AI Generated.

all right it's just after 4 20 p.m eastern that means it's time for office hours this is arroya's weekly session for cultivators to hear from the experts and talk to each other about what they're seeing with their grows my name is kasia i'll be co-modern moderating today with my good friend mandy how are you mandy hey kaisha got a question you can go ahead and type it in our chat at any time if it's chosen we'll have you go ahead and mute yourself and ask away we're also over on our youtube channel going live and taking questions over there so i'm going to be moderating monitoring for those uh go ahead and and head over there and subscribe to make sure you're always in the loop with our cultivation education uh we got a lot of questions this week so let's not waste any more time back to uk awesome mandy thank you so much and just to let everybody know out there first time question askers we are giving uh giving out some swag and everybody on today will have a chance to win a limited edition or a t-shirt drop your email address in the chat to enter jason how you doing today i'm doing pretty well how are you oh good good to see you are you ready for our first question from instagram uh sure let's do it that's excellent this one came from canna ray they asked do we ever have to calibrate the terrace 12 or atmos 14 if so when and how do we go about it yeah let's get started teres 12s we calibrate them in the factory and the calibration should be good for the duration of the life of the sensor so no calibrations should ever need to be needed on the the terrace 12s for the atmos 14s we do recommend that some of our clients suggest or send them in for calibration every two years that being said they have very minimal accuracy drift on them so for relative humidity we're looking at 0.25 relative humidity drift per year and for temperature it's 0.03 percent or 0.03 degrees celsius drift per year so realistically you know every two years is probably more than precautionary just to make sure the calibration is is still accurate but in the reality is that the long-term accuracy of those shouldn't be affected

amazing it's great to be working for a company that's been developing these sensors for so many decades right absolutely yeah excellent okay um our good friend bilbo bags 420 actually sent a couple questions about sensors i'm going to run by you jason um this is a good one he wants to know can i add other meter group sensors directly into my aroya platform using a zl6 great question so currently in our production platform uh that that's not available we're only supporting sensors via the noses and repeaters and climate stations however we have done some work in the past with a few development partners where we are connecting things like the terrorist 21 tensiometer the atmos 41 climate station all through the zl6 for some some outdoor exploratory market action so um possibly in the future at some point that that will be available in the production but but currently it's just in our development environment

fantastic thank you mandy i think we have a question from youtube yeah

yep i was just seeing that one um so yeah i'll go ahead and ask um i believe it's dylan's question um can you guys explain what's the benefits from defoliation uh it's that increase are you sorry we i didn't clean this one up yet uh uh that increase our yield somehow or just make our bottom buds a little bigger if it's if it's increase our yield what's the best time to defoliate sorry i can go through that one again can you guys explain what's the benefits from defoliation uh that increase our yields somehow or just make our bottom buds bigger if it's increase our yield what's the best time to defoliate yeah great question and i think maybe four episodes ago we did some pretty in depth on defoliation i'll just cover that the basis is on our thoughts with with defoliation there so really what it comes down to is is maximizing the potential of the plant via the resources that are available so if we're seeing a really thick canopy and it's blocking out some light down to the lower canopy you're exactly right we're going to get more live earbuds down bottom and so when we ask about more yield you know if we get possibly a higher level of a quality buds there's a good chance that we are going to get more yield at least more sellable product out of that plant and so it's really a fine balance for looking at obviously labor as a very costly input for defoliating sometimes it takes you know days to do defoliation through a larger room and and then the other aspect there is that it does signal the plant to be a little bit more vegetative when uh when we defoliate it so it's going to change the hormone impact when when that thing loses some of its leaves and so really it's it's a fine balance with all this crop steering stuff you know you don't want to go too far now some strains aren't necessarily going to need much for defoliation while others are going to be so full and thick out that you want to make sure that you're getting that done in order to produce the the most high quality bud that you can um you know some of our favorite times of defoliation would be you know around this three week mark just to get those plants all cleaned up um usually that's you know in line somewhere around the end of vegetative or excuse me with generative um stacking and like i said it just all depends on the strain so you know our time frames for gender stackings can be different for different strains the amount of defoliation is is different so the best thing that you can do is be looking at things like under canopy lighting so leaf area index how much light do we see going through that canopy document the stuff in in your session uh in your user or your harvest group in array and one of the things that does is then you can go back and take a look hey if we modify how much we defoliate what happens to our total weight and what happens to our ratio of a buds to um some of the lower quality product coming off of that plant

