Super Soil ...Wrong guano...Help

Hi. Hope you can make a suggestion about what I can do to get my girls back on track. I made up a batch of Super Soil according (I thought) to Subcools recipie. This is the first time I've used it. I have 6 plants in 7.5 gallon pots. @ Strawberry cough, 2 Original Flo, ! blueberry and 1 unknown bagseed. I transplanted them at 6 weeks. I FIM'd them at 3 weeks and again at 8 weeks. I did 3 LST sessions about a week or ten days apart. Everything was going well when I noticed the bottom plate leaves going a bit yellow. I, at first attributed it to the stress of training, but the problem seems to be getting worse. I went back and checked my ingredients and found that I had used the high phosphorus guano instead of the high nitrogen. My Ph is normal (6. and the new growthseems to be OK except that the growth had slowed somewhat. This is an outdoor grow. Full sun 7-8 hrs. per day. Filtered sun for another 5-6 hrs. I'm thinking they are nitrogen deficient want to use some fish emulsion as I think they're getting fairly close to flowering., but wanted to check with growers smarter than me, Thanks in advance...Dan

The recipe calls for a high phosphorous content aimed for flowering. Sound like a deficiency. Maybe your base soil just isn't fertile enough. Fish emuslion might help, but i don't think it will be as immediate as mature compost. Mix up some worm castings or good compost in water and give them that. It is very hard to burn with this. Just use enough that it can completely dissolve. This should hold them off until they hit the layer of super soil. Then after that, if you followed the directions right, they should have no problems with deficiencies.

I'm pretty sure they are in the supersoil already. I've been vegging for nearly 3 months. Is it possible I've used most of my available N? If so would bloodmeal be a more immediate solution? I've noticed a slight trend to rising Ph. My water mis from my well and pretty hard. I recently switched to rain water (I live in the high desert).....Thanks...Dan

My bag of Blood Meal says WATER INSOLUBLE .. which means the soil microbes have to work on it, and make it available to the plants on a "someday I suppose" basis.

Fish Emulsion says its water soluble, and available right away to plants.

I have brewed a couple batches of Guano Tea for my regular garden {10-10-2 seabird}... at about 1 tbsp per gal.. 2 days of brewing, and my nose says its ammonia dominant.

Sometimes the Nitrogen is described on the lable as Ammonia Nitrogen XX%, and Urea Nitrogen XX% . In this case, the ammonia is more readily available to plants right away... and the urea has to be processed by the soil microbes.

Thanks...They've perked up a little since the rainwater. I believe the dominant mineral in my well water is sulfur. Would that have a tendancy of locking out my nitrogen?

I see a box of Arm & Hammer in your future.

What is your PH ??? Soil and Water. For soil they have those PH test probe thingies at every garden center. For water you need a PH meter, or a test kit.

I suspect that your PH may be out of whack. Nutrients are more soluble in the 6-7 range.

You may need to adjust the PH before you water... running it a touch on the alkaline side 7+ to nuetralize the soil.

Another issue, if the soil is too acid it might be killing off microbes in the soil. The good ones that do things like making nitrogen available to the plants.

Dan Overpeck said:

I'm pretty sure they are in the supersoil already. I've been vegging for nearly 3 months. Is it possible I've used most of my available N? If so would bloodmeal be a more immediate solution? I've noticed a slight trend to rising Ph. My water mis from my well and pretty hard. I recently switched to rain water (I live in the high desert).....Thanks...Dan

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Yeah they would definitely be in the super soil. That would also make sense about the N deficiency. A good immediate source of N is worm castings. Give them a worm casting tea and i bet they recover. You can't burn so just mix some castings in water and drench. If you cant get worm castings, then good compost should also contain immediately available N. As dinosaur said, Blood meal will take time to break down and your plants will be much worse before they get any N from that. My outdoor plants recently started yellowing because they out grew the soil i had in the pots. I gave them some castings tea and they recovered within 24 hours

Thanks for all your help. The Ph is running 6.8 to 7.2 . Is this high enoughto cause lockout?...Thanks...Dan

Maybe let the water sit out side in the sun for a few days before using, that's what I do to remove any contaminates

But it really depend and if the PH is too high it could cause lock out