Hello.....well this is very heartbreaking for me. I planted 6 plants into 20 litre airpots using a mix of 60% plant magic soil supreme and 40% biobizz all mix. I made sure the soil was put into the pots nice and loose so there was air and no big hard lumps etc. I then gave each of the pots a good watering untill the was some runoff as i reckoned i probly still needed to flush some of the nutes out of the biobizz all mix and thought it would help bring the soil "to life".
After this i placed my root riot cubes where i started the seeds into the soil. The soil didn't seem hard it was really easy to make the hole. Now these were left unattended at another location with insstructions to give a little water when they were starting to dry out. Well i suspected they were being over watered because the few times i checked the soil was pretty wet and it wasnt just around the plant it was all the soil and this was like a week later. The plants grew fine for a week then all progress seemed to stop.........and the leafs started to get yellow patches on them and curl down a bit. Well almost 3 weeks later and they looked the same size and even worse condition then something in my mind clicked.....the soil looked pretty compressed compared to the plant im growing at home wich used the same soil mix and had been treated the same way.
The ONLY difference between the 2 is that i realised i made the airpot upside down and repoted my plant to fix it. I remember still having a couple of handfulls of soil still left over after i repotted it but it wasnt a huge amount and the soil was still nice and fluffy. Something in my mind clicked.....was like a flashback image of the 6 plants sitting there.......the soil looked like it had sunk down below the original level it was at when potted. So i went round and checked it and i could hardly even poke my finger into the soil......i unwrapped the airpots and exposed the soil and started to break it up,it was really stuck together it was almost like a sponge. We repotted all the plants and we had a tonne of soil left over even though they were fillled to the top! And the roots had hardly even grown at all and the ones that did were really really thin.
Where did we go wrong here? And can these plants make a significant recovery to be worth a harvest after this amount of time or is it doomed? I'll show you all some pics of the 6 that are looking bad at week 3.
For comparison here is my plant wich was started at the same time same soil etc.
Heres one more pic of the compressed soil situation before i repotted them all. This was 12 days ago aswell.......they haven't grown much at all......
After this i placed my root riot cubes where i started the seeds into the soil. The soil didn't seem hard it was really easy to make the hole. Now these were left unattended at another location with insstructions to give a little water when they were starting to dry out. Well i suspected they were being over watered because the few times i checked the soil was pretty wet and it wasnt just around the plant it was all the soil and this was like a week later. The plants grew fine for a week then all progress seemed to stop.........and the leafs started to get yellow patches on them and curl down a bit. Well almost 3 weeks later and they looked the same size and even worse condition then something in my mind clicked.....the soil looked pretty compressed compared to the plant im growing at home wich used the same soil mix and had been treated the same way.
The ONLY difference between the 2 is that i realised i made the airpot upside down and repoted my plant to fix it. I remember still having a couple of handfulls of soil still left over after i repotted it but it wasnt a huge amount and the soil was still nice and fluffy. Something in my mind clicked.....was like a flashback image of the 6 plants sitting there.......the soil looked like it had sunk down below the original level it was at when potted. So i went round and checked it and i could hardly even poke my finger into the soil......i unwrapped the airpots and exposed the soil and started to break it up,it was really stuck together it was almost like a sponge. We repotted all the plants and we had a tonne of soil left over even though they were fillled to the top! And the roots had hardly even grown at all and the ones that did were really really thin.
Where did we go wrong here? And can these plants make a significant recovery to be worth a harvest after this amount of time or is it doomed? I'll show you all some pics of the 6 that are looking bad at week 3.
For comparison here is my plant wich was started at the same time same soil etc.
Heres one more pic of the compressed soil situation before i repotted them all. This was 12 days ago aswell.......they haven't grown much at all......