awesome thanks jason um he actually had a follow-up question too uh and what's the point of defoliation if the fan leaps make more photosynthesis then sugar leaves why pull them why do we pull them away if the plants eat from them the most yeah great question you know plant biology obviously um usually leaves aren't going to cannibalize any of the energy that's going into the plant but that being said newer leaves are more efficient at photosynthesizing and if we have you know enough light in there and it is hitting all the leaf surfaces then we may not need to defoliate but but there are obviously advantages to cleaning those plants up getting better air flow so you can manage your environment in that canopy and then like like we said also to try and help raise the the ratio of a buds coming off the plant awesome thank you for that um we had one more coming from youtube uh power hash wants to know how should the media how should the media be when we defoliate do you have any advice for that i i guess you just ask about like water content or or ec in the substrate i don't necessarily think that you there's any benefit to correlating um substrate conditions with defoliating as long as those plants are growing in a healthy substrate then uh then it's going to be a good time to defoliate when you see that that canopy coverage get a little bit out of control

awesome thank you for that we're getting a lot of shout outs over there too uh hello guys um we got people call uh shouting out from hawaii um yeah and sharing some crop steering knowledge over there on youtube so uh yeah keep it going over there guys thanks back to you yeah yeah thank you mandy love to see it love keep those questions coming and the folks who are on with us here live on on hangouts please do post your questions in the chat we want to hear from you too we're already deep in the crop steering so let's keep that party started um another part a question from bilbo bags 420 um he's asking what is the difference between the matrix potential of water in high cec substrate versus low thoughts on that jason sure uh so let's just jump in and do a quick explanation on on the terminology there matrix potential is going to be talking about the amount of vacuum that the roots have to apply to a substrate in order to pull water out of it and then cec being cation exchange capacity so how much does the specific characteristics of the substrate hang on to the ions of nutrients in solution and so you know i always like to take a look at the spectrum of things that are high ecc versus low cec and different medias that are have a different matrix potential curve and so when we look at something like rockwool the matrix potential curve is very linear and so we can pull most all the water content out of that before the plants are actually feeling a stress a vacuum stress in those roots then if we go into a different substrate you know let's take clay for example clay can still have a fairly high amount of water content yet the vacuum applied to that substrate needs to be relatively high and so that plant can definitely feel some irrigation stresses before it's necessarily even seeing a low water content in that substrate so obviously anytime we're working with most of the modern hydroponic materials uh you know rockwool cocoa typically their matrix potentials are are a little bit more lenient like you know we're not necessarily worried about water stressors a lot of times we're actually worried more worried about jeopardizing the properties of that substrate so for rockwool for example we really never want to go lower than 30 probably not lower than maybe 35 or 40 percent just because it can start to build uh hydrophobic pockets uh you'll start to see irrigation channeling that type of thing um cata exchange capacity so rockwool has almost no cation exchange capacity is extraordinarily inert if we look at in uh on the other side of the spectrum more organic types of substrates usually they have a much higher cec and so you know one of the things there is you know for in a large organic substrate it's going to take us a lot longer in order to adjust the nutrient properties of that substrate you know and work with synthetic nutrients in something like rock wool and we can up and decrease those nutrient contents very quickly uh you know they're directly metabolized by the plant whereas you know for in organics it's uh a breakdown those nutrients are being catalyzed into other uh other chemical formulas in order to be uptaken by the plant they don't necessarily you know cec and matrix potential don't necessarily have a direct correlation you know they're two very separate properties that are specific to each type of media and you know you can have a media that's got a higher cec and a lower matrix potential and vice versa and really really what's going on there is just taking advantage of the specific properties of the substrate that you're working in all super important concepts to know and keep in mind uh thank you for that jason we have like five more questions that came in since that question started uh over on our youtube so i'll go ahead and get to those um greg wants to know do we have any advice for dry back and ec for black hawaii pumice lava substrates black white pumice all right black away lava pumice um not specifically i can't say i've never worked with it or seen much of it uh typically you know pumices are uh they don't have very much for the actual water retention capacity you know the amount of water that you get in there is very high because they are extraordinarily porous you know they are going to dry out faster than something that has a more exponential matrix potential curve um so it would hang on to the water a little bit lower so that's you know a nice hydroponic media that is going to be very um very steerable

