Getting my hands dirty again!

That’s definitely not a virus, the leaves would me dark shiny and spinning. Too much growth to be dudded. What ya have there is an nutrient uptake problem. Which could very well be cold pots like dirt boy said. I don’t know anything of organic feeding so that part is out of my league.
Is the tent in the garage? Can’t remember if it was you or another member that was in the garage.
I just went back and looked a saw you are in the garage, get a space heater in there ASAP and get the temps into the 80’s until they really start growing.
I have my veg tent in the garage and if I don’t have the heater in there they all slowly start to die and get sick, and the more growth you get the the light isn’t hitting the bottom of the tent that is when it really starts to get your pots cold. I. Early lost 3-4 strains from my stable not paying attention in November and the mothers over grew while I was trimming. By the time I got in there and started pulling plants out they were all crashing very hard. Easy fix though.
I’d also get the pots off the ground.
 
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(to 180)
I just did a bit more Googling and you know what, there's a good chance this is an iron deficiency! It kind of matches. I don't know why it would be, because I'm using Ocean Forest and am only at the 6-week stage with it... plus I was supplementing lately as well with an occasional micronutrient application that contained iron. So it seems as strange as an N deficiency would (since I've been using fish and work castings tea), but who knows?

I do think I'm going to go to coco, in a flood table, with GH Maxi-Gro/Bloom after this one is over. I got carried away by the idea of the alchemy of living soil, but I don't seem to have the touch for it. I want to just fall back to what works without worrying. Plus, it will be nice I guess not to have to buy $300 worth of amendments, which is what I was going to do...
 
Variety said:
That’s definitely not a virus, the leaves would me dark shiny and spinning. Too much growth to be dudded. What ya have there is an nutrient uptake problem. Which could very well be cold pots like dirt boy said. I don’t know anything of organic feeding so that part is out of my league.
Is the tent in the garage? Can’t remember if it was you or another member that was in the garage.
I just went back and looked a saw you are in the garage, get a space heater in there ASAP and get the temps into the 80’s until they really start growing.
I have my veg tent in the garage and if I don’t have the heater in there they all slowly start to die and get sick, and the more growth you get the the light isn’t hitting the bottom of the tent that is when it really starts to get your pots cold. I. Early lost 3-4 strains from my stable not paying attention in November and the mothers over grew while I was trimming. By the time I got in there and started pulling plants out they were all crashing very hard. Easy fix though.
I’d also get the pots off the ground.
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Thanks Variety. I actually did get a space heater (in the garage just outside the tent), just a couple of days before they started looking like this. It was up around 76 most of the time. The pots on the floor thing confuses me because when I lift one up and feel the tent floor where it's sitting, it doesn't feel cold at all. It's like room temp. I got out a temp gun and measured... 64F, it said. But it felt much warmer than that to my palm. Would 64 be cold enough to cause things like this?? I guess I have to go cough up $40 for a sheet of styrofoam...

They're actually not stalled, they're growing... they're just turning weird colors and getting that tobacco mosaic virus look to quite a few of the leaves.

Anyway if it's not the HLV then I will try to finish them out. If you'd told me it looked like the viroid I would have axed them to start over. Thanks
 
Bush Dr said:
Looks a lot like LED light stress .....how high is the light?
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I agree, the yellowing looks exactly like the LED stress they got in the very beginning when I put the light too close and too powerful on the dimmer. But currently the light is up like 24" away and on 75% power. So it seems unlikely...?
 
Guymandude said:
i get that from time to time. I doubt its a virus, my friend. I would check temps, check the ph of the substrate and go from there.
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Thanks. I'm managing the temps as best I can. They're not too bad, only getting down to like 62 for an hour or two at the coldest part of the lights off period (5:00 to 7:00 a.m.) During lights on is ideal, 72-74F and 50% RH.
 
Dirtboy808 said:
How cold and dam are your pots. It looks to be unhappy roots. Maybe re-pot 1 and see what happens.
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Hey Dirtboy, well they're in fabric pots, so no repotting is in the cards. As I was saying in another reply, the room isn't really getting cold, but I do still have them directly on the floor but the floor is only getting like 64 at the coldest.

Hard to imagine unhappy roots in fabric pots, but I'm inclined to agree with you. They're not damp though, When I water them they seem to dry out a lot in just 48 hours. I'm letting them go 2 days in between fertigations.

I feel like I've lost all my instincts...
 
Reverend Budbreath said:
Hey Dirtboy, well they're in fabric pots, so no repotting is in the cards. As I was saying in another reply, the room isn't really getting cold, but I do still have them directly on the floor but the floor is only getting like 64 at the coldest.

Hard to imagine unhappy roots in fabric pots, but I'm inclined to agree with you. They're not damp though, When I water them they seem to dry out a lot in just 48 hours. I'm letting them go 2 days in between fertigations.

I feel like I've lost all my instincts...
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Just another bump in the grow road. You are fine.
 
i can;t use fabric pots here either. There's very little humidity here in the winter, and too much in the summer. So i let my pots dry out a little between watering/feeding, until they need to be fed/watered daily. They don't dry out all the way before i feed/water them, but i'm not drowning them any longer. it's made a big difference for me
 
Dirtboy808 said:
Just another bump in the grow road. You are fine.
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Thanks man. It appears you're right about this. Tonight, they look much better. A couple days ago I was thinking they were going to start dying. Now, I'm realizing how resilient they are.

I find soil so much more mysterious than hydro/coco... that's part of what appeals to me about it too, but there's a level of uncertainty that might start getting on my nerves. I might want to go with a tried-and-true way just to start getting some harvests in without problems.

