DWC 1st Grow Journal Caramelicious + Mystery seed

Hey all. This is my first time growing and I have to say it's been a tough battle right out of the gate. In fact, I'm not sure whether this grow will be successful at all given the problems I'm having so far. I'm now in week 3 of my grow (seeds planted January 26), and my biggest plant is merely 3" if measured generously, the others are 2"-2.5" inches tall. My plants looked pretty ready after about a week under the humidity dome and they all looked great, but it all went downhill once I moved them under my 125W CFL lamps in the basement. I'm vegging them in 2 10 gallon sterilite totes, 4 plants to each one for a total of 8 plants. For the first few days in the basement they didn't seem to grow a whole lot so I flushed both reservoirs and fed according to the aggressive feeding schedule (I'm using General Hydroponics 3 part Flora Series). At first that seemed to do the trick and I was relieved. They rapidly started growing roots and I saw marginal growth up top. Then my plants took a turn for the worse.

I have four Caramelicious plants in tote A, one Caramelicious in tote B and the other three are the Mystery plants. After the reservoir change (I made sure to rinse both totes out completely after the first nutrient miscalculation), and now ALL four plants in tote A are showing classic signs of magnesium and manganese deficiency/lockout. I went down to my local hydro store and picked up a bottle of General Hydroponics CalMagic and poured 8 teaspoons of the stuff into my problem tote (1tsp per gallon. My tote has 8 gallons of nutrient solution in it). That was on the 15th, which was yesterday afternoon as I type this Saturday night/Sunday, and the problem doesn't seem to have resolved. That is, the damage doesn't seem to be stopping in its track like I was hoping and now I'm going crazy trying to figure out what the hell is going on. My pH is somewhere between 5 and 6 (I'm using the vial tube and drops kit from GH), but if I were to take a guess it would be closer to 6 than 5. Tote B doesn't seem to be having the same problem despite the fact that I gave both reservoirs the same amount of water, same amount of all three nutrient solutions and adjusted to the same pH.

Grow room size: 5'Wx10'Lx6'9"H
Exhaust: Hydrofarm Active Air 6" inline fan 400CFM
Intake: HomeBasix 6" clip on fan (I made a circular hole in my grow room and glued a piece of screen over it to keep pests from going in)
Vegging lights: Hydrofarm 125W 6500K Grow Lights x2
Air pump: Sunleaves 35W 950GPH Durapump

Room temperature: 68-70 F
Humidity: 55%
pH: 6~
PPM: 1300~

Man for all the blood and sweat I put into building the actual damn room I figured the worst was behind me. I'm calling it a journal in case I do succeed but my first grow experience has been very humbling. Any advice is much obliged of course!


When we were young.

This was taken on the 11th. The problem hadn't become apparent yet.










The photos above were taken yesterday.





The photos above were taken an hour ago. Again, any useful information or suggestions are very much welcome. Constructive criticism is also helpful. I've been praying to the ganja gods to make things better because the CalMagic doesn't seem to be stopping the onslaught. Hoping for the best, though.

i think your ppms are way to high for seedlings i dont go over 300 and every week raise it by 100 i also start with 0 to 30 ppm in my water keep ph 5.5 your room temps good whats water temp should be around 68 with that said in my opion nute burn lockout

bseeds said:

i think your ppms are way to high for seedlings i dont go over 300 and every week raise it by 100 i also start with 0 to 30 ppm in my water keep ph 5.5 your room temps good whats water temp should be around 68 with that said in my opion nute burn lockout

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input friend. You're probably right. Unfortunately I don't know how to properly raise the nute solution evenly across 3 nutrient solutions. The bottle only gives feed guidelines for mild and aggressive feedings. Mild says 1tsp per gallon for each solution while aggressive gives 3tsp of gro, 2tsp of micro and 1tsp of bloom per gallon. I put 24 tsp of gro, 16 of micro and 8 tsp of bloom. Looks like I'll need to duml my reservoirs again once I get home from work. Thanks man.

1300ppm is really high for those little girls (they are feminized seeds right?) what kind of water are you using? It definitely looks like you have some nute burn going on there. distorted baby leaves. burnt half the leaf on a few.

Correct me if im wrong but did you put 24tsp of grow, etc into one 10 gallon tote? That is quite a bit. For the first time introducing your plants to your nutes give them little to none to taste it, each day for the first 2 weeks give the a bump up in nutes. I know its tedious but your plants will love you.

Usually i would give them 1/16 of the aggresive measurement the first time and each day go up by increments of 1/16(or you can skip a day and go increments of 1/8 each second day if you want to be more lazy) but since you have already gave them a overdose of nutes I would say let them have just fresh water for 2 days to clear there metabolism up and then start the introduction to nutes over again.


Just remember to keep your Ph between 5.3 and 5.8
You can get really cheap digital ph readers that do a decent job on ebay from china. im mean CHEAP... like 10 -20bucks

Your grow room looks real good! My first grow was with cfls in a closet except i was in dirt which was pretty boring..

