AI generated

OHL 56 TX
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[00:00:00] Kaisha: All right. It's Thursday at 4:20 PM Eastern. That means it's time for office hour, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. My name is Kaisha. I'm gonna be your co-moderator today, and I don't do it alone. What's up, Mandy?

[00:00:13] Mandy: Hey, Kaisha. Oh my gosh. How are you? Things are good over here. Yeah, we're signing on for episode 56.

[00:00:20] Mandy: I'm psyched to see what we learned this week. We're going live over on YouTube, so if you're over there, make sure you send us your questions and I'll get those to the team. If you're active on social [00:00:30] media, be sure you're following us on all the platforms. So we're on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and also Social Club.

[00:00:37] Mandy: But you'll send us so many questions about growing this week and last week. So I'm gonna go ahead and throw it back to you.

[00:00:43] Kaisha: Awesome. Thank you, Mandy. All right. If you're live with us here and you have a question, feel free to type it in the chat at any time. And if your question gets picked, we will either unmute you, have you unmute yourself, or we're gonna ask for you.

[00:00:52] Kaisha: Seth and Jason are in the house today. How are you doing guys?

[00:00:56] Seth: I'm doing well. Good. Yeah.

[00:00:58] Kaisha: Yeah. Awesome. [00:01:00] Yeah, we got a ton of questions last week that we weren't able to get through because we had an awesome grower. What's up, Dylan? Thank you again for coming on the show. So let's dig right in. This first one comes from Neo Kari Daniel.

[00:01:10] Kaisha: He wrote in, I've got a Purge. That dumps the lines out every time the pumps come on. Frequent pulsing seems to be a waste of nutrients. Should I just get rid of the purge valve?

[00:01:20] Jason: I mean, the best way to do it, and it just kinda depends on the frequency that you are doing your pulsing. I mean really the whole purpose of the purging nutrients in the line is [00:01:30] one, to make sure you're not pushing.

[00:01:32] Jason: Fertigation onto your plants and to make sure that the mix is stabilized. So when it's sitting in the line, usually we'll see that pH rise up a little bit. So it just depends on how long that nutrients is sit in the line. You know, one option might be to actually operate the purge valve off of a oid and then you can start to control that.

[00:01:50] Jason: Maybe you are only purging the first irrigation of the day. Kind of just depending on you know, how many irrigations you're hitting for the rest of that day. It may not need to be purged and you could be [00:02:00] probably wasting nutrients and some water. So that being said, a little bit, maybe more control on there probably would be the best option cuz first irrigation of the day.

[00:02:08] Jason: It is a great practice to, to purge out and make sure that you're not getting that that stale solution, that warm, stale solution getting to the plants.

[00:02:17] Seth: Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been fortunate enough to try it both ways. with electric solenoids and with pressure compensating valves. And honestly, the first thing to look at here is we're, what we're doing is all drained to waste.

[00:02:27] Seth: So you're gonna have to make a choice at some point. Like [00:02:30] Jason said, you don't necessarily, I mean, best practice is to get the nutrient solution out of those lines in between irrigations because we're not have, you know, we're not having hot nutrient soups sit on the tables and grow biofilm inside our lines, and also, again, have that pH rise issue.

[00:02:43] Seth: That being said, I personally think, as Jason said, the electronic OID is the best way to go. That way you can dump it when you need to and not when you don't.

[00:02:54] Seth: Yeah. Otherwise, yeah, at the end of the day, I mean, it probably also depends on how big your facility is. You know, [00:03:00] if we're talking a 400 square foot room with three or four zones in it How much volume are you actually l holding in those lines? You know? Now if we're talking about a couple hundred feet of two inch pipe before we even get to the table manifold and it starts to add up to be quite a bit that we're wasting every time we perch that out.

[00:03:17] Seth: So those are things to, you know, consider.

[00:03:21] Kaisha: Fantastic guys, thank you so much for that. All right. YouTube is already popping. Mandy, I'm gonna send it over to

[00:03:25] Mandy: you. Yeah. Thanks for the questions everyone. Greg wrote in, how does Bricks [00:03:30] and Uccr percentage in solution affect EC

[00:03:36] Jason: in solution?

[00:03:37] Seth: I think we might be talking about inside the plant. I mean, if we're talking about bricks, usually general, it's gonna be in the in relation to ec. So if we've got a plant that is healthy, has all the fertilizer nutrients, aka vitamins that it needs, plant essential elements, it's going to tend to have a higher bricks number because we've giving it everything it needs to produce more sugar.

[00:03:56] Seth: If we look at different areas of the plant, we can look at sugar concentration in the [00:04:00] roots, the stem, the leaves, the buds. Typically we're gonna see, you know, the plant is gonna put more sugar into the roots if we have a higher salinity environment that those roots are in. Otherwise, when we're looking at bricks and sucrose levels, we can look at that as, you know, performance indicators for certain phases of growth.

[00:04:17] Seth: So what we wanna see is, like during stretch, for instance, we're trying to build structure. We want a lot of sugar protection. We want a lot of sugar production during bulk. Ripening. We don't want a lot of sugar production. That's how we end up with dark green buds [00:04:30] black ash basically. And not that's necessarily the only factor, but , that's the main one.

[00:04:36] Seth: I don't know if that's coming through the mic or not. We got some interesting noises in the building here. Sure, yeah. Okay, good. Just got to explain Jason's weird face there for a second.

[00:04:44] Jason: Little bit of construction in the room next door.

[00:04:46] Seth: Apologies if that's coming through. Yeah, so I think bricks is a good thing to track, especially as we're getting further and further into cannabis production.

[00:04:53] Seth: However, that's something we're looking at as a quality indicator generally in, you know, edible vegetable, crop, vegetable and fruit [00:05:00] crops. So it's application and cannabis, we can use it to evaluate, you know, how well is our plant performing. Other than that, I'm probably not gonna make any decisions based solely off of bricks.

[00:05:11] Seth: I'm gonna be looking at environmental conditions and other factors. But like I said, it is another point in saying, Hey, by week three, I should hit a certain bricks level that I've observed over and over in a healthy plant. If I've seen one that looks not healthy, I'm gonna test it. If it's low, okay I messed something up, I missed [00:05:30] it.

[00:05:30] Seth: But it's not gonna directly tell us what went wrong or how to fix it. . Awesome.

[00:05:36] Mandy: Thank you for that. And Greg, if you have any more contacts, please do send that in and I'll get that over to the guys. We had a question come in from Calor, Maine. Hey, how's it going, you guys? Cultivar specific requirements aside, is it possible to drop humidity too early in late flower trying to control humidity for microbial reasons, but don't wanna hurt turp implant production?

[00:05:59] Jason: So [00:06:00] it's, I mean it's definitely a fine balance and cultivar aside that's gonna be really hard cuz I've got some cultivars that are much more susceptible to molds and mildews. Knowing which ones those are in your room can help you target how much you actually need to drop your humidity in general.

[00:06:16] Jason: We're recommending that drop in humidity typically to prevent molds and mildew. So if you have a very resistant strain, you can keep that humidity up a little bit higher and probably have a nice finished product.

[00:06:26] Seth: Yeah. And you know, when we're looking at that balance, we don't want to have, [00:06:30] like Jason said, we're dropping it purely, or not purely, but mostly for sanitation reasons we don't want mold.

