Seth [00:00:00]:
Foreign.

Cian [00:00:04]:
What'S up Gromies? Welcome to AROYA office hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. This episode 125 shout out to our live viewers on YouTube and Instagram to everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts, thank you for your support. If you like the pod, drop us a review. We appreciate your feedback and love to hear from you. I'm your guest moderator CM covering for Kaisha who's already out for the holidays. Hope you guys enjoy our holiday episode. Seth, Jason, you guys ready to start?

Seth [00:00:37]:
Yeah, let's jump right in.

Cian [00:00:39]:
All right, first question I've got for you guys comes from Herbo Baggins. He posts Are Z Terps taking over the market? Yes or no? What's your guys opinions?

Seth [00:00:53]:
Are they taking over the market? I mean they're becoming more and more popular over time I think especially because Z the Skittles are pretty good. Chris are you know they're notoriously kind of finicky to grow and thus they kind of remain rare in the market. But I don't know that I would say they're fully taking over the market. That being said, I'm not like the biggest aficionado in the concentrate scene and I think that's might be more where we're seeing this. Jason, have you heard a whole lot in the market about that?

Jason [00:01:26]:
Not necessarily. I mean it seems like still even now we get some of some of the trickle trends from Cali. Been seeing some of those gases and stuff come over from Cali and finally getting popular on the east coast. But nationwide I don't necessarily see stuff take over the market if you will. East coast stuff I've personally seen be kind of some of the older strains hang in there and then they pop some weird shit that I've never heard of and that takes on. Whereas Cali's been pretty stable for a while up here in Washington. Same thing, Super Silver Haze. Some of that stuff I've been been getting same as it was, you know, 10 years ago up here.

Seth [00:02:19]:
Yeah, I think that just brings up how quickly the market can kind of pulse. You know, we see strains, turnover pretty quickly. A lot of them come in and out of the market in my opinion way too quick. But otherwise, you know, we kind of see things come and go in popularity and there's probably a lot of factors related to that from nostalgia to what's popular right now, to really what people are growing. I mean, you know, we, we kind of have this trend happening which growers can only Adapt to so much. Right. Like, as something gains popularity in the marketplace, growers have to grow it to get it out into the marketplace. So being that it takes time to go from cut to finished product, especially If I get 10 cuts for mothers, and I need to blow that up to a couple thousand plants to get a harvest out of it, or even a couple hundred, that's going to take time to, you know, grow out those moms, cut them, grow out some clones, veg them all, the whole process.

Seth [00:03:11]:
So the actual market, what you see in the stores is always going to be a little bit behind what we're seeing in the driving trends. That being said, there's a bunch of different marketing games out there that people play to try to keep that revolving door of strains happening and hopefully keep some of this stuff relevant. You know, being able to pull a strain out of production for a while, reintroduce it, try to invigorate that. And then there's always that fact that at the end of the day, people are still going to go to the dispensary and buy product to a certain extent, no matter what we put out there. Right. Like, if quality in the stores goes somehow so low that people only go back to black market to get their product, that could happen. But more likely, most people at this point are going to go to the store. They're not going to get.

Seth [00:03:57]:
They're going to try to pick the best of what's there, what's recommended to them, but at the end of the day, they are going to still buy products. So that does make it kind of tough, I think, for producers and anyone selling or brokering cannabis to really stay on top of. You know, it's safest to stay on certain trends. But at some point, someone's got to break the mold a little bit and start driving the trend a different direction. And that's happening monthly?

Jason [00:04:20]:
Yeah, I mean, obviously, it's. It's a balance of what gets purchased by consumers and what gets pushed by dispensaries. And I think a great example of, you know, what Seth's talking about, a break in the mold, is like, finally we're seeing some of the green weeds, like good stuff, take a little popularity In California again, we were running a number of years straight where purple is the only thing that would sell from producers to dispensaries, distributors. For me, and I think for anyone that has been a cultivator, there's a lot of cannabis that may not look as desirable or isn't cool, but it's the one that's giving you the buzz you're looking for.

Seth [00:05:04]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think soon you can comment to this. Just growing up, you've grown a good variety of strains over the last few years. And I know our, in our own opinions, plenty of those varieties, the terpeness, the flavor, overall smokability profile is actually way better right next to Purple Jealousy that you're growing in the same room, even though that other strain doesn't purple up. And. Well, that's. That's all on brokers, right?

Jason [00:05:31]:
Yep.

Cian [00:05:32]:
I'd say, you know, a lot of the things that I have felt like were my favorite flavor profiles, my favorite strains, for a number of different reasons, oftentimes didn't fit the profiles that were, you know, predominantly out there in the market. And as a result, I've had to, you know, find alternative brokers sometimes and look for people who want specific case profiles. And I think that's getting better these days. But, you know, it's definitely a game we play. And I would also say that, you know, we all want to know what the next thing coming around the corner is. I'd love to be able to have a map to that myself. And if Z is going to be the thing that blows up in the next two years, man, I hope I start growing some soon. But the other side of that is, you know, oftentimes your local brokers and your local markets are going to predict what you're going to be able to sell and market successfully.

Cian [00:06:37]:
And if that's Z, that's awesome. Grow a bunch of it and have fun experimenting with those strains. But if it's, you know, looking like you have some people that are really into some of those purple gassy profiles like we see, still see a lot of the attention for in California, I would say that, you know, grow to your market, grow to your strength, and experiment a little bit on the side with things to see if you can cultivate a market for some of those strains that you find more exotic or more fun.

