Cian [00:00:03]:
What's up, Gromies? Welcome to AROYA Office Hours, episode 135, your one stop shop for cannabis cultivation Education. I'm Cian joined by our resident cultivation experts, Jason, Jason and Seth in studio. I can't even say your name after however long I've known you now over almost two years. Well, to all our live viewers on YouTube Instagram today, please let us know in the comments where you're watching from today. Don't forget to give us a like and a follow and tell your friends about Office Hours Live. Please also leave us a quick review. It helps our podcast thrive. Well, let's start the day out with one of the questions that we got in here just right off the bat in our live so vegan fishing gives us living in a high humidity forest.

Cian [00:00:48]:
And through your videos I've learned how to steer the morphology of a plant and counteracting the effects of vegetative environment. Wanted to thank you guys for all of your wonderful advice. So not necessarily so much of a question, but just a little pat on the back for you guys for being so good at your jobs over the years.

Jason [00:01:06]:
That undefined high humidity forest somewhere near the Emerald Triangle, possibly.

Cian [00:01:11]:
It's a good chance of that. The one that did catch my mouth or my eye that I wanted to start out with. Here's from Super Cottonmouth and it came in on ig. I have a question for you guys. I'm in the or. I'm growing in a one gallon pot and cocoa bags and at night my dry backs are significant. I've always heard not to irrigate at night. Should I?

Seth [00:01:32]:
Why or why not?

Jason [00:01:34]:
I don't like to irrigate at night.

Seth [00:01:36]:
It's definitely not preferable because you don't have as much dehumidification capacity in your room at night, typically especially late in flower. We've already got a lot of humidity in the air, so anytime we're irrigating at night, it's putting more water, you know, not only into the media but through transpiration into the air in the room. So it's, it's not really ideal if your drybacks are too deep overnight. Usually that's hitting a point where we'd start looking at changing that plant size to pot size ratio and trying to find a medium that gives you the ability to run generative when you want to and not over dry. Jason's making a little drawing here.

Jason [00:02:14]:
Yeah. Since we got all the colors here. Give me just a minute. Yeah. Oh, those are really crooked axes today. VWC and Time got Our little sunshine which indicates photo period.

Seth [00:02:29]:
Yeah. So it's, it's not ideal for a few different reasons obviously. And the solution is generally pretty simple. For most cultivators it's up your pot size or start looking, going with a shorter veg. I know in my cultivation experience I've definitely messed up a few times where I over veg plants when I've moved my pot size down because I was used to vegging in a bigger pot and ended up with a plant that was just too big for that particular media size.

Jason [00:02:58]:
Yeah. And I mean Seth nailed it here. It's not ideal if you run into a, a certain grow cycle where you have to do this. It's like, all right, hopefully our H vac equipment can keep us out of the, the issue areas. You know, most of the time we're going to be seeing this where let's go VWC and then. All right, we'll actually show this. So we got something to talk about here for a minute. Typically.

Jason [00:03:27]:
All right, well why would we have to, why would we water overnight? Well if our pot size is too small. So we're already doing something that's not ideal. Right. But we gotta manage somehow. We see this probably most prolifically with Hugos when people are trying to grow five foot plants in Hugo for example, where we just, we just simply don't have enough water holding capacity in there to, to run dry back that long. Right. We didn't even need irrigation in order to not run out of water. So we got some low volume or low water content volume here.

Jason [00:03:58]:
You know, Hugo's especially because we don't like to run them too low in water content especially early in the cycle. Those are the ones that we run into the most. You know, if you're in a one gallon cocoa bag and you see this, we can get away with 20% water content. Not, not going to be the end of the world because that Coco has a pretty good ability to recharge back up to close to saturation or field capacity. Now, um, obviously this is a slightly vegetative. I just kind of went middle of the road because this can happen. Both vegetative or generative type of steering strategies depending on when you're in the plant life cycle. And so you know our, our, our timeframe is just too long.

Jason [00:04:37]:
Right. And it's, sorry it's not a perfect graph. I should have spent a little bit more time drawing it. But really what you can do, and this is my favorite way to do it is you can, there's, there's two solutions. And my favorite solution is really if we are generative, for example, we'll give it a supplemental irrigation there before lights off. Right. And so we can see this is a little supplemental and this is going to help us stay out of that low volumetric water content. So let's say Maybe we're in 6 by 6 hugos as an example, this red line indicating that we hit 25% water content on the day before.

Jason [00:05:22]:
And that's if you're doing that continuously, you probably are going to end up damaging the capillary capacities of your rockwool. There's lots of ways to say that, but really you're just going to have some pore space that doesn't want to re soak. And so then we can have a hard time getting back up to field capacity. A way to avoid irrigating at night, but still staying generative would be to provide a supplemental shot here. And so let's say we went to 25%. We only actually have to make this a plus 10% shot shot, for example, and that'll keep us out of the danger zone. We don't have to go back all the way up to field capacity there.

Seth [00:05:59]:
Yeah, and another thing to look at too is what's going on in your environment overnight. Make sure that your system is behaving the way you want it, that you're getting the temperature differentials that you're looking for. If for instance, you have a situation where because of your set points your VPD is actually significantly high overnight, going to see a significantly deeper dryback. And if your VPD, let's say, is at 1.7 to 1.9 overnight, unbeknownst to you, some of that problem, depending on how far you're over drying, might be solved just by correcting that environmental problem.

Jason [00:06:36]:
Yeah, I did want to also put another example on here where maybe we want to steer vegetative but we still need to do the same thing. And really all we're going to do is we'll take this, this red curve and we'll just extend our irrigation window farther. Right. Ideally we're not going to get, you know, too close that lights off. I like to keep kind of an hour as a rule of thumb. And that just helps, you know, some of that water if we are doing runoff, keep it, you know, out of the environment, for example, let those lights burn some of that off and allow these plants to get into their respiration period. So you know, one of the reasons that it's not helpful to irrigate at night is during lights off. Our plants are, rather than transpiring, rather than going through photosynthesis, they're respiring.

