Not 100% Sure on the Problem, or Solution

[MightyBeard]

Good call on removing jiffy pots. I think the jiffy pots might work better if they were presoaked for about 2 dozen wet dry cycles before you ever add soil, that and pop some air holes / root escape hatches too.

As far as size, hmm not sure what brewers yeast does but weed is a heavy feeder. It wants NPK that’s nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium plus calcium and magnesium. More specifically it wants high N but lower PK for veg but in flower less N but more PK, yet needs calcium and magnesium all the way thru. There’s no way brewers yeast can touch this, yeast is probably just carbs anyway and that single source input is not conducive to seeing you thru flower to build huge colas

Rootbound is ok if your soil mix and soil tilth are right, should be plenty of healthy white roots if it’s done properly. But you don’t want to go to flower in a root-bound situation, that requires heavy feed all the way thru so best to upcan a few weeks before flower. At some magical point in flower (after stretch perhaps) the plant pretty much stops growing new roots and uses what it has.

organics done easy, buy 2 bags of Geoflora. The first is for veg, the 2nd is for bloom it’s dialed in to give what I mentioned above NPK plus cal-mag in proper ratios to match stage of growth. You add it to your soil when you pot up and then top dress every 2 weeks and water it in. You can run Geoflora organic dry mix nutes with another soil product like FoxFarms Ocean Forest. Geoflora is a sponsor here and their Veg and Bloom products are in countless journals, there’s even a sponsor help thread.

Let’s talk about that led bar light… can you dig up more info like wattage draw? That will help us but in meantime strongly suspect your light is way underpowered. What is food for a plant? Photons is the correct answer. These girls want to feast on a metric buttload of light, light is their primary food nutes are kinda like vitamin pills…

I did drill holes in the bottoms! I didn't like them not having an escape and I didn't like not being able to see if they roots were popping.

It's definitely not strong enough, lol. I already have another set on order.

 

[013]

Awesome sauce, new light will set you right!!

 

[SmokingWings]

This looks more up my alley. I would prefer to try organic/natural if possible, though I know that's going to be a little more difficult.

A natural fertilizing program is not all that hard though it will be easiest with an organic or natural soil as a base. It can be done with a peat moss, coco coir or even Perlite as a place for the plant to grow its roots but when using a compost based soil mix it will work so much better.

Is there a standard feeding schedule for something like this? The Roots website mentions dosages but not frequency.

I had noticed the same regarding the scheduling early on. There was, and might still be, a schedule of amounts and frequency on the website. It did take awhile to find it and I felt it was overly complicated though the common timing was once a week. Since I was only using one product at the time I stuck with the basic dose and applied "approximately once a week".

I had been using one of the liquid Calcium products from another recognized fertilizer company and was not happy with the method and results. I made the change over to Elemental as my Cal-Mag source and within a couple of weeks noticed that new leaves were not developing any of the signs of a Calcium deficiency. Plus the overall health of the plants started looking a lot better.

I called Roots Organic with the same question you had about frequency. I had the chance to talk to the state rep. His response was that the schedule is set up with once a week frequency even if it is not apparent.

He did mention some experimenting some of the growers were doing with the dry products that involved giving slightly larger doses but doing so less frequently. In order for it to work they had to watch the way the powders would dissolve and wait until the previous dose was completely gone before doing the next.

The best way to start is to pick a fertilizer program and follow the companies dose and schedule until you are able to read the plant and know when it might be deficient or overdosing in one nutrient or another. Some fertilizers do not work well with experimenting so hold off. Then once comfortable with what is recommend begin to experiment which can take a couple of grows.

 

[SmokingWings]

I had been using one of the liquid Calcium products from another recognized fertilizer company and was not happy with the method and results. I made the change over to Elemental as my Cal-Mag source and within a couple of weeks noticed that new leaves were not developing any of the signs of a Calcium deficiency.

I forgot to add that once I started using the Terp Tea Grow and Terp Tea Bloom that I cut back on using the Elemental (the company's Cal-Mag product). The Terp Tea products already list the Calcium available at 20%. I keep the Elemental as a stop-gap measure if I feel that the plants are growing fast enough that an additional one time source will help.