I think I will coin a new disease phrase for wikpedia
SPDS Sudden Plant Death Syndrome

This is diagnosed when all environmental factors are correct and there is no imbalance in the nutrient mix. Everything is perfect in the grow room and yet a healthy plant suddenly wilts and dies for no apparent reason.

By Dr. Rebel Dawg

Here is an article about plant sudden death syndrome in soy beans. Perhaps this is something similiar except they talk about root rot and you don't have root rot, neither did I. In any case it is interesting reading.
http://www.planthealth.info/sds_basics.htm

Yeah, I don't know, I keep thinking there's such a big clue there, the lack of water in the stalk and stems, there has to be a specific reason for that. What I'm thinking right now is when I topped it up the night before it wilted, not only did I slightly raise the tds, I raised the water level back up a couple inches. Maybe if the tds wasn't it, the nutes weren't it, the water level was. But in every grow in the tubs, I have the plant stalks fall down into the tubs, possibly submerging the roots fully. It's sort of a self leveling thing, to a degree. When the plants get big and close to the lights, the neoprenes can't hold the weight and the stalks eventually fall down a few inches, then the screen takes the weight and holds the plant up. I was growing in these tubs like this all last year. At harvest, when I'd pull the roots and stalks out, I'd always see new roots growing out of the previously green section of the stalk, for those few inches.

So what's different now, why would it work then and fail now? Well, I normally have 9 plants in each tub, this time, due to all kinds of other problems, I only had 3 in each, so I had to veg them out to compensate. With a bigger plant comes a bigger root mass, maybe that big mass just reached a critical size where it didn't like to be submerged. I can imagine in a root mass that large and thick, if the whole thing is submerged, maybe bubbles weren't getting all the way through it to the top, and maybe it was drowning, in effect. ??

Fuck if I know, does this make any sense to you guys? Lol. I'd rather believe this than lose sleep over not having a clue if this is going to happen to all my other plants! Hahaha

I will say that when this has happened to me, it has been very large healthy roots in every instance, no sign of root rot anywhere, no bugs, pest, discolor, or anything to indicate anything wrong. The only other common denominator I have noticed through the years (keep in mind my stories can go back a very long time)is that when SPDS happens it is typically about the 2nd week of flowering the plant (which correlates with that article I posted earlier, only in their case the plants got root rot and I don't), all looks good, bragging about how healthy she is, then the next day she is wilted and within 3 days she is dead.

RD, I read your link, and they say the sudden plant death syndrome in soybeans is caused by a pathogen that can be found in the cysts of the soybean cyst nematode, and that it leaves a distinctive marking on the leaves. So that seems pretty specific to me, as far as what's going on with the soybeans.

That was one one of the first things I thought, that I had some kind of parasite, but why would it attack only that one plant? The other 2 in the tub with it are still alive.

I need to learn a little more about how roots actually work, if it is possible to kill a plant by drowning the roots without actually causing the roots to rot in the same time frame.

harvey, i agree, I was just referencing that article because they were calling it sudden death syndrome, and it is similiar in several ways but is not what you are dealing with. I am just trying to find cases where something similiar has happened in the agricultural industry and that is what I had come up with. Unfortunately I believe that we may never know the true answers and you probably won't run into this often, I have not but have been growing for many years so have seen it all at one time or another. This is one that has always baffled me.
That article talked about how when the plant is moving from veg to flower the roots become more suseptible to parasite intrusion. I have noticed that every time this happens to me my plants were just recently put into flower. Maybe there is a connection there.

Yeah, it's so complex how this shit works sometimes. I remember in my aero system, certain plants would dominate and ocassionally kill others, no parasites involved in that. Haven't seen that in dwc though. In the tubes, the dominant plants would grow big roots and the adjacent plants, if they were weaker, their roots would shrink away from the dominant ones, they would not grow together. If they couldn't grow enough to support the plant, it would die. Usually they just underperformed though, didn't die or go hermie.

Another example of counterintuitive weirdness, if you put plants in a really low tds solution with no fans, no air movement, they will look amazingly healthy, but they will grow very slowly. Even green leaves, with that nice healthy shine, no burns, deficiencies, etc. Right now my rooted clones are doing this at probably about 250ppm. No fans on in the room. I know from experience if I turn the fans on, the plants will lighten, yellow, and look like complete shit, unless I dramatically raise the tds. I think it's intuitive that if you move the air, that increases transpiration, pulling more nutes into the plant, which if anything, would result in fewer deficiencies. But the increase in photosynthesis dramatically outpaces the increase in nutrient uptake, resulting in deficiencies, which was counterintuitive to me.

