mellokitty
Moderatrix of Journals
am i the only one who caught this? what sort of compost? did you give it to your plants, or did you amend your soil with it 3 wks before they went in it? if it was too "hot", 3 weeks isn't going to have been long enough for that to correct itself.... did you ph after you amended? also: in the same sense that ff is too strong for seedlings, you may just have given them too much N with the compost, too, depending.
ultimately, you have to ask yourself how you're failing at mimicking nature. the 4 factors are medium, water, light and air.
let's start with medium: personally i disagree with the baking of potting soil/soilless mix - it's 80+% sphagnum. i think it's one of those practises best left to the veterans. there's probably a very fine, almost instinctual, line you don't want to cross.
sphagnum has a high tannin content (the stuff that makes coffee and tea black and bitter). we've all seen from making our morning tea and coffee what a bit of moisture and heat can do to the tannin content of those 2 things, why would it be any different with sphagnum moss? (instead of simultaneous heat and moisture, you have heat to activate, *followed by moisture to dissipate it, same shit different pile right?) which would go with the "you probably killed off all your beneficials" theory. further (from wiki, because i'd forgotten exactly how this works): " Peat moss can also acidify its surroundings by taking up cations such as calcium and magnesium and releasing hydrogen ions." (<- if it does this in the state it's sold in, don't you think heating it up would encourage this process?) (this would also go with the lockout theory above too, no?)
the long and short is you're acidifying your mix not once but twice by heating it. (again, i'm not saying this isn't possible because i've read about people doing that on riu too, but safe to assume they know what to look for whilst doing this...)
sphagnum has natural antiseptic qualities; microbes of all sorts have a hard enough time living in it. it was one of the closest things they had to antibiotics, before antibiotics. don't make it any harder for them.
(promix hp, for instance, has added mycorrhizae, which probably wouldn't survive a baking at those temps.)
if you're concerned about bugs and want to do something pre-emptive, mix some diatomaceous earth into your mix, it's cheap, safe for humans (some people ingest the food-grade stuff to treat intestinal parasites), and it kills softbodied larvae (which is most pests we encounter in our endeavours), and leaves the single-cell bennies alone.
onto water: when i started growing r/o was still some pretty damn expensive tech... almost everybody (including the world-famous pros that live here) used their tap/well water (most people using straight tap let it sit overnight) and a lot of them still do; rainwater isn't distilled (well it is but it acquires all sorts of impurities on its way down) or r/o, and cannabis has grown just fine for 1000s of years. unless you're dealing with super-hard or high-ppm water already, i doubt that that's your problem.
light: tbh, at this stage, they just want *something. obviously an optimal spectrum at this point would be, well, optimal, but if you think about it, cannabis is an annual. its sprouts come up in spring, long before that rich, strong, summer sun. and for forest-dwelling cannabis, they're fighting against a tree canopy for direct sunlight to boot. as far as wee babies go, unless you're full-on light-starving them, or have them under something that deprives them of a specific necessary colour (which it doesn't sound like), light is less important that medium and water.
air: ventilation is very important. in the 90s i had the occasion to meet (and pick the brains of) all sorts of folks that are pothead household names now, and when you ask most of them what the most important aspect of growing is, they all said that the first 3 rules should be to have good air exchange; this applies to all stages of plant life. that said, (and i'm not implying that you are) you don't want wind blowing right on your babies. a *leetle bit of swaying motion will actually serve to strengthen the main stalk but you don't want them whippin around in the wind.
good luck!! this may not help right at the moment, but i've helped all sorts of newbies-to-gardening over the years, and i've found that the ones whose first tries don't go perfectly usually end up becoming better growers in the long run, because that first failure opens their minds to learning instead of cementing the "my way or the highway" philosophy in their minds. (my first real grow actually went pretty well, and i fully admit to having been a knowitall grower back then, but when i eventually fell from olympus it was a *Hard *Fall from grace.....)