awesome uh yeah we have a ton so i'll just keep going down the list um cmdr mr grinch wants to know does the panel have a preference for oh him they're asking each other um now so hold on uh we have a ton of back and forth power hash says hi from barcelona spain you guys are doing an amazing job um donald wants to know can we clarify generative stacking sure so you know when we talk about generative or vegetative we're just usually talking about the um different properties that we're trying to take advantage of a plant so we're steering its physiological response for the ideal morphological response so when we're doing generative stacking it's trying to encourage more reproductive type of growth in that plant so what we're looking at is stacking some of the nutrient content if you will letting that rise up by reducing our runoffs and having a reduced number of irrigations over the day that shorter irrigation window that we always talk about and um yeah so you know really what we're shooting for is decreased uh node spacing you know trying to keep that planet from stretching out too much and disclaimer as we always talk about it's very strain specific some strains are already generative leaning and they may not need nearly as much of that that stacking steering in towards the beginning and and some plants you know something like a blue dream would be a very stretchy plant where we're going to pull the ginger stacking out for a few weeks in order to control the shape of the plant and get the most product as we can great thanks for that um so diane wants to know and he says thanks jason for the information uh earlier um what are your thoughts about lowering our ppfd levels around week seven of flowering so that they can be finished better are they finished better what are your thoughts you know i i don't necessarily go for lower in ppfd um you know we've built up a big plant that can handle a significant amount of photosynthesis we you know we're at the point where the plants still are producing blood mass and so i want to get them as much energy as i have previously now if you can adjust the spectrum of your lights the you know the science has shown that a little bit more far red kind of emulates fall and does help those plants ripen up awesome and we also have a follow-up question what's the most common reason for fox tailing i'm 6.0 cc ec in the medium and 1200 ppfd and leaf temperature is uh 80 fahrenheit fahrenheit uh it's can that wait can that be causing foxtails or can it be my high nitrogen in the mixing tank yes and yes uh and yes uh genetically speaking there's strains that are much more susceptible to foxtailing usually it's a you know a slight stress response or we can see it happen when we're having more vegetative type of growth towards the end or even if we're just trying to ripen up a plant a little bit faster than we really should um so there's quite a few things that are going to come into play with fox tailing you know the best thing that i would do is go go back and look at previous harvest groups what were the variables different in there that didn't lead to fox sailing and trying to target that practice for each of those strains

dropping the knowledge today loving all of these amazing questions sean typed a question here in our chat sean you want to unmute yourself and ask away

and if not i'd be happy to answer for you or ask i'm sorry i can't answer that's jason okay i'll go ahead and ask um so sean writes when i only have one tariff 12 sensor for my four to eight trays where on the tray would be best to place the sensor in the middle of the trays side or front so your advice there ah that's gonna be a little tricky and that's why we always like to have more sensors just because it does help us build an average you know depending on how wide your aisles are a lot of times your edge plants are going to see a little bit more light and as it's coming off at an angle from the lights and then being able to penetrate through that canopy a little bit deeper a lot of times you also see a little bit more airflow on those outside plants so you know typically we would think about plants around the outside of the tray having a little bit higher water usage um than the ones towards the middle um you know that's why when we have more than one sensor we like to have some towards the inside of the canopy and some towards the outside of the canopy if you have one you know the best thing to do is pick middle ground and or you know realize how the performance of those plants might differ depending on that sensor location and keep that mentally on on the top of your brain when you're making irrigation adjustments based on that data

awesome thank you jason we are still getting questions over on youtube uh raymond wants to know can you guys update us on the open sprinkler integration with arroya sure so i currently have um 14 open sprinklers on beta client sites that are actively doing i think there is a little over 40 irrigation schedules that are set up on our test environments for open sprinkler integration performance wise it's extremely reliable we've seen it performing as intended with the beta versions we are currently working to clean up the interface uh so that we're really happy with it and it's as user friendly as possible when we do the full launch um so we're you know we're a couple months out from opening up that release to the public

