Is it soil or soilless mix?
What's the difference?
This should not happen, its clear DTW. Coco you water daily with nuts (never plain) to regular runoff which is being removed = Drain To Waste unless you are running recilcular.
Soil is living and you do not care about pH since its microbe’s job. You ussually feed by top dressing or amending it before grow. Soillless is consider to be Hydroponics. Ussually its peat or coco based with perlite, vermi and DL. What I understand is to treat both like hydro. I grow in soilless peat based, that allows me to treat it partialy as a soil. I do not pH at all and water when its dried. When go plain water than there is no runoff and when feed than I aim around 25% runoff or more depends on its EC. When you grow in coco based I think this treatment is not possible. Actually I do not understand why its considered to be hydro but this works for me just fine. Perlite wont change pH but you should wash it before you add it to your mix...
You got pics and 0-20-0 guano poisoning in another thread below, don't worry about the PH out.
Kinda but also pH range is different. They thrive in pH of 5,5 as well... my soilless mix can support plants for like 5 weeks before it asks for the snack. So there can be differences between soilless mixes. Promix declares 0,2 EC (I think), mine is around 1,2 so quite big difference. I also feel difference between coco and peat based, since peat can be consider as organic matter which can act as buffer...
Do you have a EC meter?
Why wash perlite though? Maybe that's what I was doing wrong so far as I always added like 20% perlite (unwashed) to my soilless mix (eg. Biobizz Light Mix), but had all kind of issues, feeding/not feeding, always some wicked PH fluctuations, even though water in was always 6.4...
I don’t have an ec meter but will look into getting one today. I haven’t flushed yet but will be doing today. And I don’t think it would be calcium deficiency considering I just started using the guano and Gaia green all purpose which is giving it way more calcium than she has had during her life span. So I should be using the same ph water as the soil? My tap water comes out slightly alkaline at 8-8.5. So I will have to get lime or something to bring it down if so.
so I just finished flushing and whatever’s going wrong is affecting the soils ph. The runoff now reads 5.05 ph when it was previously 6. The ph I water with has been a consistent 8.75 or so. Very confused at how soils ph doesn’t raise when using significantly higher ph. I couldn’t raise it before and now that it’s at 5 I definitely need to raise it and I don’t know how since my previous efforts went to nothing. Do I continue to use my tap water at 8.50 or so or do I bring the ph I water with down to 5 as well? Thanks for any input I appreciate it. I’m definitely an amateur this is only my second grow.
DON'T FEED 8.75 PH WATER!!!! Even in soil you are hurting your microbes by giving it that high of ph.
my miracle grow potting mix technically isn’t soil? So should I be using 6.5 from now on even tho it’s down to 5? Do I even attempt to raise it or just lower to 6.5 from now on and hope for the best?