Outdoor Potted garden showing some signs of trouble just before flower

Hey guys, I am trying my hand at an outdoor garden this summer, I am about 13 weeks from seed. One plant is in a 20 gallon plastic container, and one in a 30 gallon fabric. As you can see from my pictures, the lower growth is showing signs of distress with leaves curling up yellow and brown.

I am trying to almost treat them like a hydro grow, and Im not sure if that is biting me in the ass. I water twice a day now, water source is a rain water resevoir that I mix my GH flora series nutes and ph in. Plant medium is promix hp with no ammendments.

Do you think I have a current problem with what the plants are seeing, or because the upper growth looks quite healthy green it was maybe something I did to them when they were younger? I topped them just like I do my girls indoors, as you can see I am trying to make them quite bushy and short to be discreet

I am on the fence as they are about to flip to flower if I should continue trying to mix a fresh resevoir of GH liquid fertilizer every week or if I should try a generic "shake and feed" type fertilizer, and simply water them with straight PH'd rain water, and let the granual nutrients do there work.

What do you suggest? I feel I must have something cock eyed in my program

I dont have experience with granule fertilizer but I've been using megacrop and the plants are coming along great. I had some yellowing bottom leaves so I increased the amount and they are fine now, hopefully they start flowering any day now..

I would pull the dead leaves off to spare a little energy from those areas.
Watering twice a day? I would stop doing that too. Sometimes my garden floods in early veg and the lower leaves end up drowning as a result. Let the soil dry out a couple of days. Sometimes drainage becomes an issue with overwatering. Create some cracks in the soil to ensure proper drainage.

I personally use a Big Bloom/Tiger Bloom combo for feeding my girls. 2x a week during flower. I let the rain serve as my watering period between feeds, unless we are dry and I have to water myself.

Rain is your friend outside.

Because my plants are in pots and not in the ground and even elevated 1" off the ground for air flow I dont think the rain alone my plant would catch would be sufficient.

The canopy of my plants is also wider than the pot.

I know the 2x per day waterring seems odd for outdoors, but I was more trying to treat them like hydro and get large plants outdoors with relatviely small pots, the plants are about 50" from bottom of stem today in these photos

I was also unsure if I should even get rid of the lower spotty growth if the leaf stems are still holding on. If I were to trim off the "ugly" wouldnt the plant likely start doing the same to the lowest growth soon after rather than if I were to just leave it

TurboTokes said:

I was also unsure if I should even get rid of the lower spotty growth if the leaf stems are still holding on. If I were to trim off the "ugly" wouldnt the plant likely start doing the same to the lowest growth soon after rather than if I were to just leave it

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I clip yellowing leaves in my garden all the time. Cannabis to tomatoes.
Remember outdoors=sun=optimum plant recovery from any stress.
Forget your hydro experience where you control all variables. Here, all you are controlling is medium in a pot. No different from me controlling my medium in-ground. The sun you are getting now, outdoors, is a variable you will never replicate indoors. Let it work for you more would be my advice. Still maintain your soil, but let the sun drive it more than water at this point of the game.

Yellowing on mature lower leaves is usually caused by N deficiency. Nitrogen is a mobile nutrient and the plant will scavenge older leaves for the nutrient if it isn't available from the medium. How much fertilizer are you feeding?

The sun certainly is a huge variable, they get alot of sun in this spot, about 11 hours direct.

I am feeding them about 700ppms. I use 2ml grow, 1.5ml micro, 1ml bloom, 1 ml cal mag per gallon of rainwater. I mix about 20 gallons at a time, it only takes about 10 drops of ph down to bring the solution from 7.0 to 6.0

if the plants were just yellowing I would assume a lack of N, but the weird brown spots has me thinking it may be something else.

They are transitioning to flower right now though.