awesome well that's super exciting um yeah we're just gonna keep going down our list of questions um man we have a ton from instagram this week um i'm gonna go back to bilbo baggins um does arroya set up my system or do i set the system up uh after i buy from aroya yeah so a little bit of each that um physically our clients do the installation we you know we've spent a lot of development time in the early days of aroya making sure it's as user friendly as possible for setup so you know the installation is really pretty simple you get your gateway online by connecting it to your local area network your internet you know wire it into the network at your facility and once that thing's online you can start putting up your your repeaters and your climate stations to ensure that you're gonna have good signal across the facility and then for the sensors themselves they're wireless so it's usually a fairly painless install what you do is get them turned on by by tapping the button on the face of it three times and it'll flash screen when it's on get it stuck into the the substrate nice and well obviously we do send our installation template tool which is specific for different sizes of medias so you can get as accurate as water content as possible throughout that uh that substrate um yeah as far as you know on our end what we do is onboarding schedule so meet with our client success team they'll get your facility all drawn out allocate um your zone spaces and just make sure that the interface accurately represents your facility they'll talk to you about making sure that the installation of the sensors went well give you any help that you need there physically and uh and check that everything's online and reporting and next steps from there is basically getting understanding of data interpretation so meet up with them you know week after two weeks after you get installed and start taking a look at the data and what it represents as far as improvements that are available for irrigation environment and any of the other parameters that we can we can tell so if you're doing manual inputs like i always recommend that crop registration is is key to attributing what we can't see with sensors

great um we got another question over on youtube marlin wants to know what would cause plants to start vegging again in week 7 after dropping ec and raising ph

uh you know possibly just dropping that ec would would cause them to be a little bit more vegetative typically when we look at the osmotic potential um the lower that osmotic potential between the plant and the substrate the more generative it's going to be the the higher that potential so the plant's already saltier than the substrate usually so when we drop that it's going to increase that osmotic potential and the plant's likely to uptake a little bit more water so that could contribute to to some vegetative response

wonderful um the chat is popping i'm loving it michael you have a question you want to unmute yourself and ask it or you want me to ask for you

i'll just i'm going to dive right in if you want to chime in feel free uh understood poor signal been there michael wants to know uh he writes when transitioning to a new food program with a similar balance is there any advantage to waiting for any specific day or phase of flower to switch

oh that's pretty specific i i mean if the composition is very similar you know the plants don't necessarily care if it's brand a or brand b um that being said you know without a chemical composition breakdown of the nutrients there is going to probably be some small differences you know either it is in the the macro ratios of mpk or if it's in the content of micronutrients in that so you know without knowing the chemical composition it's really hard to to predict when be the best or or how that's going to affect the plants

ideally you don't switch variables in the middle of a run um that way that you have some reference data on you know a versus b testing when you know there's a single piece of data or a single variable that's not changed so if we are making a change midstream it's it's hard to understand a is that related to that change or is it related to some other variable that we might be analyzing

great michael thank you for your question if you um have anything you want to add or clarify feel free to drop it in the chat and we can we can come back to it all right mandy what you got from youtube man they're just rolling in um yeah diane wants to know um and sorry if i butcher this what should be our dif diff on cannabis plants are they benefits from the collar nights or can we go the same temperature day and night jason did you get that one thinking that means cooler night cooler i'm so sorry that's what i'm guessing yep yeah and so you know this question is asking about uh nighttime differential so night day temperature differential in a room uh with with cannabis uh people that do like the purple coloring we can obviously encourage some of the anthocyanin it's the chemical that's responsible for more purpling in there it's actually same chemical that we see in blueberries and huckleberries make them purple and so all as far as um you know if you if you don't need purpling you might run a little bit lower lower differential my my favorite kind of rule of thumb is just to break it into three sections and go with a zero degree night day diff for the first third of flower and for the second third of flower go with uh you know five degree diff and then uh last third of flower usually go for about a 10 degree difference and obviously that's as general rule of thumb as i can get to be helpful uh without looking at the you know the strange response specifics how long that cycle is and other variables going on in that harvest group

awesome jason thank you i'm just going to keep on going all right eric wrote in to us uh this week he wrote i have a crop staring question for you love your office hours and wish i could ask them but i can never make the times we hear you eric thanks for writing in um growing into gal coco and i've had no problem nutrient stacking when i need to but what techniques can i use to keep substrate ec low in week eight and also get large dry backs sure so a couple things that we can do there would be obviously having a generative ripening type of strategy where our irrigation window is shorter if we're trying to keep that ec low um you know we only have maybe five days you know three days maybe a week left of that ripening obviously we can push a little bit more runoff to drop that ec and you know if the plants are getting close to the end of the life we can actually reduce the amount of easy so as a general rule we we don't really like to go to straight ro um you know looking at zero or very low ec but uh but if you need to drop that ec and you can't do it with just runoff you know go to three-quarter strength or half-strength nutrients

