I followed botanicare's recipe for seedlings. I fed my plants around 600ppm of ph6.3 food, and as I mentioned in my first post, they are looking overfed. I did a runoff test on 3 plants the day before yesterday, and they came out:

plant 1 ph5, and 1600ppm
plant 2 ph4.9 and 1000ppm
plant 3 ph5 and 1170ppm

this is CRAZY! wtf? How is this possible?

each 1 gallon pot received 500ml of the food water, as this was how much they took to moisten all the way to the bottom. How the %$&@ did my ppm rise so high, and why is the ph so low? My plants are overfed. They are growing fast, but there are rust spots on some of the lower leaves, and the new growth and many of the upper fan leaves have curled up leaf fringes and distorted leaf growth... This sucks.

So it would seem that 600ppm of botanicare breaks down/converts into way more ppm in the soil, bringing the ph of the soil way down, probably locking out some nutrients.

So in response, I watered half the garden with only 350mL ph6.8 water, and the second half with 1L of ph6.9 water. I have to get the ppm down. I will flush the first half tonight (I ran out of water in the res...).

1st feeding from the botanicare chart, and they are overfed. So I suppose I should not feed every watering, as the company instructs, and should use way less than the chart numbers... They go crazy high in the coming weeks... This is really kind of confusing... How can the charts be so far off?

I have a sensitive strain, but these ppm numbers are baffling. Today is day 1 of 12:12. My plants are less than 1' tall, and will finish about 1.5' to 2' (for the larger ones). My room temps are kick ass, and the humidity is low.

thanks for reading. If you have experience with botanicare, please offer me some advice.

one love
organic_sourdiesel Reviewed by organic_sourdiesel on . switch to botanicare from GH/Adv. advice please Hey everyone... Stinkyattic, I've noticed a lot of mention of Botanicare, so maybe you're the one to help me out... I grow in promix HP, under 1000 watt HPS. I use drain tables and do short sea of green in 1 gal pots... Many many little girls... My water is good, and has only about 40ppm out of the tap, with a ph of around 6.8-7. I always let my water sit overnight before using it to let the chlorine evaporate out, with bubblers going... I've just had the worst 3 harvests ever, and had Rating: 5