Hydro And Soil Side By Side

I'm not new to growing in soil but I am to hydro. Repeated attempts at conquering DWC failed miserably special thanks to the damn slime! Finally I decided to try Heisenberg's tea for 2 plants in hydro and in case this fails too, I have 2 other plants in soil.
So let's get this started:
Setup:
1.2x1.2 (pretty tall. Don't remember height)
600W HID (MH now then HPS) with an 8" cooling tube with reflectors. The duct fan is powerful enough (can't remember the exact CFM).
Osculating fan x 2.

Hydro:
15 gal Rubbermaid bucket with 3 x 5" net pots. The res get 10 gals or a little more (half RO water and half tap). 105w air pump hooked to 4 x 3" blue air stone balls. Nutes are GH FloraNova and diamond nectar. I also use Heisenberg's tea exactly as directed. I use great white in place of the ZHO and Aquashield. I use dates molasses instead of blackstrap molasses.
Plants in hydro: 1xSensi northern lights. 1x G13 Labs Pineapple express.
Note: bote are rooted beautifully. However, the NL was born with one baby leaf. The other fell off with the seed shell. This is why she's a bit delayed. Now she has one curled up perm leaf and shooting a pair of 3 blade ones! The other is at its 3rd node.
Soil:
5" pots. Soil is 30% sand, 30% perlite, 20% peat moss (buffered with lime) and 20% wiggle worm EWC, 1 table spoon high N bat guano and 1 table spoon high P bat guano. Heisenberg's teas was also use and the soil was pretreated with great white. Soil gets watered when pots are almost completely dry (but before wilting). I water with RO and little FloraNova.
Soil plants:
1xpurple haze (found the seed in buds that I got from the bulldog cafe in Amsterdam.
1xBarneys farm liberty haze (got the seed from a bud I harvested from a plant that hermied).
Now because I want to guarantee a min of 3-4 plants, I also germinated another LH seed in case the NL fails or one of the soil plants turn out to be a dude!
The 4 plants are 18 days old today (from the moment I places the seeds between wet paper towels). The extra LH is 3 days old today and only today I placed the rooted seed in a RootIt plug!
Photos to follow.........

 

Any tips and comments are welcome. I'm new to all strains in this grow but the liberty haze. I had problems with severe mag deficiency (at least that's what I narrowed it down to). they grow fast. I think (with the LH being the fastest growing plant in the grow) she's already starting to show some deficiency this early. Pics to follow

 

As I promised, here are pics of the plants.
1st is the northern lights. You can see the deformed leaf but the new growth is normal. Her stem is a bit weak but she's fighting. Her roots are growing nicely with the tea and with side branching.


2nd is the Pineapple express. She's catching up to Tue soil plants. She spent her first week working on the root mass and I can see her growing above and catching up to the purple haze!


3rd is the purple haze. Darker green than the rest. Responding nicely to the FIM.


4th is the liberty haze. She's outgrowing all the other plants and is showing similar deficiency to the previous LHs I grew (mag?????) .... Anyway I added some Epsom salt on top of her soil and watered. She grows up very fast.


5th is the newly planted LH in hydro. I'm top feeding her for now til the roots come out the netpot!

 

Was it mag? What was the problem and how did you solve it? I wasn't able to solve it good enough in my previous grow which affected my yield where I only got like an ounce and a half from each plant (grown in soil). And that's why I kind of want to compare the soil to hydro with the LH.

 

Thanks bro. Its in the first post. Mixed sand with peat moss and perlite. Added EWC and high P and high N bat guano

 

Heres an update on the babies:

Pic 1: NL growing slowly but nicely. I clipped the large deformed leaf because it was weighing down the plant. The stem is still too weak to support the asymmetric growth.


Pic 2-3: pineapple express growing fast and catching up to the soil plants. Rusty spots appeared today on the second set (3 blades leaf set). To me it looks like mag def so I upped the nuts a little and added Epsom salt (total Epsom and FloraNova grow added = 100ppm).


Pic 4: purple haze is nice and green but and isn't stunned by the FIM much.


Pic 5: soil LH is doing better. The leaf problem isn't progressing and this plant grows upward fast.


Pic 6: baby hydro LH growing slowly. Top feeding until I see roots!.

 

Thanks bro

 

One day later (after increasing the grow nutes and adding little Epsom (for a total ppm increase of 100) the pineapple express is much greener and fuller than yesterday!!! I also FIMed it!

Because of the accelerated upward growth of this LH, I decided to pinch and bend the top shoot (I hope this was OK! I wasn't sure if we can supercrop the main stem)

 

Below

 

Changed the res today and upped my nutes to include 3/4 the second week dose of FloraNova Grow for a total of 650ppm (including full dose of diamond nectar and 5ml total of B essential micro and submicro nutes and little Epsom salt) as you can see the NL (first pic) is growing nicely finally and the PE (second pic) already outgrew the two soil plants which I transferred to 5 gal pots with the same soil mix as described in the first post!
After the supercropping the soil LH, we can see the little new shoots are growing upward!
The hydro LH (last pic) finally dropped her rootlets in the res and I'll be watching her shoot up!

 

Can someone help me identify what the deficiency might be? Its also affecting the other little plant in the same dwc. See 2nd pic above (rusty spots and mottling of older leafs.

 

Thanks bro. Much appreciated. Initially I was between Mg and Cal. However, since the problem got worse faster over night when the pH shot up to 6.7 (good pH for mg uptake but bad for cal uptake). Now my understanding also is that cal def starts showing on upper and newer leafs. That's the only thing that's puzzling me. I do know for a fact though that my problem is pH related. For the last two weeks my pH has been rising from 5.5 to 6.2 and stabilizing at 6.2. I believe this rise in pH is either due to the quality of air pumped in the res (105w commercial with 4 airstones in a 10 gal res) or the bennies tea (Heisenberg's tea which makes your res slime free and the rootball massive) in the res. Last night it shot up higher than usual. Also the res pH stabilized for the 2 days prior to changing the res and adding the bennies yesterday

 

Heres an update on the babies:

Pic 1: NL is finally growing nicely and catching up. FIMed today.

Pic 2: pineapple express growing faster than both soil plants (3 and 4) combined. Its fuller and greater with more bud sites. The deficiency seen in both the NL and PE is finally under control. First I controlled the raising pH then I upped the nutes a little which also helped control the pH. The ppm was raised from a total of 650 to 850. The hydro plants are drinking lots of water and taking as much nutes too that the ppm doesn't change!

Pic 3: purple haze is growing slowly compared to the hydro plants.

Pic 4: soil LH is handling the LST and supercropping nicely. New top shoots are spread out for better light penetration.

Pic 5: hydro LH roots dropped in res with lots of side branching.

 

I decided to trim some of those diseased leaves to help with air circulation. Any thoughts what the problem is? It affects larger lower leaves and also the little hidden below leaves!

 

OK so the problem was spreading up and even below but noticeably on young leaves. Today I got Calimagic by GH and gave them 40ml for the 40L res which raised the ppm to 1110. They seem to be doing fine so far. I just need to keep an eye on the deficiency and see if the newer leaves show it.

 

Starting to look like a jungle in this 4x4 that I'm thinking about flipping the light now and losing the little Liberty Haze in hydro (3rd hydro plant) ..... Originally I was gonna wait for 4 more days, change the res and flip the lights a day after (keeping all 5 plants). I just wanted to compare the LH between soil and hydro and I already know its better in hydro!