great thanks for that um so over on youtube cmdr mr grinch wants to know do you have any advice for this jason phosphoric acid or sulfuric acid for a ph down um it's kind of up to to you you know what the suppliers can do i personally like phosphoric acid better for uh for ph adjustment um you know one of the things you do want to just kind of keep an eye on is how much ph drift do you see from the specific nutrient or the specific ph adjuster the specific acid that you're using and then also think about how that affects your nutrient composition as well so if you know we're looking in pk and the supply if we're using phosphoric acid we might have a little bit more available phosphoryl

awesome great yes keep those questions coming folks another one from instagram here this is from tristan alk they want to know how relevant are runoff measurements compared to actual substrate ec great question and this i mean this comes down to the basis of migrating how we look at substrate conditions obviously traditionally runoff is one of the best tools that we can use for making sure that our ecs are where we want them to be some of the challenges with runoff readings has just simply been getting the labor to provide a good sampling of those runoff readings you know another challenge is obviously you don't know the substrate conditions if you're not pushing any runoff right so there are a few things there that can be a little bit tricky whenever people start to use aroya one of my favorite ways to approach this would be continue taking your runoff readings you know input those manual readings into arroya and then just do some comparisons you know what's the ec that i see in the substrate what's my my runoff you see looking at you know if you're taking that runoff reading once a day you know compare with what the substrate ec is at that point and use that kind of as a general steering method after you get used to uh the difference from runoff ec and in situ you see you can probably start to reduce how much labor inputs are going into runoff ecs and i've had a lot of customers you know completely move away from runoff readings other than ph

awesome um moving back over to some of our youtube questions that just keep pouring in um diane wants to know do we need to supplement our uv lighting for indoors or are there not any benefits for our cannabinoids in thc what do you recommend uh i'd recommend go check out some bruce bugbee's videos on youtube uh he's he's the light master when it comes to uh some of the research in cannabis with uv input to other types of plants you know there are some growth benefits early on for vegetative response with with uv you know without knowing the specific spectrum that is being utilized in the first place we don't necessarily know even how much uv we would want to supplement at that point so there's there's a lot of research to be be done here um you know if you want to just google search photomorphogenesis uh one of my most favorite topics to dig into because there's always something fun to learn about how those spectrums can affect the different plant responses and the different time frame within the response and their growth cycle so uh no easy answer there sorry

but so passionate and weed nerdy which is like my thing i love it thank you all right justin posted a question here and he has short of the full sensor and data capture suite from aroya that is only available to licensed commercial growers what is an individual grower to do who is limited to only a solace that only measures substrate moisture in ec that's his first question so why don't we start there

um yeah start start logging that data you know in a excel spreadsheet if you've got a lot of cultivars that are running in there then it obviously does compound the trickiness on how much effort you're putting into it more cultivars means that you're going to need more samples to to get a really good idea of what's going on in there and then obviously you know without without time series data it's nice to um also capture you know a specific and consistent time when you are reading that substrate so if you're doing it just before irrigation it's probably a good way to go and then probably just after your irrigations are finished and you've seen runoff pushed through the substrate

thank you for that jason and regarding his second question i know we've covered this a few episodes ago but maybe we can give folks a little bit of a rundown on on the clients that we work with because of the nature of our product yeah um absolutely so you know right right now because of the radios that we're using in there um our fcc licenses only allow our product to be used for commercial usage and so we don't have obviously the aroya suite for uh for home growers at this point there's a good chance that when we we revise and we have a more compliant radio in the chip that we could open up to home growers we do have kind of what we call the grow house suite in our development process in our roadmap where we are trying to optimize the the software for that type of thing when the time does come that we can provide hardware to home growers

awesome thank you for that all right mandy who's next yeah so over on youtube donald is asking during generative stacking could you provide a high limit of ec for runts in general how high can we go with ec stacking uh yeah so let's look at ec dynamics you know if you're capturing some time series data on ec then there's really two answers to that question and the first one is talking about what is your refresh ec so what's the what's the ec that we see after our irrigation and we've pushed out some of the nutrients if we are doing runoff if we're not doing runoff just how has the new solution modified the ec of the substrate and so you know that that would be basically you know your baseline ec and then simply because we are pushing generative and we have a really long drive back window we can see that ec substantially rise right and typically the faster that's rising the more dramatic generative impact that the plant is feeling and uh you know ec numbers in there realistically that uh that baseline for after irrigation you know five to eight is a a rough number for a lot of the um commercial two-part salts that we see on the on the high side you know i don't usually get too concerned as long as they're not spending much time right right at that really high numbers um you know every once in a while i see 15 to 20 and i don't get too scared as long as the the plant substrate is refreshed back down to that lower you see on a daily basis

