Being poor sucks when you have kids.

I have 3 girls going right now (white widow, strawberry cough, laughing buddha) but am having a little bit of a problem with the soil pH being too high. The WW is affected the most. I also have a problem with having no money and have been trying to find a viable solution for my problem that takes that into account.

Now I am not looking for any diagnostics as I already know the cause of my problems. What I am looking for is for the broke mans fix for high soil pH.

I water with tap water(ground well, not town/city water) It comes out at about 7.3PH with a TDS of 260(I know, little hard... **poor**) 70-71 degrees and pH adjusted to 6.6(after nutes when applicable) My meter is a Hanna HI 9813-6 pH/TDS/EC meter calibrated monthly. I do not use soil meters but rather test the runoff. I know it is not an exact science but you get a pretty good idea of what is going on.

I've been trying to look this up for over a week so far with lots of luck... until I read the opinions of others. Everyone has their own friggin opinion! ARGH!!!!

How can a poor bastard such as myself get the soil pH down WITHOUT spending money? I know how to do it with spending money. If I had money, there would be no problem at all.

Honestly not really worried about it. Just trying to get ahead of things should they become worse. I hate scrambling to find fixes, especially the stress and anxiety that comes along with it.

Some will undoubtably disagree with me, but testing runoff pH is a waste of time when growing in soil. If you are pHing what you put on your plants properly worrying about runoff pH is not absolutely needed. Your girls look great, I think you are worrying too much. That's just my opinion......

I never PH my water in soil. That's the point of soil is it acts as a buffer. I suppose if I had issues from watering I may start, but I never have any issues with my water here.

greenlikemoney said:

Some will undoubtably disagree with me, but testing runoff pH is a waste of time when growing in soil. If you are pHing what you put on your plants properly worrying about runoff pH is not absolutely needed. Your girls look great, I think you are worrying too much. That's just my opinion......

Click to expand...

I highly disagree with you. Yes, soil acts like a buffer but soil pH being off is a lot worse than watering with the wrong pH water. My plants cannot uptake the correct amount of micro-nutrients due to the soil pH behing >7.5 which is causing my problems.

If allowed to continue like this, more problems will arise later on, especially with phosphorus intake during flowering.


The plants are constantly sitting in soil. If the pH is too low or too high, you will always have problems and your end product will be nowhere near what it should be.


Case in point: half the posts on here are issues with soil pH that look like nutrient deficiency or toxicity problems. Soil pH is incredibly important. Your girls spend their entire lives in it. It does not have to be exact by any means but it needs to be in the proper range for the mobile and immobile nutrients to be taken in at normal levels.

I think you should start a new thread without words......
Put up the pics and let people help you...
No words......
Facts....
For example list temp of soil the runoff ph and input ph..
Then help will come...

Or you can have an attitude and simply get told to Google ph down...you may run across lemon juice
Your ph does not look to be the problem in my opinion...but how would I know...you never listed it

You don't have the classic banding and tye shaped leaves etc common with high ph locking out iron zinc and mag..I'm not an expert with this stuff, to tell you exactly what it needs

Also how is your ph above 7.5??