Jason [00:07:28]:
And respiring actually means that they are, they're consuming oxygen and they're releasing some amount of water. Right. And so if the plants are already releasing water, they're, there's no advantage to giving them water in that period of time.

Seth [00:07:44]:
Yeah, they're just not really going to benefit from the actual application of the water. Which is unfortunate and something I wanted to point out too, that actually is a. You know, one challenge for growers is when you are putting on that late day application, whether it's in generative or vegetative, you can take advantage of your shot size and dry back rate. So you can go in if you're using a tool like a rake and highlight an hour and quickly calculate your dryback rate over an hour, easily decide like where you're most likely going to end up in the morning. It's not going to be a perfect prediction, but definitely a very well educated guess. And a lot of times if just by extending this watering period out farther in the day and you know, starting that dryback time later, we might not necessarily need to be right up at field capacity at the end of the day. So by having these last few peaks be just a little bit lower, you can still put on that water without necessarily accidentally pushing runoff onto the trays. Because typically, you know, especially in Jason's example with the Hugos, what we'll see is trying to run super vegetatively all day, but it's really hard, especially if those Hugos have over dried.

Seth [00:08:51]:
That rock wall is, you know, poor. It's got some hydrophobic pockets at that point. It's, it's kind of tough. Sometimes you're putting on some irrigation and some of the pots are soaking it up and some of em, it's just channeling through mostly. And at that point it's easy to put on too much water onto the, put too much water onto the T at the end of the day and at that point you're reliant on your H vac system to actually pull that water out through evaporation, which is not ideal when your lights are about to shut off. Especially if like you're in an HPS situation, suddenly you're losing that heat input that actually helps you maintain vpd.

Jason [00:09:25]:
I'm really glad you brought up the, the idea of calculating your transpiration rate. Right. You know, in a VWC chart like this, um, you know, it is Pretty easy to get what your transpiration plus evaporation rates are and what your, you know, overnight evaporation rates are. And those are just kind of good things to have in the back of your mind, maybe even want to actually, you know, do some crop registration, be like, hey, this strain, these types of environments, these are what we're going to expect to, to use as far as water content goes. Obviously on a BWC chart, you're looking at a percentage of your substrate. If we do need to be like, oh, how much bigger substrate do I need to get to to avoid a situation like that? Convert that into milliliters and then you have a pretty good idea on, you know, how much of any size substrate am I going to be needing in order to keep up with that actual volume of water usage that the plant and the environment are going through.

Seth [00:10:26]:
Yeah, absolutely. You can just look at your irrigation rates and calculate the volume of water that you're putting on in P2 during, you know, your ripening phase, for instance. And EAs understand that, hey, maybe I need a 400 milliliter increase in volume. You know, that would be on the smaller end. But obviously the next thing you got to do is look at what commercially sized media is available to actually help you out. And oftentimes you might see that, you know, the next jump with a particular manufacturer is going to be bigger than what you need. But that's why we always recommend going with small steps at a time. You know, in the market now, there's a lot more options.

Seth [00:11:01]:
If you're overgrowing a 1 gallon, you don't necessarily need to go to directly to a 2 gallon. And if you're going from your 1 gallon to a 2 gallon, make sure you actually find out the actual liters capacity of those gallons, because that's somewhat arbitrary. In horticulture, we've got US gallons and Imperial gallons, 3.785 and 4.4 liters. So that can affect things. And it's good to be aware of what your actual media size is in milliliters, because that's what we're using to calculate all of our irrigation strategies off of. And if that's not correct, number one, you're gonna have some time struggling. And then, you know, on the other side of it, if you're going for bigger, if I say let's go from a one to a two, it might be more appropriate to try roughly a one and a half first based on what the difference we're seeing, rather than going to the two and potentially losing My ability to bulk that particular strain.

Cian [00:11:53]:
I'm just really glad you guys mentioned that you have a couple of different levers to be able to manage the. The potential option to put a shot on late during a nighttime hours because there's a lot of different things you can do rather than add that shot late at night. And that's kind of the moral of the story, right. Is that there's a bunch of different options. You have to be able to achieve the dryback that you're really looking to have by the time you're irrigating the next day without adding that shot during night. And it's really common to the point where I think I've had three conversations just in the last week that have brought up I'm getting into a VWC range by morning that is causing me to try and irrigate at night. And how do I go back and try and make it so tomorrow I'm actually hitting my VWC target rather than, you know, over drying like I have been.

Seth [00:12:58]:
Yeah. And Jason drew this great graph here. I'm going to jump in real quick and say one thing that I've talked to a lot of clients about is the difference between plastic or hard sided and mesh pots. And I think this graph really illustrates why. Is that where you're going with that?

Jason [00:13:14]:
Yeah, that or just when you're calculating, it's just. All right, well why is it important to calculate water content losses? And it's because we want to make sure we see this elbow here. If we don't have a slope difference from from photo period on to photo period off, that means that transpiration is not contributing a significant amount of, of water consumption. And obviously we want transpiration to be a significant part.

Seth [00:13:39]:
Let's put it really visual here. If it looks like that you have a problem if it completely flattens off. Also a problem. Right. A little bit quick visual indicator. Like we want to see that elbow, we want to see a change, but we also want to have be able to have control and keep that plant within its optimal range.

