Naughty.Psychonaut

realising now you are going to be growing autos, I am not really sure how to go from here I've never grown autos cause I don't trust my skill level to make something nice out of them. 

17 hours ago, Martin7318 said:

Someone mentioned earlier not to sneeze near them

this got me! 

one thing I have to mention before going forward is that you should pop the seed straight in the finishing pot. don't pop and transplant. also don't go from small pot to big pot. one big pot and done. I would say don't go bigger than 20L, also not much smaller as plants won't be able to express themself fully if they don't get to stretch out properly. rather a little more space than too little, rootbound before flower will also cause a headache and stress.

I feel autos are great for the guys who have loads and loads of weed already and don't mind only harvesting "half-plants" just for new flavour. the guys that know their setups are 100% fine tuned for absolutely no hickups, because even just a slight sign of stress takes you from potential 100g a plant to a maximum yield of +/-50g. 

in which case I would rather just go with a photoperiod, because you can clone them and manipulate them and if you stress them out there's still time to forgive and all that fancy jazz PLUS you can treat them like autos if you wana..... throw a photoperiod under 12/12 at any time and it will flower, so essentially by just having photoperiods - you have the autos aswell. but it doesn't work the other way around. 

@Darclinc I'll let you know when I am making clones again you in Western Cape?

22 hours ago, Darclinc said:

do you measure this in the runoff after watering only? How else would you do it when you are at the very early stages and cannot measure runoff due to just giving a little bit of water, i.e. not nearly enough to cause any significant runoff?

Well there are different ways to do this, I usually know when I repot, the plant that gets potted needs water at that time, so when I repot I'll have to saturate my medium to ensure no dry pockets. this will also ensure a few drops of runoff. the key is to not dunk a bunch of water all at once that way it just forms a gutter and runs straight out the bottom, but rather slowly water it to make sure all the soil gets saturated and take the first 10ml of runoff and test it. should give quite a clear indication of what's going on in the soil...

you obviously need to know the EC of the water you put in, so test that first. needs to be below 1 EC for seedling plants. 

alternatively, I've seen people fill up the pots they wana plant in, but before repotting, just water them till you get first runoff and test the EC before planting. 

Ladies moving along smoothe, stinking up the whole place. 

I removed all over lapping fan leaves aswell as a bunch of lower branches seeing as we getting a whole week of high RH, don't wana risk anything. these girls been treated all throughout their veg cycles, I hardly ever have to treat flowering plants, mostly because I am scared to spray anything on a flowering plant so I make sure I don't skip any treatments during veg. Talk of the town is that the Potassium Bicarbonate is safe to spray during flower, what's the consensus here? 

French Macaron

Blueberry Hashplant

Super Cheese

Chernobyl

Frosted Apricot

Couple days later, looks like they got their roots in the new soil. and we're off

have done first Neem treatment last week Wednesday, Copper Soap treatment yeaterday and topdressed with DE this morning. 

next treatment will be Potassium Bicarbonate, we got a couple days of high RH about to hit. get ready. 

21 hours ago, Darclinc said:

Along with the fabric pots I also bought some plastic pot raisers to prevent any water from pooling.

I usually opt for solid plastic pots outdoors, otherwise they dry out too fast outdoors, but you'll be fine since it's winter for now. Just keep an eye on that when summer time rolls around with regard to the pooling, this will only really be an issue in the rain, so keep them handy, otherwise keep with their base in a tray, because when you feed or water cause the plants are dry, then you don't want the runoff to run away, but rather to soak up the nutrients and bit of water you gave it. like I said, you really only need to raise the pots when it rains.

just give Proms Little Tent thread a looksee, he went into detail about how his new raised pots are causing him problems. this can happen outdoors too, so literally only when it rains should you raise the pots. 

21 hours ago, Darclinc said:

Thanks, I still need to do a bit of reading and research on EC and what it means. I know what it stands for and what it respresents, but haven't really assembled any information on what constitutes a good or bad EC.

IMHO, the whole EC thing is easier to understand and navigate than PH. not sure why so many people overcomplicate it. once a new grower steps up there's a bit of a ego block where it took the experienced guys some time to understand something so now they don't wana tell the next person how easy it really is, people get a thrill watching others struggle and not help them and take little petty jabs with their "get on my level" notion, without really trying to really help a person. 