Jason [00:07:08]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:07:08]:
And I think that highlights a whole other side of this industry that's pretty important to expound upon. You know, like Sina saying, if you're, if you can chase your market, that's great for your business. Right. Like you're going to try to turn revenue. The most successful clients that I have that are able to break the mold and try to drive new trends in the industry are, well, they have their own brand. A lot of them have their own dispensary. So they have the ability to get that product out into Consumers hands and see what consumers think without having to go through a middleman who's already predisposed as a broker to buying certain strains based on certain trends. So it's, it's kind of a difficult web to navigate and certainly a lot easier if you have access to the marketing resources and retail resources that some growers have.

Seth [00:07:57]:
Not every grower has that. So I think it's important to also realize where you're at in the industry. If you don't have the tools to drive those, those certain market things, you're not going to be able to really go anywhere. You're at the mercy of the trends. And that's, that's an important thing to realize. You know, as growers, most of us want to grow the best terpious, highest quality flower possible. Maybe there are some that don't. But depending on your situation, you've got to balance cost versus product.

Seth [00:08:30]:
And sometimes in your specific situation, it's not going to make sense to try to drive the market trends too much because you don't necessarily have a place to sell it that's going to get you the high dollar based on just quality alone. So it's, it's really important to look at your business overall and see where you're at, what you can actually sell. I know we, you know, it's kind of a sad thing too, chasing these trends. We see plenty of people, I've been there myself, where you suddenly got a couple hundred pounds of a strain left over three months later that you just can't get rid of. And that's probably why it's also important to keep, you know, not only one eye on what your sales are doing, but one eye on what the overall market's doing and what's selling. So you can anticipate some of those changes ahead of time. This is, you know, there's. On one hand, it's really bad to grow some fireweed and then have it molded out in your dry room.

Seth [00:09:21]:
It's also pretty sad to see it sit there for three to six months and then have no real marketability value after that.

Cian [00:09:30]:
So that's well put. No one wants to have product sitting around that long at this stage of the game. 3 month old product is not really sellable product these days.

Seth [00:09:40]:
No. But you know what? I don't see Blue Dream or GG4 on the shelves in Washington anymore. So bring it back. Gross.

Cian [00:09:48]:
You know, I still see some of the spots down in California and I think there's a handful of people that are still kicking around that might never buy anything else. But with that said, there's only a couple places left still doing that. Well, I think we've got another interesting one here that changes directions a little bit for us, but I think is worth talking about because I know that I've had trouble with it and so many people that I've talked to over the years, over time. Michael Klimo asks, would love to hear an overview of why cannabis gets hollow stems during growth stages and why you see issues with cloning when hollow stems are present.

Seth [00:10:38]:
Yeah, so what we're talking about there is pith autolysis. And it's a process that generally occurs when a plant's outgrowing the rate at which it can uptake nutrients and also fix those into tissue. So basically, the plants cannibalizing that pith at the inside of the stem in order to pull sugar and nutrients out of it to sustain the rest of the plant. And different strains have a genetic predisposition to do this over others. That's why you see it persistently in some strains versus others. And I don't want to say it's a mark of genetic instability. However, it is one of those situations where if we were able to grow out, let's say, 500 seeds off of this F1 cross, to select from that and eliminate that as a selection factor and say, hey, we're not going to keep any with hollow stems. That's where we generally combat that.

Seth [00:11:23]:
Sometimes you run into a situation where it's. You take a plant that hasn't been grown in a high intensity environment, put it into one, and now dealing with pith autolysis, when it comes to cloning, for instance, we see a little bit lower cloning rate in those. They're a little bit more prone to infection because you can get water up inside that hollow space and there's really no way to get it out. It just sits there and goes anaerobic. So when battling that, I mean, there's a few different strategies. One is to run your moms under less intense conditions, try to provide enough nutrition and grow those plants so that they're not hollow. Don't have big, stretched out moms, typically. And when you're dealing with that, a lot of times you can look at a particular branch and if you sectioned it out and cut down the branch, you'd find that there's a certain point in thickness where the branch actually starts to become hollow inside.

Seth [00:12:10]:
And one of the ways around that is just to not take cuts from that part. When it comes to Actual flower production, it's not necessarily a huge problem. It's a bigger problem in the mom and cloning space.

Jason [00:12:22]:
Yeah. Nutrition levels, like a lot of times that I see it ending up in plants that you wouldn't expect it in, it has to do with its own conditions. Obviously, genetic predisposition is probably the biggest factor in this. In ideal circumstances, we're going to see it on certain cuts, regardless of how hard we try to prevent it. But in cuts that we wouldn't expect it. Take a look at your water contents. Are you seeing dynamic drybacks in that red zone? And then are we providing a high enough EC in that red zone with a good balanced nutrition to provide optimal health?

Cian [00:13:02]:
Yeah.

Seth [00:13:02]:
And typically when it pops up, there's gonna be a, a mark, a market change somewhere. Like I said, taking that clone from a lower intensity environment to a higher intensity environment. If we weren't seeing it in moms before, but you just put a bunch of new LEDs in your mom room and now instead of, you know, old school metal halides, you've actually got 600 watt lights over your mom's. Excuse me. There might be an art to balancing how hard you can blast those plants with energy inputs to avoid that pith autolysis. But again, long term, there's that solution. There's also looking at what your cloning success rate is off of those moms that express that. So if we see it go from 98% down to 72%, okay, we need to take 26% more cuts to make sure we've got a viable clone population going into veg.

Seth [00:13:53]:
So it's kind of one of those little things where in an ideal world we would solve a lot of these problems genetically through selection and breeding. That being said, one of the most fun things about being a cannabis producer is much like some people growing, say, orchids, we're working with plants that can be variable, finicky when it comes to EC, light inputs, etc. So to me, it adds an element of fun. And that's also part of what's awesome about this revolving door of strains in the cannabis marketplace is if you do have one that is difficult to grow and costs more, it's not too hard to look at your pound per pound price or your bulk price and say, hey, is this worth it or not? Because with the amount of strains out there, if I've got a library that has, let's say, 80 strains in it, if that one sucks to grow, move on to another one. You know, if it's not selling and it's not really performing in the marketplace. Some of these battles just aren't worth it to fight. At the end of the day.

