OMG I can't tell what is wrong with my plant! [pics]

[SecondNut]

Dangit. This is my first hydro, and evidently I'm screwing it up. Attached are 6 pics that show the sorry state of affairs. I've already pruned off several very crispy leaves, which is why the plant looks so sparse. I've tried searching through the problem threads, but I haven't found any pictures that quite match what mine is doing, so I'm asking for help.

Some details: I switched over to 12/12 about a week ago. A couple of weeks ago I went to using distilled water, because my tap water has a god-awful Ph (about 8.0) and I was having to use way too much Ph-down to keep it in check (also the tap water resulted in some light-brown slime starting to form after 5 or 6 days, prompting a complete flush every week). Ph is kept between 5.8 and 6.0. PPM is about 1000. Temps are fine and in check, humidity is probably low but I can't really control that (other than spraying the plant a couple of times a day, which I do). This is a single plant with about 135 actual cfl watts (350w equivalent), at about 10,000 lumens.

Is this nute burn, or is it lock-out? Or a deficiency? And if so, of what? The new growth has always looked good before, but since switching the light to 12/12 there hasn't been any new growth that I can tell.

HELP!

SecondNut Reviewed by SecondNut on 01-03-2008. OMG I can't tell what is wrong with my plant! [pics] Dangit. This is my first hydro, and evidently I'm screwing it up. Attached are 6 pics that show the sorry state of affairs. I've already pruned off several very crispy leaves, which is why the plant looks so sparse. I've tried searching through the problem threads, but I haven't found any pictures that quite match what mine is doing, so I'm asking for help. Some details: I switched over to 12/12 about a week ago. A couple of weeks ago I went to using distilled water, because my tap water has Rating: 5

[Weedhound]

if you are using distilled water you need to use CalMag Plus as well.

[bowl]

what is your water tempurature?....i noticed in my hydro system,which was in the shed, my plants didn't like cold water in the res.....even with room heated , now i'm doing fine in soil......hope this helps.

[green3gold]

what nutes are you using? also what is the temp around the plant and how close to it are your lights?

[stinkyattic]

Stop spraying your plants with just water. That can leach nutrients from the leaves. You should do a foliar feed with a complete fertilizer mixed half strength and adjusted to pH 6-6.5. There seem to be a couple things going on there. Ca deficiency may very well be one of them. As Weedhound said, you will need to add calmag plus to distilled water. Your high tap pH is quite likely CaCO3 in the water; plants need Ca and the carbonate ion acts as a buffer. I've seen growers use distilled water to 'cut' their hard tap water and bring it to a useable level. But you need a EC meter to do that consistently.
Do you know what the temperature in the res is? Is it sitting on something cold?

[SecondNut]

Thanks everybody for the suggestions.

Stinky, thanks for the tip on spraying. I just started spraying about 4 days ago in an effort to raise humidity (in case that was the cause of the shriveling leaves). I'll continue but add in the nutes as you suggest. Since I have no place to get it locally, I ordered some CalMag Plus online, but that won't get here until probably Thursday or Friday. Until then, I will go back to the tap water and just stomp the Ph down the best I can. The PPM of my tap water is about 120, so it's not too-too terrible in that regard -- just the Ph is bad. The water temp is running about 65 right now. Even with the extreme cold of the past couple of days it never got below 62. The high temp in the closet averages about 75, and the lights are about 8 inches away so I doubt there's any heat stress involved.

This thing will probably go hermie on me, won't it.

Thanks again, everybody. I'll update as things progress.

[ZiG]

Stop spraying your plants with just water. That can leach nutrients from the leaves. You should do a foliar feed with a complete fertilizer mixed half strength and adjusted to pH 6-6.5.

is that the same case with clones,....just wondering if its better to foliar feed than plain water at all times...

[SecondNut]

ZiG, if you're just in the rooting stage, spraying the clones with plain water should be ok (or so I've read -- I'm no expert). Before they root, you shouldn't give them any nutes.

As for little sicko, the Ph of my tap water was worse than I remember: 8.7! Has anybody ever heard of such a thing??? Sheesh. In fact, it was so high that I had to resort to vinegar. I also bumped up the SuperThrive a bit, to about 1/8 teaspoon per gallon instead a drop or two a gallon. The SuperThrive alone lowered the Ph over 1.5, and a splash of vinegar did the rest. Some people recommend against vinegar because they say it's not stable enough and your Ph will gradually creep back up. I find it's almost as stable as a commercial Ph-Down solution, at least in my limited experience, but it does require daily monitoring (which I'm doing anyway).

The PPM of my tap water was a little higher than I remember as well, about 160. But since I'm aiming for a PPM of around 1000 to 1200, it's still not horrible, and hopefully that 160 contains CaCO3, as stinky suspected.

[stinkyattic]

is that the same case with clones,....just wondering if its better to foliar feed than plain water at all times...

As a matter of fact, this is one of the 2 reasons (the other being possibiliy of mold) that I no longer mist my clones. Instead, I spray the inside of the propagation dome, avoiding the plants themselves. This puts the humidity where it should be, without allowing water to sit on the leaves.

[SecondNut]

Update. So, as I stated before, I switched over to tap water until my CalMag came in (which took about a week). This turned out to be a very bad idea. By the time the CalMag came in, the roots weren't looking to good, they had gone from white to somewhat brown, and from firm filaments to kind of mushy.

When I flushed out the bad tap water and went with new distilled+CalMag, I tried to flush the roots as best I could. It didn't seem to do much good, the mass just stuck together. I held out hope that the fresh water would help.

After 1 week with CalMag, the plant was looking better. There were about 8 spots with new growth, and by the end of the week all of them had begun to flower. However, the roots looked worse. There was some new root growth to the side of the original mush-ball which looked actually good, nice and white with spurts of side-growth. I did some searching and found a couple of threads where it was suggested to prune the root rot.

I did this last night after changing out the water again, leaving the new root growth intact the best I could. I'm a little worried about it because the root pruning at this stage, because the flowering sites looked good, and I didn't want to set those back in development, but I didn't want that root rot to spread to the new root growth either.

I will definitely say that this is the last time I use my tap water. In fact I might even quit drinking it!