EC, you know stands for Electrical Conductivity. We learned in school that water is conductive... the more dissolved solids (TDS = total dissolved solids) the higher your EC will be. the higher Parts Per Million (PPM) the higher the EC.... this directly equates to your nutrient count. 

Too high EC/PPM/TDS = too much nutes / hot soil

Too low EC/PPM/TDS = too little nutes / dead soil 

Perfect EC range = differs between Organic & Hydro, although the big picture stays the same - small plant want small EC, big plant want big EC

seedlings -> 0.1 - 1.5 EC

medium size -> 1.6 - 5.0 EC

flowering plant -> 5.1 - 7.5 EC

once you see your first amber trichom, inside a bud, not on sugar leaves, then you stop feed to save some money and just give water as the plant has already stopped taking up nutes anyway. don't flush the nutes out like people say, the end of cycle flush just refers to moving to clean water, because the plant doesn't go from taking potentially 7.5EC to nothing at all, it slowly eats less and less, but still wants food, just less of it and what's left in the soil will be more than enough for two weeks. 

22 hours ago, Darclinc said:

Thanks, that's the plan. I aim to test a few controls as well to see how accurate it is. But at this point I will most likely use the tap water filtered through the carbon filter in the fridge.

Sounds good! Just don't give them cold fridge water root zone prefers to be at a constant temp between 25 and 30°C. 

giving a plant cold water will slow down root development and could stunt over all growth quite a bit. 

in nature the cold slows down eeeeeverything

On 6/11/2022 at 1:22 PM, Weskush said:

Shot brother! Thanks for that info.

I noticed my first pin this morning

Its only one so far but it still feels like a   million dollars

 

Oh yeeeah that's what I like to see!!! Hope you see hundereds of little pins in the next few days!

On 6/10/2022 at 9:13 AM, Weskush said:

Ja i'm going for week 3 now and still no sign of pinning. Will see. Agar is the next level for sure. Firstly want to see if i can get fruits from spore syringes before i go in all out berzerker!

Most places advertise as spores, when it's actually liquid culture. 

It's not legal to sell the culture of any magic mushroom, so they call it spores for souvenir / research and development purposes to get by with microspcopy laws, like with cannabis seeds long before it was legal. but you don't get spores in the syringes. unless you really reeeeeeaaally lucky. 

spores generally cost significantly more. just look at the spore sprints. that's why the syringes are so cheap in comparison to them, because they actually contain liquid culture. quite the big difference in the two. 

On 6/10/2022 at 9:13 AM, Weskush said:

Those colonizing bags which get injected with culture and broken up with bulk substrate looks like the better alternative to the grain jars available here. With the grain jars you can't really shake/break the partly colonized substrate up to speed up the process...or can you?

I do all my grain work in jars, actually much easier than the bags. I get the bags for my gourmet mushrooms, but often have one tear open or just kinda split open on a seem. remember they have to go through the pressure cooker and with it already being thick polypropelene it kinda tends to form it's own seems and tear or open along those lines. 

they work nice for a while, but you also can't reuse them. I just moved back to jars, waaaayyy easier. get a tennis ball, when you fill the jars with the grain, don't fill it to the top. leave some room so the grains can move around when you shake it, hit it against the tennis ball just so it comes off the sides of the jar and it should break apart very very easily. 

I trust the jars way more than those bags. they also become expensive over time. 

22 hours ago, Weskush said:

Last thing. If my current sfc lets too much moisture out too fast, how about i just use my propagator for the bulk substrate grow? Just mist and fan as required. Good idea?Bad idea?

I would say this flips the seesaws into the opposite side of the spectrum with too little air flow. 

remember this is a golden key, although mushrooms grow in high humidity, fresh air and fresh oxygen is even more important than the high humidity. 

when there's too much co2 the mushrooms can't breathe. it's the same as sticking your head in a closed box with high humidity, cause mushrooms breathe the same as humans. they want constant supply of fresh oxygen. just with added humidity. 

I would say stick to what you where going to do here, 

On 6/10/2022 at 9:13 AM, Weskush said:

will go monotub style or re-use my sfc but tape up some holes instead.

I think closing some holes will work perfect! maybe close the whole middle row?

Goodluck brother! 