[00:06:35] Seth: But one interesting to me thing that I heard there was microbial reasons. Now, another thing to look at there is since you said microbial and not fungal, what are we failing for? Like, one thing I've definitely noticed is I've seen some people fail for weirdly enough e coli. Why? Well, when your farm's next to a dairy, there might be some e coli spores floating around in the air because you're next to a dairy, aka a feedlot.

[00:06:58] Seth: So sometimes looking at like, okay, what [00:07:00] we can do things preventative on the environmental side to avoid these. But when you say microbial I would tend to look at sanitizing my hvac, looking at my incoming air. What's going on there? Looking at the incoming water and like really trying to chase out the source of that contamination because petritis, that's kind of hard.

[00:07:18] Seth: That's really ubiquitous in the environment. We can filter it out, but it's difficult if you got fusarium or pythium or a, well, those are specifically root borne diseases, but any other microbe in [00:07:30] there, there's gotta be a source for it. Typically, like I said, unless you are near big compost piles, you're not gonna have e coli floating around in the air and high enough concentrations to fail on your crop.

[00:07:40] Seth: But if your intake is next to a compost pile, you might, and it sounds like this is probably a logistical and practicality problem more than it is just an environmental.

[00:07:52] Jason: So simple answer is yes. Keep it as high as you can without running into into some of those mold humility issues. And when I say as high [00:08:00] as you can, I mean with within the recommendations.

[00:08:02] Seth: Yeah. And you know, when we, if you're going too high early on, one of the big dangers is you know, we're looking at keeping those stama in a nice, like our prime level of openness as much as we can during the bulking period. Every single day is production time. So if we start, you know, raising that humidity more and more, we pass the point where those stamats staying fully open and they're actually starting to close in response to real drought stress or heat stress.

[00:08:26] Seth: And as that happens, you know, we're gonna see reduced [00:08:30] transpiration in production. So you wanna ride that line and not go too far to where you. Bulking days, essentially, because we're closing SMA early. But we do wanna slowly raise that V p D up in the end just to again, avoid ritu and actually one that Jason and I ran into recently in the greenhouse, straight up aspergillus grown in your pots and buds, so, Stuff to look out for.

[00:08:53] Mandy: Awesome. Thank you guys for that. And Calory Maine did come back with, thank you. Total y and m count and [00:09:00] yes, mostly bud rot issues we're trying to avoid with these big buds. So awesome. That's it for over on YouTube for now, so I'm gonna pass it over you to you, Kaisha.

[00:09:09] Kaisha: Thanks Mandy. Big fan of Big Buds over here.

[00:09:11] Kaisha: Woo. Good luck out there, calory. Keep us posted. All right, Dave Ray wrote in, when drying back generatively and Early Flower, I'm drawing back a little too hard, so I'm going to need to add irrigation events other than my two hour window in the morning that I'm currently using. Should I just add events right after my current [00:09:30] two hour window or should I add events a little bit before lights go off?

[00:09:34] Kaisha: What's your, what do you guys think?

[00:09:35] Jason: I mean, we can answer that, but typic, typically what's gonna be happening is either you're growing too big a plant for the size of substrate, just you have. So, so you might think about that for the next run. You know, as far as mitigating this run I'm gonna let you answer that one, Seth.

[00:09:49] Seth: So with that generative steering, basically we really. Give as much time in between each irrigation as we possibly can. So when we're looking at like, okay, what can we do to mitigate the [00:10:00] overdrawing issue that we have, but not straight flip over into a vegetative steer, we're gonna try to, you know, still have our two hour P one window and then wait until either two or one hours before lights off and just correct the amount we need.

[00:10:13] Seth: Now, if it's severely over drying, like a lot of people encountered say, running a bigger plan in a six by six, that might mean bringing it all the way back up to field capacity with multiple shots. However, what I, one thing I find the work really well for me is if I am over drying, I say, oh, I went 5% past where I wanted to [00:10:30] yesterday, about an hour before lights off, I'm gonna put on one 5% shot just to correct that and not come in too low.

[00:10:37] Seth: And I'm gonna try to, as best as I can, limit that to one shot. If I start to put on more shots, I'm starting to get into a vegetative P two cycle, and that's what we want to avoid.

[00:10:50] Kaisha: All right. Some, a little bit of irrigation best practices there. Big fan of that. Thank you so much guys. All right. Over to you, Mandy.

[00:10:58] Mandy: Yeah. Kevin wrote in, [00:11:00] when drying at 60 60, I know 14 to 16 days is ideal, but what about the cure? What would the best method be for curing in 64 ounce jars

[00:11:12] Jason: in 64 ounce jars? So what is that half gallon jars? Yeah. Make sure that you are burping them regularly. Obviously there's not a lot of air and even one good practices if in the room that you have the jars in is maintain a humidity that isn't gonna dry it out way too quickly when you do let fresh air in [00:11:30] for the burp practices keep it, keep an eye on water activity if you have equipment to do so.

[00:11:35] Jason: That's definitely gonna make sure that hey, we're not drying out or becoming more moist during the curing process.

[00:11:43] Seth: Yeah, I couldn't agree with Jason more. You know, keep your environment that you're actually curing those in right at your 60 and 60 as well, just so you can maintain that and you're not losing a bunch of moisture.

[00:11:52] Seth: Because with that cure we wanna hold it, you know, in a moisture content range where we're still allowing some of that chlorophyll and other [00:12:00] compound in compounds in there to break down. You know, that's part of the cure. We're getting rid of that hay taste, that grassy smell. We want everything to slowly mature and if we dry it out too fast, it's not gonna happen too slow.

[00:12:11] Seth: And if you're in the glass jars, I. I use those for years, honestly, at home and still use 'em at home cuz I'm not generally, you know, growing too much. I'll just get little drop in hydrometers that you can put in. You can drop 'em in one out of every 10 jars or one jar of each strain on your shelf and actually look right through the side of the jar and go, oh, that one's looking a [00:12:30] little dry.

[00:12:30] Seth: And actually monitor that because ideally if you got the environmental control in your room, you can burp those and leave the lids off for quite a while and actually get good air exchange. If your room's too dry, you'll start seeing the humidity in those jars go down until you end up with some really crunchy buds.

[00:12:46] Seth: As far as time goes, I like to see at least three weeks usually from pulling it down off of the drying rack, going into curing, and then. You know, we're looking at about five weeks after harvest, usually putting that bud in a [00:13:00] package and on the shelf. I know some people like a tighter timeline on it.

[00:13:03] Seth: I've just found that if I give myself five weeks in a production cycle, that's ensuring that I've got a proper cure and I'm not putting any under or uncured bud out the door. You know, we, if you got a premium brand built up, someone opens it and there's just no nose and it smells like, hey, like they're not coming back as a customer.

[00:13:24] Mandy: Super important stuff to keep in mind. Sounds like you're on the right path though, Kevin. Yeah, let us know if you have any other questions about that. Holy Nodes wrote [00:13:30] in also. What is the optimal way to hand feed coco Daily? I'm in three gallon pots and typically feed every three days.

[00:13:36] Jason: Yeah. Ideally for hand watering, well, hand watering is definitely a challenge because you have a lot less control over what those water contents are doing. I mean, really, you're gonna have to take a look at what the water content ec is performing like in between irrigations. You know, for a three gallon pot, it's gonna depend on how much transpiration and evaporation is pulling the water from the pot in those [00:14:00] three days.