Cian [00:14:54]:
I'd say that's definitely true. I know that several of the strains that I have seen that be more persistent with, like Jason was saying, I don't grow now. And largely for, you know, those types of reasons. I will also say that exactly what you guys are getting to there, when you have issues with that root zone stability, that tends to be the hallmark case where I have seen that in my own plants over time. And then also changing plants from a nursery room into, let's say a mom room that had harsher conditions. Like Seth was saying, seeing some of those moms exhibit those symptoms when, you know, had they maybe grown in that nursery room the whole time, I've had those same strains not produce that effect. And, you know, that just goes to show, some of those environmental factors can really push your root zone in ways that you're not expecting. And if your plant has the genetic predisposition to show those types of traits, you may well see them then.

Cian [00:16:07]:
And the times that I was successful, I was going to say the. Like Seth was saying, I just took cuts of parts of the plant that were not experiencing those hollow stems, and that was the best success rate that I would get. And if you keep to just clones that or cuts that are have a solid pith to the inside of that cut, you're going to have a much higher success rate off of that plant, even if there are parts of it that have hollow stems.

Seth [00:16:35]:
Yeah. I want to emphasize something that genetic predisposition. I've personally grown a few different strains that they did exhibit hollow stems and flower. When we went to cut them down, did that necessarily mean our yield or quality was worse on those plants? Absolutely not. It is kind of a, hey, we're chopping it down and whoa, this is a surprise. We haven't chopped a big branch off this plant in a few months, and here it is. But at the end of the day, on those particular strains, as long as we were providing enough nutrition, and you know, you can always identify that by looking at your plant. You have a healthy plant.

Seth [00:17:06]:
Is it lush green when it's supposed to be? Does it have any symptoms of deficiency or disease? If not, that's something you can totally work with and right back to it. If. If that strains worth it in the marketplace and you're not experiencing branches falling over, reduced yield or any other problem you could associate with that other than the rooting in Strategy, it may not quite be as big of a problem as you think it is.

Cian [00:17:35]:
All right, I think we did a good job on that one. I've got another topic related to clones here. David Tate posts. Good afternoon. Is it possible to grow out? By that, I think he means eliminate viroids in plants just through conventional cloning techniques.

Seth [00:17:55]:
Thanks.

Jason [00:17:58]:
Depends. What? Thyroid? A little bit, but not usually.

Seth [00:18:02]:
No, I mean, what you can do there is reduce. So basically, as you're getting fresher and fresher tissue that has a little smaller and smaller amount of vascular connection to the rest of the planets had less time for that virus to move up into that tissue. And we're talking about plant viroid symptoms, just like testing that has to do with the prevalence of that viroid in the tissue. So the higher viral load you have, the more symptoms you're going to see. If you can go with fresher and fresher cuts off of newer and newer moms, you're going to reduce that viral load. But at this point, it's pathogen management, not pathogen elimination. And that's where you've got to look at, hey, is this effective to a point that I'm able to continue to get an acceptable yield off of this crop? Usually it's pretty worth turning your mom's over really regularly, because once you've got, let's say, a mom room that has HLV or a different viroid in it, it's pretty hard to stop that from spreading to those other plants. Alternatively, if you can, one of the easiest things to do is to refresh your mom stock from a safe source.

Seth [00:19:09]:
Hopefully you've gotten your cuts from somewhere that can refresh them. If not, you're looking at sometimes doing a meristem tip culture, which has mixed rates of success. I encourage people to do that, but sometimes the expense outweighs the benefit, unless you've got a very special strain and the time.

Jason [00:19:25]:
I mean, if you're looking to do that, you're not going to be in production again for probably six, eight months.

Seth [00:19:30]:
Yeah, easily six to eight, nine months from taking it into Marisim tip culture, actually being successful there, and then ending up with clones about that tall that you can now go grow out with the expectation of still testing that regularly to make sure that you actually eliminated that. Because, you know, I think we've talked about this before. If I take a plant and go and take some tissue samples looking for HLVs like the big one out there, I might take 10 samples off of one plant and nine of those come back negative. That one tenth one that's a positive is still a positive for the whole plant doesn't matter. And part of that is because using these PCR tests we're using a few different chemicals to really replicate a lot of that viral rna, boost it up to a detectable level. And if there's not enough in that particular sample, we're not really going to be able to detect it. So even with meristem tip culture, it's not guaranteed. And going back to it, once we get into a commercial setting on pretty much any crop you can think of, we're looking at pest and pathogen management more than eradication or extermination.

Seth [00:20:40]:
That's we're moving into a model where we're getting hopefully the cleanest cuts clones we can from a source. Whether that's in house or out of house becomes extra important. And really developing that business model where you, if you're making clones in house, you have essentially a tiny business feeding your bigger business. And that business needs to have its own biosecurity, reasonable sop like everything's got to be in line to make that business successful.

Cian [00:21:09]:
I think that that covers that really well. I would just kind of say thinking back on some of your guys earlier episodes, you know, whether or not you keep these strains, a lot of times it's going to come down to whether or not, like you said, it can be commercially viable for you and whether or not that's going to be something that you can put back into production and that you are attached to putting back into production. Because like Jason said, if you know you are looking to really clean that genetic, six months down the line is going to be the earliest opportunity that you have to be able to replant that strain. And is that worth waiting for for you? Is there maybe another genetic that you might be able to find in the meantime that may do just as well for you in that market. So food for thought, sometimes getting into production or back into production more quickly can be a little more advantageous than waiting on that genetic to come back from cleaning.

