With talk of "ph perfect" nutes, I was wondering if anyone is checking the ph of their run-off? There was a great post 20-30 pages back about checking ec in the run-off to monitor your feed strength. But I've noticed that coco has ph buffering effects on its own, so I'm wondering if using "ph perfect" nutes would really be counter intuitive.
I've been running some tests and here's what I'm seeing so far. I use Osmocote products for my nutes, and have been for over 3yrs. I've been running hempy buckets w/ osmocote for the last 2yrs, most of that with a coarse perlite bucket and a soil cap. I'm now on my 2nd & 3rd runs with coco hempy buckets. I started to check my run-off with my 1st coco bucket and found that my in to out ph dropped by 1.0 to 1.2, so ph in at 7.0 gave me an avg of 5.9 out. At this point I stopped adjusting the ph of my feed water (it's just water because by nutes are mixed into the coco), and the plant took off.
So this run I'm running 1 coco and 2 perlite w/ soil cap (my standard), for comparison.
I wasn't sure how much of the ph drop was due to the coco or the effects of pre-loading with OC. So to start the perlite buckets I didn't adjust the ph of the feed water. I tested overflow out the hole, and found the ph in and out were within 0.2 I ended up with a mild ph lockout during the first 7 days in the bucket. Next watering adjusted to 5.9 the out ph out was 6.0 and the ec gained 1.2 and the plants bounced back.
So with this new info I can say that using OC is ph neutral, and the coco is responsible for the ph buffering. But I'd really like to see some samples from folks using other nutes to see what the buffering effect are if any.
