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1. Are you growing from seed or clones? Seed 2. How old are your plants? 3 weeks 3. How tall are your plants? ~1.5 inches 4. What size containers are they planted in? close to 2 gallons 5. What is your soil mix? Not sure, soil mixed with perlite
6. How often do you water and what type of water do you use? Water whenever top couple inches dry out, using just normal drinking water.
7. What is the pH of your water? Not sure, no PH meter yet
8. What kind of fertilizer do you use and what is its NPK ratio? Have not used ferts yet.
9. Do you foliar feed or spray your plants with anything? No
10. What kind of lights do you use and how many watts combined? (HPS, MH, fluorescent, halogen, incandescent "plant lights") 400 Watt MH, started off with 3 40 watt compact flouros.
11. How close are your lights to the plants? Approx 1 foot 12. What size is your grow space in square feet? about 3ftX3ft 13. What is the temperature and humidity in your grow space? Approx low to mid 70 F Humidity of the room shows 30 percent (tho the meter could be broken)
14. What is the pH of the soil? Not yet sure 15. Have you noticed any insect activity in your grow space? no 16. How much experience do you have growing? about 3 times ______________________________________________________________________________
Ok, so basically the problem is that I have some really slow growing plants. I've grown about 3 times before, once seriously, and two times just for the novelty of it. I've never ran into this problem. It seems that as the plants were growing new leaves, the older ones quickly dry up. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is. There is still some new leaf growth but it is slow.
The first thing I did was use compact flourescents until they got their first set of leaves. Then I had them set under the MH light.
There are a couple things that I think could be the problem. This is the first time i've used HID lights. When I first had them under the MH light, they were quite a distance away, maybe more than two feet, and so I thought maybe this problem was caused by insufficient light. The reason I believe this could be the case is because after growing the 3 pointed leaves, the newest growth seems to have gone back to a leaf with no points. After moving the plants about a foot under the MH Light 3 days ago, the newest leaves seem to have perked up a bit and point straighter up than before, instead of being horizontal.
Will insufficient light cause leaves to get droopy, become pale, dry up and fall off?
The other thing I think it could be is soil PH, i'm not sure what the PH is because I don't have a PH tester yet, (i'm really busy during the day time and havn't gone to buy one, but plant to do it on the weekend.
Here are some pictures to give you a better idea of whats going on, sorry if some are blurry:
These next two pictures at the end are of a previous novelty grow I did, as an example showing that I've never had a problem like this before (by the way these aren't the plants I'm currently growing):
I can't understand why these are taking so long, and why their older leaves seem to progressively die. In my experience, previous plants have always grown to where i could see new growth everyday. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to resolve this
Oh and another thing to note that has nothing to do with this problem, is that I seem to have one plant growing 3 leaves at one node.. weird huh??
Thats the texture of the soil, i didn't add any mulch. Does that soil look pretty shitty? Those last two pictures, of the previous grow was done using different soil. I didn't buy the new bag of soil, it was given to me. Also, those seedlings were far from the light with no result which is why i moved it closer.
If that course soil is the culprit, is there any way I can transfer those seedlings to a new soil? I don't know how deep the roots are, or how I could go about doing that, I still have some left over of the better soil. THis has gotten me all sad, because those seedlings are from my best batch of seeds.
Im not sure if the "soil" is poor or not. Typically soil should not contain woodchips unless it's well composted or the pH will be too acidic. You want pH of 5.5-6.8 and with soil you want that range to be more like 6.5-6.8 maybe as high as 7 ideally.
I would put odds down that it doesn't have anything to do with a lack of light and having your 400w MH 1ft away won't do anything beneficial im sure.. go with a foot and a half to two feet away or you may be causing more problems. That second picture looks like the leaves are burned or ripped off or something.
I see, I'll move them down. Thanks for the advice. Do you think I can save them if I carefully take them out of that soil and put them into the same soil I used before, or do they look too damaged? I'm think to just dig down deep to minimize root damage, and rinsing off the roots, and then putting them back into the better soil.
That seems like a lot of work, you could just transplant into new soil when signs improve. I mean your plants are still green and the roots will continue to grow...
I really think I would just wait instead of risk of damaging the roots.
