Kaisha [00:00:00]:

You. What's up, Gromies? Welcome to Office Hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I am your moderator, Kaisha, and this is episode 74. Welcome. Here's how we do it. I'll keep an eye out for questions in the chat. Drop them anytime, and if your question gets picked, we'll have you either unmute yourself or I can ask for you. We're also going live on YouTube if you're logging in over there. Same idea. Post your questions. If yours gets picked, we will do our best to cover it during the show. Quick programming note, today's session is going to be 30 minutes today, so don't hesitate. Drop that question in the chat. We'll do our best to get to it. Jason, how are you doing over there?

Jason [00:00:37]:

Doing all right. How are you?

Kaisha [00:00:38]:

Good. Good to see you. All right, you ready for our first question?

Jason [00:00:41]:

Let's get it rocking and rolling.

Kaisha [00:00:43]:

Let's get it rocking and rolling. All right, this one came from Leland. He dropped this question a couple of weeks ago. He writes, Good day, guys. We are running 1000 kilowatt HPS lights in our rooms and have one cultivar that starts photo bleaching around week 67. We implemented some LST early flower to manage the canopy height, but it hasn't made a difference. Could there be something in our irrigation to cause this, or is it most likely our lights? Any insight would be great. Cheers. What do you think, Jason?

Jason [00:01:12]:

Yeah, he said thousand watt HPS.

Kaisha [00:01:17]:

Thousand kwh?

Jason [00:01:19]:

Yeah. So a couple of things, obviously with thousand watt HPS is we do have quite a bit of heat coming off there. There actually can be quite a bit involved with light and bleaching, which does make it harder to diagnose. Obviously, the first really easy thing to look at is how much airflow and how high are our plants growing as far as close to those HPS, if we got tall ceilings and we're looking at four 5ft plus, typically with enough airflow, we're not inducing too much actual heat that could cause some of that bleaching. 1000 watt HPS, very standard for reasonably high light intensity, which is good. One of the things that I've encountered as far as bleaching goes is you definitely want to make sure that you're getting those plants fed enough. And so obviously, by looking at red zoning, you see get an idea of how much of the nutrients that you're putting in there are the plants eating, how much is the nutrients stacking in the substrate. And ironically, obviously, when we're looking at bleaching, we want to make sure that the plant has enough nutrition to keep all of those chloroplasts as healthy as possible. And really what happens is when we see light bleaching, those chlorophyll are going to start either the environment is not right, nutrients are not right, or they're simply getting more light than they can process and the activity in that chlorophyll starts to go down. So rather than being green, they're turning white. We actually see this type of coloring in lots of plants. That can happen if we start getting too much light, you're going to have a little bit less green on the plant. Some plants actually start turning other colors when you get too much light. And ironically, for indoor plants, it sometimes can be a preferential trait. So I guess in your application, one look at obviously light levels at the canopy, heat levels at the canopy, take a look at leaf surface temperature and definitely analyze nutrient load. If you're seeing that the plant is eating more nutrients and we're just not getting enough balanced nutrition uptake in that plant, then kick up your nutrition a little bit and see if that doesn't reduce how much photo bleaching that you get. And then the obvious starting off with if your lights are too close, intensity is too high, you don't have enough CO2 to match your light intensity, then address those things before you start playing with nutrient.

Kaisha [00:04:00]:

Thank you for that answer, Jason. It actually makes me think about my sad little plant in the backyard. I think she might be getting too much sun. I'm just trying to find anything I can do to save this poor little plant.

Jason [00:04:13]:

Obviously, in an outdoor situation, we're going to be lower on CO2 levels than our ideal. And it's pretty common to see 1000 802,000 PPFD from the sun itself. It's all full spectrum. So you're seeing lots of leaf surface temps increase from the infrared and far red radiation coming out of the sun.