Somewhat logically consistent with that, co2 does the same thing. It creates and accelerates the fuck out of deficiencies. I normally can't even run 1000ppm because of that. It just burns everything up. I probably could if I turned my fans down. But normally my problem is way too much growth, instead of not enough, so whatever. 600ppm co2 would probably be more than enough.

And then when you get into the roots in these types of systems, it's just as confusing, at least to me. In my dwc veg unit, with the little tubes the roots are contained in, weirdly enough with that, what I found was I needed to keep the thing topped up religiously to avoid deficiencies, which seems to be the opposite of what I'm currently observing with my flowering tubs. Who knows though, maybe when I go to veg these clones, they'll like a lower water level.

I am going to try find out if my theory about the water level and roots drowing is correct. I think I'll be able to, maybe not confirm it for sure, but confirm it to some degree. My eyes are definitely open to this shit now. I can't help but notice how growth in the other 3 tubs has increased as their water levels have dropped. So I just dropped the water level in the tub with plant that died about an inch and a half, I'll see what it does. I'm actually betting that the 2 other plants left in it, which currently look like complete shit, start to take off. We'll see!

I really feel like I have no idea what I'm doing, like these plants speak a language I don't understand. All my hypotheses, formulas, etc, are just shit. I can't wait until the day when I can finally read the plants, just know what's wrong at a glance, from so much experience.

Harvey, most times I can indeed read the plants but even with experience etc some things just can't be explained. I accept that.
As to your idea about a portion of the roots being uncovered by water, I think there is some truth to this. My dwc buckets are mostly 3 gal buckets and I would say that 50% of the time a good portion of the roots are not in water due to usage and evaporation. I refill the buckets with water 1 to 2 times a week and change them out once a week. Typically when I go in to add water the bucket is 1/2 empty, sometimes even more and yet these plants thrive. I don't do it on purpose but it happens all the time and I have never seen any indication of issues as a result. I was not looking for positive effects but rather just ensuring that nothing went wrong. Maybe you are on to something there though that is beneficial.
As for folks following specific regimes and following books for answers, they have their place but I have not used a feeding regiment in years, my plants tell me what they need to eat and that is what I feed them, not a situation where week 5 I put xyz in the nutes exactly as on a chart no matter what the plants want. Rather I look at them and sit with them for about an hour once a week and they talk to me and then I feed them accordingly. Each week I start with a brand new nute mix for every plant and they are each in their own bucket as I found that doing them communally disallows me to feed them by need individually.

I've never followed a feed schedule or any formula in any book, because I know they're usually way off. For example, the botanicare feed schedule is way, way off, insanely high tds, and jorge cervantes' grow bible is full of incorrect info. I just form hypotheses and experiment constantly, and I write down as much as I can without going insane trying to decipher it all. Lol. When I find something that works, that's my little formula. It's just annoying and confusing when what worked before doesn't again.

I'm not quite to that level where I know what to add to the plants without thinking much about it, or doing some kind of math, etc. It's tricky, because how do you know what to add when you don't have any deficiencies, without a lot of experience? (and experience with that particular strain) You'll only know if you made a mistake after you make it. Weirdly enough, my tub #1, which has exploded to the point of even partially covering the adjacent tub's screen, I still haven't changed the nutrient solution in that, and it looks almost perfect. I've just been topping it up by "intuition", or "feel", or whatever you want to call it, and all the other tubs I have swapped out nutes multiple times, and they don't look as good. But they aren't all identical plants either.

One thing I have learned for sure though, related to that, is constantly checking on everything and topping shit up, ph correcting all the time, micromanaging the fuck out of it, causes nothing but problems. I keep having to remind myself of that this grow, but it's extra hard to be true to that now, since so much has gone wrong from the start. I used to actually have to force myself to not go into the grow room every day, but I'm afraid if I do that now, I'll find half my equipment off and half my plants dead.


However, I'm still confident that I'm going to get a good harvest, all the problems aside. :-)

When this has happened to me, its always been root bound plants, which going to the next size container, always fixed.

I hear ya OC, but I know I have had it happen in 5 gal dwc buckets, how on earth could the roots be bound? Harvey is in the same position, he runs dwc.