Run Off pH Is Ridiculous...

I'm a new grower and I haven't really messed with my soils ph yet, mainly because I haven't had to. I'm using fox farms, happy frog and worm castings so when I do a ph check, it's 6.8-7.0. I haven't started using nutes yet either. Our city water is awesome.

Dubbz0r said:

I'm a new grower and I haven't really messed with my soils ph yet, mainly because I haven't had to. I'm using fox farms, happy frog and worm castings so when I do a ph check, it's 6.8-7.0. I haven't started using nutes yet either. Our city water is awesome.

Click to expand...

Worm castings are your best friend in container growing. They have a wonderful ability to buffer your mediums pH and keep in in check so you dont have too.

if your plants are not in optimal conditions you will never achieve OPTIMAL yields or potency. this isnt even a debatable topic, and is bad info for new growers

Our tap water is close to 7 out of the tap, so I only adjust when adding nutrients to get it back up to 6.5-7.

All the grow shop folks I've talked to say runoff doesnt really matter, it's all about what you put in

here's my expirence with growing. my very first grow i bought a bag of mg potting soil mix and had a small hand full of beans, had some great looking plants but they wouldn't bud because i didn't know about light schuduling. that's when i found riu and bought into the idea that i needed expensive soils and nutes, ph and ec meters, water filters and all the other bells and whistles to be able to grow a plant. had all kinds of problems because i was trying to make things way to complicated. here it is a few years later and all my toys for growing are collecting dust. i draw my water straight out of the tap and water with this or mix with mg nutes when the plants need feeding. i'd like to think my plants are just as nice as the best growers on here. you just have to find what works for you, keeping it as simple as possible works for me.

Thats pretty much my point Kevin They say I am spreading bad info. But I have yet to say 'pH does not matter'. Telling noobs to "read runoff, dump gallons of pHed water through their pots to adjust pH, which does nothing to adjust a mediums pH other than maybe flushing some built up salts out. Telling them its normal for them to lose foliage during flower. They need to flush the chemicals out of the plant. The list is endless". That in my opinion is the bad info, nothing but ghetto bullshit myths. A new grower needs to learn good watering habits, proper plant nutrition and how to light and thats exactly what I am going to share here once the so called experts are finished spouting off. Do these things and grow a healthy root system and foliage, big buds will follow. As far as the so called 'optimal conditions' I doubt very seriously any such 'optimal condition' exists in nature. Yet the plants adapt and thrive, go figure. And how many of you that endlessly chase pH consistantly yield 1+ grams per watt?

I think pH testing is for Hydro only. As long as you don't do anything to fuck up your soil and it has some kind of buffer in it pHing is unnecessary and can be the very thing to fuck up your soil!

EDIT: I love the people who use pH corrected water for clones and to flush their medium...do they even know why pH is important like?!

Yet another wise one that gets it. Even in hydro though those that adjust pH twice a day to keep it spot 5.8 are kicking themselves in the bag. Start it at 5.7-5.8 and allow it to drift to around 6.3-6.4 and then adjust back to 5.7-5.8. This method will assure all nutrients are availible to the plant. Plus you spend less on adjusting agents and over use of adjusting agents can cause issues also......

Harrekin said:

I think pH testing is for Hydro only. As long as you don't do anything to fuck up your soil and it has some kind of buffer in it pHing is unnecessary and can be the very thing to fuck up your soil!

EDIT: I love the people who use pH corrected water for clones and to flush their medium...do they even know why pH is important like?!

Click to expand...

Wow more bad info. Please just stop. All you have to do is look at the chart posted earlier to know that your statement is ignorant and quite dumb.

Harrekin said:

I think pH testing is for Hydro only. As long as you don't do anything to fuck up your soil and it has some kind of buffer in it pHing is unnecessary and can be the very thing to fuck up your soil!

EDIT: I love the people who use pH corrected water for clones and to flush their medium...do they even know why pH is important like?!

Click to expand...

On the contrary, just somebody that gets it and is not spreading bad info...

watchhowIdoit said:

Thats pretty much my point Kevin They say I am spreading bad info. But I have yet to say 'pH does not matter'. Telling noobs to "read runoff, dump gallons of pHed water through their pots to adjust pH, which does nothing to adjust a mediums pH other than maybe flushing some built up salts out. Telling them its normal for them to lose foliage during flower. They need to flush the chemicals out of the plant. The list is endless". That in my opinion is the bad info, nothing but ghetto bullshit myths. A new grower needs to learn good watering habits, proper plant nutrition and how to light and thats exactly what I am going to share here once the so called experts are finished spouting off. Do these things and grow a healthy root system and foliage, big buds will follow. As far as the so called 'optimal conditions' I doubt very seriously any such 'optimal condition' exists in nature. Yet the plants adapt and thrive, go figure. And how many of you that endlessly chase pH consistantly yield 1+ grams per watt?