Jason [00:14:01]:
Yeah, absolutely. But you do you bring up a great point as far as talking about, you know, the ability to make micro adjustments on there. You know, we see people with, you know, mesh sided pots or poly sided pots, solid sided pots then and bags, you know, mesh bags, same type of thing. Something that's perforated, something that lets gas exchange through the side of the pot. We're going to see a little bit larger evaporation rates out of something like that. Right. And you know, between that and you know, having different pith chip ratios in cocoa. That's one of the reasons I really like using cocoa and you know, anything between one and two gallon to be appropriate for my plant because I can get the exact appropriate media.

Jason [00:14:46]:
You know, if I'm in a 1 gallon and I need a little bit more, well I can either go to a gallon and a half or I can go to, you know, a chunky pissed 2 gallon and then vice versa. If I'm in a poly sided at solid sided 2 gallon but I need just a little bit less, you know, I need a little bit more water content loss, I can go to mesh sided 2 gallon for example. We'll see that.

Seth [00:15:15]:
Adjust your chip to pith ratio. Yeah, have a little 2 gallon but slightly airier.

Jason [00:15:20]:
Lots of options. I mean that gives us what, three options to play with to get the right media. You know, we always talk about right media size. Well, you know, with some of these things there's a couple other options to play with that can kind of get you to the same spot.

Seth [00:15:34]:
Oh absolutely. And I think one thing that I end up talking to customers about frequently is, you know, I often get asked what in your opinion is the best media? And there is no, you know, silver bullet. One size fits all. Depends on your plant density. It depends on if you're double or single tier. How big of a plan are we trying to grow? What's the irrigation system look like? How reliable reliable is it? Is Rock Walmart appropriate here or hey, we're having some reliability issues. Maybe we need some extra forgiveness from the cocoa. It's really about finding the media that's going to fit your grow because certain things like let's say your irrigation system, okay, if your emitters are plugged to the table and you can fix that easily.

Seth [00:16:15]:
Cool. That's really solvable. If you have a problem where you're struggling with your Rockwool because you're having to cycle irrigation between rooms in a large facility and you can't necessarily get water on demand when you need it. Cocoa and even airing on the larger pot size might be your best friend in that particular situation. Can you crop steer quite as hard in terms of like being able to put on these bulking signals? Maybe not. But you're also mitigating a lot of risk by not, you know, putting yourself in a situation where your plants might run out of water.

Cian [00:16:48]:
I like that you guys are bringing up media choice and all the different options you have in that regard because it can make such a big difference, especially when you're in those smaller size mediums. Personally one of the things that I noticed a while back I was doing a run in soft sided pots. Nice, a lot of gas exchange, a lot of transpiration happening with them but was finding myself in a situation where it didn't have the holding capacity to be able to get through the overnight drybacks that I was really wanting to push it. And the next run I swapped to the same size bag but it was a plastic over the outside of the mesh. And that made a huge difference in those overnight transpiration rates and helped it retain enough water that by the next day I'm actually still hitting my VWC targets. And you know even something just so small as what material is covering the outside of your, your instapot can make a huge difference in that.

Seth [00:17:53]:
Oh yeah, and you're, you're putting new pots in the room every round anyways that's you know, in this case probably the easiest lever to pull. That's not requiring any equipment changes in a room configuration. All you're doing is swapping something that you're buying anyways for a slightly different product. And these days most manufacturers in the cocoa space have quite a few options actually to meet customer demand. Whether you want 0.3 gallon pots to stack on top of your 2 gallon or 1 gallons. Whether you want a particularly more airy media because you tend to like let's say in your facility, it's hard, you know, if you have 2,000 plants in one irrigation zone that's an extreme. Obviously you need something that's a little more forgiving when it comes to over watering because you can't restrict water for a small population of plants. And I found these days, and I think you probably noticed this over the years too Jason, more and more manufacturers are getting to be more diversified and offer products that are a little more custom fit for individual cultivators needs.

Jason [00:18:53]:
Yeah, I was talking about this the other day. I mean for, I mean up until pretty recently choices of cocoa between 1 and 2 gallon compressed bricks were not very prevalent. And you know, for me, you know, obviously, you know, when we think about. All right, traditional growing, okay, at 12 gallon that's all small substrate sizes, right? Well when we go from 1 gallon to 2 gallon of identical bag and pith chip ratio we're at a hundred percent increase in water holding capacity. Right. You know, we go from either 0.45 gallons to 0.9 gallons or 0.6 to point or 1.2 gallons of water holding capacity in those cocos and that is a huge difference. I mean I, I wouldn't imagine that my, my plant size has either those two options.

Seth [00:19:48]:
Right.

Jason [00:19:48]:
I mean I'd either grow in a three foot plan, six foot plant.

Seth [00:19:53]:
Yeah, that's, that's a very important factor to consider when you're looking at all these options too is, you know, just volume alone is not really going to be a good, it's, it's not the total guiding factor on your media selection and the range that you're going to see out there. Especially you know, if you're in a commercial facility and you're able to crank through large volumes and then have access to tools to consistently test them and see where they're hitting fuel capacity, you're going to notice a, a sizable range, you know, even within one manufacturer batch. But once you look at like the breadth of products out there in the compressed or even loose coca market, you're going to see a range from low 30% all the way up to mid-70s, which as Jason said, you know, inside of one gallon, that can double our water holding capacity easily. And that's also why we've seen, you know, over the years a, you know, not only a commodity price per compression, but also a compression on the size of containers people are growing in. You know, we looked, you know, more traditionally a few years ago, people were growing in let's say a 70, 30 cocoa perlite mix and a two or three gallon pot. Well, we can get the same amount of water in that two gallon mix pot as we can, or we can get in a 1 gallon, the same amount as the 2 gallon mix pot with straight cocoa. And that makes it a little more economical in certain ways because as a grower, if I can master using this higher water content media, basically being able to use sensors to know that I'm not going to over water and kill plants early on, I can really economize my process. Like for me, moving from a three gallon pot to a one gallon pot meant that I could double the amount of plants I could put on a cart to move in between rooms.