Seth [00:22:05]:
Well, I want to say too that's where now that we're in a more legal sphere, a lot of little caveats have been taken care of to the point where, you know, having a tissue culture library as a separate independent business, not even attached to your own, but a service that you buy from someone else is totally feasible. And there certainly is value. If you have a strain that has been pretty unique to your grow, or maybe it's super rare, it might be worth it to Essentially put it in the freezer, you know, throw it in a tc, have someone library it for you so that you can bring it back in a year or two and not have to try to store it safely in your production facility. However, it's like anything, you got to balance the cost of that versus what you're actually going to get out of it. And at a certain production size, it might not be quite viable to go down that route. Especially in a world where, you know, one thing I tell people is like, hey, if you're going to buy seeds to pop, I like four times as many of any cross that you think you might. Because guess what? Even if you only bought 50 or 100 and you pop 20 of them, let's say you did get some contamination, you at least still have a little seed bank to go back to and hopefully pop another 10 and find a similar fino in there that'll work for you.

Cian [00:23:21]:
Think that that is. Well said, Seth. Just want to let you know, Jason, you're getting so much love today on your choice of outfit for the afternoon.

Jason [00:23:31]:
Good. It's not easy to wear.

Seth [00:23:36]:
Most people don't know that it's based off an actual taken photo of Jason last Christmas.

Jason [00:23:40]:
Jesus.

Seth [00:23:45]:
That was a custom deal.

Cian [00:23:48]:
Don't see where the comment went in here, but we had a good one about. I think it was like whether or not Santa opened up the Victoria's Secret bag or not.

Jason [00:23:57]:
Nice. I like the comment talking about the bag seats smelling like sewer.

Cian [00:24:06]:
Sometimes those genetics, really, they just smell weird when you take them out of the pack.

Seth [00:24:11]:
Urinal cakes out there.

Cian [00:24:17]:
All right, a little pivot into a different one here. We have a question that came in from. I'm not entirely sure who this one was from, but Canon canopies get overfilled and stretch and if they do, how is it or what's a good metric to know how? As much as too much. An interesting one.

Jason [00:24:38]:
So, yeah, a good metric is going to be how much light penetration you're seeing. Right. So under canopy lighting levels. And for me, the best way to know what that is is looking at a percentage of what we're getting on top of our canopy. If you're not using under canopy lighting, we're going to see that number typically decrease until we're. We've gotten down to the lowest part of the canopy. As far as what the ideal number for that is going to be really dependent on their strain, unfortunately. Right.

Jason [00:25:14]:
We've got some strains that, you know, they don't. They don't mind being In a really thick canopy, we've got others that start to do a little bit weird stuff. You know, you'll see accidentally that plant will keep stretching a little bit longer because it's trying to be apically dominant versus the other plants around. So that number is very relative to the crop itself as far as, hey, you know, do I want to be seeing, you know, 10% at the bottom of the canopy?

Seth [00:25:40]:
Right.

Jason [00:25:40]:
Under canopy lighting, at minimum of 10%. Right. And when you think of plant physiology, you know, that plant's going to be responded specifically to its total photon accumulation. And what that means is basically we're looking at what's the combined capture of light energy from all of the leaf surfaces. And this is why we're always preaching things like canopy management and plant spacing, because those are the ways that you're going to increase not only how much light you're getting throughout the canopy, but airflow, that other types of stuff that helps homogenize that, that, that range. You know, obviously, under canopy lighting has been one of those things that has helped mitigate how much labor that we put into canopy management in order to achieve those. Those baseline numbers, you know, for. Let's.

Jason [00:26:28]:
Let's just take an example. For a thousand micromoles at the top of the canopy, if our Standard, if our SOP was saying, hey, we need getting, you know, 10% through to the bottom of that canopy, and then, you know, start writing that stuff down for your strain, make some notes on how you want to run it, and, you know, take into account plant spacing as well. That's all going to help you standardize and optimize how a strain is planted. Taken care of. And really the end results.

Seth [00:26:58]:
Yeah, a lot of this just really goes back to crop registration all the way through. You know, oftentimes when I'm looking at dialing in that optimum canopy, you know, you. You try out a run, you do everything you normally do all the way through at a particular density, and then evaluate the results. On this strain, did you get an acceptable A to B grade on your bud? You know, was half of it age arable weed? The other half was, hey, we're going to joints and distillate. Was it more in favor of that? A grade and then what's your space? Can you do something with the B grade? If your current business is packaging jars or bags of a grade flower, we're probably gonna go a little lighter on the density and try to increase that light intensity down deeper in the canopy. And then we gotta look at other factors too, for different strains. Like a lot of the runs, crosses out there do tend to grow not bushy, but branchy, I will say. And that's one way we'll look at is like, hey, what, what, what was that? Bud size equality in the mid canopy.

Seth [00:27:54]:
Did we get that right back to that? A to B ratio is a good way to evaluate. And then another thing we'll look at is labor time. So in order to achieve a certain density of canopy, am I working against the plant or with it? So if I go with a heavily topped plant, let's say I bush it out really quickly in generative phase, then I hit day 22, 23 right in there, maybe day 21, river end of stretches that we're typically doing another D leaf and actual pruning to set that canopy. If I went from nine plants a light to 12 plants a light, and then the actual labor time on that second defoliation and pruning took four times as long as it did when I was flipping a smaller, less bushy plant. That's another factor I'm going to look at is how much effort did I have to put in to produce a certain number of mature bud sites, essentially. And there's a. So by recording all of that, you can start to look at, hey, what were the benefits of running this density? What were maybe some of the drawbacks? Did we sacrifice a little bit of overall yield? But maybe we improve that A to B ratio and then just as Jason said, you know, under canopies coming in to help solve a lot of these problems. So for some strains where we really do see a big gradient or particular rooms, we're seeing not enough, let's say temperature differential or energy input differential due to, due to light radiation coming into the plant from the top to the bottom.