[00:14:00] Jason: So, you know, are you looking at still, say, 40% water content? When you hit three days? Are you looking at 20% water content? That'll give you an idea of, Hey, do I need to just decrease my irrigation sizes, you know, count a little bit less longer when you're hand watering. However you're doing that, to try and stay consistent and yeah, that's really the best way.

[00:14:19] Jason: And typically, you know, that's one of the reasons that when people have migrated over towards more automated irrigations, we're irrigating every day and using a little bit smaller planter typically [00:14:30] because then we get more dry back cycles. We're exercising that plant to maximum potential.

[00:14:35] Seth: Yeah. And you know, one, one thing I'd just like to outline, you know, a lot of us, we've been at this long enough, you made the jump from bigger pots to a smaller pre-packaged media. Even in like a, like I used to go on three and a half gallon pots quite a bit. They're great. One thing though is that pot sized plant to pot size is still crucial because we don't wanna be going three days without an irrigation.

[00:14:55] Seth: If we can go that long, that probably means that plant's, you know, a fair bit [00:15:00] undersized for the media. And at that point we risk, you know, having anaerobic conditions in the root zone. So if you can go three days right now, you might be running into, you know, high humidity in the room not giving you enough transpiration, a small plant potentially especially if you've been doing a lot of three day gaps, you know, some root rot anaerobic environment in the root zone.

[00:15:20] Seth: So, really, If you are gonna hand water in coco, you know people still have had great luck using one and a half, two gallon bags. You hit it once in the morning and [00:15:30] then go generative. If you happen to be there in the afternoon and you're hand watering again, trying to get some P two s on is great, but.

[00:15:37] Seth: Hand watering always kind of comes back to practicality, right? I know. In the past when I have to drag a hose around and water 800 to 1500 plants in a greenhouse, guess what? By the time I get done with the first round, with the hose, it's almost lunchtime. So , put everything away, fill my res, and if the plants are big enough, come back and do the P two s that I can.

[00:15:58] Seth: But [00:16:00] you wanna make sure logistically, that you're never gonna back yourself into a corner where you can't be there at a water when you need to, or you are massively overwatering and rotting out your plants' roots.

[00:16:12] Mandy: Thank you guys for that. We had one more question come over. Come in over on YouTube. Greg had a little bit more clarification. I meant more like backstrap and irrigation solution. Similar to some of the cleanse and flesh products. Can you use sucrose to raise EC in place of n [00:16:30]

[00:16:30] Seth: theoretically? Yeah, but. I would venture to say that you're gonna get potentially mold and a lot of other things you don't want growing in your root zone because you're just dumping straight sugar in there.

[00:16:41] Jason: It's like the old days of using terpinator.

[00:16:43] Seth: Oh yeah yeah. I suppose I don't see, I mean, I guess the biggest benefit, not benefits, but side effects of those products I see typically are biofilm in the line and plug emitters as a result of, you know, microbial buildup in my irrigation lines.[00:17:00]

[00:17:01] Mandy: Awesome. Thanks for that. That's it for over on YouTube for now. So I'm gonna pass it back to Kaisha.

[00:17:06] Kaisha: Oh, thank you, Mandy. All right. David posted a question, and David, if you wanna mute yourself to speak to it, feel free, but I'll go ahead and ask. He wrote, is it Okay to long-term store dry matter and Ziploc bags?

[00:17:17] Kaisha: I think I know the answer to that, but let me toss it to the experts.

[00:17:22] Jason: Depends what those Ziploc bags are in. If they're in an environment that maintains you know, quality, if. [00:17:30] Are at the humidity that your water activity of your plants is or your dry matter, excuse me, is in that in that room, then it's probably okay.

[00:17:37] Jason: And the ziplocs are gonna be slightly permeable to some degree, and obviously make sure that you're storing it in a dark place. Probably other practices might be a little bit better, especially in on a commercial scale. But yeah, obviously at home you're doing what you can for what you have.

[00:17:53] Seth: Yeah, I mean, you know, on a commercial level, we see a lot of people use things like nylon or polyester Turkey bags. You [00:18:00] know, that's, I mean, the pla the permeability of the plastic is the real problem with the Ziploc baggy. I mean, we can all provided, you know, how to actually close the top, which most people do.

[00:18:08] Seth: That permeability is gonna lead to oxidation in the bud. So, like Jason said, you want to know where you're storing it. Now, if we go back and you throw a pound of weed, In a gallon bag or half pound, whatever you can stuff in there, depending how small your buds are in the freezer. We're probably gonna end up with some freezer burn, cuz that's a pretty permeable surface.

[00:18:25] Seth: Now if I put that inside of a stainless steel container and did a nitrogen or [00:18:30] CO2 purge removed all the oxygen from the container, it's probably gonna be fine inside that bag because if there was any exchange, I'm not pulling oxygen in. So, short story, long switch to glass.

[00:18:44] Kaisha: Yes, that part I knew. Everything else you said, I was like, what? I had no idea.

[00:18:48] Seth: Yeah, and that's something to think about too on a commercial level, you know, right Back to like when we were talking about curing if I've got enough resources, right? Like if the studio we're sitting in was dedicated to only my finished [00:19:00] product storage, I'm gonna dedicate some HVAC resources to make sure that room is holding exactly where I want it to all the time.

[00:19:06] Seth: And that's why a lot of the, you know, if you look on Instagram and stuff, you'll see, oh, there's five pounds in a Turkey bag, 10 pounds in a big Turkey bag, whatever. That's how they get away with that is maintaining the overall storage environment and then also looking at things like, Hey, do we need, you know, pretty good air filtration in here just to make sure we don't have any spores floating around.

[00:19:24] Seth: You know, really treating it on that next level for storage, not only inside the container, but [00:19:30] even in not opening that door very much throughout the day.

[00:19:34] Kaisha: David, I see you've unmuted yourself. You have anything you wanna add to that?

[00:19:37] Guest: Yeah, a question. Thanks for the info. I'm a novice, so sorry about the No worries.

[00:19:42] Guest: But is there a benefit to storing in nitrogen in the glass? Is I actually have nitrogen available very easily.

[00:19:50] Seth: Yes.

[00:19:50] Jason: It's ideal.

[00:19:51] Seth: there's actually a few companies in Washington and other places I've seen that utilize nitrogen packaging for their grams and eighths. It can be a little underwhelming cuz you know, the [00:20:00] nitrogen effect is gone right after that first

[00:20:03] Seth: But it does seem to have a huge effect, I've noticed on preserving terpenes and then also not getting a what did someone call it recently? Was talking to you like the grandma's weed effect, like when your grandma's had that same bag of weed for 30 years and it looks and doesn't really smell just the way you'd expect it to look when I say that.

[00:20:20] Guest: Yeah. I'm trying to preserve it to the point where I can turn it into oil for I'm trying to. I've done a test sample of the material and I wanna send it out and get my CBD and PhD [00:20:30] readings off of that. And I don't wanna process this stuff until I get that information back, which could be a couple weeks.

[00:20:34] Guest: So. , I have like a fair amount that I wanna store and like I said, I'm a novice and I don't know the best way to do that.

[00:20:42] Seth: How do you, I'm not sure you're planning on extracting it, but I'm a huge fan of fresh, frozen, if I know I'm gonna go to extraction anyways, cuz then I'm just sealing it in freezer bags and throwing it right in the freezer.

