Airavata - 11/24/10 - 2-tent - continuous grow - soil - 1 x 125w cfl - 1 x 600w hps

Veg. Progress:

So the vegging plants are doing great so far. They'd been in their little 3" pots for a while by the looks of them, but they perked right up upon being transplanted. They have all more than doubled their size over the course of 5 days. They are all 6-7" tall (I buried their stems b/c they were kinda leggy). The "Hi Planez" strain (whatever that is[I can't find info on it anywhere]) wasn't as root-bound as the rest and suffered a little transplant shock. The leaves were curled up badly, indicating that it was trying to retain moisture, even though it was well watered and the temp. was low. I raised the cfl to about 9" above the canopy and the curling has all but disappeared.

Flower progress:

The plants that are now in bloom have issues.

As you can see from the pictures, I probably could have fit a lot more plants in this tent, but that would have been cost-prohibitive and, as this is my 1st grow in this tent and in the last few years, I decided to be conservative. Next cycle will be about the same but I think I'll choose a clone mother from one of the plants I have vegging now and pack that tent on the 3rd cycle.

Forgot to mention, I'm using miracle grow potting soil. Nutrient proportions looked acceptable and the bag claimed to feed plants for up to 6 months. Well they grew great up until I moved them to the flowering tent at week 5, when the leaves started yellowing a little. No real cause for alarm yet, though. It was also at this time that my slightly annoying gnat problem (the gnats snuck in with the dirt) blew the hell up. Looking back, having familiarized myself more with Cervantes' MMGB, I realize that what I was looking at was probably Manganese deficiency. Magnesium deficiency looked like a possibility at a glance but I added plenty of lime to my potting mix, so I don't think that was the problem. At the time, though, I thought it might have been toxic shock from being hosed down with neem oil on two consecutive days. I didn't want to mess with more than one variable at a time. So a few days went by and these symptoms kept getting worse so I decided I was looking at a nutrient deficiency. I used a .15-.85-.55 nutrient solution (Eleanor's VF-11) at 7 times the recommended daily rate, thinking I'd do the same in a week. I decided that I wasn't seeing enough improvement after about 4 or 5 days and repeated the same procedure. Up until that point, my blackberry (my favorite)had only shown minimal symptoms but the day after the 2nd application of fertilizer, there was a very noticible difference (this morning). I consulted Jorge Cervantes' MMGB again and decided it looked like Potassium toxicity. So I flushed the living crap out of the plants and decided to use a different fertilizer. The Eleanor's didn't list any micronutrients. I went with a Lilly Miller's "Morcrop", which is 5-10-10 and has a bunch of micronutrients too. I wanted to add a really dilute solution but the directions were very vague so I completely guessed at what constituted a dilute solution. They recommend 2 tablespoons per plant every 6 weeks, applied to the soil above the roots so I mixed one tablespoon into about 2 gallons of water, which I used to water all four plants. Now all I can do is pray that this solution was dilute enough. Tomorrow I'll know more.

I have my theories, but I obviously haven't got this whole nute thing ironed out yet so any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Some questions I still have: Was it a nutrient deficiency that caused all this in the first place, like I think? Can I rule out the possibility that flowering the plants somehow locked up the nutrients? Any specific nutrient/dillution rates anybody?

Here are the pics I took of the girls after I flushed and re-fertilized:

Big Bud-









Blackberry











Kush #1

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Kush #2





The Kush plants are leggy b/c I mistook powdery mildew for mold and freaked out and stuck them in the window for a week. For some reason, though, Kust #2 hasn't really shown symptoms of nutrient deficiency/toxicity. I feel like the buds on all 4 plants should be bigger at 2.5 weeks though.