Made a new topic so as not to confuse a newer grower in their journal. Plus I’m a newer grower myself and dont know enough to answer questions. Just by my so far limited experiences.
I had issues with low runoff ph/high ppm in my soil grows. I was advised to flush with ph’d water. That 100% did the trick for me.
But soon afterwards my ppms rose again and the ph went back down. So I essentially needed another flush like 3 weeks later.
The second time instead of flushing, i just used plain ph’d water for like 10 days and slowly watched the ppms reduce as the ph increased. My thinking was to just use what was left in the soil until it required more. It seems the soil will hold massive amounts of salts (I was over 3000 ppm)
Seemed to work pretty good for me but obviously I was in mid flower the plant did not seem to react negatively in any way to that approach and I had a very nice harvest.
Is PH out of range something to worry about if it doesn’t kill your plants? I had leaves showing what was mottling from ph fluctuations from plain tap (8 ph) to my nutes mix (6 ph) every other watering. But the plants still did ok. Admittedly, the mottling did stop when I went with consistent ph’d water. But other than leaf discoloration I noticed no other ill effects
Thanks for posting this… I’m in this situation right now. Got some great advice what to do and now I think I’m going with the 2nd option I was given which is just use plain water and see what happens. I’m getting ready to start week 6 of flower…
Honestly, if I had the time this week, I might have at least flushed SG…as her buds are a bit behind TG…but I just don’t have any time until Thursday… I’ll do the RO water with Cal/Mag and ph at 7.0 and water to runoff the next week which would be like… 2 - 3 watering.
I tried flushing once never again pourd water til i was sick and barely moved the needle i try my best to keep in rage 6.2-7
But have had 7.2 readings with no ill effect in soil as you do dry backs the ph will raise due to salt concentration increasing this is alot of times were you will get tip burn also runoff ph will differ from root zone ph hope any of this helps in anyway
Also organic. Strong life means no flush. Over amend is a ride it out. Increasing life during an overfeed mitigates a lot of it. Some nutrient lines do require a salt flush.
Yup, it was fox farms I was using at that time as well. And following the chart the flushes were lining up.
All that tells me is fox farms wants us to waste our nutes. I went 10 full days before I needed another feeding, maybe more. They were in 10 gal fabric pots so another flush would have been ridiculous. First one took me hours! From sun up to 1 am or something before my ph came back up. I took a chance in just plain waterings cuz of the horrible experience.
I always thought the verbage for the flush running vertical was an indication of a complete lack of how people read in a technical environment. Changing orientation like that is a good way to confuse folks not used to technical instructions.
Truly stupid.
I used fox farm trio plus Bembi and I had a few issues but never flushed the first time. Only flushed individual plants with problems. my Problem was Ocean Forest! I switched to coco and never looked back.
I stopped paying attention to runoff ph. I was screwing up my grows by trying adjust my soils natural ph buffering to fit with the 6.5 mark. That’s important for hydro and soilless grows since there aren’t any buffers. At some point soil grows got lumped in with those. If you have quality soil, just concern yourself with your input PH. If your PPms are high, just water until they come down.
Depending on the nutrients you’re using flushes may be required. Fox Farms is very necessary to flush at designated periods.
For final flushes before harvesting, I haven’t noticed a difference between flushing or not flushing.
There has been scientific research on this and all flushing at the end of your grow does is deprive your plants of the nutrients they need to finish. And as far as taste more ppl said the unflushed samples were better tasting
I’ve heard it both ways. May be more important in one medium as opposed to another just like PH. I never noticed a difference so I just stopped flushing and dumped the soil on the outdoor foliage when I cut the plants. The citrus trees love it because I don’t feed them anything.