[00:20:53] Seth: Until extraction and not having to worry about quite as much issues.

[00:20:57] Guest: I was doing the isoprol of solvent extraction. [00:21:00]

[00:21:01] Seth: Gotcha. For sure. And you can still do that with fresh, frozen, but yeah, if you have access to nitrogen and you're already past the cure, nitrogen sealing it in, you know, half gallon jars, just like Jason was talking about earlier, is a pretty solid way to keep your bud pre, you know, well preserved and darkness.

[00:21:20] Seth: That's a big one. You know, the old days of getting the brick weed, it's like, oh man, it's all brown and stuff. It didn't look that bad until they dried it on a rock under the sun for a week, , you know, and light [00:21:30] destroys thc, so there you go.

[00:21:34] Kaisha: Awesome. Thank you so much. Great question, David. Great conversation.

[00:21:37] Kaisha: All right. Mandy, over to you and YouTube.

[00:21:40] Mandy: Yeah, I love this. I'm taking notes over here, you guys. Back to Kevin's question about curing in 64 ounce jars. He says, thanks for answering the previous question. And what's your opinion on humidity packs? Would you add them in the jars to keep the jars at a certain percentage?

[00:21:54] Mandy: Let's say 62. Even though they haven't gotten below 62%, or would that affect the [00:22:00] curing process?

[00:22:02] Jason: I've had good luck with humidity packs especially on the small scale. If you are, you know, dealing with 50 or a hundred half gallon jars, then you might look to a, you know, a more holistic approach where you're controlling the humidity of the room rather than localized humidity in each jar.

[00:22:18] Jason: That being said, Pretty simple solution that I have personally found fairly effective.

[00:22:24] Seth: Yeah I use 'em all the time curing at home just because right back to what Jason just said, at home, it's [00:22:30] great. I don't have, you know, a huge amount. I don't have 50 or a hundred jars. I'm typically going after, I might have, you know, 10 or 20 off of small harvest.

[00:22:38] Seth: Well, okay. I'm not going to put a humidifier in a whole control system in the closet where I'm keeping those jars. So therefore I do my burp. I got those in there. There are two, I use two-way humidity packs, so that gives me a little padding. Either way, Casey from, you know, over drying or it getting a little bit too moist in there.

[00:22:55] Seth: So go for it. They're a great idea. And you know what I've found, they actually [00:23:00] last a little while too. , you know, as long as you don't put 'em in there when it's too wet, you'll get a few rounds outta using 'em. And long term, I've noticed the increased quality. You know, we haven't seen a few producers start to put those in their packaging just to make sure you get it at, you know, optimum freshness.

[00:23:16] Jason: We, we gotta make you a cigar closet and use it for storage instead of cigars.

[00:23:21] Seth: There we go. Yeah, no, I mean, that's what you'd want though, right? Is a big old cigar humidor basically, to have that kind of perfect. 60 60 or so.

[00:23:29] Kaisha: I'm also a [00:23:30] big fan of humidity packs for my little, for jars of homegrown.

[00:23:34] Seth: Yeah it really helps and it's easy, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, How much, like if you're not making a lot of money off your grow, I don't think people like us should try to sell you an AQUALAB because , that might be a little bit of overkill, but it's also like if you're really trying to get that, you know, boutique connoisseur cure, you probably need some sort of tool a little more than just the timed burp.

[00:23:58] Seth: You know, there's a lot of variables [00:24:00] inside your house or your building, wherever you're working in.

[00:24:04] Mandy: Yeah, I guess it really all depends on your setup and where you're at right now. Thank you guys for that. We did have a follow-up from Greg on his reason for his question on sucrose. He was worried about feeding too late in flour, doesn't wanna mess up his fade.

[00:24:16] Mandy: So yeah, just a little bit more context on that, but I think that's the last question on YouTube for now. So I'll pass it back to you.

[00:24:23] Kaisha: Awesome. Thank you, Mandy. All right. This came in from Rooted and y I'm assuming they're in New York. So love [00:24:30] that new market. I'm interested in these systems, assuming we are talking about AROYA here and how they could work with horizontal mixes in raised beds, would learn, would love to learn more about this.

[00:24:42] Jason: So to start off with, I always like to talk about what we call the volume of influence, and that's basically how much of the substrate is the. Actually reading for the Terrace 12, it's about one liter of volume around the prongs. And so when we think about using in something like a rockwool [00:25:00] slab or one or two gallon coco, we're getting a pretty substantial sample of that substrate when we're measuring one liter of it.

[00:25:06] Jason: Becomes a little bit more difficult when we're in larger substrates, say three gallon, five gallon, seven gallon. And this is where you really wanna have that sensor installed and somewhere that is sampling the most average water content or EC of that substrate. And so a lot of times I have people kind of probe around in a larger substrate to understand here is how much striation I have [00:25:30] in water content and or ec.

[00:25:31] Jason: And also think about where the bulk of your roots are, because we want to know what the roots are feeling and that's why we're using this sensor in the substrate. So with you know, horizontal like if Yeah, horizontal, sorry. Vertical layers. Stack.

[00:25:47] Seth: Just layers. That's all we're talking about .

[00:25:50] Jason: Yeah.

[00:25:51] Jason: And the TEROS 12 is actually used out in field soils quite a bit when we do field soil installations. A lot of times we'll go in at like six inches, 12 inches, [00:26:00] 18 inches, depends on the type of crop that we're looking at. Some of the larger cannabis crops can have up to two and a half or three foot deep of roots.

[00:26:07] Jason: In that case, you know, we'd wanna be at, say eight inches, maybe two feet and maybe two and a half feet. Typically, I like to have 'em evenly spaced out. And this is really kind of starting to introduce a lot more complexities than we have in something like rockwool or coco, where it's a fairly predictable media.

[00:26:25] Jason: The composition of that substrate, of the soil that you're working in [00:26:30] is going to affect what those water content ec readings actually mean. When we look at the spectrum of matrix potential and chaotic exchange capacity, we have to start thinking about those for managing ECS in unknown.

[00:26:42] Jason: Composition of

[00:26:43] Seth: soils. Yeah. And you know what I've found, you know, number one, just the fact that the T 12 was originally designed four field applications has made it like incredibly useful in these bed situations. You know, we can really just, like you're saying, map out what does our soil profile look like in terms of moisture content.

[00:26:59] Seth: [00:27:00] You know, when we're talking about a raised bed, if you got a five foot wide by a hundred foot long bed, we'll wanna look at sensor density, different depths, different areas. Cuz man, it's hard to make a hundred foot long bed very level. . So there's another dynamic we'll be dealing with there. When you're saying you're horizontally layered, do we have a well drained base in there?

[00:27:17] Seth: So we're gonna look at like, Hey, our most wet point might actually be six inches off the bottom of the bed because we've got a gravel or a river rock layer to help with drainage. So there's a few things to look at in terms of that, but basically if you're [00:27:30] moving into a bed, you're kind of just taking we've done a lot of work to bring greater soil science down into this small pot, right?

[00:27:35] Seth: When we're talking about working with cannabis production here, you're just blowing it back up from where we shrunk it down to. So you're gonna be using that to look at moisture content, figuring out where you need to be looking at that, and then also, Hey, you can't go pick your bed up. So, this actually is one of the best types of technology you could use to evaluate, you know, how wet it is in there.

