I going to guess you started the seeds in the 5g pots? This is your problem.
I start with 16-20oz pots , then #1 then #2 then #3 then 10gallons .
Story time...
I started in red solo cups. I read that if the roots come out from the bottom of the cups, then it’s time to transplant to something bigger. Everything I was reading was saying that it should take about 2 weeks to reach out through the bottom of the cup.
My original thought was to go from red solo to 3 Gal to 5 Gal. Unfortunately me being new to growing and being a noob and panicked, at day 6, I saw roots were already coming out of the cup! I freaked out because I did not have enough soil on hand because I did not expect roots to come out of the bottom so soon. It had to be 2 days before my local grow store opened up before I could buy more soil.
At the time I was using fox far light warrior for the little plants. Once I saw the roots coming out of the bottom, I panicked and transplanted from red solo cup to 3 Gal, but only to find out that I did not have enough soil for the 3 Gal. It only filled up about half way. So I transplanted into the half filled 3 Gal smart pots. Once the store opened I went to get soil. Being my first grow and reading on forums, I heard people liked to use fox farm ocean forest and happy frog, so I said Fuck it and bought both and mixed them together with the light warrior.
Once I started filling up the 5 Gal smart pots then went to transplant the half filled 3 Gal, I noticed how the root system seemed not very strong and seemed week, so right then I already knew I jumped the gun and messed up by transplanting too early. So I basically transplanted twice within 2 days (learned my lesson).
I knew I had probably stunted the growth on them pretty badly. After that I pretty much backed away from trying to baby them too much. A few weeks go by and everything seems to be doing good except for the size. Still pretty sure for their age. So time goes by and we get to week 6-7 and the plants are about 9-12 inches. Normally I would water the plants with run off about every 3-4 days. During this week time frame, I increased the wattage on my mh from 600 to 1000w. Not even considering that the plant is getting bigger and needs more water and the light might be drying them out faster,
So day 3-4 come around and I see the plants dropping pretty bad, so i sit back and watch and try not to freak out like I did with the transplant misstake I did. So I let it go 1 full day and 1 full night of being slumped.
And still seeing them slumped, I was like maybe I should just water them, so I did. But I didn’t do a full watering because I was still trying to hold back from underwatering them or babying then too much. After a few hours of watering, they perked up a little bit, so that’s when I realized that they were probably under watered. So after a couple days passed, I did a regular water and they seemed to be over watered, which is kinda why I created this post because I HATE seeing my plants not healthy. I put about a couple weeks planning and figuring out which equipment I wanted to go with etc. I went with soils because I heard it was more forgiving with new growers. And now I’m here.
The last 7 days I’ve been trying to get these plants back to good health to where they are nice and perky again and not looking tired or over watered.
