You numbers in and out tell a story.
Soil is PH high and full of nutrients, still(unused or locked out)
Next flush PH 6.0, just spring water, no nutrients PPM under 100 and record what comes out.
it will be interesting.
@DEEPDIVERDAVE Hey Dude. Here’s a question, I figure I will continue with my mini flushes to finish out this cycle and then if I were to do like you say and feed them via their soil with 1/4 recommended nutes, how do I get the EC, PPM, and Salts down in my nute mix? I would be using the 6-part Flora Series. The Micro, Gro, Bloom, licious, and cal-mag, and later maxi bloom-I think it’s called. The numbers for the mixed solution at half the recommended show the EC of 972. PPM is 484. Salts at .04. How do I get those numbers lower without watering down the potency of the nutes? After reading your recommendation the other day I mixed in straight pH balanced water with the nutes and had it up to 5x added water to the amount of the nute mix I used and still wasn’t as low as we’d want it to be. Thanks.
Btw, I accidentally skipped AO3 so will do it tonight at your recommendation of 6.00 and I bought some Spring Water to do it with.
Feeding with 1/4 Nutrient dosage, from bottle recommendations, will have a lower PPM in the feed available., causing plant to utilize nutes from soil.
Ah! Ok. Who knew? You! I’ll try it. Thanks. I’m afraid though. I’ll tell you that. AO3 is tonight and she is my best and most favorite strain. I hate to mess her up any more. But I trust you. Thanks.
Spring water, PH 6.0 without nutrients would help reduce soil PPM.
Have fun learning.
Ah yeah, you beat me to it. I was about to say I’m supposed to do that first. Starting now. I will post the numbers after. PH6!
Ok. Well, the numbers for this week are in the attached photo. They have gone down since last time, but last time they were way up from the time before, and this time they are still quite a bit higher than the 1st time. Maybe because the 1st time I pushed a bunch if bad stuff to the bottom but not out so the numbers were smaller and the the 2nd time a bunch of that got pushed out? And then today there isn’t that much left so the numbers are lower than last but still high? Do I have it figured out? One guy told me that I’d never get the soil back down to acceptable levels so I was gonna give up on it until you started talking. Seemed I couldn’t get a straight answer until you. Thanks for that. Sometimes when left to my own devices I make great decisions and other times not so much. It helps to have a straight forward no nonsense person around. -Karen PS, I hope you had a great Valentines Day.
I understand your frustration.
Last year using FFOF, I was stymied at week six with PH crash-lock issues.
First in soil, then the PH pen crapped. Double down the wrong way.
Soil can be salvaged or saved, both take time and effort.
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You could transplant those plants to new soil but may end with similar issues.
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Flushing with straight water should take triple the volume of the soil, would be my guess. Flushing took me so much water and accomplished little change in numbers, so I don’t, yet, again.
I just feed less, use soil slurry, and adjust for all plants, the same same.
3 PH pens, Calibration Kit, and cleaning/storage solutions, currently employed.
Replace the battery in the PH pen and complete a calibration routine.
Apera 20 or 60 are the good ones (try not to drop).
Bunch of cheap $10.00 pens available. -
I have about a third of my plants in soil that they don’t like.
I will have to take readings and diagnose their issue (may learn something).
They are growing and may recover. They all have flowers, like balls of cotton. -
Cull them, ouch, that hurts me big time.
Space is needed for better growers.
Yeah, I thought about transplanting. What stopped me was thinking about how they are doing ok, just small, and the transplant at this stage would maybe be more than they can handle. They are already in enough stress, I think.
Lol! I totally get you on the meters. I too had one go out on me. I used strips to conduct my slurries until the new one came and some calibration solution arrived. Got my first one working again. But the new one does all the reads on one pen and I like that.
Nothing wrong with cotton balls. As long as it does the trick, right?
I think you must be a decent grower. You’ve provided me with information that I desperately needed, and I intend to be one of those better growers before all is said and done.