[00:27:56] Seth: The biggest difference, you know, we've really kind of dialed the [00:28:00] use of volumetric water content as an output unit to relate how much water you're gonna be putting on. That's the big thing that's gonna change in terms of how to calculate your irrigation. You know, it's not gonna be the same way you'd calculate it off of like soil moisture potential, but we're not talking about a percent means exactly this many milliliters now just because of that volume of influence Jason is talking about.

[00:28:24] Kaisha: That's great. Thank you guys for that overview. And actually I have a perfect segue into this next question. Someone wrote in [00:28:30] an email, they want to know what's the life expectancy of the terrace 12?

[00:28:36] Jason: You know, I don't know that we have anything out there that describes the life and expectancy. I have some at my house that are five years old at this point I've been using since the beginning of AROYA.

[00:28:47] Jason: That thing is encapsulated. It's very durable. That surgical grade steel for the prongs really doesn't deteriorate at any calculable value. So, I would expect them to last [00:29:00] five years easily. Just from my personal experience, if they keep going from there, it's just frosting on the cake.

[00:29:06] Seth: Yeah I generally hear people talk about buy, trying to buy them on a at least outside of cannabis production, a historical like, you know, research setting. Usually about a six year cycle. And that's not because they break, that's just because that's a funding cycle for them. They go, this is how long we expect these tools to last before.

[00:29:23] Seth: I'm gonna secure funding for more new tools because it's research

[00:29:27] Jason: that's also just happens to be about our [00:29:30] new sensor release cycle as well. ?

[00:29:32] Seth: Yep. And I'll say guys, the only time, there's only a few occasions I've seen the actual T 12 sensor fail. Number one is using a hammer to install. That'll get 'em, unfortunately running over them after they've been installed loosely into the ground.

[00:29:47] Seth: Don't do that. And then, you know, rodents chewing on the cables on that one. Yeah. Cables are soft spots. Definitely. mice will get ya putting 'em in your barbecue. That'll do it, you know, . But typically they're pretty tough.

[00:29:59] Kaisha: [00:30:00] Maintenance is key, in other words.

[00:30:01] Seth: Yeah. Or, you know, one of the other ones we see is, People trying to adapt them to another system and not, you know, consulting even like some of the meter guidelines about what kind of voltages and stuff it operates on.

[00:30:13] Seth: So if you over current a T 12 trying to get a reading off of it, you can melt the inside of it. But that's certainly something that's not unique to that hardware. That can happen anytime. I mean, let's go get an open sprinkler and try to open all the zones at once without putting relays on it. [00:30:30] Like there's all kinds of electronics so you can over current out there.

[00:30:35] Kaisha: Word to that. All right guys, thank you so much, Mandy, over to you.

[00:30:40] Mandy: Thank you, Kaisha. So yeah, calory Maine came back with another question. Day 21, leaf pick skirting. Do you recommend lowering light intensity for one day following the pick or leave it alone? Do we risk stressing the plants too much or are we overthinking it

[00:30:59] Jason: My simple answers [00:31:00] that's overthinking it? When we actually look at the physiology of the plant, you might consider raising your light levels. We have decreased its ability to capture energy. . And so since we've got less surface area, we're getting less photons to that plant. We really don't want it to slow down growing. And it's just kinda like when we go from 18 our cycle, veg cycle to a 12 hour cycle, we need to up our light intensity to make sure that plant is getting the energy it needs to continue photosynthesizing [00:31:30] at the rate that it has.

[00:31:32] Seth: Yeah, and you know, something to look at too is like how hard you're de leafing and what a dele or a defoliation is versus a prune. and when you need to employ both of those because you know, there's a lot of different styles in there. Typically on here we talk about lollipopping early on to reduce some of that under canopy growth and not waste a bunch of time and make it difficult at your day 21 or end of stretch cleanup.

[00:31:53] Seth: But I mean, I've seen it done different ways, you know, I've definitely seen it. Don't really touch it till day 21 and then go [00:32:00] clean up. And at that point we're talking about an actual pruning, not a de leafing, where we're taking and cutting off full, lower bud sites, not just taking fan leaves that aren't connected to a bud site.

[00:32:11] Jason: Yeah it's a really important balance because if we over prune, we are doing some amount of stressing to the plant and it's gonna try and have regenerative growth vegetative. When I say regenerative, it's trying to build stocks and stems again when we want it to be building up the bud sites that we've established through the generative crop steering.

[00:32:29] Jason: [00:32:30] Obviously if we don't dele enough, sometimes we can have some lar bud sites in the bottom of the plant that could have been pushed into Nutrition for the larger colas that we'd like to get at for a bud

[00:32:41] Seth: s Yeah, and you know, I mean, one thing I definitely have gone back and forth with a lot of people on is like, Hey, I want to get, you know, I'm stripping the top of the plant to try to get better light intensity down to these lower buds.

[00:32:51] Seth: That's a big thing that comes up. And you know, the reality is when we're talking about light intensity, every time we double distance, you lose three quarters of your energy. So when we're [00:33:00] looking at my zone of maximum production in terms of how deep in the canopy that light can get, sure I can move away all the leaves that might catch the light going down lower if I want to, but no matter what, I'm losing energy the lower down I go.

[00:33:12] Seth: So shining a light on a bud farther away from the light is not gonna lead to greater production compared to trying to put more buds up closer to the light.

[00:33:23] Mandy: Awesome. Thank you guys for that. And call Corey Maine. Yeah, seems like it's just a balance and we hope you guys find it. But that's it for over [00:33:30] on YouTube for now. So back over to you, Kaisha.

[00:33:33] Kaisha: Thank you Mandy. And just to clarify about the life expectancy of the TEROS 12, our team member Rachel here wrote I used to work in the environmental repairs department before coming to AROYA. The T 12 lasts easily 10 years in the field, so great information. Rachel, if you wanna add anything to that, you're welcome to unmute, but

[00:33:52] Guest: just a fun story. I've actually seen them go through a wildfire and they completely survived that. [00:34:00]

[00:34:01] Kaisha: Well, there you go, . So they can survive a wildfire, but not being run over sounds like. No,

[00:34:07] Jason: it's still not recommended. We've had some wildfires in the grow rooms when the h p s bulbs pop and that data is sometimes shocking.

[00:34:15] Seth: That's one way to put it. It's on fire.

[00:34:19] Kaisha: Awesome. Rachel, thank you so much for that clarification. YouTube is so on and popping. So Mandy, I'm sending it back to you.

[00:34:25] Mandy: Yeah. Wow. Growers are hardcore with those sensors out there. Oh my gosh. B town road in, [00:34:30] I often hear about the 12% of end humidity in the butts when you buy them in the dispensary.

[00:34:35] Mandy: How do big facilities do this in like four weeks? Turn down humidity while cure or keep 60? 60?

[00:34:45] Jason: So yeah, 12%, I'm guessing that is moisture content. Really what we kind of help people do is start to use water activity to make sure that they are. Hitting those targets as fast as possible. You know, I've seen realistically 10 day cures or 10 day [00:35:00] drive cycles work out just fine.

[00:35:02] Jason: Comes down to airflow, humidity, and temperature control in those large facilities. And, you know, and obviously another advantage is getting to shelf on time. And a lot of times once this product is sitting at the dispensary or in route to a dispensary or in storage to be sold to a dispensary, it can lose some of its quality.