Seth [00:29:17]:
Sometimes we can solve that by injecting a little bit of energy down deeper into the canopy. But it all goes back to really recording everything that you did. And I mean, we say this all the time. This is so cyclical. Cannabis farmers are some of the only people they get to grow this many crops this quickly over and over and over. And I know personally, it's. It's hard to keep track of all those variables in your head sometimes, especially when it's things that you have to go do with your hands, not just things you have to write down or put into a spreadsheet. So whenever you are playing with some of these plant densities, make sure you're recording, you know, how heavily you're defoliating and take pictures.

Seth [00:29:53]:
Pictures really do speak a thousand words. And you're trying to communicate from one person to another how you pruned or defoliated a plant, what kind of density you're running. You know, when I say like hey, that canopy looks pretty thick or pretty dense, man, that's, that's really, really, really subjective. You know, that's, that's totally my opinion. Depending on what CN's growing, he might completely disagree with that statement. If he's growing like some multiple wedding cake or ice cream cake, he'd be like, no, don't, don't judge my canopy. Meanwhile, I'm growing a runs cross over here and my nuggets are like a quarter the size of his at the same, at the same day in flower.

Jason [00:30:29]:
I think, yeah. Crop registration. I know for, for me that kind of came into this industry not having a really significant biology or growing background. You know, I relied on technology in order to do, help me do more crop registration stuff. Right. Not only, you know, to organize what the team was seeing their eyes on, but you know, probably one of my most favorite was to do a time lapse photography. Most of us have security cameras in these rooms anyways. At least if you're a production, legal production grower, you have access to that.

Jason [00:31:03]:
Typically it's not going to take any more hardware, just get it set up. So one of your security cameras, most of the time they're IP cameras, you know, it's pipe into a feed that you can just do a time lapse photography. If you can watch a whole grow cycle in three minutes, two or three minutes, it's going to give you the ability to make some very visual comparisons without putting a lot of labor forward into journaling or documentation type of stuff.

Cian [00:31:30]:
Yeah, I'd say crop registration and just being able to have the tools available to document a lot of those different changes over time. I think that's probably one of the most powerful tools I've ever been given to be able to analyze what's going on with. The results I'm getting are like Seth said, being able to have an idea of your genetic selection and what types of needs and wants it has is going to predict largely how you're going to treat specific crops. And I know for me the only way that I really got comfortable knowing one way versus another way to treat a specific cultivar was like Jason was saying, you know, take as many pictures as you can. And I remember actually the first time of hearing you tell people, Jason, to take time lapse photography series and I remember going in and putting in a yardstick into one of my grows or like a meter stick so that I could have the time lapse photography and also the heights of it as it were, went through its growth stages day by day, week by week. And I love watching those little time lapse videos now. I mean, it's one of my favorite things to do once a crop gets done, just to watch that whole series and see how it pans out and watch those different stages of growth and then be able to look back and compare how did this run do versus one of the runs before. And oftentimes if there's a significant difference in quality or yield at the end of it, I can watch those videos and I can see pretty visibly where or what part in time and during my grow I had some of these changes occur that led to what happened.

Cian [00:33:19]:
And that's how I've learned, honestly is being able to get that feedback from what my yield and quality was and be able to look back in time with all those crop registration pictures and time lapse videos to see what I did.

Seth [00:33:33]:
Absolutely. And just something that simple can also teach you to start to predict, even visually, much better, what your yields are going to be as well. Like if you have time lapse, time lapse stratography on certain strains, especially with those height measurements in place, and then your notes that say, hey, this was the density I'm running, you can start to make some pretty good judgments that says, hey, if we're not going to, we're not experiencing this amount of vertical plant growth or this amount of canopy density by a certain day, we can probably project that our yield might be lower compared to this last run based on the fact that we might have 20 runs with this data to go look back on and look for some of these identifying factors for this strain.

Jason [00:34:22]:
And you're on mute, big guy.

Seth [00:34:24]:
Oh no, of course I am. There we go.

Cian [00:34:28]:
Missed that button click by just a hair. I think we'll jump into a another question here that we had come in. Happy holidays, guys. I have a question about veg and interrupt light. Most people veg their plants 18 to 24 hours, but I was wondering if I split the 18 hours into nine hour increments each, let's say two to three hours in between, I would imagine is what he's trying to say. Will they stay in veg if I split my times that way?

Jason [00:35:01]:
That's a great question.

Seth [00:35:03]:
Yeah, I would test that. I probably wouldn't test on a bunch of them.

Jason [00:35:06]:
Yeah, I can dig into a little bit of on why we don't necessarily do that. And that is because when we're looking at photosynthesis ramping up and ramping down, typically we're not seeing max photosynthetic rates for about 45 minutes for cannabis. For other types of plants it can be even longer. But for cannabis, usually we're looking around 45 minutes. And so when we think about, all right, that photosynthetic rate is ramping up, well, you know, we're trying to get growth as fast as possible, right. So if, you know, if we're doing say three hour increments, we're going to have substantial more amounts of ramping up and ramping down in photosynthetic rates. And you know, that's just going to be an overall loss of total amount of mass growth. Right.

Jason [00:35:54]:
And especially in veg, when we're just trying to build plant matter, we want to hit photosynthetic max rates, keep that rolling for, you know, 18 hours plus and then rock and roll into the next one. As far as if the plant's going to stand veg, I feel like yes, but I don't know.

