A lot happened this week but she seems to be recovering and not worsening. I fed plain ph’d water end of last week but got a little too cavalier with too much top feeding and adding stuff without adjusting ph. All the top feeding is how debris and runoff kept getting into the base and mucking it up. I was out of homemade calmag so I had a bottle coming in the mail. I ended up adding calmag to not a lot of water and not ph’ing it and top feeding/pouring rest into the watering base later in the day after adding plain ph’d water. Wrong move.
She appeared to slow down drinking but I chalked it up to a full base and plenty of top feed. Topsoil dried out very fast but I let her sit assuming she would start drinking eventually. This continued for 3-4 days, and also was happening to one of the photos I did the same thing to. Starting smelling something rank around this time so I checked the bases and found what is in pics 9+10. Ph was 8.5 and had this brown chunky film all over!! Took out all 3 bases and scrubbed thoroughly with soap and water and rinsed with some vinegar.
I was worried about how dry and hard the soil/roots must be but I also didn’t want to do a full flush so close to her finishing. I opted to put 1/2 strength tiger bloom/big bloom and full strength calmag into full 1.8 gal water can ph’d to 6.5 and top feed slowly over ~20 min so it didn’t just rinse everything out. About 20% runoff which tested at 5.8 which seemed a little low but not as terrible as I feared. Cleaned the base back out after no more runoff and refilled with normal strength tiger bloom and calmag, ph’d to 6.5. This seems to have been the right move, 60 hours after flushing/cleaning/refilling, she has drank 75% of the base and topsoil is also not dried out.
But we’re not done!!! The 2 photos also got a clean base and proper refill. The next day I checked the bases and found some insects on top of the water in ALL 3 bases shown in the last 2 pics. Teeny white things that kinda jumped on top of the water and seemed to stay underneath the fill port to get some of the light coming through? Hard to identify but I think they might have been springtails and not something destructive. Either way I made a weak vinegar/water solution and sprayed them aggressively over 24 hours and they seemed to die and not return. Only saw them in the bases and not anywhere on the plant.
A lot of the leaf tip curling and spots spread from last week but seems to be contained and not worsening at the time of writing this. It seems contained to the top ~30% of the fan leaves and minimally on sugar leaves. While her buds did grow and thicken, I’m sure this set her back a little. All in all she had the water ph imbalance, definitely some light stress, nute burn and a little potassium deficiency.
Got a little cheap digital microscope as well, trichomes still maturing with at least 30% still clear, plenty of white pistils as well. Some purple coming in on sugar leaf tips. Smell is much stronger. Idk if this is indicative of the buds as well or the “right way” but if I remove any small fan leaves I swipe the stem between two fingers to smell the oils. Still giving a very strong funky citrus scent with an earthy finish.
Flipped lights to 12/12 for the photos at the end of the week. I just couldn’t wait any longer with how big the photos are. It also didn’t help that when I adjusted the light for the mimosa and moved it to the middle, the photos were getting much less and resulted in them stretching a lot with too much internode spacing. Not the end of the world but supercropping is definitely in their future.