[00:35:21] Seth: Yeah. And it, you know, to your question is like how do they main, how do they accomplish that? Yes, it is maintaining that 60 and 60, but part of it is having the DEH capacity [00:35:30] and the control granularity to maintain that. So like one thing we'll see is you bring a fresh crop into a grow or into a dry room, boom.

[00:35:38] Seth: That humidity shoots way up. Alright, so for the first three days, I need a lot of de capacity. And what I really need to be looking at is absolute humidity, not relative. Okay? How many grams of water or grams of milliliter do I need to pull out of this environment, this room to get my relative humidity down to where I want it?

[00:35:57] Seth: Okay, well if I go overboard and I [00:36:00] get four huge de. That running, you know, one of 'em or two of 'em can absolutely accomplish it. The first take care of my first three or four days, suddenly I don't have the granularity to step it down and remove smaller amounts of water from the air to maintain that 60.

[00:36:15] Seth: 60. And now suddenly I'm over driving it and I'm five days in at 40 and 65 or 70. And at that point I've tried the outside of the bud too much. I've kind of locked in that crispiness and it's gonna be really hard to get that bud [00:36:30] to cure properly without rehydrating it and getting, you know, That getting it right back in the zone.

[00:36:37] Jason: Yeah. So in equipment side, I love automation and making sure that these systems are working. If you have some type of logging on the duty cycle of your rel of your dehumidifiers in your dry room. If those things are at a hundred percent duty cycle, so they're continuously running, that means that we either have too much product in there or we don't have enough dehumidification capacity that things should be able to turn off just [00:37:00] occasionally within a few hours of load in.

[00:37:05] Mandy: Awesome. Thank you guys for that. I did wanna take a quick pause and go over a poll that we had over on YouTube. So we asked, how many years have you been a grower? And the answers were zero one to 10 years or 10 plus years. And the answers, so we had 62% who have been growing under 10 years, and then we have legacy growers, so at 38%.

[00:37:27] Mandy: So Awesome. Thank you guys for letting us know [00:37:30] how long you've been growing. We also had another question come in over on YouTube. So Calory main wants to know question on leaf temp measurements. Can we log and plot this In AROYA, we are all l e d. What's the danger or the warning zone for leaf temps?

[00:37:45] Mandy: Sometimes seeing 80 to 83 Fahrenheit in the air temperature and sometimes up to 89 Fahrenheit Le Leaf temp.

[00:37:53] Seth: So, you know, when we're talking about leaf temps, typically we want to see, you know, in, in like early flower bulking, [00:38:00] right around 78 to 82. 80 to 82 is generally scientifically where we see the best plant metabolism.

[00:38:05] Seth: That being said, you know, there's a few factors here. Like with LEDs, a lot of time times what we'll see is a lower leaf surface temp than the light, but that also depends on the ambient temp of the. , but I think you're, you know, you're right on there. And I believe we do have leaf surface temperature.

[00:38:20] Jason: We don't have a specific one named for leaf surface temperature, but we do have a, a temperature of a sample. , which you could easily use for leaf surface [00:38:30] temperature. And just remember that's the manual reading type that you're logging leaf surface temperature under.

[00:38:35] Seth: Yeah. And you know, that's and a good point though you brought that up cuz leaf surface temperature is what we really want to target when we're making our environmental changes.

[00:38:42] Seth: That's the microclimate that the plant actually lives in and transpires in. So when we're looking at, you know, and that's why there's a lot of big differences between HPS and L E D, right? How much does it heat up the surface of the plant and why? HVAC wise, we have to treat the two very differently.

[00:38:58] Seth: But that's what we're gonna [00:39:00] base, like I said, our temperature decisions, our humidity decisions, and ultimately, like when we're looking at Air V P D. We all get used to looking at that cuz that's an easily measured value that we can log in time series data. When you first start dialing that p d the way you know, we figure out what those air V p d values should be is by looking at leaf v p d and saying what air v p d, which is something I can measure consistently.

[00:39:24] Seth: What range can we keep it in, where we also keep it desirable leaf surface V B D, which is that, you know, millimeter [00:39:30] above and around each Tama.

[00:39:34] Mandy: Awesome. Thanks for that. And thanks for all the questions over on YouTube, everyone. I think that's the only, the last one we have for now, so I'm gonna pass it back to Kaisha.

[00:39:41] Kaisha: Cool. Thanks Mandy. And yeah, welcome to the newer growers and am the legacy growers alike. It's really good to have a good cross section of people visiting our little show here. All right, ghost Grows wrote in, would you feel lowering water level during flower in A D W C to be a form of [00:40:00] that irrigation control for crop steering?

[00:40:03] Jason: That's a really cool question. So, DWC being deepwater culture obviously a form of pure hydroponics where our roots are suspended in in typically an oxygenated solution or TATed solution. Both. We see people do it in five gallons and stuff. My gut answer would be possibly, yeah. I mean if we think about the amount of roots that are in water that might be playing with that, what do you [00:40:30] think Seth?

[00:40:30] Seth: So it's kind of tough when you got plants that are developing the hydroponic solution. We actually see a little bit different root formation. We don't get nearly as long as root hairs. So honestly, just lowering your level is probably not gonna have nearly as much effect. I mean, unless you're lowering it to the point where it's very low.

[00:40:46] Seth: But even if we look at like some of the first aeroponic setups, let's say, those were basically a shallow water culture with some quarters in there. The tips here, roots were hanging down into a pool of water. Even though it might have been more of a nutrient film [00:41:00] or shallow pool it was still hanging in there.

[00:41:02] Seth: So I think, you know, you might cause some different reactions. The bigger thing is how much air you're putting into that water. So do you have an airstone in that bucket with it, or are you just piping in oxygenated water and keeping the flow going? Because if you have an airstone in the bucket, you're gonna get better growth than if you're just piping in oxygenated water, unless you're really pumping that water through at a high rate.

[00:41:23] Seth: The real steering and deep water culture that we typically see is purely EC influenced. You know, we're raising and [00:41:30] lowering that ec, adjusting the pH and dealing with the nutrient load and osmotic pressure that we're putting on the plant. But dropping your res, depending on your ratio, you might be raising your AC and I'm not sure what else you're doing.

[00:41:41] Seth: There could be a few factors here that all come together to produce some of the results you want. I've

[00:41:47] Jason: worked with a couple of growers in aeroponics, not in dwc, like this guy's talking, but they actually increased some of their spray off times to try and do some of those crop steering that we do traditionally.

[00:41:58] Jason: And rockwool and coco and the [00:42:00] reports from the field were that it was a functional way of controlling using aeroponics in their case, which I find quite.

[00:42:07] Seth: Yeah. And it's tough too because, you know, we, like Jason and I focus almost exclusively on Rockwall, Coco we do some Soilless stuff back to the beds, you know.

[00:42:15] Seth: But when we're talking Deepwater culture in Aeroponics, there's a huge technology component here, you know, and Jason is saying like they're off times that they're playing with. Okay. Can everyone doing aeroponics do that? Maybe not. There's different systems out there that wouldn't seal up well enough for you [00:42:30] to do that.

[00:42:30] Seth: The root zone would dry out. If it's a well designed system, you might have twice the amount of time that you could have, you know, your sprayers off without actually causing root damage. So there's a few factors to look at there.