great thank you for that all right forrest dropped a question in the chat for us can you want to mute yourself and ask you want me to ask for you

i can go ahead and ask and then if you want to try oh great perfect all right forest rights cultivars that require longer gen should we try to push the ec as high as possible in rockwool for example a diesel strain uh as high as possible probably not i mean if we wanted to go really high we can just put a lot more salt a lot more nutrients in the the feed easy if you are just keeping with the same vdc a lot of times you know if you've got very minimal runoff and you do get you know a slight increase day to day and in that that means that you've got a a good choice um you know if you're running generative for let's say like five weeks i probably wouldn't get want to get too carried away you know if you're seeing uh your daily refreshes not go under 10 then then you might consider uh getting a little bit more runoff in those irrigations

awesome porous thank you so much for your question drop your email address in the chat so we can send you a hat i didn't mean to rhyme but it just worked out all right going back to instagram over here um lose green goss wants to know if there's a required ph for foliar feed feeding and how should the media be when doing foliar sprays yeah um you know i what we're looking at with foliar sprays is you know there's a most the time the the best full air sprays are really pest sprays right we're looking at integrated pest management type of sprays nutrient polar sprays there's not a lot of chemicals that are absorbed through the the plant's skin i mean it's kind of like a human being right i'm sure i can put a topical on my skin uh the absorption rate is gonna be much much lower than if if i drink it um and so that is you know something to kind of keep in mind is what is the purpose of your full air spray as far as the you know the ph probably not super important just because like it says it's it's not you know interacting with the substrate it's not getting directly uptaken through the the plant's inner cells uh it is being just slightly absorbed through the plant um you know i i probably would be pretty happy anywhere between your your feed ph and and just basic or just um neutral 7.0 so if you know if you spend a lot of time trying to perfect that um might be waste energy uh if anyone else has thoughts on this it's not something i've looked at in specific um you know let us know what your experience is with foliar ph

yeah you guys heard the call we'd love to hear from you what's working for you with foliar ph let us know in the meantime moving on to our next instagram question this is from carlos dopamine ox 4 flex and athena have high strength schedules starting seedlings office 3.0 early acclamation that's his question yeah probably i mean just making sure that the plants have as much nutrients as they need for the the fastest growth possible uh cannabis is one of the most aggressively growing plants uh that that we do in horticulture and so you know it's probably going to be more of a hamper to have too low easy than too high of ec uh you know usually if we see nutrient burn it's more likely related to a nutrient imbalance and we have you know an excess of one nutrient that's blocking out the absorption of of some other nutrients and unfortunately there's quite a few high quality nutrients on the market right now and so that's why they can get away with a little bit higher ec than than what we're used to um i would probably follow their recommendations

great thanks for that um boris submitted another question in our chat i can go ahead and ask that one do you find many cultivars suffer from nitrogen toxicity in rockwool when running athena proline

um i haven't run into it i i mean there's tens of thousands of situations that i have worked through um easiest way to tell uh sitting in a leaf for tissue analysis um that'll give you a very sure-fire information on what whether you are seeing nitrogen toxicity for sure and what the the levels of nutrient composition all around that that plant are hitting so sometimes you know a toxicity can also be a deficiency of another nutrient for example as that uptake is being blocked by an excess so that's definitely the the best way to check it out um and then just kind of in general when when i am talking about these numbers uh and and giving advice it is so very dependent on all the factors that are going on into your grow you know when we're looking at environment you know when i'm generalizing numbers we're just talking about the best environment with these plants that we know of across the span of the genetic rainbow and when we're talking about ec levels you know maybe there are certain types of strains that don't like to start off at 3.0 with your athena best thing you can do is you know log your data as possible and unlog the response of those plants with you know plant heights pictures are my favorite just because there's so much information that can be derived from a picture maybe you're not even sure what you want to be looking at at that point but you can go back and reference how that plant was responding when you're diagnosing a specific type of of the issue and your growth cycle and uh and so please yeah keep that stuff in mind you know when we're talking about those ec levels i'm just trying to go middle of the road and what you need to do is is document and log harvest group to harvest group make some continuous small tweaks and uh try only limit the number of variables that you're modifying between those so you're you're not chasing your tail you know any kind of time we're looking at compounding variables there's there's not always a correlation directly between both of them and it makes it hard to make a great choice based on more than one type of process being changed to the cycle

