Plants have light brown marks on leaf margins, starting from the bottom and moving up.
It’s the end of week 4 and it started last week
It’s on all 3 plants but some more than others
I probably overwatered but it’s dry now and it keeps spreading
They’re in Biobizz Lightmix
They had only one watering with nutes (recommended quantity of Biogrow and Alg-A-Mic) last week (after the problem started) which is a bit late so I think this shouldn’t be an overfeeding issue ?
Soil is Biobizz Lightmix. I only have strips to measure PH and I use BioDown to adjust it. That’s not great but it should at least be in the 6-7 PH range. Sanitary testing for tap water in my city says PH is at 7.5, strips are roughly there too.
Typically but you haven’t really run any nuitrents through the soil so that shouldn’t be a big deal. I don’t see any NPK numbers on the Biogrow. Could they just be hungry?
Biogrow’s NPK is 4-3-6. Yes I thought they were hungry since they had nothing for 3 weeks in a light mix soil but last watering didn’t fix it.
I’m thinking maybe it IS a pH issue as I noticed I needed a lot of pH Down compared to Biobizz’ recommendations (0.1ml/l for -0.5 pH, so with a water at ~7.5 pH that would be .2 or .3ml but I used .4 and .5 without nutes). I thought Biobizz was just generous with their recommendations but maybe not. If the soil is out of range, and if it’s a potassium issue, then that would explain why nutes didn’t fix it ?
I need a soil tester or distilled water to verify this but I have to order it so it’ll have to wait a few days. I’ll need to water before that though, I’m thinking of adding recommended quantity of Biogrow and Alg-A-Mic again, would that be ok ?
The strips can be hard to read. I’m in a peat mix and it looks like that’s what ProMix is. I aim for 6.3pH all they way through the grow and even slight variation have caused issues.
Also, I’m not familiar with bottled nuits but it seams they are under fed. I use a good amount of salt nuits to get an EC of 2.0-2.2.
I’ll order a soil tester for pH to make sure that’s not the issue, it generally comes with moisture meter which can’t be bad since I overwatered before.
Do you have a way to test EC or PPM? If you are using tap water it could be very hard and that is throwing off stuff in the pot. if the nutrient guideline is for say 400ppm and your water is at 300ppm, then you can’t add much at all.
If you don’t want to buy anything else at the moment, start buying jugs of distilled water at the store and blend your tap/bottled water together. See if that helps. Most nutrient line dosing is based on 0 ppm water or close to it. Reverse osmosis systems aren’t terribly expensive anymore.
Most “hard” water is full of calcium. Also tap water is full of chlorine and if you can look it up see if your town is using chloramines. You can offgas chlorine by letting a bucket of water stand overnight. Chloramines are a stronger more persistent chemical that has to be broken down to remove. It’s easy to do but again, see if you have it first. It will kill any beneficial bacteria so adding biologics won’t help since the water will knock them down a lot.
I don’t have anything to test EC, I’ll try to get a combo pH/EC if I can find one that’s not too expensive.
Yes water is full of calcium (I can actually see it), I always let it sit from 8 to 24 hours before watering. I had a previous grow that went well but that was a few years ago and the calcium issue has gotten worse since then.
I can’t find anything about chloramines but it’s not listed in the sanitary report of my city (there’s chloride and chlorine). It has a conductivity value at 25°C of 570 µS/cm, apparently conversion to PPM depends on the scale and I don’t know which one is relevant (results goes from 285ppm at 500 to 399 at 700).
Yeah. That is some hard water. Either conversion 285/399 is really high. That is going to be hard to deal with. If they don’t list chloramine then they probably don’t use it. So that’s one plus.
Mixing in some store bought water is probably the cheapest way to go. I would invest in an RO machine if you are going to be semi-serious about growing. Otherwise I think you are going to be chasing your tail with issues.
Yeah and it’s a city testing so it might be even worse at my tap. I ordered an Apera pen for pH and EC so I’ll know for sure. There’s no distilled water in stores around here (only demineralized) so RO machine would be the way to go if I can find one that’s not crazy expensive.
If you can’t find distilled water, look for purified water. It won’t be as clean but it will be very low ppm. You can get a decent RO system for about $100. Which isn’t nothing but it’s not crazy expensive.
I have this one:
Since your water is very hard you will probably want a small water softener in line before the filters. If you don’t you will be replacing the RO filters often. Something cheap like this should help knock down the amount and be a consumable item.
Just going to add this. If you get a R/O machine and have that much calcium in the water ( this goes for Magnesium as well), you will want to get a anti-scaling solution for the water you run through the R/O machine. Calcium and magnesium ( which are the normal cause of hard water ) build up scale on the filter membrane. Therefore making it harder for the machine to push the water through the membrane. Which eventually leads to the machine stops working
Just two cents for ya
Thanks for the recommendations, the ones I saw were 2/3 times that price . Would solid nutrients also help ? If I understand correctly the plant only take what’s needed ?
. Would solid nutrients also help ? If I understand correctly the plant only take what’s needed ?