Are Nutes killing your plants?

I've been having some problems lately with yellow leaves and sparce growth on a couple of plants and I tried several of the suggestions that I gleened from the forum, nothing seemed to work.

Decided to get back to basics and take a more elementary approach to diagnosing the problem. Started thinking what is occurring now that has changed. What I came up with is that since I am growing in a coco based media, salt build up just might be the problem.

After all, I have been watering everyday for a couple months now and I sure have been seeing the salts in my buckets. I have been agitating them back into suspension and re-feeding the topped up nutes to my thirsty plants. Upon close inspection of the media, sure enough....lots of salt crystals.

So I proceeded to wash the salts out of the soil trough gentle agitation of the salt laden media. This was done by submerging the pot into the solution (my regular feed PM)

I gently pushed the pot int a five gallon untill the nute solution completely over filled the pot. Then I removed it and let it drain. I did this several times in a washing machine kind of motion.

I don't always water the pot. Sometimes I just water the plant and at this time I'm thinking that I am going about this wrong. I just yesterday cut a home made cloth bucket open and realized just how dry the outside of this system gets. I would not deliberately allow roots to dry out and therebye restrict root development to 60-70%
of the capacity of a pot.

Conclusion is that from now on I will be watering the entire pot by complete emersion and every week or so Washing the salts out of the media.

Opinions?

Watering and feeding are two separate needs that you as a grower need to meet. They do not always coincide and therefore should not be done together every time. I would recommend you get a meter to monitor your EC's, PPM, or whatever measurement system is most applicable/easiest/preferable to you. Flushing is done by some people but not all people, I am of the school that thinks that if you fertilize properly there shouldn't be a real need to flush. I could get more specific with how I feed, etc, if you wanted, but what I do might not be best for you. If you would like me to elaborate I'd be happy to however.