Seth [00:21:37]:
Doesn't seem like a huge issue until you've got like four or five people that have to move 2,000 plants in a few hours. Doubling their ability with you know, each 50 yard walk or whatever is huge. It's massive. It cuts down your time. And that's, that's another important part of this. You know, a lot of us are in the quest to grow the best possible cannabis, but there's a lot of different ways to do that as long as you understand some of the underlying principles and scaling production for different types of facilities is not only tough, but it comes down to small details. Just like pot size. There might be places where you really can't run a bigger pot due to height limitations.

Seth [00:22:18]:
Or, you know, again, if we're going to move 2,000 pots, one gallon versus a three gallon is a big win. A four inch cube versus a one gallon pot is also a huge win.

Jason [00:22:30]:
Yeah. And you know, one of the, one of the things that has really allowed people to become successful in smaller pot sizes, substrate sizes, is the ability to keep uniformity not only within that substrate size, but from substrate to substrate. You know, when we think about how does this affect the plant? Well, if the plants in a, you know, living soil, like a large, large bed in earth per se, or maybe even a, you know, 15 gallon substrate, those roots are always going to be seeking out an ideal water content, nutrient content and oxygen content ratio. And if we have a very large substrate, there's always probably a pretty good volume that's existing with those parameters and a really nice balance. And so the roots are going to seek that out. Right. They're not going to grow as good where we're too wet, too dry, don't have the right amount of nutrients or have too much nutrients. Obviously, when we go into a smaller substrate, the plant no longer has the ability to, to seek any of that out.

Jason [00:23:30]:
And that's why it becomes so important to make sure that we're keeping these substrates in, you know, healthy parameters. We're providing appropriate dissolved oxygen nutrient levels and keeping those water contents within the range that promote plant health.

Cian [00:23:48]:
That was a great way to break down the original question. We got a little bit sidetracked into the substrate conversation, but it really applies super directly to, you know, whether you're not or whether or not you're going to end up in a situation where you're looking at your graphs and wondering whether or not you should apply a shot overnight or not. Because just as simple of a step as like Seth said, planning on switching to a medium that is going to be able to have that double water holding capacity that Jason's talking about from what you're using at a 1 gallon is going to make a huge difference in your ability to actually hit your VWC targets overnight in those drybacks and doesn't really cost you all that much more money. Just step in planning. Well, let's move on to another one here that it kind of goes along with it. It's a little bit on more on the irrigation side of things. But I think it's an interesting question all the same. Shane, EG grows from IG says.

Cian [00:24:49]:
Have you guys looked at the difference between stakes and sprayers? And if so, what have you guys found out?

Jason [00:24:56]:
You know, in a larger substrate size or things that aren't manufactured consistently, say, you know, I'm digging dirt out of my field to fill my pots or I am growing in the field. I like sprayers, you know, it just, it gives an amount of guarantee of, of uniformity across that, that substrate that I'm using, you know, however, with high performance medias like our present day Cocos and Rockwell's drippers are, are very effective as well. You know, we'll have a little bit less evaporation loss when we're using drippers. Just a little bit easier to make sure that, hey, they don't get twisted and they're shooting off the side of the pot, that types of stuff. So, you know, for me, they both have their advantages when it comes down to production growing. When we are in a little bit smaller substrate sizes. You know, anything less than probably 15 gallons, maybe 10 gallons, anything less than that, I, I'm pretty happy with drippers.

Seth [00:25:59]:
Yeah. As a person that's worked with pivot irrigators in the past, I say drippers all day. Unless you find yourself, you're in a situation where you've got like, let's say, you know, a 20 gallon pot with mesh sides outside, then we're looking at trying to, you know, have the best possible configuration to get the Most coverage or 15 drippers. Well, that's what I was going to say. So that's where you, when you start to hit a certain limitation, you know, that's part of it is volume delivery. With, you know, pressure compensating regular drippers, there are definitely volume limits that we're gonna hit. And that's kind of when, when sprayers come into play, we've really got to get that volume. And again, like you said, 15 drippers per pot, that's not nearly as economical as.

Seth [00:26:44]:
For sprayers.

Jason [00:26:45]:
Yeah. And I just do want to make sure, even if you are using sprayers, no reason not to use pressure compensating. Yep. Valves on that.

Seth [00:26:54]:
Yeah. So I mean, both are good. I think some of it just depends on application, what you're doing, how much time you have for attention to detail. Go out there, make sure things are set up correctly, and then, you know, the evaporative losses we're talking about in a short amount of Space are not very big. It's not. You know, I made the pivot irrigator joke because you're losing like 30 of everything just by turning it on. But that's not really the case we're looking at here. I'd say a lot of it comes down to personal preference.

Seth [00:27:27]:
And in certain applications, I've definitely seen spray. Depending on the sprayer, how it's built, they tend to not clog up quite as easily, especially in outdoor applications.

Cian [00:27:40]:
That's a good way to put it. They each have their place.

Seth [00:27:43]:
Don't. Don't run the sprayers inside, though. If you have like, you know, drywall or something like that, there's probably the biggest advice.

Cian [00:27:52]:
Or if you don't have floor drains.

Seth [00:27:54]:
Yeah, yeah, there's another one like that. The sprayers might have potential to shoot water off the tables. There you go. Yep.

Cian [00:28:01]:
Just one of those things that I've definitely learned the hard way myself a few times over the years and been really just very sad when I walked in the next day to find my mistake. So I can save you guys just a little bit of hassle from that. There you go. Um, wanted to move into a little bit of a different topic here. Um, we have a question from Emma Marley from Instagram, who was wondering. So she's growing for the sole purpose of growing plants into. Sounds like fresh frozen to do live rosin. She asks, would it be more beneficial to maintain my VPD or to have nighttime daytime differential in temperature? I'm struggling a bit doing both, trying to achieve a 5 degree swing during bulking and a 10 degree swing during ripening.

