Quote:
Originally Posted by Ironwood
Hi,
First of all I very much enjoyed reading your story here. Thank you for sharing and the wonderful pictures!
I have about 25 years of growing experience indoors. It helps with my withdrawals from gardening during the winter. Your growing area is very nicely done, attention to detail of environment is the key to indoor gardening success.
Your BER problem comes from a combination of irregular watering, which looks like you got on top of kudos there, and your nutrients. The single biggest leap for me from just keeping plants alive and fairly healthy to unreal yield of fruit and super healthy plants was my nutrients.
I started using Earth Juice liquid nutrients, it is a three part organic nutrient. I also got some liquid Cal/mag as well. The result was so profound I started to play with different nutrients. What I found was it didn't matter so much the brand, any of them worked 10 times better than my triple ten or 5-10-10. Or whatever I was using outdoors at the time.
Sorry for the ramble. I see you spared no expense and I did exactly the same and became frustrated. I just wanted to share my discovery in hopes you will give some good quality nutrients a try before you call the project.
In the end I found Botanicare and Earth Juice we're the best two economically and results in the finished product. The Botanicare Cal/Mag is something I use 5ml / gallon every watering.
Now if you really want to go hog wild check out using coco as a media with drip stakes, feeding 5-6 times a day for super consistent watering. It cost me like 30$ to setup my whole area with drip system using a tote for a reservoir and a cycle timer.
Thanks again for sharing I enjoyed the read and have a great outdoor season!
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I will definitely be trying this next year and would love to pick your brain more on this when the time comes.
Yes the watering in the beginning may have been an issue and the bottom watering in the tray seems to have helped. The BER has slowly becoming less
severe.
I think fertilizing early and not using the best fertilizer also contributed to the problem. The plants are growing crazy.
I am working on my gameplan for next year and to start I will be using a potting mix with no ferts then look into a liquid fertilizer.
Do you think I overloaded the plants with nitrogen?
I threw so many things at this grow that if I do get rid of the BER, I wont know what was the fix!
I have the plants under lights 16 hours, could transpiration be a problem?
The leaf curl was excessive but the plants leaves did not get leathery except for one plant, however, the leaf curl isn't as bad as it was earlier, only on a few plants but only the very top smaller leaves.