thanks for that for us you'll have to let us know if you have any follow-up questions or if that answered everything um we do have a question that came in on youtube a couple of minutes ago that i did skip over by accident uh diane wants to know should we be using silicic acid in the roots or can we use potassium silicate silicate because it's cheaper do you have any advice for that um it is good to you know something like power sci for those roots you know it does help create some robustness and defenses in the plant to pests etc as far as you know how that gets uptaken in the plant i i don't have a great chemical background on on which is is going to be more soluble to the plant give it a try see what your plants like and obviously sometimes when a product is cheaper you actually have to use more of it and then and then you're either putting the rest of the solution out of balance and or you're just spending more money um than you than you would be so a lot of times you know keep that in mind as well is that uh that it's not always one to one if i'm using you know 50 milligrams per gallon of a specific type then it's not always going to be the the same effectiveness of a different

awesome jason you're holding it down just you amazing all right our next question from instagram and i'm going to have to phrase it a little bit here so um at fur rh wrote in that they share a room for veg and moms but only have irrigation system for veg and they posted something about irrigation strategy would it be the same to try to achieve crop steering on the moms does that make sense sure yeah it does so they have you know ability to set one irrigation schedule for both their vegging plants and their mom plants um the only time that we really talk about crop steering with moms is trying to achieve as many cuttings as possible and typically that's going to be you know related to uh vegetative growth and so i would definitely focus on crop steering your veg plants and then you know just making sure that you're not getting water contents out of control or ecs out of control with those mom plants and a lot of times you know you're either gonna have to use a a different dripper rate on those moms more or less drippers on those moms or possibly adjust your mom substrate size in order to balance for that handicap

great uh we had a question come in over on youtube marlin wants to know generative or regenerative irrigation for flush

uh well i i don't necessarily i'm not familiar with the specifics of what regenerative irrigation is obviously you know we like to type it we like to talk about it as generative ripening simply because uh you know flushing can have some some connotation that's not necessarily specific you know is it goal related is it just going straight to ro so when we talk about generative ripening we will talk about large drybacks that shorter irrigation window and a lot of times if you can you know dropping your ec to three quarter half strength and tapering that down

wonderful thank you so much jason um so this is the last question we have from ig and i love these because it's just like personal preference um so bilbo bags wrote 420 wrote in wide or narrow leaf varietals what's your favorite to grow and consume and why yeah so uh historically you know when we looked at the the genetic spectrum that wide varieties typically were more indicating type of strain and and the long skinny ones were more sativa type of strain sometimes with the amount of crosses that we've gone through these days there's it's really not one or the other there's so many strains that lean one way or the other both ways depending on what you're trying to analyze you know whether it's growth style or um thc response to your a response how do they make you feel head high body high the mood etc i i personally um historically have preferred sativas just because i i enjoy partaking when i'm out doing activities in the forest and that kind of stuff so i uh i i prefer i guess the uh the skinnier leaves if you will for a consumption i like how we're referring to it around the leaf as opposed to the typical designation so love that question thank you bilbo bags 420. all right raymond just posted in the chat what's up raymond um you want to ask it yourself you want me to ask for you

sometimes i will ask i got you all right during p2 how much drive back are we looking for before we irrigate one to three percent or three to five percent and why uh great question uh so obviously if we're running p2s we're probably in a more vegetative type of irrigation strategy and when we're looking at the you know the percentage drybacks we always have to kind of keep in mind two things what's the substrate size um and then how much runoff are we getting and so you know when we look at those aspects yeah like let's go three percent right it gives you the the answer for both of them um i you know i think generally we talk about you know two to three percent between irrigations for for vegetative but uh you know obviously if if you are looking for a little bit more runoff throughout the day then then you can up those up to to mitigate any climbing you see that you're wanting to avoid during your vegetative so best answer is look at your graphs analyze the response and make the adjustments that you need for the most ideal conditions based on the data you can capture