Cian [00:28:50]:
Wondering what your thoughts are.

Jason [00:28:52]:
So, I mean, one of the benefits of going into fresh frozen is a little bit less concern for molds and mildews. Obviously, we still try not to grow those types of things. You know, some of those processes are more forgiving than in flower product would be also because a lot of times we're going to be harvesting it slightly earlier than we would with our flour.

Seth [00:29:19]:
That's a whole debate. Is that it's harvesting early the cause or, you know, the reaction to the problem?

Jason [00:29:25]:
Yeah. So kind of my simple thing would be, if that is your only goal is fresh frozen, then you can get away with a little bit wider VPD ranges than we typically stick to. Right. Yes. We want things to be ideal for plant growth, but those nighttime drops are going to be very key as far as building, you know, nice terpene profiles in that plant.

Seth [00:29:50]:
Yeah, I think it depends on what your goal is. You know, ideal conditions, we're able to maintain the same VPD deadband day and night, but also be able to run that temperature differential. So, you know what that means to someone programming set points is that you're going to have to bump your humidity down, you know, usually about 10% or even a little more overnight to keep up. And can your system manage that and maintain a similar vpd? Well, I'm not looking at your data right now, but if not, then that means we can't push the temp quite as low and get that expression that Jason was just talking about. And generally speaking, even for rosin, any hash production, ultimate, you know, output quality depends on input quality, right? So historically, we've seen there's a lot of rosin producers out there that will harvest a little early. Some will claim because it's for a particular terp or cannabino profile. There's certainly merit to that, if that's the goal. Right.

Seth [00:30:47]:
If you want a hasher rosin to be like most representative of the finished flower product that you like, you're going to want to be pulling all of your trichomes, all of your wash off of a good example of that finished product. So I think the, the thing to really determine is what do you want your outcome to be on that particular strain if you can't manage humidity. So we're either gonna push a wider VPD band, maybe risk going into some mold territory, but harvest it early before it's a problem, and we're happy with the product at week six or week seven versus week nine. Cool, that's great. Um, if you really like the terp profile that comes off of the dried and cured flower, run nine weeks on that strain, you might want to be washing your fresh frozen at nine weeks. That's something I've always typically done in a commercial setting is when we have to split up a room and say, hey, we've got a certain percentage of this going to fresh frozen. We would take and pull a certain percentage of each different strain down on the same harvest day and put it into fresh frozen that the rest of our bud came down. And, you know, obviously that's more practical.

Seth [00:31:56]:
It's a lot easier to just do that on the same day and not have half of a bench with sticks and pots and potential mold contamination and stuff sitting in the room for two weeks or have to disturb all that moving it. It was just the first part of harvest and then we moved on to the dry flower harvest. So a lot of things to consider there. And I think One of the biggest takeaways there is no matter what you're growing, ultimately that environmental control is important because as Jason said, when we're looking at the hash washing, we can run a little wider parameters. You know, for instance, a lot of hash growers I work with, not a whole lot of ripening, will push the bulking pretty hard and actually not care if there's some loose flour, because that tends to wash a little easier and the. The end product is good. So I definitely think you need to play with it, look at what your ultimate output is, and then realize that at the end of the day, if you do push it too high in humidity, low in VPD and low in temp, it's still not the best to be making hash out of moldy weed that you then froze. So establish where that bottom line is.

Seth [00:33:05]:
And I don't know, what would you say, Jason? Like, if you start, I always tell people going below 1.0 VPD under 70 degrees is risky. If you're hitting like, 0, 4.5, 65 degrees, you're looking for some serious. Or you're gonna. You're gonna end up having some serious problems. So don't overestimate or underestimate the ability of your mold to affect your crop. You know, just because you're growing for hash doesn't mean that you don't want to have really quality flour coming out of the other side of that. In terms of not being moldy and having the cannabinoid and terpene profile that.

Cian [00:33:42]:
You want, that's an important distinction to make because, you know, like, you have a little bit of margin, like Jason's saying, but it's not, you know, it's not miles wide. You can't just, you know, totally ignore your VPD and let that ride and cross your fingers, and it's just all going to turn out great. You definitely have to choose a spot that works.

Seth [00:34:02]:
Let me clarify some of that margin, too. Some of that margin might be saying, hey, we're only going to 68 or 69 degrees overnight instead of 65, because, well, the trichomes don't turn purple. So this particular strain, if we're going for hash, we might not need to push that overnight differential quite as low to achieve the product output that we want. However, if you walked in the room, if you had one room of LCG that you're able to push the differential, and the other room, you can only get down to 70 degrees at night, one's gonna be green and one's gonna be Purple flower. Fortunately, in the extract space, that is not nearly as much of a concern, although it is, I don't want to say exceedingly rare. But it is fairly rare actually out there that we see any producers growing only for extract. Generally that's coming out of, you know, greater production. So a lot of times we're not seeing that particularly, again, like just growing for hash production.

Seth [00:35:04]:
It exists, but it's certainly a little more rare.

Jason [00:35:09]:
If we had Willie on here from last week. Yeah, he'd be talking a little bit about this. I think I. I jumped into it a couple of episodes ago. Maybe it was last week with the sine curve. But so one of the things that also lets you cheat a little bit is if you can ramp some of your environmental parameters, these direct changes, these very quick changes in environment. Let's say we go from a set point of 75 to 65. Right.