Seth [00:36:13]:
I think that's going to be highly strain dependent. You know, some strains we see that if you go below 16 hours of light, they start to flower some closer to 17, some at 18 stay fully in veg, some even at 18 will tend to pre flower in veg if you try to hold them into a mom space too long. So it's going to be slightly strain dependent. And while there are examples of other crops where we utilize interrupted photoperiod, specifically flor like more in floriculture cut flowers where we're looking to induce certain responses on a really given timeline. We're also trying to do that in cannabis, but the responses we're looking for aren't typically artificial. That's why we're going with an 18 to you know, sometimes up to 24 hour photo period during that veg time is because what we're really maximizing is like, hey, especially, you know, the farther you get from the equator, cannabis is growing. You know, seeds are sprouting in June, early July, when well actually the sprouting mainly in June, late May, but that main growth period is happening when the day is actually the absolute longest in the year. And then after June 21, at least in the northern hemisphere, obviously December 21 in the southern, when they're in the middle of the summer, we're starting to see that daylight march down, you know, shorter and shorter Days are happening and that photo period signals the plant to go into flower.

Seth [00:37:29]:
So we're dealing with a plant that's evolved for millions of years along that cycle. And we're not necessarily trying to interrupt that too much to force a response. Because as we've all seen, especially when we're talking about feminized crosses and we really have no guarantee of stable genetics out there, at least in terms of diet selection, that's potentially putting an extra stress point on the plants. Similar to, let's say you take a flowering plant, try to make a clone, you might have to go through like two more cuts off of that to get back to an actual veg state plant. Because it's really, really hard to turn over a plant that's in that determinant hormonal state back into an indeterminate state where it's trying to just continually grow veg material. So while it's possible, I certainly wouldn't try to experiment with it on too big of a crop. Because one thing you might find is some strange pre flowering. And in my experience, if I were to take plants from a pre flowering state in clone and veg and then try to throw them into an actual flower room sometimes, or especially if they're pre flowering and clone, then I throw them into an 18 to 24 hour veg cycle and then throw them back into a 1212.

Seth [00:38:40]:
I see some very strange morphology that it would be very interesting to do some tissue analysis and try to figure out what hormones are at what concentrations in there that are producing, producing that. But ultimately that problem is solved by a more conventional light cycle. So long term I would, it would be really fun to play with if you can throw two plants in a little tent and do it. But I, I wouldn't expect that to have any more positive result on the plants. If anything, it's risking a potentially negative response when it comes farther down the line into flowering.

Jason [00:39:14]:
Yeah. So I kind of just had a weird thought, hopefully not getting too abstract here, but obviously as electronics person, so I was just like, all right, well so what if we do it for six hours on, six hours off or whatever you want to do, say six hours on, four hours off. So one hour off or one hour on, 30 minutes off. All right, let's keep pushing that farther. And I was thinking about how actual lights work. And most lights are actually turning on and off at a very fast frequency. Right. If you take your cell phone camera and you try to film an LED room, for example, a lot of times you're going to see flicker, right.

Jason [00:39:52]:
That's coming on and off and those little bulbs are actually turning on at the frequency of the power supply. So if we go way, way, way down there, we know it doesn't necessarily have a huge response or effect on the plants. So do some tests at those different levels. I would love to know the results of that stuff.

Cian [00:40:12]:
That is fascinating thought, Jason. I never really think about it that way. You're totally right. Be really interesting to see kind of the effects over time as you're able to just minutely stretch that bit by bit by bit.

Seth [00:40:27]:
Yeah. There's going to be a minimum amount of time that lights off actually affect the plant. And I think there's actually a little bit of debate out there on what that might be for different plants. Cannabis, I'm gonna say if you have your lights off close to an hour, you might end up seeing some, some morphological changes. But yeah, that would be really interesting. You can take a chance on that. Let us know.

Jason [00:40:54]:
Yes, please do.

Cian [00:40:57]:
Let us know how that turns out for you though. All right, we've got a two part question in here from Longpoint Winery. He says you often speak on how it takes several runs to dial in a perfect irrigation strategy for any strainer, cultivar. Could you possibly use some case studies or examples and show how switching ear. Show how you can switch irrigation methods. And I think the second part here says the reason I'm asking is I'm having a difficult time dialing in. Super Booth grown it a few times now and I can't seem to get much density. And the buds are extremely large.

Jason [00:41:35]:
Yeah. So, you know, really.

Seth [00:41:37]:
Right back to the name Super Boof.

Jason [00:41:39]:
You know, really what we're doing is we're using some of those crop registration cues in order to help tell us which way we want to go with our steering strategy. Right. So when, you know, when I talk about the importance of plant height, that's what's helping me dictate how long to run a vegetative or, excuse me, a generative and then how long to run a vegetative. Right. So for those first two to four weeks for, well, actually first week to four weeks of flower, those plant heights are really, really important for me because that's going to dictate. All right. When I see my plants stop, what we call stretching or the rate of plant growth is no longer increasing on a day to day basis, maybe it's leveling out. Maybe I'm going from an inch growth every day to three quarters of an inch growth every day or it stands steady at an inch growth.

Jason [00:42:29]:
Well, so once that stretch is done, then I know, hey, it's about time to go back to a vegetative type of cue. If you're seeing that, hey, we just have massive buds, but we're maybe not necessarily getting the plant size that we need to have an optimal crop. Then let's push a little bit more with the vegetative duration. And as we're always talking, there's both duration and intensity when we're talking about crop steering techniques. So a great example of the most generative type of cycles would be large pots and we're going in and hand watering every three or four days. Typically that would be a very generative type of irrigation. And then on the other side, a very vegetative intensity would be, you know, saying like, you know, irrigations every 15 minutes for 10 hours a day. Right.