Last thing I need to mention, if everything is 100% in check there is still a possibilty of getting no fruits. if it's not a strong master culture it's easy to get it to colonise a substrate, but fruiting is a whole different thing. 

this is where agar becomes important. once you can clean up cultures it opens a whole world of possibilities!

20 hours ago, Weskush said:

but didn't roll in vermiculite. Read somewhere that it isnt necessary..?

waoh hahah don't go back to that place for information  maybe I shouldn't be so hard, but when I was doing cakes the vermiculite was the game changer for me.

Also it's not a said and done thing. vermiculite will help in situations where the cake dries out too quick. and from what I can see this is your situation aswell.

if your setup allows the cake not to dry out too quick then the vermiculite will make less of an impact cause there's already enough relative humidity. 

in my case with the sub, my "cake" is much bigger and I also soak her before fruitng, but it takes a week or two for this big cake to dry out and it doesn't breathe from all sides. as with cakes they are all much smaller and tend to dry out much quicker cause they open on all sides and the SFC is more suited for Amercians and Cannadians where most of the R&D information comes from, but down here in SA we're relatively drier than a lot of other countries in the world so we need to have fruiting chambers that retain moisture a little better. 

unless you wana mist more friequently. 

19 hours ago, Darclinc said:

Like would this be a good option and, more importantly, enough for my 4 autos?

https://www.takealot.com/plantmatter-s-myco-plantmatter-mycorrhizal-fungi-substrate-250ml/PLID70922347

when using mycos, you just add a teetsy bit, like half a teaspoon. 

you can water it in with the first watering you do, mix the half a teaspoon with the water and stir nicely. preferebly dechlorinated water for this as the chlorine can hinder the living organisms. 

or the easiest way I have founf is filling the new pot as you would when transplanting and just add the half teaspoon on the hole you left in the new pot for the small plant to go in. then just lightly mix it with the soil around the hole. as soon as the roots move into the new soil it will form a relationship with the mycos and they will live happily ever after. 

I also mix some into my "kooking" soil. When I finish a cycle I dump all the soil in a big 100L pot, break down clumps and get rid of big root balls, then reamend with elemental blend and mycos and it stands like that till I am ready to do my next batch 3 months later. 

I will flip the soil in the pot once or twice, sometimes not at all. 

19 hours ago, ORGANinc. said:

Ill let you in on a little bit of a secret, the best version available is gotta be Biocult Mycorrhizal from Hydroponic, it has a few specialized species that I've had my eye on for some time. I have not purchased it yet as I still have my trusty generic granular version from hydroponic. 

But a little fun fact, apparently people have done some microscope work on how the different grades of mycos spores populated and the powdered forms have the amazingly better hit rates. 

But why would that come as a surprise, we all know about surface area by now surely. 

Anyway its not cheap either. there are other more affordable granular version there too.   

I am using the biocult at the moment, have done some light testing on clones when I repot them with / without the powder. saw quite a bit of difference in the roots. it works!

8 hours ago, Darclinc said:

Not at all, I appreciate the valuable input! FWIW I have bought this combo Temp, PH and EC pen. Hopefully it does the trick.

I had another question which I've been meaning to ask, specifically since these are going to be outdoor plants: 

What do you do if it rains heavily? There's so much talk about over watering, so presumably when it rains for days on end (happens in CT frequently in winter), are you meant to take them out of the rain?

Also, does it typically flush all the nutrients from the soil and means you should replenish it?

D

small plants are the easiest to overwater in the rain we all learn this the hard way. 

It's best if you can move them out of the rain into a dry area specialy when they in flower and it's raining for a long time. more because of PM on the plant itself than the rain being too much water in the pot. 

even a vegging bush if it's real dense you should be more worried about PM if it's too humid for too long. 

usually plants perk up nicely after the rain and you see all the talk about what magic rain water can be when used with a good living soil. as long as you getting a craft soil with good drainage and the pots you use allow for water to run away freely, you'll be fine. In case you have your pots sitting in trays or something and it pools up it can become a problem, but easily fixed by raising the pots and / or removing the trays.

the nutrients, it has to rain quite a lot to flush a only a small bit of nutes out your pot, though it's not impossible. it's a little subjective though, depending on the EC of the soil before the rain. if it's already low or you got a big plant in a small pot that requires a lot of nutes, this all puts you at higher risk of ending up with a few yellow leaves after the rain. if you got good EC you should be fine. 

but then I have also found some of my pots stay dry outdoors sometimes if it only rains for a day, cause the amount of water is not enough to get through the bush and the amount of water that does make it to the pot is only surface moisture that dries up especially with the 4 seasons in one day we are so blessed with here in the Western Cape except like I said with the small plants, they drown easily if the pot is too big and too wet. 

