfeed (soil medium) and so I thought that's what I was doing. My 8 girls (hopefully) are telling me otherwise. Most of them are showing slight yellowish lines in the leaves, parallel with the leaf growth and a few tiny white spots. My biggest concern is subject #2 who appears to be a healthy green color but is consistantly acting like she's starving for water. Originially of course I thought she might need more and yesterday gave her more water than the others. Her behavior hasn't changed at all and has also started to have "crinkly" bottom leaves. All of the plants are not quite a month old and are given a 60 sec light spray mist of room temperature reverse osmosis water into each plants 5 gallon container every 3-4 days (i water again when the top of the soil appears pretty dry). I have only fed nutes twice and those were within a 9 day span between feedings. When they were fed nutes I only used a 30 second light spray mist around the stem and was careful not to get any on the plant itself. Of course I thought that would be sufficient, but the crinkling of the leaves, the drooping of some of the plants and the yellowish tint of others makes me fear that I had overfed and maybe even have developed pockets of calcium lock. I think the answer now is to flush each of the 8 to be safe, but how much is enough? Would a gallon of R/O water be enough to flush out excess nutes and calcium deposits in a 5 gallong grow container or is much more needed? Is it possible that the problem isn't overfeeding at all and is something else because they were only fed (what I thought anyways) a small amount? The nute used was "Miracle Grow All Purpose..." with a N-P205-K2O ratio of 24-8-16. Also, when mixing the water soluble nute in water I used slightly less fert than what the box recommended for indoor plants. These changes have been fairly recent and only noticed within the past week, and despite all of this I am still measuring growth in height and foliage every day or two but I'm worried if I don't solve this issue that will stop quickly. Any help is greatly appreciated! :confused:
 

shadymyster555

Well-Known Member
Yeah, at this point it would probably be best to flush. This way you can't really go wrong. I do not know how much water to flush in your 5gal pot, maybe someone else can tell you. My advice would be to flush until water is coming out of the bottom holes, and you have drenched the soil. I would not create a pond in your 5gal pot though. You can always do it again.
 

magic

Well-Known Member
I'm taking your advice and tested it out on 1 of the 8. #2 was the one that made me think calcium lock instead of simple overfeeding because the green hue on the leaves looked pretty healthy but the entire plant was significantly more droopy than the others. I sprayed down the soil with a 1/2 gallon of RO water to moisten it up and then poured 2+ litres of RO water throughout. The idea was that moistening the medium would allow more excess material to flow out instead of water just escaping down the sides and through the drain holes. To my suprise the drainage water had a lime green/orange color to it which I guess it the excess nutrients. When I put her back in the grow room I noticed an incredible difference in the overall color of the medium compared to the other 7 girls. I can see that orangey (if that's even a real word) hue in the soil of the others. Like any good test I have to give it 24 hours to sit and if #2 shows decent signs of recovery then I'll have to flush out all the others. It'll be a pain in a$$ but so isn't normal gardening that doesn't have the fun results! Thanx for the heads up on double-flushing... I'd never considered it before and might do it anyways just to make sure I got all that crap out. Should I leave them be after the 1st flush and wait until the soil starts to dry up before the second flush?
 
Top