Hello, I’ve been using Fox farm soils on all my grows and at some point on every grow I’ve had I get a calcium deficiency because the pH in the soil is too low. I’m always watering with 6.7 6.8 and coming out is always 5.5 or even lower sometimes. I switched to from Ocean Forest to happy frog because it was not as hot and I’m still running into the same thing. Is there a different better more neutral soil that I can use or how do I resolve this? I’m not sure if I should use dolomite lime or What
I just flushed with 5 gallons of water and still coming out is 5.6 so I’m kind of struggling with how to resolve this
Oyster Shell Flower will help stabilize ph. Ive seen alot of folks having issues with FF over the last few years with soil ph tanked straight out of the bag. I use Coast of Maine Stonington blend and recycle, and i also make my own mix using promix BX, compost, worm castings, and OK organics highway dust for nutes.
I feel your pain brother. My last 3 runs in FFHF/OF were spent chasing ph and nute lockout. Especially when hitting flower.
If you search around the forum you’ll find plenty of info on the subject but i would highly recommend taking a look at this journal Spanky's Twin Turbo @spankyjr1 has got the foxfarm soil mastered and was one of the saviors on my last grow.
I’ve switched to an organic mix for my current run with roots organics original as my base. Nothing to report yet. See how it goes
I thought I ran into issues with Fox farms soil because of the runoff PH. It was not because of the runoff ph but it was me trying to fix the runoff that I ran into issues. That’s a losing battle. The runoff is just what the soil amendments buffer it to. It was more an issue with Fox farms nutes being low on magnesium than anything.
But if you like seeing 6.2-6.8 runoffs, grab some Roots Organic soil. The one thing I love about Roots is you don’t need to add perilite.
I am one and quit using their products when I did a slurry on a new bag and it came back at 5.2. Now I’m in coco and wish at some point over the years I would have at least tried it once as it is easy to keep her healthy once you figure it out.
FF nutrients are notorious for submarining your pH. FF nutes are very salty and the salt buildup leads to pH problems. It is why FF recommends intermittent flushes. I cannot comment on how salty Super Thrive might be.
We do see bad bags of FF soil occasionally, but I can count on 2 hands the number of times I’ve seen it be a bad bag of soil in the ~6 years I’ve been a part of this forum. It does happen, but not very often. It is far more frequent that the nutes used are the problem.
Hey, thanks for your reply. I can get some pictures later this evening.
I’m using super thrive bloom with Mag-pro.
I’m following the feeding chart, right now. I’m doing about 5 mL of the Bloom, with 1.25 mL of the mag Pro. PPM is going in about 530.
I wasn’t measuring runoff so much but when I started flushing yesterday, I was getting about 1000 runoff. I brought it down to about 600 yesterday using water with full nutrients in it. I’ve done flushes with zero water and then add a nutrients at the end so I Just thought maybe from what I’ve read flushing with nutrient water has it potentially same or better effect however it was my first time doing it this way. I only flushed with 6.8 water and brought ph up a little but I didn’t do anything otherwise trying to chase the ph.
Certainly, I’ve gotten further with better results with the super thrive than I ever did with the fox farm nutrients but now it’s showing calcium deficiencies at the top.
The super thrive bloom has calcium in it, but should I add more calcium? I was assuming it was a ph issue but could it be a nutrient issue?
I’m not familiar with your nutrients and would need to see the plants and what nutrients you are using take a picture of all the nutrients you are using and the plants,
I tried searching but there’s too many products that come up
Are you using tap water?
What’s the starting PPM and PH?
I use Calmag at least once a week to ten days
Your runoff should be around 1000-1200 PPM’s
I don’t PH my feed or water but do keep track
I would start calmag and also add MKP-potassium which is needed during flowering. I see all 3 deficiencies not to bad though
Otherwise plants look pretty good
I tried the Mother Earth Groundswell with perlite 70/30 and it was not bad, I didn’t try anything other then the soil, I’ve bounced a few different nutrients and have come to the liking of Advanced Nutrients line, and @Roadsideorganics.ok brand I’ve never heard a bad word as for product, instructions, customer support well never heard anything bad about them. Just depends on what grow you want to do.
