It appears things got reset last night on the forum so I'll post an update.
The other day I decided to take clones and cut all my plants down. It was a hard decision but I think it was the right one. In my experience, plants entering flower with deficiencies tend to struggle and I don't want to waste my time. Two weeks ago I reached out to JRPeters because my plants have continued to show Mg deficiencies. I was advised not to use scorching hot water to mix nutrients. For the last two weeks I've been doing everything by the book, and while the plants showed improvements, they never fully recovered.
I was a bit conflicted about chopping them down because I probably could have uppotted them to give those roots a chance to spread out and recover properly, but with the floraflex caps and drippers all setup, I didn't want to change everything up again. I feel that starting fresh and wiping the slate clean gives me a chance to figure out if using very hot water to mix the nutrients was the culprit of the Mg deficiency.
So right now I have about 24 clones in a propagation dome and 4 random seedlings germinating in rockwool. I'm not ready to ditch the Jacks 321 quite yet, especially when it has yielded me six very nice harvests to date.
I went through some of my previous journals on RIU and IG and spent a considerable amount of time reading up on what I was doing right. I'll be honest, I needed a bit of a confidence boost. It was nice to read up on some of my successes and it got my mind off of the current fiasco.
Some takeaways
- Looking back I always started plants at full strength with 321, so that's something I'll be doing again.
- I ran fulvic acid powder at .4 grams per gallon. I haven't been running that on these last grows so I'll be including that in my recipe moving forward. Did some reading and I'm going to to cut that down to .1 grams per gallon.
- I used enzymes religiously and randomly stopped. I picked up some cannazyme and will begin adding that to the reservoir at 5ML / gallon. Talked enzymes with the guys at the hydro store yesterday and I didn't know they also provide pest management benefits towards soft body insects.
- I used about 1ML / gallon of Silica. I just picked up a bottle of Armor SI and will be incorporating that into my recipe moving forward.
- I didn't use hot water to mix my nutrients, instead room temperature water. In Sept 2019 I purchased a 25lb bag of 5-12-26. The raw ingredients are different from tub I ordered in 2018. In 2018 the 5-12-26 mixed to a yellow/greenish color. The latter batch mixes to a copper/reddish color. I spoke to JRPeters about this and they attribute it to whom they source their raw ingredients from at the time of production. I did have successful harvests with the copper/reddish stuff, but noted it was more difficult to solubilize. This is where I started heating the water and things started to slowly unravel. I began augmenting with cal-mag around early 2020 and never put two and two together. So no more hot water and no more cal-mag.
Moving forward here's the breakdown of the reservoir ingredients per gallon.
3.6 grams Jacks 5-12-26
2.5 grams Calcium Nitrate
1.5 grams Epsom salt
.5ML Orca
1ML Silica
5ML Cannazyme
.1 gram Fulvic Acid
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