I just ended up transplanting them to the new soil, didn't see your post until now. Your right, it was a LOT of work (and a huge fucking mess) . I dug around the edges with a spoon and scooped my hands to the bottom of the pot and pulled up everything and put it in a garbage bag. I then very gently and slowly crumbled up the soil letting the clump sit on the bottom of the plastic bag as i did it. Anyways I kept almost all of the roots intact, but there was a little bit of damage. Hopefully not too much.
Anyways a thing I noticed about the soil. It was very hard and sandy with a lot of those big wood chips. The new soil I transplanted to was soft and spongy (the soil that I've had success with before). If they go to shit, I won't stress too much, i'll just have to start with some new seeds. HOpefully these work out though, because I don't have anymore seeds of this particular strain. Thanks a lot captain coons.
EDIT: (I was going to give you a good rating for your help, but turns out I need 50 posts.)
Yeah I personally would be like wtf is this shit? Woodchips are just a waste product put into cheap soil but anything composted enough can be a ingredient to top notch soil I'm sure.
I hope you didn't damage the roots too much if they recover at all they should make a full recovery.
Hard soil is very bad and was probably your problem. Soil should be loamy enough that when mixing at start it breaks apart easily. You should use at least 1/3 perlite in your soil mix to break it nice.
Large amounts of uncomposted organic matter (wood chips) in grow mediums can cause severe deficiencies.
What happens is, the uncomposted material actually begins to undergo the composting process, right in your container. This process uses huge amounts of nitrogen. As nitrogen availability falls, so does the availability of ALL other nutrients. If this is occuring, it is very difficult to supply enough N for the plant's needs.
However, considering just how small your seedlings are at this point, I would point to these issues instead: 4. What size containers are they planted in? close to 2 gallons
and 6. How often do you water and what type of water do you use? Water whenever top couple inches dry out, using just normal drinking water.
Cannabis does not like "wet feet". In other words, it requires a wet/dry cycle in order to achieve optimum growth. The roots absorb water during the wet cycle and air during the dry cycle. Cannabis roots "stop" at highly saturated pockets. Only when they dry out do the roots continue "searching".
In such a large pot, with such a small plant, even though the top of the soil may be dry, you know there is still plenty of moisture in the lower portion of the soil. You know this because with cannabis "as above/so below" meaning that their is a ratio between root activity and foliar activity, and since you have a tiny plant, that means you have tiny roots. There is no way the roots on that plant could have had time to even absorb the water from the original moist soil.
You are watering the way you would water a full grown plant in the middle of vigorous vegetative growth. Small seedlings merely need moist soil. By the time the soil dries out, you will have a large vigorous plant, and there will be no doubt that its time to water it. The amount of water you are supplying is drowning the small seedlings.
I experienced this in my vegetable garden last spring. I started my first round of super sweet 100 cherry tomatoes in peat pellets with no problems whatsoever. Once roots were popping, they got transplanted right into the square foot garden.
The next round of big boy tomatoes were planted in 1L containers of moist soil. These plants sprouted, but it was obvious they were stunted as they became more and more pale and yellowed. After weeks of trying to get them to recover, I finally just popped new seeds.
the only difference between success and failure was the size of the container. The seeds in the peat pellet germ'd, and quickly colonized the pellet, using up its available moisture rather quickly (2-4 days), progressing into very healthy productive plants (i was picking tomatoes until November off plants that began producing in August).
The seeds in the 1L of soil drowned, because as the roots kept penetrating slightly deeper after using up local moisture, they kept running into more fully saturated soil, trying to "hold their breath" long enough to make it to the next dry cycle. That dry cycle, as a result of too large a container size, never came, effectively suffocating the tiny, fledgling root system.
In conclusion, I would say that the symptoms you are experiencing are the result of overwatering.
This seems to be the main issue, however based on the yellowing, then burning leaf tips(cannabis cannibalism - lack of nutes) I would look second at the pH (6.0 to 6.8 is optimal for soil) and the general properties of the soil (Remember it should hold AIR like a BALLOON, WATER like a SPONGE, and DRAIN like a SIEVE).
Also, your lights are a little bit close, but I dont suspect that to be the culprit in this case.
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