How to "rebuffer" coco during veg??

So this is my 3rd grow using coco coir. I always buy the compressed canna bricks and just soak them in a medium strength dose of nutrient solution and my two previous grows turned out great, never really had any issues except for a bit of nutrient burn around mid flower.

Used the same coco bricks from Canna again this time and was having some issues during veg which they all appeared to have calmag deficiency (especially magnesium) symptoms. I decided to test my runoff and it was coming out anywhere from 3.0 to 5.0 ec and a ph between 4.0- 4.8!! So I kinda tripped out about it and flushed each plant individually with plain tap water and i think i might have screwed up there... I forgot about flushing with a light nutrient solution or at least adding some calmag.

I grow on a pretty large scale for a single man ran operation and I wanted to save time (my reservoir is being replaced at the moment) so I pulled the plants out of the grow room one by one and did a flush till the EC was down around 0.4-0.7 and the ph runoff around 6.0. Did this strip or remove my buffer since I used straight tap water? I didn't even think about this till after I flushed all of the plants. So immediately after the flush I mixed a new nutrient solution (using canna coco nutes which is also a first for this run) with calmag @5.5ml per gallon of water to put nutrients and calmag back into the coco...

Will this work or am I screwed? I am still a newbie with coco and have spent the last 20 years using only soil and peat based mediums...This will be a lesson learned!

Would feeding them with extra calmag for a few days get them back on track? Or do you think my buffer will be fine??

You would have been fine without the Calmag treatment. You just needed to reduce your EC with lower EC feeds fed to significant runoff, which you did. You can prevent this from happening in the future with more runoff. I like to feed around 1 EC, and that's a good EC for flushing out coco media between uses, just with a complete nutrient like Jacks or Maxi series.

Rurumo said:

You would have been fine without the Calmag treatment. You just needed to reduce your EC with lower EC feeds fed to significant runoff, which you did. You can prevent this from happening in the future with more runoff. I like to feed around 1 EC, and that's a good EC for flushing out coco media between uses, just with a complete nutrient like Jacks or Maxi series.

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Awesome! Thanks... I just checked on the girls and they look like they turned around overnight. I will continue feeding with lower ec and stop doing so many drybacks, thats likely the reason I had so much buildup... I like to get my roots established fully before going into flower and dry backs help significantly, but sometimes its easy to wait too long and they dry completely up on ya.

psychadelibud said:

Awesome! Thanks... I just checked on the girls and they look like they turned around overnight. I will continue feeding with lower ec and stop doing so many drybacks, thats likely the reason I had so much buildup... I like to get my roots established fully before going into flower and dry backs help significantly, but sometimes its easy to wait too long and they dry completely up on ya.

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i find that letting very young plants partially dry out in coco helps them establish a good root network, although i never let them dry completely. i don't ever let a plant big enough to flip to flower come even close to drying out. i start in quart size containers, then half gallon sized pots till i want to flip them. i'll put them in one of the three gallon hempy buckets i use for flower a week before i flip them, and that seems to be plenty of time for them to get used to the new pot. they take off pretty quickly in the flower tent without any drying out at all