[00:42:43] Kaisha: Great. Thank you guys. There's so much. Every episode. Deep water culture. I'll be looking that up after, after the end of this show.

[00:42:50] Kaisha: All right, Mandy, sending it over to you and YouTube.

[00:42:53] Mandy: Yeah. We got a lot of shoutouts. Dr. Jay says, love this show. Thanks Dr. Jay. We've seen you around a long time. [00:43:00] Call Corey, Maine came back with a little bit of context. Thanks. Sometimes I worry an early flower and in stretch that we're too humid and the leaf temp rises when we increase airflow or drop humidity.

[00:43:10] Mandy: Some we can lower the temp the leaf temp and the plants drink more. So, and then also we have some more questions rolling in. So Kevin wants to know, I hear people talking about light leaks when drying, does ambient light from across the room affect the drying process?

[00:43:26] Jason: I mean, it depends how much it's you know, direct UV [00:43:30] exposure is really what breaks down THC in component. So, you know, low amounts of lights may not. Be too big a deal. That being said, how much work is it to clean up your light leaks? Yeah, that's probably how I would approach

[00:43:41] Seth: it. Yeah, number one, uv. You know, where's your light leak coming from?

[00:43:45] Seth: Do you have a window to the outside or is it a fluorescent light from the hallway, you know, and if it's a fluorescent light from the hallway, tape up some paper over that window in the door. Yeah.

[00:43:56] Jason: And I did wanna follow up on the response from Calor [00:44:00] Maine. When their humidity was a little bit too high, like they were talking early in flour, they might not be hitting their target V P D, which means that our stone mates are slightly more closed.

[00:44:08] Jason: We're not hitting optimal transpiration rates. And that's why your leaf serves temperature goes up. The more that we're transpiring, the more that the evaporation, the transpiration from the leaf surface is decreasing the temperature of the leaf. So if that transpiration goes down, it's absolutely expected to see the leaf surface temp go up a little bit.[00:44:30]

[00:44:30] Mandy: Awesome. Thank you. And thanks for all the questions over there. I'm gonna keep going down our list. Iron armer rode in. Can you guys go over again, how to apply absolute humidity readings to your grow room and dry room? .

[00:44:43] Jason: Sure. So let's just start off with explaining absolute humidity. Most people that aren't directly working in the HVAC industry are used to relative humidity, which is talking about how much water as a percent of how much water that air can [00:45:00] hold at that temperature, right?

[00:45:01] Jason: So if our temperature goes up, our water holding capacity goes up as well in that air re or absolute humidity is actually a calculation of how many gallons of water are in a volume of air, right? And so these are nice calculations when we're looking at increasing hvac systems or change making HVAC changes to understand how much capacity we have to de Hume from the room.

[00:45:26] Jason: Same thing with the drying room. If we're using absolute humidity and we can see, hey, [00:45:30] when we turn our system off, our absolute humidity goes up at, you know, two gallons per hour then we need to be able to have a de hume that can accommodate for slightly or somewhat more than that amount that the water's getting into the air.

[00:45:43] Jason: So, rather than a percentage, it's actually a unit of measure in, of water in the air.

[00:45:49] Seth: Yeah. What it does is, you know, a lot of these dehus are rated in, like how much they can pull out over a time period, right? So I can look and say, all right, I'm at capable of pulling X amount of water in gallons, liters, quarts, whatever I [00:46:00] want to use that manufacturer's specifying.

[00:46:01] Seth: But I say, okay, this is the rate, it can pull it out. Right now I have got. X amount that I need to pull out of the room. I need to pull out 30%, or let's say six grams for every cubic meter I have of water. Well, I know one gram of water equals one milliliter. I just figure out the volume of my room, figure out how many milliliters of water I want to pull out, look at my liter rating and say, okay, over time how many liters do I need to pull out in a day to achieve my goal?

[00:46:29] Seth: [00:46:30] Then I can start Devi shopping and see if what I'm looking at is even close to reasonable, or if it's gonna be way too much or not nearly enough. Cuz we've certainly seen it every which way when people are trying to size these and It's tough because you've got, you know, people like us that are out there helping people out that have developed a lot of this based on a certain situation that they've seen that's worked for 'em.

[00:46:52] Seth: They'll say like, Hey, we need 20 liters of light that's gonna do it. And it's like, well, sometimes there's a lot of other calculations to take into a, [00:47:00] into account. And the other thing that I found out is when I was first learning about greenhouse design operation and how to calculate how much airflow is going through just like a lot of other things in general, big agriculture, we're looking at the smallest delta possible for economic means.

[00:47:15] Seth: So, When it comes to cannabis, we're looking at much bigger deltas, a lot bigger differences in humidity, variation, temperature. We're really running the, these growth facilities at a you know, everyone uses the sports car analogy, but it really is like that, you know, we're calculating things on a way [00:47:30] wider difference and looking at parameters that traditionally we just didn't approach when growing spinach or ornamentals or something because the profit margin wasn't there.

[00:47:39] Seth: We didn't have the impetus to need to do this.

[00:47:42] Jason: You're growing tomatoes on steroids.

[00:47:44] Seth: Yeah, and there's a lot of books on growing tomatoes, , it turns out, and a lot of books on how to do it as cheaply as possible. And that's just not the kind of approach we are taking in cannabis. So, to go

[00:47:55] Jason: back, absolute humidity is temperature independent.

[00:47:59] Jason: So if we have [00:48:00] one, one gallon you know, per cubic meter and for absolute humidity, then at a specific temperature that relative humidity would. Change, whereas the absolute humidity would still be one gallon per cubic liter.

[00:48:13] Seth: Yeah. Like a good thing to think about if you really wanna see how much temperature affects that relative humidity is if you want to run a 65 degree overnight temp in your last two weeks of flour to maintain the V P D that I want you at means you're gonna be at about 45, 43 to 45% relative [00:48:30] humidity.

[00:48:30] Seth: And that sounds pretty low to a lot of us that are looking at humidity in a grower room. You know,

[00:48:37] Mandy: man, all about humidity. Thanks for that. We have a couple more questions that came in of our YouTube. JT wants to know, and this we might have to give a really shortened answer for this, but can you explain the process of a leaf tissue analysis?

[00:48:50] Jason: Like from the grower standpoint, you take a leaf sample and you send it into the lab and then they send you the results of it. [00:49:00]

[00:49:00] Seth: typically. Yeah. And then as a grower, if you are gonna engage in leaf tissue analysis Your best bet is to get on a program with a lab, and you're gonna be sending them weekly samples throughout different growth cycles with different strains and mapping out, just like we were talking about back to bricks, what we need to look for KPIs in a certain strain.

[00:49:17] Seth: So, I mean, You know, if you're talking to someone who deals with tissue analysis a lot, they're definitely a good help on establishing benchmark goals for different nutrients in the plant. But with the variation we [00:49:30] see in cannabis, there is no single golden standard for marks that you have to hit. We'll look at it and say, Hey, we know that typically when we see plants below a certain ppm, calcium, we see these issues, but not all plants are gonna behave the same way.

[00:49:46] Seth: So really what you're looking for is some of those key nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous, potassium benchmarks, and then some of your micros just to make sure you've got adequate nutrition. And then if you do have one, a certain strain that's got some in some interesting properties, like [00:50:00] every time you grow it, it just throws off way lower pH runoff or way higher.

