Indoor plants that aren't rootbound only need water about once a week and only enough to where a little water appears in the saucer. I have houseplants that are over 20 years old that have never been watered more than once a week, and some Fridays I forget to water so they wait until the next Friday or until I notice they are drooping. I haven't grown herbs indoors, but they can stand quite a bit of neglect outside. I've overwintered huge pepper plants inside, and I just water them once a week too. Good luck!

Sorry, not on here much lately. Yes, flushing is rinsing the roots, but also the container. If you have a bad nutrient situation (like overfeeding or bad pH levels) the salts can sometimes build up on the roots. Check the roots. Built up salts will give a brown tint to the roots. I mean an obvious tint. Don't sit and think "well, it looks a little brown in this light". If it's not obvious, that's not likely the problem. Sometimes it is recommended that you use a flushing agent to remove the salts. I don't, but maybe I should. Pure water seems to work great for my plants. urbangardenfarmer makes a great point I forgot about. Calcium deficiency. However, the addition of cal/mag should not be necessary at all for lettuce if you are using commercial nutes. The most common causes of calcium deficiencies are not really a lack of calcium in the solution if you change your solution often (as often as you mentioned) and are not growing huge plants or fruiting plants that require more calcium. The most common causes as far as I know are uptake issues and (as mentioned) mobility due to low transpiration. If the roots are unable to take up nutrients due to fallout caused by high root zone temperature (the primary cause of calcium deficiency in tomatoes, I'm told), poor pH management, or due to a film on the roots, then adding cal/mag is a waste of money. It really is with small leafy plants, anyway, I have discovered. Every notice how much better, faster, and more solid lettuce grows in cooler ground? In answer to your question about how often to change solution: Most recommend every couple of weeks. I give it at least 3 if the conditions seem to be okay. I've gone longer due to procrastination with varying results.

when did you pot it??? .. could it just be transplant shock??? why is it indoors??? .. its going to struggle as a houseplant ... looks awful dry ... the plant itself look very good ... are those 3 leaves your only problem?? .. no plant retains all its leaves forever .... based on the whole plant.. i wouldnt really be worried about much at all ... ken

Dan, I've used a few different mixes in containers and I like the sound of your sea soil. The problem with containers is that the system is really too small to set up a true organic soil system in them. People do all sorts of things and may technically get away with it, but I my abilities can't do a completely organic soil and get reliable production, since any "help" and you kid yourself that it is "almost organic". That said, I had some luck with a mixture of 1/3 compost (Black Kow Composted Organic), 1/3 peat & 1/3 perlite in summer but you must watch it doesn't get waterlogged. I know it sounds strange, but raw perlite is "organic". You could put some of those fancy rock dusts in there and dolomitic lime and give it a whirl. Problem is at some point your plants will need the nutrient boost of something like Miracle Gro, which is not organic, but not as bad as some make it out to be, either! There are some Fox Farms hydroponic/organic and Dutch Master hydro organic ones, but these things are really cost intensive and there is no way I could afford to even evaluate them. Tomato-Tone is organic and you can use some of it (the affordable option I would use) but a lot of experimentation is necessary to get it right in a bucket. Those are the tools I would use. There are others that are more expert than I am in this forum on organic methods in a container, but the problem is that ingredients and climates can vary enough that a lot of experimentation is necessary anyway and it is a bit much to ask of a container considering the nutrient demands of a big tomato plant. And a bigger contaner ( say, 25 gallons) can be costly to fill with organic nutrients only. There are other much more economic ways to go if you drop the requirement of deriving all nutrition from "organic" sources, for example pine mulch, etc, is cheap but offers no nutrition so it doesn't get you anywhere nutrient wise, though it might help you save on perlite. I can't answer whether your tap is appropriate for your plant, even knowing the pH is 7.5. That's because it will be the interaction among the tap, soil ingredients and amendments that determine the pH of the container. For example, if your soil starts on the acid side which it likely will it needs to be neutralized with some lime, but you can do what I do ... put less in and water with alkaline water for a while. Clearly that is not an optimal situation but to be honest my plants do fine despite all the issues with pH, and my tap is pH 7.7. But this is a fragil relationship and the only way to now for sure is to pH test your soil while you grow toget the hang of what's happening, if you are really enthusiastic. Just because it works for me, btw, doesn't mean it will work for everyone. We get lots of rain here and that frequently washes trhough soil mixesand I purposely open the tops wide to encourage that. No residue builds up from the tap or any of my not-organic supplements due to the rain. The common wisdom of hydroponics of a vegetative and a reproductive period fertilization schemes doesn't seem very pronounced to me when growing the tomato for the long haul. To be perfectly honest, I think all these mantras about vegetative stages and drastic changes during flowering stages are geared towards high value crops LOL. Really with tomato plants you want to keep the nitrogen at a baseline, low in all of my scenarios. You are not growing vines, they get quickly unmanageable for indeterminates and make few tomatoes, and most everyone here seems to agree that being pretty stingy with nitrogen is the way to go. That's the opposite of what you've done. When I grow my tomatoes, my seedlings have only 1/2 to 2/3 the nitrogen the producing plants do, so my nitrogen rate actually increases for me. At the end I back off though because the plants get less productive and unmanageable so there's a lot of give and take. Hope that helps a little, because nothing is as easy as it seems, so most people find something that works and get pretty stuck to it. Cheers PC