Kaisha [00:04:34]:

I also, as you all know, overwatered her in the beginning. Don't judge me. I'm doing my best. All right, we're going to keep going. Wyatt Turk just posted an autoflower question. They write crop steering lines up fairly well with auto veg periods, but not so much with autogen periods. For example, gen P two, dramatically extended by 18 hours light cycle. Gen P three, dramatically reduced by 18 hours light cycle, lower gen EC approximately 1.5. How can we adjust our targets to make autos? Got any thoughts on that?

Jason [00:05:12]:

Give me just the last few words again because we had something ping in here.

Kaisha [00:05:17]:

Yeah, no problem. So we got gen P two, dramatically extended by 18 hours light cycle. Gen P three, dramatically reduced by 18 hours light cycle, lower gen EC approximately 1.5. And they're looking to find out how they can adjust their targets to make the autos steerable.

Jason [00:05:39]:

Yeah, I guess I've got a little bit of confusion here in the question. It was just far as far as what was increased and decreased in the 18 hours light cycle.

Kaisha [00:05:50]:

Gen P two dramatically extended by 18 hours light cycle. Gen P three, dramatically reduced by 18 hours light cycle. Maybe Wyatt Turp, do we need a little bit more information about what they got going on over there?

Jason [00:06:02]:

Oh, the actual irrigations were changed by the light cycle. So typically when we are in an 18 hours light cycle, we're just going to be doing vegetative steering. I guess maybe if he's in an autoflower, he's trying to get as much growth as fast as possible. I guess one of my first questions would be, what's the driving factor of doing an autoflower? If you have a controllable light cycle, most applications for production, other than some research applications, autoflowers, we're going to be running outside where we don't have control over the light cycle. How can we make them more steerable? I think there's just too many unknowns here to give really great advice. Obviously, with an autoflower, usually we're working with a little bit smaller plant. You most likely have a larger or uncontrolled substrate size. So I think those are factors that we really have to dive into before we can make some good assumptions on how to make it more steerable.

Kaisha [00:07:10]:

Appreciate that. All right, Wyatt Herp, if you got a little bit more details about what you got going on over there, please do drop them in the chat. Let's see if we can kind of drill down some more specific advice for you. All right, we're going to keep it moving. It looks like we got some action on YouTube. Jeans. Just James wrote in howdy. Searing question. I need help understanding whether we want the daily EC target after runoff to increase day to day during generative cycles, or if stacking just means letting the EC creep up during the day overnight with a larger spike before morning irrigations.

Jason [00:07:48]:

It'S going to be both. So when we look at healthy EC levels for a good production cannabis plant coming out of veg, usually we want to be at the three to 536 type of range, and I usually consider that to be minimums in the substrate. If we want to do some generative stacking, we're definitely going to start to obviously control runoff and have a large dryback window, meaning that we're trying to get our irrigations done in one to 2 hours. After our first irrigation. And this is still an irrigation that's getting us up to field capacity or close to field capacity, then obviously like I said, if we're controlling our runoff amounts, then we should be able to actually stack that EC. So when we talk about stacking, we are actually talking about the increase in EC nominally from day to day throughout that period. And that's what's basically getting the plant accommodated to a lower osmotic differential. And so that osmotic differential is the salt concentration within the root zone or the roots themselves and the plant versus the substrate that is encompassing the root zone. And really what the whole goal of that sacking is doing is trying to help balance or change the plant's hormone into more reproductive type of chemicals.

Kaisha [00:09:19]:

All right, thank you for that, James. Just James. Keep us posted. Let us know what's going on over there. All right. Boys next door wrote a post asking. They're wondering what the best nutrient line for Rockwool is. Got any advice?

