Help with Auto grow

[zulumonty]

I need help my autoflower are 3 weeks old and haven't shown there three leaves,I put two hands perlite Two hands coco and one Hand potting soil ratio in an 8liter black plastic grow bag.

[Ill_Evan]

So far so good, they might look a little pale but it's still early stages. I assume you are growing outside? 

[TheLazyFisherman]

As Evan said. Mine started off just as slow but believe me, time to come you will see explosive growth

[AK-47 Gold Arabesque]

I agree with the above two mense. 
If you do feed them any nutes, remember that you need to do half or quarter strength as they are autos. 

[Naughty.Psychonaut]

On 11/6/2023 at 10:11 PM, zulumonty said:

I need help my autoflower are 3 weeks old and haven't shown there three leaves,I put two hands perlite Two hands coco and one Hand potting soil ratio in an 8liter black plastic grow bag.

Awe brother, hope and trust all is well on your side. Don't change anything now, autos don't like to be bothered at all. Your best shot now is to just get the feeding right. Autos you stunt once and they show you the finger, but for future reference....

The 3 part mix is usually 1:1:1 - peat:drainage:wormcastings.

First I wana touch on the wormcastings, cause I see you put potting soil instead. When buying worm castings you gotta be a bit snobby, cause 95% of commercially available WC will have sand and some kinda "filler" mixed in to fill more bags. Anything that's available in bulk at commercial retailers will lack on the side of quality, cause they pushing for quantity and serving only the unknowing masses. I make my own WC so I know what I work with, but in my days of buying it, you get one kak batch and it will fuck your view of the stuff. Since building my own soil with my own 100% pure WC my organic living soils been pumping faster than some peoples hydro setups. Now you gotta know, if just the quality og worm castings put in can make such a big difference, there's obviously a HUGE drop in quality when you talk about nutrient availability in WC and potting soil...

Potting soil...... eh..... I get nauseous when I have to talk about it. My passion is rare plant collecting, got a big greenhouse with some extremely rare plants. Been on it for up to 15 years now, learnt the hard way that potting soil is detremental to most plants. Double Grow, Reliance, Red Tracktor, Cultera, ALL OF THEM fall under this umbrella. Any generic potting soil will lead you "van die wal af in die sloot". I haven't bought a bag of potting soil in more than 10 years, that doesn't mean my family stopped with their shit or learnt their lesson by now, still wondering why each and every plant they bring home from the nurseries with a new pot with a fresh bag of potting soil with all the bells and whistles the nurseries make them buy, just instantly dies as soon as they repot them. I mean the answer is in there, just need to not be oblivious to it. I avoid potting soil even for my ornamental plants. 

For peat I avoid coco unless it's untreated and pre-buffered. Those coco bricks get treated with a sodium based product to compress them into those bricks, if they're unbuffered that sodium starts to affect your soil and you get major ph swings even when you do "organic" feeding. Calcium buffer will help the coco act like soil where it holds onto nutrients otherwise the coco will stay negatively charged with no cation exchange sites, so it'll fill your pots but the nutrients just run straight through or you get nutrient build up from the plant not being able to access it cause it's not breaking down into plant available compounds and then you get root burn and nutrient lock out and and and all the undesired rootzone problems. You can't have buffered peat that's compressed, cause the sodium treatment will undo the calcium buffer, and vice versa - part of the calcium buffer strips the coco of sodium, so you can only really buy untreated coco (extremely rare) or pre-buffered coco. Otherwise if you going for the cheap option you gotta put in the work and buffer it yourself.

To skip all that, just get Sphagnum peat. works 1000 times better than coco, never goes negatively charged, no need to buffer, no sodium byproducts and just all around a better option.

For drainage, skip perlite and go straight for leca. Endless reasons why, I'd love to tell you all the reasons, but I am sure by now you're getting tired of all the reading. If you want me to give the reasons just say so and I'll drop the info.

I hope you're not one to be diacouraged by reading more than 2 or 3 sentences, as with all crafts people enjoy, if you're into something you gotta be into it at least a little and not give only the bare minimum and then expect the best results. more often than not a short snappy response will lead you further from where you need to be, because we all interpret things differently. 

forums are a thing these days cause people don't always have the time and means to go read a whole book or do deep research on something just to get the 1 single answer you looking for, so a forum allows people to ask a question directly and get a answer directly - hopefully from people who know what they talking about and the majority of the time people don't, they just wana "help" so they throw in their  but infact answers to things that has more than one variable will never be direct and short. there are many ways to grow a plant, like these people say seem like your plant is fine and it will obviously grow, but for sure there are "better ways". If you think about it, the very very best grower in the world still tinkers and tweaks his methods to improve what he's doing cause there is always room for improvement, no matter what the level of expertise.