I haven't used that a specific PH/EC pen so I have no idea how they are, but we will see  

once you get it I would say test your well point and all water round the house, find the best stuff for you

usually foxtailing happens cause of too much light, but not in terms of intensity, in terms of hour cycle. stray lights perhaps?

outdoor cycle is just a mess these days anyway. growing out doors you kinda have to expect some funny stuff, because as we all know nature doesn't give a single shit what the textbook says. 

the seasons aren't what they used to be, plants think it's winter then we get a whole week of summer, this may cause them to do funny things like foxtailing or even hermie. very common for females in late flower to push nanners when their cycles get messed up or even just a little stray light.

Sorry, didn't even show, but this is what my monotubs look like. 

once fully colonised I place a plastic bag over the surface with minimal breathing on the sides to create a little micro climate / condition of high RH to trigger pinning, once I see pins I take that bag off and the mycelium starts to breathe like crazy pushing loads of fruits!

big 5cm whole saw bits used to make 6 x holes near the top of the bin covered them with a small piece of HEPA cloth, but you can use a pantyhose or a old shirt anything that will keep dust and bugs out. with a single row of 8 - 10mm holes about 5cm off the bottom of the bin right around.

in this case the layer of substrate I put down will be 5cm deep the whole tub through. as the mycelium breathes it will exhale CO2 (like us humans, they suck in oxygen and let out CO2, so they breathe like us rather than like plants... which I think is pretty cool) the CO2 will condense on the surface of the mucelium and start to fall / move out the row of holes made right above the surface, as the air gets pushed out it will naturally start to suck in through the big filtered holes. 

the filter holes also helps it from drying out too fast win win

before I start fruiting, during colonisation when you need much much much less FAE, I cover the row of holes near the surface with this magical waterproof breathable stretchy plastic surgical tape you can buy at clicks or dischem

this stuff! 

15 hours ago, Weskush said:

Yo @Naughty.Psychonaut hope all is well brother! I need your input on my current situation please. My pf cake was fully colonized with no signs of contam this time round. Placed it in a sfc with soaked perlite in my room. Avg temp about 20celsius and rh avg 90% in chamber. Misting and fanning minimum 3-4 times/day. Its been 2 weeks and no sign on pinning and cake is turning light brown. Is it contam? Shot in advance brother

 

Niiiice  

No stress man, the brown discoloration you see there is just a basic form of oxidisation the mycelium experiences as it dries out. 

The cake looks fully colonised but I think the reason it's drying out is because of the SFC... how constant is the 20°C + 90%RH? those are the right conditions to be aiming for, but if it fluctuates a lot it will hinder the growth of the mushroom. the temperatures and humidity has to stay relatively constant for pinning to start. 

I got some GT pins this morning  

hard to see how many there are, but they're all over, few bigger ones will be picked by tomorrow

this little dude with his even littler bro to the left of him

this dude fell over, but they still grow like this, gona make all kinds of funny shapes

Anyway, looking at your SFC, I think the way you made it dries out the mycelium too quick resulting in the browning of the mycelium surface. 

if it's nice and fresh and there's enough RH the mycelium tends to stay fluffy and white. 

did you soak the cake for 24hrs before birthing her into the SFC? the "hydration" is quite important so the cake doesn't dry out too quick and another thing to retain moisture on the cake is the "dunk and roll" which I see you skipped. 

So basically what you do, when the cake is fully colonised you fill a big bowl with filtered water, RO / Distilled water works even better. soak the cake by placing a lid or another bowl ontop to ensure the cake is submerged. 24hrs later you bring over a bowl of dry vermiculite, clean out the bag not recycled vermiculite, then just roll the cake in the vermiculite. when you spray/mist the cake the vermiculite will suck up the moisture and release it slowly around the surface of the cake. 