I guess you have your own share of issues going on. I am sorry to have bothered you so much when you need a little help yourself.
I did find a friend that has a friend that grows. He just gave me a whole buttload of Gen Hydro products. Must be $4-500 worth. And it’s the stuff I use and then some. There’s some stuff in there, doesn’t look great and probably out of date, called FloraKleen. I read the lable and it is for flushing solids out of soil. I think I might look into getting some new of it at least to have on hand if ever needed.
Oh! I did get some new potting mix to ‘top’ as you say. I was pleasantly surprised when I cut the bag open and saw it is primarily Peat Moss. I’ve read that stuff is really good. 
Welp, I will leave you to your own plants now. I wish you’d have mentioned before what you were going through, but am kinda glad you didn’t because you really did help me a lot and I totally appreciate it. - Karen
We all do have our share of issues, some, more than others.
We are fortunate to be on this side of the dirt.
The forum provides a space for helping others, period.
We all benefit when helping others.
Trying my best to become a decent grower, after a 40-year hiatus, working for the machine.
Hell, I am alive. A walking miracle. Medical Mary License has a list of doctors who know me professionally.
If you want more forum reading,
My grow adventures
and
Or
That’s a LOT if reading with a lot of words that idek the meaning of. While I do plan to try revegging, idt I am quite ready to be thinking about clones and making seeds. You’ve definitely done some research, that’s for sure. And in a very short period of time too. I just have my 6x6 tent with a light and some fans and don’t see me getting much bigger really. Although I did just order some autos because I think I can grow them along side my photos. Maybe if I do both I can expand, but really it’s only me so I don’t need a whole lot and have zero sales skills, sooo…
TBT, I got some experience. Novice, but eager to learn.
Not interested in commercial, just good smoke and good karma.
Should have, would have, could have,
Always wanted to learn growing since attending USU in the 70’s.
BS Forest Management (love smoking small green trees).
Hi Karen. Your ladies look to be recovering well.
I wanted to ask, what tester pen you’re using? I’m currently using the Apera PC60 and my salts numbers aren’t matching yours for the same PPM. On a recent runoff measure, I had 824ppm with 0.58 salts, and on another 1555ppm (1.55pppt) with 1.09 salts.
I don’t record the EC. From my minimal understanding of these measuring devices, it’s measuring the same thing, dissolved solids, with electrical conductivity, and the device calibrates it to the needed value and shows it either in EC, PPM or Salts. I could be off on my understanding.
But my numbers between PPMs and Salts are pretty consistent so I noticed your low salt numbers right away. I’m investigating now - could be my numbers have been off all along.
Happy growing! 
You are probably good to go. I only have the el Cheapo, as my Daddy would have said, meters. Only one that reads all, is a 5 in 1. However, I am sure it works well as I did calibrate it myself and it reads 0.00 when it’s supposed to.
But you probably just don’t know my whole story and that I am using dirt from my previous grow and it has all the nutes for flowering plants already in it. That’s why I’m having trouble. But yes, they are coming back.
And yes, the EC will most likely be twice the PPM, always. Idk what is high for salt levels. That would be a great question to ask the forums because it is those salts that clot around the ends of the roots and block them from feeding. All I know about it is that in my tap water there is between 0.00-0.03 Salts, so .09.or .10 seems high to me.
I hope some of that helps.
Sharing my pictures detailing my Friday night.
My Reveged 10/23-WW 3-gal soil (FFOF/FFHF/Seedling Warrior mix resident lady
My best guess 4/2022 origins.
Then I waterboarded her for a gallon of 6.5/500PPM
After the third gallon, later, I quit
.
To fully picture:
The lady looked good to begin with.
The soil had been top dressed, 3 or more weeks ago.
Her sisters look just as good.
I wanted to see the numbers.
I saved all run-off.
Then,
I took a not healthy lady (great flowers, NO fan leaves since they all fell off) and
fed her the energized run-off in an attempt to fix her soil, cause the flowers look like cotton balls.