Click to expand...

yes they adapt and thrive in nonoptimal conditions, but thats completely irrelevant. If a plant experiences 100% optimal conditions in the wild it will no longer adapt. regardless, a plant 'thriving' is not the same thing as achieving peak performance. i have never come across a wild cannabis plant that would compare to anything even a rookie would pull from an overheated closet. sure the genetics may be present, but the care and optimal conditions are not. or the case of a rookie sub-optimal is still doing better than a 'thriving' wild plant.

watchhowIdoit said:

Yet another wise one that gets it. Even in hydro though those that adjust pH twice a day to keep it spot 5.8 are kicking themselves in the bag. Start it at 5.7-5.8 and allow it to drift to around 6.3-6.4 and then adjust back to 5.7-5.8. This method will assure all nutrients are availible to the plant. Plus you spend less on adjusting agents and over use of adjusting agents can cause issues also......

Click to expand...

Oay, okay I was just starting to come artound and see that you are just saying relax, let the pl,ants do there thing----i totally get that, people mind fuk shit constatntly until they fuck it up,.........however this last statement may be a little much and Harekin's post is pretty terrible too. what's up with that edit?

who on here actually has any hydro and dirt experience, raise your hand.... See infront of the plants? those are try meters, they make my life a lot easier, fuck the water testing drops, they are not nearly accurate enough.

watchhowIdoit said:

On the contrary, just somebody that gets it and is not spreading bad info...

Click to expand...

The problem is, you are just with the instant internet experts.

This shit is so pervasive, that after 35+ years of growing stuff and having my own (small) orchid/rare fern nursery, I was convinced I *had* to have a pH meter.

Now, it mostly sits in the box, only used to check when my AEM is done.

Everything improved dramatically once I just started treating mj like the rest of the plants I grow.

pH does matter, but once you have your soil or mix right, limed/buffered and the micro herd happy, THAT takes care of pH matters. I dump everything from very low pH teas, to very high pH silica supplements on the plants and they, or the soil rather, take it all in stride.

IDK, maybe it just takes a while and experience to get where kevin is and discover that there really is an *Easy* button for growing. Perhaps not easy so much as uncomplicated.

Wet

of course it goes without saying once you know your methods are sound you wont have to check the ph as much but really.... we're talking about a pretty short and easy step in the grand scheme of things. the best defense against any potential problems is prevention.

I'm looking at the poll options, I don't see "asshole" as a choice!!

Kidding!

obijohn said:

I'm looking at the poll options, I don't see "asshole" as a choice!!

Kidding!

Click to expand...

The wife usually has that option covered.

Wet

PH does matter if you want the plant to perform at it's very best. If you don't give a shit, and as long as you get some bud from your plant you're happy, then by all means, don't PH anything.

Do I PH the water I put on my tomatoes, peppers, or basil? No, but then again those plants are legal and didn't cost an arm and a leg to get seeds for. If they go a little south or don't produce very much, who cares? I'll just plant more seeds or grow more plants. Due to the risk involved with marijuana, if I'm going to do it, you can bet your sweet ass I'm going to get the best results possible. I'm in it to win it. I guaran-fuckin-tee that.

I cant get my soil runoff down past 7.5 pH no matter how much I water with 6.5 pH water. I've just learned to ignore runoff, maybe I added too much dolomite lime.

Stomata said:

PH does matter if you want the plant to perform at it's very best. If you don't give a shit, and as long as you get some bud from your plant you're happy, then by all means, don't PH anything.

Do I PH the water I put on my tomatoes, peppers, or basil? No, but then again those plants are legal and didn't cost an arm and a leg to get seeds for. If they go a little south or don't produce very much, who cares? I'll just plant more seeds or grow more plants. Due to the risk involved with marijuana, if I'm going to do it, you can bet your sweet ass I'm going to get the best results possible. I'm in it to win it. I guaran-fuckin-tee that.

Click to expand...