I don't do cakes at all anymore, but here's an example I got on the internet for you

the last point I wanted to make, I hot my SFC off google too, but it didn't make sense to me to use the same style chamber if I am in a lower over all RH area. Infact I actually had a SFC, but it gets used for storage again these days. 

I found what works better is much fewer holes and smaller ones. 

I moved over to monotubs, but these can be just as easily used to fruit some cakes. 

I can spray / mist the tub in the morning and it'll still have droplets of water on the side tonight when I get home. I still fan as often as I can though, fresh air is the golden key to growing mushrooms, so the more fresh air with fresh humidity you can introduce the better and then the more constant those conditions are the better for the mycelium. 

If everything's 100% in check and still no fruits, only thing it can be is genetics. 

Like I said long long long time ago on this thread, I got Liquid Cultures online, advertised as spore syringes, had to make a bunch of agar cultures with the LC to clean up the genetics, only after subsectioning like 30 to 50 agar plates I got a clean Psilocybe Cubensis genetic that was ready for growing. 

if you take a LC syringe and inject it straight into a substrate you most likely will only get a few mushrooms if any. 

what happens there is like planting 100 cannabis seeds in one pot. you will get a plant, you will get weed, but putting them all together like that isn't fair. you're not giving the genetic a fighting chance when you do that cause now theres 1000 plants competing with eachother. 

same with liquid culture, theres 1000s of culutures within that culture you got and they all competing with eachother. 

where as with agar plates it allows you a 2dimentional surface where the cultures can express themself and branch out in different ways and you select and sub section the strongest culture till you get a perfect clean "master culture" they usually just look perfectly round cause it's closer to one dominant genetic in stead of all out of shape because of many different growth types and genetic variations. 

sorry again for all the reading! I bet it will all be worth it though! Goodluck brother!

39 minutes ago, Khakibos said:

 

Can someone please explain to me how this term ended being used for growing out cut only cultivars/varietals ? isn't it already a monocrop if you are just growing cannabis ? - I've been hearing it a lot lately and its just so confusing because in agriculture it simply means growing one crop and only that crop on your land no ?  

well say you're on a wine farm talking to one of the farmers it would be pointless to say "I am doing a monocrop here" and assuming he is talking about grapes only. in most cases it's variety/strain specefic. so when you hear a wine farmer standing on his wine farm saying those words, he means he is growing one specific kind of grape in that specific area of the farm, because grapes grow differently just like with cannabis you got the late crop and early crop and everything in between, some varieties need a bit more water than the others. some need more heat. some need the first sun of the day. some are more frost tolerant. some need more nutrients and all that fancy stuff, which means they all require slightly different conditions and so they end up moving one specific variety to the desired area, so when you really get into the whole farmer talk you'll see the talk within the talk

there's probably better terminology, but in this case I was doing the same here with my little farm.

a "mono-strain" crop

that's just the thing, nail on the head, you can agree ALL soils will have inconsistencies.... 

growing weed is not a black and white, said and done, type thing. there are millions if not billions of variables and this is the reason for the existance of those tools. 

when was the last time you bought a fresh bag of FF? I got my buddy I built the LED for in fresh FF, bought about 5 bags and they all 9.0 to 9.9 EC..... only realised it once his plants where toasted, cz how could you know before? did a run off test, got the answer, fixed it right away. with his noob mind telling him it was deficiency cz he hasn't used nutes yet..... this all conflicts with the whole notion of craft soil + water = success.... that's major bullshit.

I can show you emails between me and Derek Van Zyl from Freedom Farms, it's not only generic soils that have inconsistencies. basically EVERY living soil is prone to inconsistencies literally because of the way it functions. 

you can't avoid it unless you move over to hydro.

you also stated that some "honing in on the problem" would be needed............. why not use a probe and get it over with, rather than standing there scratching your head and running around like a mad hare asking 100 people and getting 50 different responses and then you have to cherry pick and all that while your plant gets toasted?

