Ok. So due to some seriously amateurish mistakes I think I have pushed the pH way too high. I've not been testing it and have stupidly been relying on blind faith to keep my pH right. The runoff is testing at around 8.2 on a couple of my plants and they are showing signs of of Mg lockout as per the photos on this thread. They were taken a few days ago and it's just a little worse than it was then. I live in the middle of nowhere and have no way of getting to any place that'll sell something specific for reducing the pH for plants for at least 3 or 4 days. My question is: is vinegar a suitable a suitable product for reducing the pH? If not, can anyone suggest anything else that is suitable? I've had a search but can't find any definitive answers and don't really want to find out through testing it. Thanks all, JayF
LEMON JUICE!!! Why didn't I think of that? We have lemon trees in our garden. Freakbro, Sir, you are a genius. I owe you, big time, multiple smokes and many favours. Thank you endlessly.
Luck: where can I buy some of that stuff? I need it. I've just been out to flush a couple of the plants with newly pH'ed, and quite nice smelling, water (I only had enough bottled water to do a couple of them, I'll do the rest when I can get some more bottles). It turns out that not only did I fuck up on not pre-pH'ing the water, but I also fucked up at least one of the transplants. As soon as I started pouring loads of water onto it a load of dry compost started bubbling up. It also took waaaay too long for the water to run through. In fact I've left it raised up above a bowl so that it can keep draining without pissing all over my mylar floor. I was watching a video by Jorge Cervantes the other day, he mentioned putting a little washing-up liquid in the water. I guess that will probably get rid of any dry pockets. Thoughts? Oh well. You live, you learn.
As daft as it sounds,its true!It actually pulls the soil back together,and wont harm your plants.Good luck,man,keep at it,you will get better at this.
Cheers buddy. Appreciate the support. Things aren't helped by the fact that I have my grandparents and uncle staying with us for 11 days at the minute. And they can't know what I'm doing under any circumstances. I'm having to do everything super stealth at about 2am. It's a pain in the arse. I'm just hoping my grandad doesn't ask why there is a padlock on the shed door. 1 week to go and they'll be out of here for another year.
I'd guess so, but hopefully not too significantly. It shouldn't contain anything harmful, it is, after all, plant juice. I'll try to get hold of something specifically for lowering the pH of water for plants as soon as I can. I'm using bottled water and I was adding less than two caps of an 8 litre water bottle of lemon juice per each 8 litre water bottle. The water is around 300ppm (around EC 0.45 before I added anything. My tap water isn't drinkable and even after running it through a brita filter it's still not great, so I can't use that. Bottled water is the best I'm going to get. This other thread that I started before I established exactly what was going wrong, give some more specifics on the water I'm using.