[APD] Plants not pearling, growing slowly

[James Foley <foleyjames at shaw_ca>]

Our water is very soft. GH 0-1, KH about 2. The water that comes out of the
pipes here is pretty high in iron I'm sure. The building is over 100 years
old, and so is the piping. I have to let the water run for about 3-4 minutes
to get it barely orange.
Water temp is steady at 78. The problem started probably about 4-5 months
ago.
At the time I was overdosing potassium. After cutting back, the growth went
back to normal for about 2 leaves, then went right back.

> From: "Tom Wood" <tomwood2 at flash_net>
> Subject: Re: [APD] Plants not pearling, growing slowly
> To: <aquatic-plants at actwin_com>
>
> Hi James,
>
> You didn't say what your water for water changes is like. I've just been
> through a very frustrating search for the cure to very similar behavior.
My
> tapwater at our new location has 83ppm Ca and 50ppm Mg, so I turned to an
> RO unit to soften things up. While doing so I kept targeting Mg at 5ppm
and
> a 3:1 ratio of Ca:Mg. After weeks and weeks of failure I went back and
> looked at the water report for my old location, where things grew well,
and
> it was 15ppm for both Ca and Mg. Once I switched to that, the growth
> returned.
>
> If this is *very* recent, you might also check that the temperature of the
> tank hasn't dipped too much because of winter. There may be ancient
> biological clocks at work that *expect* winter now. (It would be
> interesting to see if there is a correlation between the behavior and
> whether or not it's northern hemisphere plants that are behaving this way
> now.)
>
> TW

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