I've had quite a few misdiagnosis' by experienced growers, even here on the forum, so I also don't trust that an experienced grower will know all visual keys right when they happen and much less so if I have to show someone and trust their word, cz they themself don't know what the soils read outs where before everything went wrong. 

now if you build your own soil, that's another story, but to tell a new grower he must start by building his own soil and trusting it fully with no testing, is like giving a 5 year old a racecar and expecting him to drift around the track and the car returning to you unscratched (I've noticed a lot of car related referances on the forum so I am tapping into those) basically, it's not gona happen.

this conversation can go on and on and on and on and on and a lot of points will contradict themself, the object will stay the same. having a probe will guarentee a safer grow experience. no doubt about it. 

to the point you made of a new grower not knowing what to do with the information the probes give them, I have to ask what in dear Sally's big juicy butthole will make someone think that that same grower who doesn't know what to do with the probe information, will know what to do without the probes? I honestly don't get it? You're not saying a noob is so much of a noob that they skip all the noob stuff and jump right to being an experienced grower? how does that make more sense than just using a probe?  

This might be petty, only because I believe you guys not to be petty, but this point I just feel like there's reluctancy to agree with me even though a lot of things said falls under the values of my opinions. like you said you tested your soil with a more thorough test than the PPM test, but you advocate new growers shouldn't test? they should just run into problems and deal with it. I don't get it man.

some people get their "clean water", for household and everyday use, from a borehole... usually with EC sitting pretty around 2.0 to 4.0 EC... and you never know what the water is rich in.... magnesium, calcium, iron all very common in boreholes around western cape with some areas higher in certain compounds and other higher in other compounds ..... meaning different things will happen. Mg can swing your PH easy peasy, causing lock out and showing signs of deficiency, but what's actually going on is a toxicity.... no way of knowing this without probes.

wait, let me stop with my opinion before I get called out for arguing again  

just let the experienced ouens talk and keep my bek shut, looks like I still got tons to learn aswell! 

cards are on the table, next move is up to OP  

1 minute ago, ORGANinc. said:

Because i'm not happy with just good, where your ppm test tells you how many total dissolved solids, I want to know how much of each nutrient is available from each of those solids. 

 

never the less, a test is a test. no funny business  

as a intermediate grower I would rather give advice that I would have liked to recieve when I started out, because the advice that circulates a experienced growers conversation and a learners conversations is also two vastly different things.

like I said, I was left scratching my head way more taking advice from people who advocate the "just know better" notion. infact it was infuriating listening to advice that doesn't help at all. 

3 minutes ago, ORGANinc. said:

If a new grower wants to grow successfully first time round. 

They can buy any potting soil and talborn green and red topdresses. No tools, no happy clappy dances. Just a winning formulae.

 

then scoop water from the dam?  

I think there is more than that to it? have you tried a cannabis plant in pure double grow potting soil? I've lost many many plants to generic potting soils. the biggest problem there is inconsistency. one bag has 0.3 EC, the next bag has 9.7 EC..... 

I wouldn't plant anything in generic potting soil ever. 

different strokes hey 

what would help, IF you wanted to go that route, is to have tools to test the soil to see what you need to do to it to get it in the right range. 

CannaSanta swung by in June  

dropped a load of stuff along with a few selected phenos 

will be making mothers for future clones and what not, few strains I'm excited about, some just came with the batch, couldn't say no... not the everyday drop off

Pineapple Chunk - Barneys Farm

Cherry Pie - Unknown breeder

CannaHealthGenetic#21 - CannaHealth

Sunset Sherbet - Seed Junkies

Peanut Butter Breath - Thug Pug

Inzane in the Membrane - Ethos Genetics

Zweet Inzanity - Ethos Genetics 

Grape Diamonds - Ethos Genetics 

Forbidos - Inhouse Genetics 

Garlic Sherbet - Inhouse Genetics

Platinum Silk - Inhouse Genetics

will be selecting from this batch for future monocrops once I start a new batch. 

will have to do seperate project for breeding, have to work through quite a few seeds and select which of the batch mentioned above gona be used before breeding starts. 

31 minutes ago, ORGANinc. said:

Also don't PPM anything. 

I've done a soil test twice. My CEC is always just under max after reamends  

why did you need to test the soil  

17 minutes ago, ORGANinc. said:

I don't pH because I don't use much fertilizers, if any. 

Also using rainwater. My soil PH at the beginning of a run is always at a desirable 6,9 noting the higher nitrate levels for a decent start to veg. 

Having one fixed number for pH is not always correct, as the Ph in the rhizosphere generally changes throughout growth periods, ending in a more acidic ph. 