Jason [00:09:36]:

Obviously we try to stay fairly agnostic in the industry. It's hard for me to tell. Obviously, there's a good number of nutrient lines out there that I have had a lot of experience with. As far as success with our clients, first off, probably would be good old HGV. They've been in the industry a long time. Ron Goldman is just a fantastic guy to work with. Been growing tomatoes in greenhouse industry for three or four decades at least. And you got to be careful if you call him up because he'll talk your ear off, which is awesome. Just incredible amount of knowledge, I think another great nutrient out there, ambrosia crops. Just a fantastic nutrient line. Front row, pretty hard to beat some of their pricing. Definitely a higher quality two part salts. I think Athena is something that a lot of clients have had a lot of success with, especially moving from liquid nutrients to one of their pro lines. And then we've got some newcomers in the industry. I think advanced nutrients is starting to do with two part salts, crop salts out there there's. It's pretty amazing how many different nutrients are available now that are tailored towards cannabis. And really what I recommend is going with something that is popular in the industry and then one that's got enough resources for you to use it properly. One of the things that we've seen probably most prolifically here in the last two or three years is these nutrient companies that might have had historic lines in other crops, other horticulture applications. If they do get people that are specific for cannabis, a lot of times you'll start to see their nutrient recommendations start to be increased. A lot of that has to do with in controlled environment. Eric, we're trying to build a plant very quickly. So nutrient requirements, obviously, especially when we have CO2 appropriate light levels appropriate. We are doing some crop steering amounts with heavy feeding genetics. They're usually starving at some of the older recommended levels. So if you are choosing a line in there, obviously choose one that is right for your application. In the fact that rockwool, if you're doing a small grow, you may not be quite as cost conscientious. If you're at a production level, then keep in mind what some of the bulk quantity discounts are available from your suppliers. And that's how I would make my decision. As far as the differences in there, there definitely are subtle differences. How those subtle differences represent in the end product that you're growing actually has a lot to do with the strains that you're running. And it's kind of interesting because I'll work with some clients where they make a change from a nutrient manufacturer to another nutrient manufacturer, and they say, hey, my strains all started growing a little bit better and vice versa, maybe on the other side of the US. Where a different set of strains are most popularly grown, we'll see a company switch vice versa as far as which nutrient company they were, and their stuff improved as well. So a lot of it really comes down to, are you using your supplier the best?

Kaisha [00:13:05]:

That's a great overview. Just in general regarding nutrients. Thank you for that, Jason. Okay, max just posted in YouTube. Has combining both generative steering and switching to bloom newts at Flip been an ideal method to change the plant's morphology and bud setting quicker? You had any experience with that particular technique?

Jason [00:13:28]:

Yes, pretty much anytime that we are talking about flip to 1212, getting that plant to flower, we do want to start using bloom nutrients. So if your supplier of nutrients does Base plus Veg and a Base plus Bloom, definitely start switching to that bloom. And every once in a while, we'll see people transition. If you are planting into new immediate, you might go a day or two of veg nutrients, but really, typically the complexity of having your residue set up or your injections set up to do that may not be worth it. So for simplicity's sake, a lot of times we'll just go to a Base plus Bloom and we'll start stacking that EC for the ideal plant morphology.

Kaisha [00:14:17]:

Awesome. Yeah. Thank you for that question, Max. Appreciate you. And Mikey actually just responded to the previous question that he has found success with Athena. So I love the resource sharing post in the chat. Let us know what nutrients are working for you. What do you like? All right, we're going to keep it moving. We got a couple of questions from Plant Alley. They asked about two things, so let me ask the first one. How to determine field capacity, specifically with peat based mediums.

Jason [00:14:47]:

What do you I mean, the best way to get field capacity for any media? I think Ramsey did a YouTube video for us on this. I think Seth actually recorded another one pretty recently on how to evaluate that. Pretty simple. Get a kitchen scale or a scale that has enough resolution for you to get fairly accurate measurements on the weight of substrate that you're working with. Make sure that that substrate is completely dry. You can either do that by obviously leaving it out in the sun for three days, five days, eight days, whatever it takes to get that stuck completely dry. Or you can bake it for a few hours, make sure that all the water weight is out. Pretty easy to test that. If you're not sure the water weight is out, just measure the weight of that dry substrate every hour. When it stops going down, it's completely dry. So it's going to be your starting point when we look at that weight, that's the weight that we know our dry peat in this case is going to be. Works for any substrate. coco rockwool. I've done this test many times. So that's your starting weight. Now, we're going to obviously add water. I like to add water in a few different sets, say three or four different sets. And just making sure that you're not channeling out that media that we are getting the field capacity. Make sure sure it's that everything is fully saturated, and then let it sit for 30 minutes an hour, making sure that when you do go to remeasure it, there is no runoff. And I guess how long you leave it out is going to affect if you're in a really dry, hot environment, don't leave it out in the sun when you're letting that get to field capacity. So basically weigh it again and subtract your original weight from your saturated weight. And the difference is the amount of water that's in there, right? And so that amount of water, 1 gram equals 1 ML. Let's divide the whole substrate size by the amount of water that we had in there. Now you've got the percentage of water content, volumetric water content at field capacity. So break that down into basically three steps. I talked too much to count. Measure the dry weight, measure the wet weight when there's no more runoff, and then make calculations as far as how much water that substrate was holding at field capacity.