Jason [00:43:19]:
You know, each one of those is given a cue. And then obviously with balancing it out with environmental factors, smear, environmental factors also are going to dictate some of that crop steering strategy. And occasionally we actually will offset our environmental strategy with our irrigation strategy in order to get, get the both of it, you know, the optimization of it to actually balance it out a little bit.

Seth [00:43:42]:
Yeah, I'm gonna hold that update. I mean, this is, this is kind of an example of water content lines and what they would look like with the two different strategies we talk about. So with generative, we're reaching water content, trying to hold out till the next day, going for a 22 to 23 hour dryback. With vegetative, we're pulsing it more throughout the day. As we've talked in the show, you know, the plants respond in different ways. Mainly though, what they're responding to is those number of irrigations you're putting on while keeping it in an acceptable saturation zone. So the whole goal is to be able to drive a particular strategy at any point in the plant's life cycle that you want to be able to apply it. And just as Jason said, with environmental cues, sometimes that comes down to a.

Seth [00:44:22]:
Not sometimes, always. It's a holistic approach. If I want to produce this vegetative graph, I need, sorry, vegetative over here. I need enough dehumidification capacity to actually get my dry back in the middle of the day so I can start putting on these small shots in the afternoon. And that also is going to depend on me not having too big of a pot. So I can actually achieve that even, you know, even though I'm in perfect environmental conditions. And then when it comes to vegetative, we've got to have a pot that's, you know, not too small, not too big. We can pulse that and then go back ripening at the end.

Seth [00:44:55]:
But one thing that makes it very, very tough is if your environment isn't dialed in your pots not at the correct size to the size plant you want to grow, oftentimes we're going to end up like the, the classic conversation we have with a lot of clients and it's getting better over the years, but it still there is when you're running something like a Hugo or a three liter pot by the end of, you know, week three, going into week four, this vegetative my strategy. There we go. I'm looking in the mirror. The vegetative strategy is about all you can do because if you don't hold that water content till the end of the day and let it dry back from there, you're not going to be able to make it till the morning with surviving plants. So there's a few factors to look at. One is with something like Super Booth that we know tends to boof out, as we all like to say, a lot of time that is in response to this vegetative strategy and for a lot of strains, what I find, if I'm getting that kind of a response, I'm going to run this generative strategy pretty much all the way through and maybe throw in a small amount, one or two P2s mid flower during bulking. But what I'm going to do is know that, hey, if I run this generative strategy, this is promoting quality, this is promoting biomass production and plant stretch potentially. So if you're trying to baseline a strain like Super Booth or the other classic example, use a bunch on this show is GMO running this generative strategy and trying to dial your plant size and pot size for that.

Seth [00:46:22]:
Especially in modern media like Rockwool and coco, if you can run generative all the way through and you're in something smaller than a three gallon pot, we're also able to be be able to run vegetative at this point. But it's going to be hard to really investigate what your plant responses are to these irrigation strategies without having the freedom to switch back and forth to either one at any point in the growth cycle. And I say that with the caveat that we're generally always going for generative during stretch, vegetative during mid flower and then back to generative for ripening. And I see a lot of growers struggle with this because they are in generally an inappropriately sized media, so they're not able to achieve that generative push at the end. And when you are talking about a plant that likes to stretch out or like a lot of pineapple strains, same kind of thing, they'll, they'll boof out if you give them too many shots. They'll stay dark green, they won't finish very well. It's going to be tough to evaluate because at that key time when you needed to go back into ripening, you, you just absolutely couldn't without killing plants. So that's probably the first place to start.

Seth [00:47:25]:
Whenever I'm looking at dialing a plant for quality, I'm just erring on the bigger side for media and trying to go generative and then realizing that, okay, once I've established a certain quality point, we can start playing with some more vegetative, steering in the middle of flower and opening up that vegetative window to maximize a little bit of production. And then on top of that, realizing that some strains there's an absolute trade off on yield versus quality inside of a given production time frame.

Cian [00:47:58]:
We covered that one really well. There's a bunch of different things out there that I think when you're growing these types of things, you have to pay attention to. And that crop registration is what it really comes back to, being able to understand what's happening as you have grown these strains and applied these different irrigation strategies. It's how you learn so you understand whether or not changing from that generative strategy into your vegetative strategy a little bit earlier, a little bit later, or how many shots you applied actually achieved the results you wanted or whether it didn't. So always going to harp on that one. I love the crop registration. You can tell, right? Let's finish out with another question here. We've got a couple of really good ones that came in over the last one, but I don't think we'll be able to get to all of them.

Cian [00:48:52]:
Let's go with this couple of questions here from Dustin Ladoski. Dustin first writes in and said, noticed our rooms are hitting 90 degrees with 90 degrees with CO 2000 watt HPS. Flower looks great, but what should we make of it? Being that the rooms are, I assume that's a temperature at 90 degrees there. For those guys hitting such a high temp, we don't have the ability to get more ac. Should we be concerned if our flower is a plus grade?

Seth [00:49:25]:
Currently highly genetically predisposed. I mean a lot of strains we see if you go above 85 to 86 degree surface temp on the bud, you're going to start to see fox tailing again. That's dependent on the strain. And then another thing to watch out for is actually, you know, I've experienced this in the summer. We cannot get that, that greenhouse temp below 90 degrees. The next thing to watch out for is super, super high VPD actually impacting your crop, causing a yield lost and potentially damage to your leaves and stuff. In that situation, we're in there spraying a hose on the floor and getting humidifiers and doing whatever we can do to get that humidity up. Obviously it's not ideal, but no matter what your temp is, VPD is what's telling us how the plant's responding and how well it can respond to that environment.

