Flushing soil

Not to sure on that but the more you water with that kind of soil the more you release nutes. So if your going to flush make sure you throughly like alot of flushing. If you were to just minimally flush you most likely would cause more damage then good. You would have an nice pot full of chemical nutes.

Next time just order some Fox Farm soil.

 

i have a couple of questions. did you flush the soil before you started the grow? did you flush the soil between veg and flowering? that will make a huge difference in your final flush.

 

Flushing is not 100 percent necessary but is good to improve smoothness and taste , I am still on my number one also so I am just going to be using tap water with Lemon juice as ph down and 1/4 strength nutes. Lots of my friends don't even flush n they grow dank

 

Flushing is mandatory if you want smooth good tasting, burning smoke. Flush last two weeks with ph balanced water. Never use miracle grow anything. Get a book. I suggest Jorge Cervantes.

 

use pH'ed water to flush. use 3 times the volume of the container/soil you have. just do this every watering for the last 2 weeks.

 

Considering he is using Miracle Grow that should do fine. But you really only need to make sure you get a total of 3x container size over the course of the whole flush. I have 75 plants in 3 gallon pots. That would be 675 gallons of water every time I water for 10 days assuming I let them dry for 3 days prior to harvest. If I had to use ro water that would be 2700 gallons of waste water. That's a bit of overkill IMO.

 

I would try flushing and let it be a learning experience and not use any more Miracle Gro products for your plants. Time release fertilizers take the control out of your hands. My 2 cents.

 

There are other "time released" fertilizers that are awesome. I use two products, for veg Perfect Blend 4.4.2 and for flower Growilla. Growilla is top dressed every 10-14 days and is fed plain water in between applications and using a hum tea once a week. This is such a low salt formula that regular watering during flushing is enough. The last fertilizer goes on no sooner than 21 days before flush. The only thing they get in the last 21 days is a tea feeding. Not only is it organic, it is vegan! I will never go back to liquid base ferts.

 

Yeh I was referring to the Miracle Grow specifically. It just isn't for MJ. Your time release system sounds awesome and all organic. Good job.

 

No, 22-1/2 gallons over the whole flush period. Triple the container size.

 

No, you don't need to run 3x for every watering for a 2-week period.

Correct.

True you want to use (at least) triple the container size, but where does 22.5 come from? 7 pots, 5 gallons each, that's 35 gallons of soil volume. Thus, 5x3=15 gallons minimum per pot for the flush, or 35x3=105 gallons minimum for the flush for the whole grow.

I don't know why flushing is so confusing to some people. Flushing is the act of running a bunch of water through the soil, rinsing and cleansing it. It takes 30 minutes to a couple of hours, not two weeks. You do not flush constantly during the final two weeks. You don't flush every watering for the last two weeks. You need to do it only once, 1-2 weeks before harvest, but that entire 2-week period is not "the flush".

You want to run at least 3x the soil volume through the pot. So in the case of a 5-gallon pot then yes, 15 gallons per pot is the target number. Or, in the OP's case, 105 total gallons of water, minimum (no harm in running even more water through) for the 7-plant grow.

That's a lot of water to pH, and you can cheat a little -- if your tap water is basically clean you can use un-buffered tap water for most of the flush (I haul my plants up to the shower and use the hand-held on a hose extension). Run water gently into the pots. As you run water in, it probably will collect on top (it won't filter through the soil as fast as you can pour it in). So, as the pot gets full you stop and leave it for a few minutes, allowing that water to percolate down into the soil and out the bottom. Then repeat, and keep doing this. Hard to gauge how much water you are using this way, but you can measure by running the water at the same flow rate into a bucket for a measured amount of time (say 15 seconds) then measure how much water that is and calculate how much time you need to flush like this (so, for example, if you find that your water is flowing at one gallon a minute, then each pot will need to get 15 minutes of water flow to get 15 gallons).

If you are going to use un-buffered tap water for most of your flush then it's best before the flush to prepare some pH-buffered water (at least 50% of pot volume, so in the OP's case 17.5 gallons minimum) that has been allowed to sit out at least 24 hours for any chlorine to evaporate, and then finish the flush with this buffered water. This way you will push out the un-buffered tap water and leave your soil mostly pH-balanced and any chlorine washed out for the most part.

After the flush your soil will be super-saturated, more so than after any of your typical waterings. The flush counts as a watering -- it leaves your soil soppy wet, after all, and you can't turn around and water those plants the day after the flush with the soil saturated like that. After the flush it most likely will take longer than usual for the soil to dry out enough for the next watering -- with 5-gallon pots it could be more than a week. Once the plants are ready for watering again just water your regular way except no nutes and add 1tbsp unsulfured molasses per gallon to your water. This is not part of "the flush", it's what you do after the flush. No need to try to run another 3x through the pot, your plants may be sitting in wet soil at the time of harvest if you do.

Now, as for flushing soil with Miracle Gro time-released ferts, how long did you veg? Rhapsody is correct that flushing will dissolve the time-released fert pellets still in your soil and so could release even more nutes, so the issue is how long have the plants been in that soil? If you vegged for a couple of months and then obviously have flowered for close to a couple of months now, that should have been enough waterings to pretty much dissolve those pellets by now, in which case you shouldn't need to worry about dissolving more. But if you vegged only a couple of weeks or shorter then you still could have the pellets in the soil and thus could dissolve them more with the flush. If so, you should either not flush at all or else flush well more than the recommended minimum, so possibly 5x or 6x pot volume (or more).

Many people hear that you flush 1-2 weeks before harvest and think that means the flushing lasts that entire 2-week period. It does not, you should need to flush only once, and then there is a period of roughly 2 weeks after the flush, not part of the flush.

 

You just flipped them? In that case I would flush the hell out of them now and then be really easy on ferts for 2-3 weeks, and then flush again 2 weeks before harvest.

 

Wonderfully informative post.

 

QUOTE/: but where does 22.5 come from? :/QUOTE

Doh!, I mis-read that as 7.5 gal.pots.

 

One more thing to clarify -- I was talking about "flushing only once" and so forth, to clarify I really am talking about the final flush. What I said about how to flush applies to any flush, but what you do afterwards (give only water with molasses) is for after the final flush.

There are three appropriate times to flush your grow: the most common is the final flush about two weeks before harvest, but also good idea to flush when you transition to 12/12 (and more importantly when you transition from veg nutes to flower nutes) and also any time you have a pH and/or nute imbalance.