Kaisha [00:17:18]:

That is a quick and dirty explanation of field capacity, which is amazing. But you all need to check out the crash course that we have on our website, too. We just dropped that in the chat. A little bit more detailed, but amazing. Thank you for that overview, Jason. I love that you just know this off the top of your head. So good. All right.

Jason [00:17:35]:

We did it down at cookies. You sure?

Kaisha [00:17:38]:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I think I was taking pictures. Plant Ellie had another question. They're wondering when to cut CO2.

Jason [00:17:50]:

I actually don't really cut CO2 unless I'm really trying to optimize costs simply just because the cost the CO2 doesn't outweigh. And I guess we'd be talking it in the whole cycle. I guess I made an assumption there that they're saying, hey, during ripening, when do we cut CO2? I just let it run in the daytimes, obviously towards harvest. If they're talking about cutting CO2 on the 24 hours day period, obviously when lights are off, we want to make sure we're not injecting CO2. When lights are on, we are injecting CO2, and that's pretty much the cut off. So if your lights are on, CO2 is on. If your lights are off, CO2 is off. Scientific reasoning for this. Obviously during lights on, we are looking at the plant doing Photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is using the CO2 that's available. If we're matching our light levels, then it's going to use fairly substantial amount of the CO2 that's being supplied. Obviously, cannabis is a carbon based plant for providing CO2. That's the building blocks for the weight that is coming out. Of that plant. So when we look at photosynthesis, that's CO2 plus H 20 catalyzed by light is giving us the building block sugars that the plant is going to start to use. Now when we turn lights off, some interesting things happen. Rather than the plant photosynthesizing, it's actually respiring. And basically what that means is these sugars that we built during the daytime, during photosynthesis are now actually getting used and processed by that plant. And so when it's respiring, that chemical reaction actually starts to release a little bit of CO2. So those plants are using a little bit of oxygen while they're respiring at night. Kind of a wild process. But if our CO2 levels are too high during photo period, off during nighttime, during no photosynthesis, during time that we're respiring, then we can actually decrease how quickly that they are building plant matter, which is not good.

Kaisha [00:19:58]:

That is not good. Amazing. Okay, thank you for that plant. Ali, thank you so much for your questions. We're going to keep it moving. We're ending a little early. You all ten minutes left in the show. So if you have questions, now is the time to drop them. In the chat Indie Bud posted on YouTube. They're wondering what to do with strains that are growing purple stems and veg. Most of the strains work perfectly with 2.3 EC and they are all in the same veg room, same nutrition. Thanks. Got any advice for Indie Bud?

Jason [00:20:28]:

