The smaller plant is from an ancient seed of unknown variety and the bigger and more yellow plant is Blue Widow from a clone. Every single growing condition is exactly the same and the small plant looks like the most perfect looking plant I've ever seen while the Blue Widow looks pale green to yellow. It seems to be growing at a good rate at week 5 in the picture and some times it looks like it's just a lighter shade of green and I should quit worrying and some times it looks too yellow. The picture is in sunlight through a window with the camera set for sunlight. The large pot is 12" wide and 10" deep.
400W HPS 24 Hour, Fertilome Ultimate potting mix, Schultz 10-15-10 Plant Food Plus, 7 drops per quart every time you water. I water as needed. When the top looks and feels dry, maybe even a tiny crack where the dirt meets the pot, I dump in water fast using the top of the pot for a measuring cup. At this stage about 3/8 inch of level water is about right to get the bottom soil good and damp while not getting runoff. Sometimes I like to pour in enough to get some runoff. I've doing some double checking with a moisture meter and I doubt the watering is the problem Two ph meters agree my tap water is 7.0, fertilized water is 6.8, and the probes in the soil is 7.0.
With all the reading I've done it looks to me like the classic low Nitrogen but if you zoom into the bottom of the picture you can see yellow leaves that are burnt at the edges and tips. There are even some mid height branch leaves that look like this. How can it have low nitrogen and fertilizer burn at the same time? For about 3 days I bumped the fertilizer up to 10 drops per quart and it seemed to look greener but it could have been my imagination. I cut back to the normal mix because of the burn concerns. The perfect looking plant has only had the standard 7 drops and there are a couple leaves that have a tiny burn at the very tip so the 7 drops seems about right to me.
I'm really bugged about how sometimes it looks not so bad and sometimes not so good. I don't really want use expensive fertilizer but I could try Dyna-Gro Foliage Pro 9-3-6 if anyone thinks it's far superior than the Schultz fertilizer.
It looks like it might be improving as the roots are filling in but maybe it's just that the more yellow and burnt leaves are disappearing into the center of the bush.
Thanks