Jason [00:35:38]:
I mean, that's a condensing point, and that's when your H Vac equipment's going to have to work the hardest. It's not going to necessarily have the ability to keep up with some of those changes. And so that is where a lot of. Of molds and mildews are beginning to kind of become present. Right. And like I said, a lot of times it just takes a little bit more time to get to where you want your set point to be. And so if we can do some ramping, obviously, here with the grain, I drew kind of a very natural sinusoidal that's similar to what we would approximate outdoor type growing to ensure you could probably do that with your programming in your equipment. Not necessary, but.

Jason [00:36:19]:
So I drew this blue line where it shows kind of a compromise of, hey, let's try to get to our set points over a period of time to avoid those convincing points.

Seth [00:36:28]:
I think it's an important thing to bring up, Jason, because I think a lot of us focus on, you know, this. This shoulder here and how difficult this drop is. And some of that is just due to control limitations that some of us have had in the past. If you don't have VFDs on any of your equipment, you can't ramp things up and down. You might not have had access to some controls that allow you to pull off that ramp. And then the other side of it is if you've never really dove into what's going on in this intersection here, and then looked at like, hey, what is. What does it look like outside in nature overnight? Which is what Jason's talking about here, it's pretty Low or it's a pretty slow drop. You know, rarely does the sun go down and immediately drops 10 or 20 degrees.

Seth [00:37:09]:
It's slowly dropping and then even overnight it's slowly dropping. Unless you've got some weird weather, things going on that are going to impact.

Jason [00:37:15]:
That, that it's, it's kind of like behind the sunshine. About six hours.

Seth [00:37:20]:
Yeah, it takes a while.

Jason [00:37:22]:
It's coldest at about like 5am for.

Seth [00:37:25]:
Right before the sun comes up. Yep. And it's, it's a short period of time. So really in controlled environment, at least with cannabis, we don't need a full 12 hours or 11 hours of cold nighttime towns. We only really need like 2 to 4 to actually get that expression change or to get that purple expression that we're generally looking for and to push more of those ripening characteristics in the plant. So, you know, long story short, there's a lot of situations that you might find where investing in more sophisticated controls for your space might actually get you farther than trying to replace or upgrade equipment that isn't necessarily broken, but might not be able to keep up. I know I've seen a lot of rooms where, especially in the past few years, you know, in the past two years most people building rooms were quite aware of the D heat problems, especially since LEDs hit the market, but they just might have something that can only maintain a 15, 10 or 15 degree and 10 or 15% humidity deadband. And it's not fun to go spend another couple grand per room on, you know, extra control equipment.

Seth [00:38:32]:
But that's a lot better than trying to rebuild something that isn't necessarily out of spec.

Jason [00:38:39]:
Yeah. I mean, if you're, if you're like us and you love learning, there's a lot of times that you can get creative either with, with, you know, physical layouts, just take advantage of some type of facility flaw and actually turn it into a benefit and then, or, you know, work outside of traditional controllers that are marketed to cannabis. There's a ton of stuff that can do this that's much more cost effective than the big name brands you see in the hydro store. A lot of times there might be more sophisticated, sometimes they might, you know, not be necessarily quite tailored towards what you're needed to do. But it's, it's great things to learn. You know, having the, you know, the scientific and maybe a little bit of technical background is not going to hurt you in the long run. So it might be worth investing, you know, rather than investing something that costs five grand, that's cannabis Specific spend two grand and that extra three grand can go in your pocket and you can learn something.

Seth [00:39:40]:
Yeah, yeah. Depending on, you know, your, your specific day to day and how much time you have. A lot of learning about technology, particularly electronics and control systems. It might seem intimidating, but a few hours of just a little bit of research time, input reading can really get you a long ways. Most of the logic that a lot of these programs and controllers operate off of is actually fairly simple. So once you put in a little time investment to wrap your head around how to manipulate some of these systems, it's not that bad. Unfortunately. It is a, a, it's an investment on the part of the operator.

Seth [00:40:19]:
That's certainly something that's, you know, if you've got a big organization, sometimes hard to inspire people, that's a whole other challenge. But to Jason's point, there's so many products and systems that have been built out there that are absolutely not cannabis specific, that actually work great. And there's other industries that have much higher demands in terms of environmental control than cannabis does. Does. It's just that, you know, compared to lower evaporation rate crops that we've traditionally grown in a lot of greenhouses, we're hitting some walls on how traditional build outs used to work, which most designers and growers have really, I mean, force had to forcefully overcome, otherwise they'd go out of business.

Cian [00:41:05]:
That's a good point there. Everyone's had to try and make adaptations in one way or another. And I know in my position, lots of times I didn't have the money to upgrade a major piece of equipment, but had the time on my hands and the perseverance necessary to fight my way through some of those technical challenges. Jason was mentioning, when you're trying to adapt some technology that isn't necessarily purpose built to what we're doing. But one thing I'll definitely say to credit Jason's theory here, I have not once ever been upset that I learned those things.

Seth [00:41:46]:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, see, and I, I think a great example would be your, your adventure over the last, what, seven years with open sprinkler. Like, you know, why did you start using it? Well, is a, is the most economical thing and it could work.

Cian [00:42:00]:
It just flexible, it was cheap, it was reasonable. I could get multiple of them and break one trying to do the things I wanted to do and then, you know, go get another one if I needed to. And it wasn't any big deal.

Seth [00:42:12]:
Right. And served the same function as some much more expensive products that were just you know, that given week, literally not gonna happen. Right. It was like, hey, I'm either gonna get this or go with like a lawn sprinkler timer or you know, slightly higher end light timer or something.