I've been using really good beneficials the whole time, and have been believing that they were like "insurance" that was going to make everything work great, but I see it's not necessarily like that.
 
Guymandude said:
i can;t use fabric pots here either. There's very little humidity here in the winter, and too much in the summer. So i let my pots dry out a little between watering/feeding, until they need to be fed/watered daily. They don't dry out all the way before i feed/water them, but i'm not drowning them any longer. it's made a big difference for me
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Do you suppose that my running a dehumidifier in the tent is stressing them out since they're in fabric pots? I could probably get away without it right now. It's holding RH down to an ideal range of like 49-53F, but if I turned it off it would probably only go up to about 70% at the worst, and be around 60% most of the time; I'm so early in flowering that there aren't any buds forming yet at all. I could probably leave it off for the next 2 weeks as long as there's no rain.
 
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That dehumidifier may not be necessary in early flower but you'll probably want it later. Also, dehumidifiers put out some heat, so that is probably helping warm the tent.
 
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Reverend Budbreath said:
Do you suppose that my running a dehumidifier in the tent is stressing them out since they're in fabric pots? I could probably get away without it right now. It's holding RH down to an ideal range of like 49-53F, but if I turned it off it would probably only go up to about 70% at the worst, and be around 60% most of the time; I'm so early in flowering that there aren't any buds forming yet at all. I could probably leave it off for the next 2 weeks as long as there's no rain.
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180 said:
That dehumidifier may not be necessary in early flower but you'll probably want it later. Also, dehumidifiers put out some heat, so that is probably helping warm the tent.
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what 180 said.
 
Day 30 flowering (Strawberry Banana)

Hi guys, sorry for the big gap in reporting. I thought I'd update with a day 30 flowering shot.

They're doing quite okay, and the only problem really is that these turned out to be "pygmies" with very little stretch, so the yield is going to be much smaller than I'd hoped since the vertical space is 70% unused. I flipped them at about 20"-22" because the description of the strain states that it's "a medium bush" and I was worried about running out of vertical space. Um, no... wrong. They should have said it is a "short, squat bush." Had they said that, I would have vegged them to 36"!! Oh well. It's going to be nice stuff, just way less of it than I hoped for. Lesson learned (again). This is the kind of thing that has happened a lot when I try to use dispensary clones. Next grows are from seeds.

Now that they're halfway into flowering I can tell what the terpene profile is like... that nice candy sweet indica smell that we've all encountered a hundred times. Nothing unique, but I'm not complaining!

I'm pretty sure that what I was interpreting earlier as nutrient problems actually turned out to be an effect of the LED being too close. "LED light shock," which mimics nutrient deficiencies very closely. I didn't know that was a problem with LEDs and plants in veg. I know now. But because I believed that my organic approach was about to go off the rails, I reverted to using salt nutes (GH Maxi-Gro/Bloom) so I could finish without problems. I don't mind, because in the process I realized I don't want to manage all the factors of the amendments and all that. From here I'm going to get a 4x4 flood table and grow in coco. I basically chickened out on the organics. But it's fine.

Strawberry-Banana-tent-grow-2-7-21-day-30-flowering(resized).jpg
 
They look good, Rev. The lack of stretch might be due to low temps and the LED spectrum. The warmer the environment and the redder the light, the more stretch you will see. Most "white" LED fixtures seem to be a combo of warm and cool white LED diodes. That extra blue in the spectrum (as compared to HPS) really affects how much they stretch.
 
They really pulled through for you RBB! That is awesome! I probably would have made the same call switching to bottle nutes. I know the organic soil can be very easy when you know what your doing but man I’m scared to make the jump lol
 
All in all, it's turning out to be a good grow to get my feet wet again. A couple of mishaps, some good advice from you all, a realization or two and then a decent harvest. Yeah, I think it'll be alright.

I'm already having olfactory ecstasy when I smell their terps since they're so fresh and complex, whereas all this dispensary weed I've been getting is the opposite. I thought of a great analogy the other day: buying dispensary weed is like buying 4-day old bread as opposed to getting it fresh out of the oven.
 
180 said:
They look good, Rev. The lack of stretch might be due to low temps and the LED spectrum. The warmer the environment and the redder the light, the more stretch you will see. Most "white" LED fixtures seem to be a combo of warm and cool white LED diodes. That extra blue in the spectrum (as compared to HPS) really affects how much they stretch.
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Glad to hear you say that, because it bodes well for when I go to grow varieties that I'm worried might hit the ceiling. Perhaps they won't! Plus I'm going to a 4x4 flood and drain system, which will take up at least another 18" or whatever of the vertical space.

Like I have some seeds of that Dr. Grinspoon, which I've been almost too scared to run because I was sure it would be too much. But now I feel like it might be manageable. And the strain I'm thinking of running next, "Hot Mess," which is a Trainwreck/Gorilla Glue mix just might not do anything crazy.
 
Variety said:
They really pulled through for you RBB! That is awesome! I probably would have made the same call switching to bottle nutes. I know the organic soil can be very easy when you know what your doing but man I’m scared to make the jump lol
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Yeah I think I was being a little ambitious there, heh. My buddy Pistilwhipt—he's pretty famous with some around here—he was urging me to do it. Like me, he thought when they were turning yellow colors that the soil was way off and that it was headed for disaster. Like I said, I now suspect that the LED light shock faked us out. But I realize I'm happy to just do it with salt nutes and that maybe I don't want the huge soil amendment project right now, since I lost morale so easily.
 
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