Probably one of three easy options there. One would just be obviously check the environment in that veg room, make sure that our temps are higher, relative humidities are higher, typically shooting for a VPD around 0.6.7. During veg periods, I like to be around 80 degrees mark, depending on your light requirements, but without knowing lights up around 80 degrees, maybe a little bit warmer. Take some leaf temp services to know leaf surface temps, to know exactly where that temperature should be and then humidity is appropriate to get that 0.6 EPD. So that would be the first looking environment. If it's too cold, you're more likely to have some of that purple in the stems. And obviously strain to strain is going to be dependent on how they react to the environments. Next up is also going to be strain dependent, which would be nutrient levels. So obviously there's a chance that that strain is actually just hungrier than the other ones. And so some of that purpling could become coming down of a nutrient. An easy thing to look at is the PH runoff from those plants similar and are the EC of their root zone graphs representing the same trending over the EC. And then the last one, it might be what that strain does. Some strains are just going to show purpling regardless of conditions being absolutely ideal or not. So basically two of those three you can adjust. The third one might actually be why that plant turns out to be a good seller is if it is very purple. Personally, I prefer some of the greener plants, and so if that genetic could be modified so it's not showing that purple, you might have an opportunity in the market as well. But that's definitely a business decision. That my standpoint. You'll have to analyze your market in order to be most effective in making that choice.

Kaisha [00:22:31]:

Fantastic. Thank you for that. Jason, Indy, Bud, keep us posted, let us know what's going on. All right, we got a two part question about irrigations from King Greenbees this week. So let me give you the first one here. If you could only have two p one waterings given to you to reach full saturation, and two to three p three waterings afterwards, which substrate and size as well as emitter would you choose for optimal results?

Jason [00:23:04]:

I probably wouldn't necessarily determine my media size and type by those irrigations. I would think about how much headspace do I have, what are my lighting types, am I in a very controlled environment? So lots of variables there that I would probably put significantly ahead of those irrigation constraints. For me, I would ask myself is, why am I constrained to those irrigation events? It's not actually bad. You could get away with doing five irrigations a day is probably five times more than we used to be traditionally hand watering. Right. So you still have pretty good control. Obviously, the things that we recommend for crop string are still going to work for that. Using low flow dippers is always helpful, but then again, in today's age, it's not very expensive to get irrigation controllers that can basically do as many or as few irrigations that you want on any schedule. Obviously, one of the things that we do is we integrate with open sprinklers. Pretty cool little product that's been on the market for, I think, almost a decade now. Very reasonable. You can get a lot of channels for under $200. Each module and array integrates with it. So now you're only using one interface to monitor your environment, your red zone, your irrigations, and then same exact interface to start pushing irrigation schedules. You can have Aria update those irrigation schedules based on the plant lifecycle. So if you need an irrigation schedule to be different each week, you can load those into Aurora. And by doing harvest groups, aurora will automatically update the increased irrigation needs or the change in irrigation. Know if it is an equipment constraint, I would probably just invest in an open sprinkler, integrate it with your array system, if you have an array system. If you don't, an open sprinkler interface is actually pretty reasonable. It's easy to use if you set up a VPN connection or other ways you can access it remotely anywhere that you have Internet, which is really nice way to monitor your crops and make updates to irrigation if you're not always at your grow. Yeah, like I said they're not going to be one of the more expensive parts. If you're making up your decision on which type of substrate because of irrigation constraints, I would just consider what are my irrigation constraints? Am I really making the best approach? Am I just going to be a loss on money because not upgrading my irrigation equipment and maybe using a substrate too big or too small? Most likely too big if you're constrained.

Kaisha [00:25:52]:

Yeah. Okay. So his second question was how many minutes would you let pass after the first p one was completed prior to starting the second p one? Watering? So I guess what are some considerations King Ruby should keep in mind with regard to the scheduling of his shots?

Jason [00:26:09]:

Sure. So if I'm in the right size media and I'm going to irrigate with two p ones and three p two s, I would probably wait for 1 hour after lights on irrigate, wait about 30 minutes, do my second p one irrigation, and then in order to stretch my irrigation window out to middle of the road, say 6 hours, 8 hours. Then you would do an irrigation about every 2 hours after. That.

Kaisha [00:26:41]:

Awesome. Thank you for that. Good luck. Dr. Not doctor. I'm sorry. King Greenbeast. Not doctor. All right, we got another question here on YouTube. Ricardo wrote in when in two gallon coco Pots. What's the best ideal runoff EC and PH? You'd want to see if you wanted to stack your EC in the early weeks, not running AROYA, but implementing crop staring techniques. What advice do we have for Ricardo?