Cian [00:42:35]:
Well, and you know, to kind of touch back on what Willie was talk, you can do a lot with the systems you have in place that sometimes isn't necessarily right there ready for you to go in the first page of your controls. You might have to seek out some extra help from outside resources. You might have to look up a couple of technical documents. But oftentimes the equipment that you have actually is capable of going into and doing what you need it to, but ramping it, like what Jason was saying is a huge part of being able to make sure that you're actually achieving what you're looking to do. And if your equipment isn't off the shelf, capable of doing that, like Seth said, look for opportunities to be able to supplement, help your system out and help you achieve those set point goals.

Seth [00:43:29]:
Yeah, and you know, one thing that I run into quite a bit working with prospective clients, let's say, is everyone's always, you know, every facility out there has a list of upgrades that people are wanting to make all the time. Even if everything's functioning correctly, there's a nicer version of something that someone there wants. But at the end of the day, especially now, you know, the price of data acquisition has come down a lot in the recent years. And being able to collect it and, you know, learn what actionable changes are is one of the lowest buck investments you can actually make into your business. Especially in the space. If you don't have, you know, constant environmental monitoring, obviously substrate sensor. Substrate monitoring is important for us, but if you're not investing in having some baseline of good data, especially in time series when you're trying to dial in these H Vac systems, it's really not going to get you. I mean, you're going to make strides, but it's going to be much more expensive than be able to get some data and actually make some calculated decisions on what we can actually do do.

Seth [00:44:33]:
Like I said, I've seen so many situations where, you know, a lot of expensive equipment was purchased and really didn't need to be.

Jason [00:44:41]:
Yeah, and it kind of reminds me of the good old wall thermostats where it's like I need to change my set point at 7:00pm to you know, 65 degrees. Right. Well, even with something like that, sometimes we can do another cheat where it's like, let's just add a few more set points in there. Right. We don't have to go with a 10 degree difference on that set point. We could go to a three degree, three times over an hour, two hours and actually get to be in a better situation. Might save a little bit of electricity, probably save a little bit of equipment maintenance. Might make better environment for the plants because we're not trying to change so much so fast.

Seth [00:45:25]:
And that's, and that's some of the features that like some of them more, you know, BMS systems and other H VAC management systems outside of cannabis, you know, traditionally see they, they offer these features. There's just a learning curve involved. And again, honestly it's, it's not typically that bad. It, it might be not the most exciting thing you've done in your career, depending on who you are, but when.

Jason [00:45:51]:
You can understand, smoke some sativa instead of indica that night.

Seth [00:45:54]:
Well, and once you, once you put it into play and go, hey, I'm gonna, you know, know. Jason's strategy he laid out here is actually how you would achieve this curve if you were to manually set that. And yes, there's systems that will attempt to do that for you, but it's not that terribly hard, especially in controlled ag. If your building is well built, you have, you know, good insulation from the outside environment. Your inside environment is very well controlled. A lot of these changes are something that you're going to make and then it's a repeatable program that you can use day after day. That's, that's the other side of it is it's not like Jason would stay up every single night and make these changes and watch it.

Jason [00:46:35]:
You know, I was lucky enough that the system we had actually did ramp. It was pretty cool because you could watch it, you know, 10 minutes later it'd be at, you know, 73.5 and then it'd be at 72.7. It actually did, you know, calculate the slope and make a really nice transition. But you know, when we think about air mass specific heats of volumes, it takes time anyways. So even if you set points turn like, are like the black line, a lot of times your sensor readings are going to end up very smooth.

Seth [00:47:12]:
Yeah, yeah. All of this takes time. I think that's one of the hardest things to factor in with H Vac is that you want to affect a change, but everything's constantly dynamic and in fact affecting change too fast in a growing environment is generally not good.

Cian [00:47:35]:
Well, and it's a really common issue that people run into because there's lots of people out there, like I said, that are running equipment that's a little bit older and they probably haven't had either the control system that is capable of doing it or. Or maybe even just the knowledge that they had other options besides reinvesting. I know that's something I love talking to people about all the time because I'd like to think one of my strengths, trying to work with the equipment that I have and make the most out of it and figure out ways to help it get me the results that I'm actually looking for without having to run to the store and go purchase a whole bunch more things. H vac has been one of the most difficult to nail down pieces in almost any space that you operate in just because it changes so dynamically and it's different place to place, environment to environment. And I think it's one of the places that if you spend more time playing around with your current system and seeing what types of changes you're able to affect, oftentimes it's a place where you may well save a lot more money just by being able to gain a better understanding of those systems and how they interact with your room. On that note, I think we have one more in here that kind of goes along with this exact train of thought from Agram Love. We have a question in here that says would it be sufficient to have three small dehumidifier units with a total capacity of 31.7 gallons per day? If I have two tables, the total of 54 plants. Plants in the room, what do you guys think?

Jason [00:49:18]:
Could be. Are they operating at 100 efficiency?

Seth [00:49:22]:
A 240 or so pints, two trays. How many lights?

Jason [00:49:30]:
I don't know. I'm 31 gallons a day.

Seth [00:49:34]:
Yeah, it's like 248 pints.

Jason [00:49:38]:
How many plants do you have? 54.

Seth [00:49:40]:
54.

Cian [00:49:40]:
54. Yeah.

Seth [00:49:42]:
I mean a big part of this is going to depend on the, the amount of actual light available. If you've got let's, let's say 12 plants per light. Let's hope 54. Nine. Well, no, there. Nine. Six. Yeah, there we go.

Seth [00:49:59]:
Six lighter. And we want 30 to 40 pints per light.

Jason [00:50:07]:
How much? 30 to 40.

Seth [00:50:08]:
Yep. More is better, especially if you have a controller that can ramp. So six times 40. 240 pints. We have about 240 pints. You should be pretty close.

Jason [00:50:23]:
You know, another thing to consider also is what's the ambient humidity?

Seth [00:50:28]:
Yes. Yeah. What. What is the area you're Growing in at my house, that would be on the ragged edge. Just because our nighttime humidity here in the winter is really, really high. If you're in Arizona, you're. You're doing great, bud.

