First time grower desperate for help!! Is she experiencing nute deficiency or did I give her to much nutes?

Hey everyone!! This is my first grow. Alien Cherry Kush Autoflower on day 43. Week 2 of flower I believe. The smaller one is grown in a 2.5 gal with only FF happy frog and the taller one grown in a 5 gallon with only about 3 gallons of soil (super noob mistake) has a solo cup worth of happy frog and the rest being ocean forest. My temps have been around 77 degrees Fahrenheit and around 68 at night. RH has been between 50-65%. Watering schedule has been when they dry out and then giving them about a half gallon each. On Sunday I gave them 1/4 strength of what the recommended feeding schedule is for fox farms big bloom, tiger bloom, and cal mag bush doctor. Since then I have really started seeing these girls decline. One of the big fan leaves is turning brown in spots and starting to curl upward. I’m noticing yellowing starting from the top I believe and working its way down. I’m super new and I’m not sure if it’s Interveinal Chlorosis starting or if the whole leaf is yellowing. I feel like it could be a few things and I’m not sure. I was thinking either a Zinc, magnesium, or phosphorus deficiency but I’m really just struggling to identify and I don’t want to do further damage then I am doing. Do any of you have a clue at all what I have going on? I have posted this elsewhere and have had no responses. I’m starting to worry. If anyone could help me out here I would be grateful. Thanks for looking!

do you have a pH and PPM meter? Check runoff as well, when i have had issues and i check my runoff, usually itll show low ph and high ec.

you said you water it and then wait til they dry out. Has the soil become hydrophobic? I know when i used ffof, if it ever dried out, rehydrating it was a bitch; you’d pour water and it would go right out.

they look more overwatered than under from here tho.
the shorter one doesn’t look bad imo.

dwc420letsgo said:

do you have a pH and PPM meter? Check runoff as well, when i have had issues and i check my runoff, usually itll show low ph and high ec.

you said you water it and then wait til they dry out. Has the soil become hydrophobic? I know when i used ffof, if it ever dried out, rehydrating it was a bitch; you’d pour water and it would go right out.

they look more overwatered than under from here tho.
the shorter one doesn’t look bad imo.

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Yes I actually do have both!! I have an apera I think it’s called for a ph pen but I got some cheap ppm pen. Seems like it’s accurate then again i don’t really know. Also yes again the soil must be hydrophobic when I do that because that’s the impression I was getting. I was getting some run off from the taller one but I believe the shorter one was so dry that what I was getting from it was actually spillage and not run off. Usually I wait until the soil isn’t moist at the top 2 inches and then I stick a soil tester in there to see how dry it is at the bottom. I’m not sure how accurate they are though. If it’s the drooping that makes you think over watered it’s because these girls are supposed to be sleeping but I pulled them out real quick to get some natural light on them for a photo. They are autos so I felt like it would be alright. Hopefully I wasn’t wrong about that. What exactly makes you think overwatered though?

maybe try using some saponins when watering, it helps the water sort of stick to the soil. A tiny drop of dawn dish soap should do the trick when watering, but you can also get some quillaja extract from build a soil or from jay plantspeaker directly

Yeah, it's hard to keep too small pot properly moist, but not too dry.
Maybe you could try bottom feeding? Put the pots in a tote or so and water them from the bottom.
Especially those fabric pots could work nicely like that.
Maybe cover the top soil with something that blocks evaporating water like perlite, leca-clay pebbles or so.

Other than that they do look like they could use more nutes, specifically the PK, since she is starting to use it more now and already looks bit like deficiency. Of course the too small pot, with too little moist surface area where to pull the nutrients is also a big factor.

If ur gonna run small pots, try switching to coco, but that will require daily feedings, maybe multiple times per day so autowatering is the way.

In soil, i wouldn’t do less than 7 gal, heck, 15 gals should be perfect for one plant and comes with the benefit that you don’t have to water it as much.