Seth [00:50:15]:
So, so turning 90 degrees, your humidity is going to have to be up and you know, hopefully you get some really purple bud. Because one thing that might also be tough at that higher temp is to retain terps and some of the more volatile compounds in there. That's certainly anecdotal, but I do know in my experience, especially genetics, depending when I start to hit those temps, that is when I see looser, more foxtailed out bud at the end.

Jason [00:50:42]:
Yeah, all of what Seth's saying there, just be careful on how wild you're going to get with other genetics because if you're getting a plus buds with the genetics that you're running, you might be in a kind of a sweet lucky spot because there's not necessarily a ton of plants out there that I've seen that are going to be producing top quality in those temperatures.

Seth [00:51:04]:
Yeah. And verify your plant surface temps as well. You know, I have plenty of customers where we're running in a, especially rooms that have been converted from HPS to led. A lot of those turnout end up being kind of wind tunnels because they're low on dehu right when they first make the transition. And suddenly we've got a situation where we're running the room at 85, 86 degrees to get an 80 degree plant surface temp. So definitely go check out what's going on there. And then also you might have some options with airflow in the room, adding small amounts of fans that actually do strip enough heat off, off of your plants where it's not, it's not as much of an issue. But as a general rule of thumb, you are going to want to get that ambient heat down in the room for sure as a, just as an end goal.

Seth [00:51:48]:
To be able to grow whatever strain you want and then. Yeah, long term or not long term, short term. This is part of why we see too, you know, traditionally people lowering light intensity at the end as well, trying to get that plant surface temp down, trying to, you know, lower inputs into the plant plant completely so that we can help push it to ripening. Because temperature is also a factor in that veg response in plants. And that's part of why we see foxtailing, for instance.

Cian [00:52:16]:
Let'S say that that really covers that. Well, you know, temperature. While you may be getting those A plus buds, like you're saying, I know personally, even in times where I've had a genetic that was predisposed to those higher temps and I was still getting really good quality out of it, my yield numbers weren't quite where I wanted them to be. And then from time to time, like Seth was saying, I was seeing, especially in the plants that were closer to the nodes, that were closer to the lights, a little bit more of that foxtailing and a little terp loss as well. Like I said, I said a little anecdotal, but you know those, those tops that were closest to the lights on several of those runs that I've had where that temperature was an issue for me definitely seemed to suffer a little bit of a loss on the nose. And I mean I thought that and several other people that I had looking at those packs said similar. So while I can't say for certain that you will lose your nose by overcooking your plants, I know I certainly had some comments.

Seth [00:53:22]:
Some of the best pineapple cuts I've ever grown were, did great under high temp, but good luck fitting an eighth in a jar or a bag. You know, like if, for, for those of us that don't care about that look like if I have a bunch of it, great, I'll smoke it. It's delicious. But on the marketability aspect, that was, that was kind of a loss there. It was. If you can't fit three and a half grams into a standard sized jar, you don't have the best looking weed on the shelf. Unfortunately, even though it might be super frosty, super terpy, super amazing, that's just not what I've seen the market look for. Again, my opinions are a little different, but at the end of the day they really don't matter as far as what, what constitutes good weed.

Seth [00:54:05]:
Right. It's whatever people want to buy.

Cian [00:54:09]:
Well, we've got a Mike Judge fan in the audience today out there. I Do want to correct something now? He said electrolytes. It's what plants like. And, sir, electrolytes is what plants crave.

Seth [00:54:23]:
Dude, Rhonda, it's got it all.

Cian [00:54:27]:
Oh, man. I think the last one that I want to throw in here today, we had a fun question come in that relates back to an episode we did a little while back. So it has been said before that plants react favorably to music during growing. And we had a question come in asking, how do plants react to Christmas music?

Seth [00:54:49]:
Sick. They get green and they get red hairs and they get all sparkly.

Jason [00:54:57]:
They turn Christmas colors. Yeah.

Seth [00:55:01]:
Probably fine. I don't know. Do you. Do you have a subwoofer in there? Base that helps with water percolation through. If you're vibrating the pots, just.

Jason [00:55:12]:
No, no.

Cian [00:55:13]:
Christmas lights like me, put them on during that generative stage so that you stress it out pretty good and then pull it off as soon as you're moving back into that vegetative stage.

Seth [00:55:24]:
Yeah, if you're gonna do Christmas lights, just make sure you turn them on in the last two weeks with a lot of red bulbs.

Jason [00:55:28]:
Silent night before you turn the lights out.

Seth [00:55:30]:
Ah, there you go. Do it.

Cian [00:55:33]:
I think that's it.

Seth [00:55:35]:
Might make it cheerier around the grill. Music is like one of the best things to keep people in a good mood.

Jason [00:55:41]:
That might be the secret to happy plants with music.

Seth [00:55:44]:
I see very few people with music. Happier facilities than those that have a bump in stereo in every room and employees that are allowed to control the music.

Jason [00:55:53]:
What?

Cian [00:55:57]:
Oh, man. Lots of fun, guys. Well, I want to close us off here. I want to thank you guys, Seth and Jason, and our producer Chris today for another great session. That was a lot of fun. Loved the Christmas sweaters. Loved the enthusiasm from the audience today. That was a blast.

Cian [00:56:14]:
And thank all of you guys for joining us on office hours. As always, to learn more about Arroya, please book a demo@aurora IO and our team will show you the beans and adds the ultimate cannabis cultivation platform. If you have crops during cultivation, questions, please want us to cover them, drop them into our Arroyo app, or email us at salesroyd anytime. You can also DM us via Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn. Please throw us our comments. We'd love to hear from you and answer some more questions. You guys are a fan of the podcast. Please leave us a review at Spotify or Apple Music or YouTube or wherever else you're catching our podcast today.

Cian [00:56:45]:
Thanks for the feedback and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Thanks, you guys. We'll see you all at episode 126 after the new Year.