Jason [00:50:47]:
Depending on what brand you have, you might just have an extra sitting around on standby just in case you lose one anyways.

Seth [00:50:55]:
Yeah. And depending on how big a plant you're going to. This is where we always go back to time series data. But this is where having a climate station in there so you could watch what happened over a 24 hour period when you turn your lights on, turn them off and everything in between would be hugely beneficial. But you're right close to spec.

Jason [00:51:13]:
If you're currently growing and you have good time series data, you can do a pretty easy evaluation of this. If you can look at your absolute humidity values, lights on versus lights off, and go from there.

Seth [00:51:27]:
Yeah, you can use an absolute humidity value to quantify how many actual milliliters or grams of water you need to pull out of the air for the volume of the room and start comparing that to the actual capacity of your H Vac system to do that. Both what it's spec to do and then what it has actually done in practice. Because oftentimes those are two very different things. By the time the room is wrapped, dying.

Jason [00:51:51]:
Unfortunately, we've seen some equipment advertised at different actual extraction rates. Then they do end up providing depending on the condition of the equipment.

Seth [00:52:04]:
Dude, it's great. Greenhouse in the Northwest. Your dehus aren't only efficient for like two months, a year, maybe two and a half. Because it's hard. It's just hard to even get it warm enough. Yep. Into their optimal range of working.

Jason [00:52:15]:
Yep.

Cian [00:52:18]:
Yeah, that is one of those odd little things. You know where you're located can have a huge effect on the efficiency of those pieces of equipment. Well, to round out the day, I just wanted to put in one last question after I shouted out two of our listeners today that said IG Surfree 401 said open sprinkler is the best piece or best price piece of equipment in the game. Yeah, best price piece of equipment ever.

Jason [00:52:47]:
Sorry.

Seth [00:52:47]:
It can get better. You can build your own.

Cian [00:52:50]:
It's true. And then one more of those came in. Ian or Iron Armor said, one of my favorite things about the open sprinkler system is the ability to do different size P1 and P2 shots and its integration with the Roya and couldn't be more on the head with that one. I, I love those things about it too. And Honestly, the other biggest thing I absolutely love about it is just how flexible it is. It's easy to adapt it to almost any purpose and like I said before, it's cheap and easy to use. So don't have enough good things to say about that personally.

Jason [00:53:22]:
And they're reliable?

Seth [00:53:24]:
Yeah, I mean they're very reliable. I, I like to think of up and sprinkler the same way I think of like the ECU and cars for the most part. Keep it simple, you know, you can make something as complicated as you want, but keeping it as simple as possible when it comes with things like electronics and controls often is the solution. I mean, that's part of why we see some of these more complex control systems that seem more complicated to operate, but in effect they're simple because you're not asking it to do, to make decisions that either you wouldn't make or you don't want it to make.

Cian [00:53:59]:
Well, and on that last note there, since I was going to give him his last question here, sirfree401 that shouted out our open sprinkler and gave it so much love there, asks 2gal bio all soil, 61% water content down to or 30% dry back for generative phase and a 20% dryback for vegetative stage. Should my dryback be bigger in soil?

Seth [00:54:23]:
Actually, no. I mean, it depends on what, you know, we've talked about this a few times. Generally speaking, if it's in a pot, it's not what we'd call traditional soil. You've got a, hopefully a living soil mix where you have something that has relative consistency throughout. It doesn't have, well, we didn't take a core out of the earth. So we have soil horizons, we've got good drainage and generally when we're talking about, about, you know, a soil, usually organic inputs, again cultivating some form of microbial and fungal life in there that's helping the plants out. And when it comes to drybacks, going down into the low 20% range typically and even lower starts to actually negatively affect a lot of that soil biology. So that's one thing that, you know, traditionally, let's say growing in a living soil bed with a large volume, really tough to steer because I need enough volume of soil that if I don't want to add supplemental nutrients, I'm not going to get it down into a one or two gallon pot to get a good harvest out of that.

Seth [00:55:24]:
And at that point I really am relying on that soil biology to help out my plants in terms of nutrition by converting all the, all the nutrients into available forms to the plant. But like I said, down when you get, when you get down below 25, close to 22, down to 20 VW, you see a lot of that life starts to die. And if you're killing it a little bit every day there, you're not going to get the benefits of having that type of a system.

Cian [00:55:52]:
Yep, I think that's pretty well said. Well, we're rounding on the corner on wrapping up for the day here. I think we're a little running short to be able to put in a whole other question. Otherwise we might end up 20 minutes past time. Well, thank you Seth Jason, our producer Chris, as always for another great session and thank you guys all for joining us today. A bunch of great questions in the comments today program note, we're going to be taking a break from Office Hours Live over the next few weeks. In the meantime, refresh on all of our great podcasts over YouTube channel or by subscribing to our podcast and go on. You can subscribe through Spotify, Apple music or through YouTube and watch all of our past episodes on there.

Cian [00:56:39]:
We've got, as we've seen there, 135 episodes as of today. So a whole bunch of great content for you guys to check out there. Learn more about AROYA. Book a demo at AROYA IO and as always, we welcome you guys to send in your cultivation questions, drop them into the AROYA app or email us through salesrooya IO. You can also DM us via Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. Anywhere you guys see an AROYA symbol, we want to hear for you. So thanks.

Seth [00:57:07]:
Yeah, I gotta jump in here and say thanks guys for a good run. This is my actual last podcast here at Office Hours. Hit me up at Seth Underscore Baumgartner on Instagram or on LinkedIn. I will still be around in the industry and available to talk to. It's been great and I've enjoyed all of our episodes here. It's been a blast.

Cian [00:57:28]:
What a run. Thanks.