If ever I was forced into a corner and had to use tap water, I would use it without pH'ing it and just letting it sit for 24hour, because your will notice the pH drop to a suitable range without adding any chemicals, if you are fertilizing, you are on your own.

I have my style of growing, and my soil is more than 3 years old, with consistent love and care it gets better by day. 

 

lucky you guys with year round supply of rain water for all your plants! very few growers have that privilege 

would this be your advice to a new grower though? or are you just saying how things work for you? as this is clearly a thread started by a new grower wanting to learn how to do these things, cause no one ever mentioned use of rain water to our fellow newcomer till I mentioned tap water can be a problem, so all the while the standard was rain water? I must be living on Pluto! 

did you do this from the start and never had issues?

from testing my own rain water just collecting over night it's not always 0 PPM, I sometimes get between 0.1 - 1.0 EC, cause the rain collects shit on its way down. it hits the roof, runs through gutters, comes out with stuff in it. Sometimes cleaner than other times. Do you do anything to make sure the rain water is clean or you just collect and use without a care? 

During my first few months on the forum I was left scratching my head way more than I was after I just used the right tools just once.... because humans can be wrong sometimes, just like me, I can be wrong that's why I still use my tools 🛠  

@Darclinc hope all is well your side!

As you can see even a seasoned grower change their situations and products they use over time and just introducing a new type of water or a different nutrient product you can have quite adverse effects, specially if you don't research the product properly. 

I have also seen situations where the product itself does not match what the lable sais, sometimes it's marketing, sometimes a batch flaw and in all these cases you can contact who ever you got the stuff from and take it from there, but without tools you would have to let the products to the damage first before you can call it. in my opinion that's a waste of time and resources. I don't wana burn my plants to have to learn, I would rather just learn and have healthy plants  

I have a PH probe and a PPM probe. I use them both. however I use my PPM probe much more than the PH probe. There is quite a strong stigma around the whole "Don't panic, it's organic" bullshit... I've heard it everywhere from vegans to agriculture and everywhere in between... The horticulture community love this, I have heard it plenty of times, infact I have heard it WAY TOO MUCH, how people will demote the use of PH and PPM probes in organics simply because of the fact that it's organic. 

Well, I have learned my lesson, was left standing scratching my head.... did the advice givers actually really wana help me? or did they wana make me feel inferior, because I don't understand the plant as well as they do? or maybe they just didn't really understand it themself? 

could be any of those, but trust me when I say this, I have learned way more from using the right tools than from listening to people.

Back to PH / PPM.... even though all the talk here is about PH swings, it's much more likely to run into deficiencies or toxicities when working with living soil and slow release fertilizers that need to be broken down to become available for the plant, everything will be fine then one day you see heavy discolouration, what do you do? run to the forum and ask??? try to recall what you did last, did you feed it a lot, give clean water? and and and..... all this will cause more confusion and cost a lot of time and in the end more damage will have been done. 

what you should do, is get clean water with a PPM of 0 - 500 and a PH of 5.5 - 6.5 (very easy. most tap water and bottled water fall in this catagory, you can go to a local spar or pick n pay where you can fill up filtered water for cheap cheap and it will give you the PH and PPM of the water on the content list) run that water through your problematic soil very slowly to make sure you saturate all soil to get accurate reading, then you just dunk the PPM probe in the first bit of runoff you get. if it's too high you keep flushing till you in desired range and if it's too low you know you need to feed. there you go. no waiting for people to respond and hoping they get it right.

More people have PH probes than PPM probes so it's easy to get someone to swing by and test PH every once a month or so. you really just need to test your tap water or whatever water you been using, because it'll take a while for water with a super high or super low PH to cause living soil to swing. Organic living soil balances PH by itself and in most cases if you're only slightly off you wont ever really run into any issues. only when you're way out for a period of time will it cause a swing. 

Sorry for all the reading so early in the day!  

yoyo wingwing!  

let your thing swing! 

basically to sum it all up

sq1 -> having probes = safe 

sq 2 -> not having probes = less safe

sq3 -> knowing someone with a probe that can help at a moments notice so you don't have to spend the money to get probes = a little safer but less reliable. 

once you got the visual keys it's still easy to misdiagnose, throwing you back at sq1.