I am struggling with the watering in my coco peat

I am on very first indoor grow and i am struggling with how much water should i give my plants and how often. I am growing them in coco peat mixed with perlite in 50 litre containers. They seem to be a bit sagging and very slow growing with soft new growth stems.

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Are you using Mother Earth Coco Peat, or did you make your own mix up? Are they in hard pots or fabric pots?

If you’re in Mother Earth Coco Peat and fabric pots, you can water more frequently than in regular soil without any worries. At any given time if you checked to see if they were ready for a feeding/watering, and it seemed close, but you weren’t sure, go for it. In regular soil I’d say wait until it was dry enough, but one of the biggest benefits of having the coco mixed in there is that your root zone will still have access to oxygen even when it’s saturated.

When I grew in Coco Peat, my young plants were thirsty every other night in 5 gallon fabric pots, and my adult plants were thirsty every night.

If you haven’t started feeding any nutrients yet, you should water until you get minimal runoff, just to make sure they’re saturated. If you’re feeding any kind of salt based nutrients you should get around 15 to 20% of the total amout you put it out as runoff.

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I made my own mix and they are in hard pots. I have been giving them nutrients and calmag and made sure ph is around the 6 mark. They are 38 days old and i have topped them all and they are about 40 cm height

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Howdy Matt
Welcome to club.

Did you buffer your Coco?

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Do they look over watered at all

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Welcome to the community
I grow in straight coco and feed for 25-30% run off daily when the seedling is 3 days old til harvest. Coco has no Nutrional value so plain water does nothing positive for the plant.
Coco likes a 5.8-5.9 ph mix the nutrients according to the schedule of the manufacturer be sure to check the ppms before feeding, Make sure the pots have good drainage don’t want water puddling in the bottom. Like Cap-Ron mentioned it’s difficult to over water in coco
Hashtonbutcher is correct about buffering the coco, Coco contains sodium and soduim like cal-mag and can lock it out from the plants so feeding cal-mag from time to time won’t hurt nothing.
Your plants are looking good…Happy Watering/ Growing

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Thankyou very much

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Like already mentioned frequent watering with coco is key, minimum of once a day.

Looks like a pot inside of a pot? Which is fine just make sure all the runoff makes it out.

Are you using a good ph pen? Unfortunately with hydro/soilless medium the ph has a smaller window. Calibrating and storing the meter properly can save you some headaches.

I don’t see anything wrong with your plants just sharing things iv seen many times.

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What’s the ratio of your mix? Amounts of coco, peat, perlite, and whatever else you added?

The reason I ask is because coco and soil have different requirements. How you should be feeding/watering them depends on what you mixed, and how much of each you used.

There are good pre mixed combo soil/coco options out there that work really well, like Mother Earth Coco Peat, or Roots Organics, but the ratios are correct and the coco is pre buffered.

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I mixed a ratio of about 80% coco and 20% perlite. I should of probably done more perlite

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Ok, you totally threw me off by saying coco “peat” in your headline. You’re growing in coco. 30% perlite is a better mix, but 20% should be fine.
You should be feeding them a minimum of once a day, and you should be using cal/mag in every feeding.
If you want the best info you can get, check out the Coco for Cannabis website. Read a few of the tutorials on understand EC, and high frequency fertigation. Everything you need to know is on that site.

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