The tap water here is around 13 PPM. Following both of your suggestions I spent an hour dumping the nute solution and refilling with a much lower concentration according to week 2 on the following chart: http://generalhydroponics.com/site/gh/docs/feeding_sched/GH-FloraSeries-REC-Charts.pdf

I went according to the feed schedule printed on the bottle the first two times, but then I found this week-by-week chart online and am now following that. (2 tsp per gallon) 16tsp of Gro, (1 1/2 tsp p.g.) 12tsp of Micro, (1/2 tsp p.g.) 4tsp of Bloom. GH shouldn't have an aggressive feeding schedule on the bottle for vegging if the end result is nute burn. I admit it was stupid of me to jump straight into the aggressive feed schedule after I saw underwhelming results after the first week in the totes. I'll be monitoring my plants multiple times daily from now on for further signs of damage. If things continue to get worse by tomorrow night I'm going to need to dump and follow a very cautious and gradual feed schedule. Thanks for the advice klassen.

Good work on flushing! You have really good tap water! Wow.. mine has so much chlorine i need to first bubble them..

I think thats still too much nutes, there chart doesnt know how far behind your plants are. You will do no harm giving them 1/4 of that amount of nutes, only good. The aggresive feeding schedule is for when they have a strong root base, thick stems, and at least 6-7 nodes. Dont ever go by there weekly chart, its a general rule of thumb, My first plant i grew was 3 weeks and it was as mature as my current operations 1-1/2 week old clones. Its more about the root and metabolism maturity on how much to give them. Still use there numbers but just dont relate your plants to its weekly chart.

Can you provide pics of the roots?

I just went ahead and flushed again, this time using 6 tsp gro, 4 tsp micro, and 2 tsp bloom. I've also heard that using CalMag is necessary when using water with very low PPM (or RO water). Is this true? Anyway, my PPMs are in tote A 400~ and tote B is 390~ with a pH of roughly 6 in each. Looks like yesterday's flush didn't do much to improve my ladies, in fact they were drooping when I got home today. I'm wasting a lot of nutes trying to make them happy! Hopefully this latest solution will restore balance to my grow room. Here are the pics of my roots as of tonight.













I cut a whole in some leftover plastic and glued a screen between plants so the roots don't get tangled. Don't know whether it will work yet. Anybody have any ideas on how to keep my airstones from floating to the top? whenever I need to change the nute solution, the airstones end up getting caught up in the roots and I'm afraid somewhere down the line I'm going to damage my roots trying to keep my airstones out of the way. I tried glue but that didn't work at all.

Your roots look pretty good, i dont know if its the bad angle but the plants look like they have improved. There growing and thats always a gooood sign. I would try to bring the PH down by .5 if you could.


For Calmag, some nute solutions contain enough but according to the table you gave a link on it recommends in the first 2 weeks to give 5ml per gal. I would go with that, Ive always had solution that didnt really need anything else.

Now for your grow room, nice DIY, i like it. Is that reflector really for your cfls? Its aircooled!? crazy man...
The mesh dividers are a really good idea, and i would give you some more plus rep if i could do anymore for you. I remember when i used those rubbermaids for 6 plants and there roots where sooo tangled, i was lucky none of them died and rot with nothing i could do to take it out.

if your a fisher you can use fishing weights and tie them to your airstones with fish line. Worked wonders for me
or just buy them at general store

I checked the water temperature and it seems to be around 60-62 F, an increase from about 50~F straight from the tap last night (I stuck my hand in it and it was painfully cold after 5 seconds). Looks like even 400 PPM is a little high- I checked the PPM the next night and it had risen 30-40 PPM in each bucket and I had to top off both reservoirs. It looks like my plants were a little thirsty. This brought then both down to about 415 PPM, still about 15-20 higher than it was last night but I think I'll reach the target PPM soon. It was a tough lesson for me to learn and unfortunately my plants suffered, but I'm getting there.

Nah my Fluorowing CFL hoods aren't air-cooled, they don't really need it. You're probably looking at my HPS hood. It's hooked up to the exhaust fan for now just to ventilate the room. I have 600W Ushio bulbs and Quantum ballasts that haven't been hooked up yet- don't really need to at this point. Yeah I put mesh between each plant to prevent the roots from one plant dancing with another so I can hopefully move them into 5 gallon buckets when they're ready to flower. I mean, I can just leave them all in the same reservoir and not bother keeping the roots separate all the way through harvest. That means each plant has 2.5 gallons of space (4 to each tote) vs 5 gallons all to themselves if I move them to 5 gallon buckets. Does it matter how much space the roots have to grow in?

It does matter how much room they have, my strain master kush grew twice the size having its own pale vs having it mangled together with 6 others in a tote. Give them more room and they will use it. I just wish I took pictures of my 5 gallon pales roots systems. It was like taking out an oversized white cork that perfectly fit into that pale.

any update?

You do know you can use tap water start to finish,, the NUtz are a + for better growth, but the plant will still grow without... Just put them in water till they are not
SEEDLINGS

If you are less familiar with nutes VX420's statement is a good idea for the first 2 - 3 weeks, you can't fail starting on the light side

This one is the healthiest plant I have, no contest.

Almost at the foot mark. Not really sure at what height to induce flowering, especially since they're growing at different rates.


Tote B. The stem on the top right corner plant snapped and it doesn't look like it's doing too good after applying a shishkabob stick and a twisty tie.

Tote A (left) outgrowing the stunted tote B.

The plant with the broken stem is in the foreground on the right.



It seems like nutrient burn is a continuing problem, but it seems like that's what you get when you grow multiple plants in the same reservoir. The result is some plants (the weaker ones) will suffer so the strong ones survive and produce that delicious bud. With my biggest plant being 10" tall, I'm getting my shit together and finally putting the finishing touches to my room. Also, the roots have really exploded since my last post and they look white and very healthy. At this point it is about week 6 starting from seed.