Hehe. People can call me ridiculous if they want but I even ph my solution for the herb garden

I raised my hand, have experience in most mediums used for growing, indoors and out.
And I do not mean once you get things tuned in. I am speaking about taking a simple, reasonable approach to growing, first grow or your 1000th. Learn to read your plants, not a meter. And learning to read your plants you will learn how to feed your plants, depending on what your eyes and common sense tells you, not following what a meter reads. Healthy plants, with a vigorous root system and healthy green foliage grow quality buds, not pushing so many nutes down the plants throat so you need meters to keep up with things. Most meters the home grower uses has a +/- of .2 anyways, that alone constitutes a range of .5 from what it reads, so all most of you are doing is keeping it in range anyways. The chart has been brought up many times now. And again I will say look how bold those lines are on the soil side from under 6 to over 8. And do you all think each 10th on the meter is just a tenth? Well its not, more like each tenth is a factor of 100. I am pretty certain most of you actually have no clue what pH is other than being a number. So heres a little copy/paste read to get you started.....


[SIZE=+2]Definition of pH, pOH, "p", sample calculations[/SIZE]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]General [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The acid potential of aqueous solutions is measured in terms of the pH scale. The symbol "p" means take the negative logarithm of whatever follows in the formula. for pH, pOH, p[anything] . The pH scale is intended to be a convenience. Tremendous swings in hydrogen ion (hydronium ion) concentration occur in water when acids or bases are mixed with water. These changes can be as big as 1 x 1014, This means concentrations can change by multiples as big as one hundred trillion, 100,000,000,000,000. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The pH scale is a logarithmic scale. Every multiple of ten in H1+ concentration equals one unit on the logarithm scale. Physically the pH is intended to tell what the acid "potential" is for a solution. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In a sense the system is INVERTED so a low pH value indicates a great acid potential while a high pH indicates a low acid potential. ( Sad but true this is upside down and counter intuitive.) The pH values range from negative values to number above 14. Commonly the scale is often misrepresented as ranging from 0 to 14. We will see that negative values are possible. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]

[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Definition of pH, pOH, pKw, pKa, pKb [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The p" factor" is defined as the log of the whatever quantity that follows the symbol. The "p" is an operator. It communicates the instruction to calculate the negative log of any quantity that follows the symbol. The definition of pH in equation form is [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = -log[H1+] where [H1+] means the molar concentration of hydronium ions, M = moles / liter[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]This allows the definition of the following series of quantities.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pOH = -log[OH-][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]the negative log of the hydroxide ion molarity[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pKw = -log Kw[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]the negative log of the water ion product , Kw[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pKa = -log Ka [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]the negative log of the acid dissociation constant, Ka[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pKb = -log Kb [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]the negative log of the base dissociation constant, Kb[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The relationship pH + pOH = 14 [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In a water solution the ion product for water is: [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][H+] [OH-] = Kw = 1 X 10-14 [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Take the -log of both sides of the equation[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]- log [H+] +(- log [OH- ]) = - log [1 X 10-14 ][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH + pOH = 14[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Calculations of pH [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]For strong acids like HCl the molar concentrations are essentially the hydronium ion concentration. These strong acids can produce solutions where the pH can be equal to or less than 1, the pH value would have a value from 0-14. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Example: Determination of pH from [H3O+] [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]What is the pH of a solution whose [H3O+] = 1 X 10-4 M [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = -log[H3O+][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - log[1 X 10-4] [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - [ log 1 + log 10-4 ] [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Note: When you multiply numbers you always ADD their log forms [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]log 1 is always zero [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]log 10x = x [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]so log 10-4 = -4[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - [ log 1 + log 10-4 ] = - [ 0 + (-4) ] = - [-4 ] = +4[/FONT]

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Example: Determination of pH from [H3O+] when coefficient is other than "1"[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]What is the pH of a solution whose [H3O+] = 2.5 X 10 -5 M[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = -log[H3O+][/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - log[2.5 X 10 -5] [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - [ log 2.5 + log 10-5 ] [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Note: When you multiply numbers you always ADD their log forms [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]log 10x = x [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]so log 10-5 = -5[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]log 2.5 can be determined using a calculator having the log function key: [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Enter the number in this case 2.5 [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]depress the log key [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Read the display which should be .3979 for this problem[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = - [.3979 - 5] = 4.6021 or +4.602[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Alternately if you can enter a number in scientific notation into your calculator key in 2.5 X 10 -5[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]depress the log key [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Read the display which should be -4.602 for this problem[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Multiply by -1 to get + 4.602 [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Example: Determination of pH from [OH1- ] using defintion pOH and equation pH + pOH = 14[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Calculate the pH of a solution that has a [OH1-] = 1 X 10-5 M [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Determine pOH = -log[OH1- ] = -log [1 X 10-5 ] = 5[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Use the relationship pH + pOH = 14[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH + 5 = 14[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]pH = 14 -5 = 9[/FONT]