thank you so much raymond for your question great answer jason forrest has another question for us here he posts we would like to see larger yields from our mach 1. our numbers are in range with each phase would you suggest shortening the gen 1 phase for this particular cultivar yeah you know mac one's been around for quite a while i have a lot of experience with it it's probably one of the most generative leaning strains that we see widely commercially available i've successfully seen mac one uh you know with one week of generative stacking um so i don't know necessarily how how long you are pushing it right now uh take those plan heights shoot for the ideal plant height that you're wanting you know we see the double and triple um stacked guard rooms where they've got different levels a lot of times they'll they'll pull in mach 1 crosses because they're a little bit more manageable in height and they can take full advantage of those different tiers

great thank you for that um you'll have to let us know if you have a follow-up question but we are still getting a lot of shout outs over on youtube greg says aloha mahalo from hawaii a great educational series and he's thanking you jason so um yeah i wanted to make sure that you saw that um what we got another question that came in um baby got drybacks wants to know what are some tasks that arroya consolidates for growers and my team yeah uh so let's just start off with data related tasks obviously you know if we're in there trying to capture environmental datas uh you know you can go through the whole day and get a bunch of data and it's not gonna be anywhere near as much as you're capturing with aroya so our environment and substrate sensors push a fresh data reading every three minutes and so i think historically just some of the challenges i had would be if we had a a low high average and an instant hygrometer and i could come in the mornings and you know and see a low of 60 and it doesn't give me any indication of of why is it 60 was it because i didn't close my um my vents in the greenhouse early enough at night to to get past that was it because the the early warning dip wasn't i know my heaters weren't being able to keep up with that so having that time series data is i mean as far as tasking it's way more valuable than just getting rid of that labor of capturing that data is because you can dig into new insights and get a better understanding of facility performance on the other hand one of my favorite things that we can do with tasking is rather than managing tasks manually you know counting the day of harvest updating a a white board every morning with what needs to be done we can lay it out with a specific recipe for those strains so what in aroya what those harvest group recipes basically are is laying out the entire lifespan of the plant and specifying it towards that plant's growth style so when we look at certain types of strains you know maybe we're running a specific number of days for each uh each growth phase for each steering phase and we're going to line up our tasking in specific to what that plant's needs are nice thing then is when we run a knicks group we just apply that recipe and we might have you know 70 task events that are automatically lined out based on the day frame and when that plant was born and when this needs to be done

awesome thank you for that well we're getting close to rounding out the hour for our show we do have another question i think this might be the final question that we get to today um it came in through youtube diane wants to know can defoliation slow down our flowering cycle to 10 or 11 weeks instead of nine or ten what's your advice on that yeah i mean if you did over d-leaf that you're going to slow down that plant growth so when we look at some of the effects of de-leafing it's it's obviously the plant's response is that it needs to grow more new leaves and we want to make sure that it's growing more new buds instead of that and so another aspect is if we over d leaf it's going to have a hard time capturing enough uh photons to keep up with the photosynthetic rate that it's been at so uh you know there's there's a chance if it's you know significantly over de-leafed you could be delaying the the life cycle of that plant

amazing yeah awesome yep that was everything over on youtube we want to thank everyone for participating over there um yeah kaisha any more questions from instagram today that is everything from instagram not seeing anything in the chat jason held it down today solo jason amazing thank you so much for covering all these topics i think we broke on a record today i don't know if we've had so many questions before i seriously think we got through a record today thank you amazing so jason once again thank you so much for another great conversation mandy thanks for being my partner and moderating to all of you who joined us here on the hangouts or on youtube thank you so much for coming this is really what it's about um oh yes sean we got you yes we got your email address oh yeah you're definitely in the raffle my friend so fingers crossed hopefully you'll win a limited edition to wear a t-shirt and to everybody else out there um thank you for for joining us for aroya office hours this is your hour if you have any questions about aroya you want to book a demo uh learn and hear from our experts so that you can find out how aroya can help improve your cultivation production process everything else let us know if there's a topic you'd like cover in a future office hour session post it in the chat send us an email at support.org metergroup.com or send us a dm over instagram we want to hear from you we record every session so we'll email everyone in attendance a link to the video from today's discussion it'll also be on the arroya youtube channel like subscribe and share while you are there and if you find these conversations helpful please do share with your network and spread the word jason and mandy until next time thank you thanks everyone