Our
friends at Advanced Nutrition (
i'm being facetious, here, so please, no flaming. ) has a good article on soil/nutrition lockout and well worth reading.
I would venture a guess that this issue is more prevalent in pots, as with pots the water drains out very quickly, so the plant has a small window in which to absorb the water and nutrients/salts, where in the ground the soil stays moist, plus there's other surrounding plants and weeds and bactira and such that can eat-up the surplus. Anything that the plant cannot absorb, in that short period of time, would start accumulating in das soil, and over time, would build up to the point where the soil becomes saturated. At this point, you either have a PH imbalance, or the soil is just so over-saturated with nutrients that the plant is just choking and can no longer absorb anything.
Also, in pots you have an tendency to overfeed. I notice this too with my garden plants. If they're in the soil, I rarely feed them. If they're in a pot, I feel sorry for them for some reason and tend to think that they're not getting enough nutrition, so i end up feeding them a lot more often. I can just imagine how i'll feel next year when I plan on test growing a couple of cannabis plants in outdoor pots. I already have an advanced, complicated spreadsheet for my Bloom feeding regime. I therefore can't wait to see how bad i'll get with my Vegetative feeding schedule for the pots.
I've never grown cannabis in pots, so I don't know. However, i have grown hundreds of garden plants in pots over the last 40+ years, and I've never had this or any problems with them (other than aphids and slugs, etc. - nothing that Neem oil can't fix). The only difference being is that all these plants I've grown were
Not smokable, and therefore i'm not feeding the crap out of them every 2 days in order to increase their potency. lmao
PS If you think you're under feeding you plant (and therefore low in nitrogen), and you add more nitrogen, then you've just F'd up your plant and exacerbated the problem. If you therefore flush the hell out of your plant with water (making sure the soil is draining completely out, and not being held by a dish under the pot), several times a day for 3-4 days, you got nothing to loose, as this will not harm the plant. Then don't water or feed and see what happens (by don't water, i mean let the soil dry completely out before the next watering - yes, plants will survive when the soil is dry for a couple of days
). It may take a couple of weeks for the plant to recover. And don't panic and freak-out that you're not feeding your plant. millions of years of evolution has proven that plants can survive when they're not being fed by humans. : P
PS See my posts on
Composting [
Forums>
The Grow Room>
General Marijuana Growing>Do It Yourself], where leaf compost added to your soil balances the soil with slow release nutrients, and buffers and balances PH levels below 7, which is ideal. You can then relax and start feeding you plants once or every other week and not have to worry about missing your daily feed.