Didn’t bother to test second round run-off, she either is happy or it the highway.
Process should have worked for all benefit.
You have a lot more room for error than I do, apparently. I’m just not at liberty to experiment. I either do it or don’t. I will get better and then be able to try a little new stuff. Until then it’s a tight leash. Have fun.
I read up of your thread for trying out your bendy things for a little of the story. I don’t spend as much time on this forum as I’d like so I’m not sure how to navigate to other previous topics of your back story.
I just wanted to add a recent growing experience to the plethra of knowledge you’ve received here. I’m a novice, only on my 5th grow so I don’t feel in a position to advise but I can share my experiences and hope they might help someone.
For the last two grows I’ve been using a mixture of 75/25 FFOF/Perlite in my pots with the bottom third a mixture of that and a Super Soil product on the last grow and on this grow, that same organic soil product mixed throughout the pot for a “kinda-sorta” Living Soil blend. And on two of this grow’s pots, I planted two seeds right next to the nubs of stalks of two of the previous grow’s harvest the day after harvest as an experiment. So our soils are completely different and I’m using two different lines of organic top dressings between two tents for feed so there are a lot of different variables so this may not apply to your situation at all.
Sorry I get to rambling on, I’ll try to stay on subject. Both grow #4 and #5 (and possibly previous grows) my pH out ran high. Like 7.50 area, sometimes more. I chased it for a while. I was going to try some of the remedies that have been mentioned to you and would have except the one I opted for first was lowering my pH in. I was hesitant to add anything harsh into the soil environment for some reason. If you use this method, be careful. I started putting my pH in at aroung 6.0 consistently. After a number of waterings and feedings, I started noticing problems I thought were related to another issue I was fighting but all the signs showed a calcium deficiency. Turns out, the ladies were locking out the calcium (calcium uptake falls off on the lower end of the pH scale) because the pH in was too low. If I had continued, I think they would have gone into full nutrient lockout And all the time I did this, the runoff pH was still high. 5.95 in / 7.48 out for example.
I was reading my pH out from my runoff of course and translating that into my soil pH. I began doing slurry tests and they were showing somewhat better but still high and fluctuated a lot between samples, depending the area of the pot I got the sample from. So I broke down and purchased a pricey (for someone like me 
) Bluelab soil pH tester. I calibrated it, it matched the readings of another one of my other pricy investments, the Apera PC60 pen. When I tested the soil in the pots with the Bluelab soil tester, all five pots averaged 6.5 to 6.7. I had been chasing a problem that wasn’t there I guess. I don’t know.
I began putting my water in at 6.30 area and the calcuim deficiency problem disappeared. The pH in the runoff remained high but the soil always tested ok. I stopped testing the soil, and I have not tested the soil at all on this current grow. After the pH issue I had along with some other novice issues, that grow yeilded 19 ounces from 5 autos. Blew me away.
I’ve been pHing at around 6.30 this entire current grow and all my runoff pH readings this grow have been in the 7.50 range. I don’t know why this is but my plants are all healthy. I got an average of 2.5 oz (I’m ok with that) from each of the ladies I planted in 2 of the root balls of the previous Auto harvest I mentioned earlier and the other four are a couple weeks away from harvest and doing just as well.
One more note. The four ladies in my larger tent are a little lower on the high pH numbers than the 2 ladies I harvested a week ago from my smaller tent. I believe it is from the different organic top dress ammendments I’m using. On that note, if I top dress hotter one time than I did the last, the high pH numbers fluctuate …a lot. The more top dressing I add, the higher the pH in the runoff. Saw it go above 8.00 a couple times. Not so much with the other line of nutrient top dressings in the large tent. While the pH numbers in the runoff were high, they didn’t fluctuate as much as the other. I found that a curious obsevation.
Sorry to bend your ear (eyes) so long. If you throw a “pics, or it never happened” at me, I can provide, lol. It just takes me a little effor to get it done. Happy growing! 