Jason [00:27:11]:

Yeah, obviously for did you say PH and EC?

Kaisha [00:27:17]:

Yes, runoff EC and PH.

Jason [00:27:19]:

Yeah. So runoff PH, usually we want to see that pretty close to our feed PH. If we're in Rockwool, we definitely want that runoff PH to be as close to, say, five, six as possible. That would be one of our ideal feed PHS. For rockwool, for coco, you might be five, eight, maybe 60 on your feed PH. And so runoff, same thing. Let's try and keep it as close as possible. That means that our plants are eating balanced nutrition and our substrate is not modifying the PH that we're feeding the plant. As far as ECS go, let's take an idea of what is our feed EC and for our feed EC, let's say day one that we're doing very low runoff. I like to have just enough runoff to check my EC and PH when I am stacking. So we might say, all right, if we're in a two week stacking cycle and we're trying to let the EC rise, maybe, let's say seven points. So let's say we start coming out of edge at a runoff of, say, 30 EC. Then maybe by the end of the time we're getting closer to a runoff of almost ten, you're probably not going to see let's say, actually that's the substrate that we're going to want to see is probably starting to say at 30 in the substrate. Usually we want to be a little bit higher than that in flower. And then let's say we're shooting for a substrate EC after irrigation about ten. So you're going to probably see that runoff EC rise just a little bit more towards the end. And just do the math. If we're trying to stack that much over 14 days, that's the stairstep of EC and the runoff that we're going to see each day. How effective this is going to be is going to come down to all of the parameters that we talk about. And then the last one, obviously, being crop steering, so make sure everything else is in line. Whenever I do any consulting, I actually like to call it agronomic advising. I pretty much check crop steering. Last. I'll look at all the environmental parameters, start to look at irrigation parameters, look at the plants, and then start talking about, well, is that crop steering working? If there's much to be worried about in your environment, then you're really going to struggle to start diagnosing irrigation. If there's any issues with your irrigation or your plant lifecycle, then it's going to be really difficult to understand how to improve crop steering or even to crop steer at that point.

Kaisha [00:30:09]:

Got to look at the whole environment. Awesome. Yeah. Ricardo, thank you for that question. I have one last question for us here. Jason. Mikey, our good friend, posted this. I missed it earlier on YouTube. He wanted to know, do you have any experience using the reheat method of dehumidification with your AC units? Any experience with that?

Jason [00:30:29]:

I personally have not run a facility that had the option to reheat. Best things work with your HVAC, guys. I'm not sure exactly if the question was just if I had experience with it or not, or if we were trying to make some improvements. So, Mike, if you want to hit me up, I'll pick my brain here on email or a phone call and see if there's something I can help you with.

Kaisha [00:30:53]:

Always, yeah. Appreciate the question, Mikey. I know you got a direct line to Jason, so hit him up if you have any other questions. Bilbo wrote here. Agronomic consulting. Is that what you call it? Is that what we're calling it, Jason?

Jason [00:31:04]:

I like to call it advising.

Kaisha [00:31:06]:

That's right. Agronomic advising. All right. And with that, this episode of agronomic advising is coming to a close. We're ending a little earlier today, folks. Jason, thank you so much for holding it down. Also to our producer Chris for another great session. If you're looking for some AROYA gear like what I have on right now, AROYA shop is now open for business. Head over there, get you some merch. Thank you all so much for joining us for this week's AROYA office hours. We do this every Thursday, and the best way to get your answers from the experts. Is to join us live. To learn more about Aroya, book a demo at AROYA IO. One of our experts would be happy to walk you through all the different ways the platform can improve your production, cultivation, production process. If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, post questions anytime in the AROYA app. Drop questions in the chat on our YouTube. Send us an email to sales at Aroya IO DM us. We are on all the socials instagram TikTok YouTube, LinkedIn and Social Club. We want to hear from you. We'll send everyone in attendance a link to today's video and post it on the AROYA YouTube channel. Be sure to like, subscribe and share while you're her. We'll see you at the next session. Thanks everybody. Bye.