Slow Growth Any Ideas?

[BudSpuds]

What soil do you use?

 

[Emilya Green]

What soil do you use?

By saying I was not a fan, I was referring to your bottom watering method. Only concentrating on the lower roots and letting the upper root system suffer is NOT how to build a solid rootball, IMHO.
Regarding soil, I use the same soil over and over now. I have about 40 gallons of soil that I will keep rotating and adding a few amendments to all the time as half of it sits there composting while the other half is in containers growing plants. When I start new plants, I cut it 50% with a standard organic soil like FoxFarm OF or Roots Organic, and on the first transplant to a solo cup I put the strong composted soil on the bottom half and the mix on the top. From then on, everything I do is using my living soil.

 

[millertm]

we would have to get into a discussion about what type of soil mix you were in and what sort of amendments you use to figure out why this could be millertm, but unfortunately this is not our thread to do so. Your results however are atypical, and probably confusing to someone trying to figure out pH in a normal soil. btw, the reason you keep seeing people talking about watering and nuting at 6.5 pH, is because that is the way most of us do it.

Yea, FFOF too. While you are correct, my post was to say that me, and other growers using either FFOF or FFLD may find feeding and watering to uptake better with PH under 6. Since he is using FFOF, I posted what I feed at for comparison. You have a great setup and are solid on your feeding and I see great results. But different medium's need different imputs. Since you are not a fan on FFOF I threw my comment in the mix.

Cheers

 

[Emilya Green]

Yea, FFOF too. While you are correct, my post was to say that me, and other growers using either FFOF or FFLD may find feeding and watering to uptake better with PH under 6. Since he is using FFOF, I posted what I feed at for comparison. You have a great setup and are solid on your feeding and I see great results. But different medium's need different imputs. Since you are not a fan on FFOF I threw my comment in the mix.

Cheers

Good discussion! I used FFOF exclusively for a couple of years and had very good results with it. I did find that there was a slightly better micronutrient uptake (late flower molybdenum deficiencies) if in flower, pH was adjusted downward to 6.3. I would never recommend going lower than that in soil however, because magnesium doesnt start uptaking until 6.5, and you have to be certain that your drift will take you there, or a large majority of the time a magnesium deficiency will result. You can mitigate this a little by adding cal/mag, but why add extra salts when you don't have to? pH is very important in a synthetic grow, and a couple of tenths of a point can make a huge difference.