• Plant Help
  • Live Buffering coco coir with cannabis plant

I'm doing something pretty silly, but I'm actually super excited to see what happens.

Grow School: more info on growing cannabis in coco

A week back I noticed signs of deficiency, with reasonable confidence it's magnesium specifically. My growing medium of coir is notorious for it's tendency to 'steal' Calcium and Magnesium from plants. CocoForCannabis.com is a great resource for the exact science behind coir's behavior, and more importantly how we can buffer the medium to force the swapping existing salts for a heavy dose of calmag that bonds better to the coir, and prevents it from stealing any from your nutes.

Anyway I thought I done did a good job buffering before I read the aforementioned book site (free on kindle unlimited!) turns out my calmag flush's dose was way too low, and way too short.

So, sad plants, but already weeks in, what do we do?

The symptoms are now emerging on all the plants in this batch of coir, increasing calmag feed over the week seems to have slowed spread, but not stopped it.

F! it, we'll live buffer.

I created some ph'ed water with ~150% (7ml/gal) calmag dose, cocoforcannabis says 100% is fine, but they use an 8 hour soak. (I am reasonably confident soaking plant in that much salt for 8 hours would kill it). So i'm aiming for a slightly higher concentrate and shorter duration for the cation exchange sites to swap salts without the plant loosing all her water to the super salty concentrate.

I soaked it for 2 hours, as you see in the photo. After that I set it on riser to drain thoroughly before returning to the autopot for regular fertigation.

expatgrows - You may be right, I hope you're wrong.

I let it drain out all night, and this morning (4 hours of light so far) and she's doing OK, too early to see correction or worsening. (i want to think I see less purple/red but I might just be too optimistic)

Day 2, I think it's doing well. Leaves seem much perkier, stems have lifted, no real change in color.

So based on minimal death 😆 I grabbed a few more and gave them a bath too.

6 days later

1 Week Later...

Oh my gosh this turns out to be a great idea. I soaked 3 of 6, and all of them show marked improvement.

5 days later
13 days later

expatgrows

you def just killed your plants

Any comments? 😛

I'm only teasing but super happy to see how these girls have been thriving since the bath. It is not something I am 100% convinced was the right move that saved this batch.

    18 days later

    Based on the last update it sure did 🤣 - I need to get me some seeds!