[00:50:04] Seth: You can start mapping that out and then say, Hey, when I see this problem, this is what it appears to be a deficiency in. Or more like, Hey, if I take a leaf tissue analysis and it's this particular strain, I'm seeing this problem. , I know that it's a nutritional problem and that this plant has very specific needs and I can rule out certain other things such as pest and disease.

[00:50:29] Mandy: There we [00:50:30] go all about continuously improving. We had another question come in Maynard Rodin, what EC would you recommend? Free soaking rockwool cubes for Germinating seeds.

[00:50:39] Jason: I mean, it's gonna depend a little bit on the cold, fresh preference and what type of nutrients you're using. For germinating seeds, you're probably gonna wanna be a little bit low. I personally like to germinate seeds just in a humid, dark environment. And then once the taper has split out, then I like to put 'em in the rock wool.

[00:50:58] Jason: That's not [00:51:00] necessarily at a scale. What do you think?

[00:51:01] Seth: Usually about a 1.5. Make sure you got some cow mag. Make sure your pH, you don't wanna get it too hot cuz you're not gonna have a lot of up uptake for quite a while. And even to that effect when using really small starter cubes, especially distilled or deionized water, honestly, we're just trying to get that pop to pop once it's, you know, very small.

[00:51:20] Seth: We want to get that into its next medium as soon as possible. We don't want that tap root hitting the bottom of the. And then just wandering around, we wanna time it, so that's going out of our tiny Rockwall [00:51:30] cube directly into a bigger media, so we don't slow that taboo down.

[00:51:35] Mandy: Sweet. That was awesome. Thank you guys for all the knowledge you dropped today, and thanks to everyone over on YouTube for answering our questions and bringing yours.

[00:51:43] Mandy: I think that's it that we can get to today. So I'm gonna pass it back over to you, Kaisha.

[00:51:48] Kaisha: Awesome. Thank you Mandy. I'm gonna, I'm gonna give, do this question as our close. Bilbo good friend Billbo, he's on the horn today, submitted this, and I love this question. We weren't able to get to it last week.

[00:51:59] Kaisha: What [00:52:00] specific plant development stage is your favorite? It's phase, day range and why?

[00:52:05] Jason: The smoking stage, .

[00:52:09] Kaisha: Oh, same with me.

[00:52:10] Seth: Post-production.

[00:52:10] Jason: Yeah, there you go. Tech technical. You know, I, for me, probably one of the most favorite is a transition from veg to flower because it's the time that offers some of the most challenging, challenging decisions.

[00:52:24] Jason: And also the ones that can offer the most opportunity for high quality, high yielding plant. [00:52:30] You know, making sure that I get that, that dry in on transplant and start to stack my ECS in the right timeframe. Definitely exciting to see that plant morphology change.

[00:52:40] Seth: I personally love watching bulking cuz I can see everything that happened up to that point and then it's followed right by, my next happiest or the most sad phase, and that's when I over bulk it and then mold everything out.

[00:52:53] Seth: So ripening is always like, I think everyone's least favorite phase. Maybe visually it's beautiful, but from the [00:53:00] cultivators standpoint, that's the scariest time for sure. Billbo, what's your favorite?

[00:53:09] Bilbo: I'm not gonna lie, I really like the one that was described, not the smoking one, that's the same one. I like the one the challenging phase going into flower where you realize that you have to take the work that you put down in veg and make sure that it's within an acceptable range, especially if you're growing something new or there's some [00:53:30] outside influences.

[00:53:31] Seth: That's the most dynamic part early on, you know, the farther we get into any growth cycle, the less we can do to influence the outcome. So, , you know? Day negative 28, let's say that day. A cut , that's just as important as that transition phase is everything else. So early on is where we actually do see a lot of that, oh, the art part of it. The hand skill, the part that you have to learn, not be taught. I would say

[00:53:56] Bilbo: preach.

[00:53:59] Kaisha: Preach indeed. [00:54:00] I love that question. Thank you, Billbo. I mean, we have two more minutes. Let me squeeze one more in. Someone wrote in, what should I do if my field capacity and EC are continuing to rise on a generative steering and they put water, but I don't know if that's what they meant.

[00:54:15] Jason: Yeah, generative steering, irrigation strategy. Well, ec easy one. Usually when we're generative, we're allowing some amount of salt to build up, and that's why we call it generative stacking to some degrees. I like to call it stacking for two reasons. One, cause we're. Stacking the nodes. [00:54:30] They're trying to decrease node spacing and build out as many bud sites as possible.

[00:54:34] Jason: But also because visually, when we're looking at the day-to-day ec in AROYA on the, those curves, the EC is gradually stepping up day by day because we're not setting resetting all the way back down to our input water content. As far as field capacity, usually we see that stay about the same or decrease a little bit.

[00:54:53] Jason: Off the top of my head, I don't have really easy things to point at that might explain that.

[00:54:58] Seth: Typically what I would say is, number one, [00:55:00] make sure your initial hydration procedures are, yeah, correct. Make sure you're all the way hydrated, cuz some weird things can happen even in coco where we'll develop hydrophobic pockets that might start to hydrate later.

[00:55:11] Seth: After the block's been wet for a week or two. If you get lucky. Yeah, if you get lucky. And then, you know, the other thing is too if you're like, especially hand watering or one thing I've run into lately is some of the holdover people out there still using Octa bubbles that haven't tried to neck 'em down as much as they can.

[00:55:26] Seth: Basically what's happening is channeling, so you're getting [00:55:30] premature runoff, you're not actually hitting field capacity some of the time. So one thing you can really do is if you don't have any monitoring equipment, go get a hold of a solus. And every time you hydrate a new batch of media, test it and see what your field capacity actually is.

[00:55:43] Seth: And then just regularly test it at the, you know, right before P one and right after your P one s and if you hit runoff C. And then if you're playing around with your shot size and you notice, hey, like I'm getting runoff quicker during this phase, or when I try to put on a shot of this size, go test that and see if you've actually hit [00:56:00] field capacity, because you're eventually gonna find out that like, Hey, if I have a percent per minute shot, I am gonna hit eight, nine, 10%, 10 minutes, and suddenly I'll get premature runoff.

[00:56:11] Seth: It's too big of a shot. Versus if I would've put on two 5% shots and I actually, or two, let's say 8% shots versus the 10 and I actually hit 16. Whereas if I put two tens on and only hit 14, that was too much too fast. So really make sure you've established what that field capacity actually is, because we should see it like, especially in [00:56:30] a coco pot, like if you went clone into a one, one and a half or a two gallon rooted in and then flipped, we should see that field capacity actually go down a little bit as that poor space gets completely packed with roots.

[00:56:45] Kaisha: Amazing. Thank you all so much for all of your questions. Before we sign off, let's give a shout out to the brands, helping our experts keep their hat game on point. What are you guys wearing today?

[00:56:55] Jason: I've got my mills hat on. I like the blue color of it. It fits well.

[00:56:59] Seth: Yeah [00:57:00] I'm repping the exotic genetics hat, some breeders up here in Washington that continually putting out fire. Gotta support him.

[00:57:06] Kaisha: That's right. Yes. Thank you for the hats. Thank you son and Jason for an a fantastic conversation, man. I learned a lot. Mandy, I couldn't do this without you. Thank you for being my partner in co moderation and producer Chris for holding it down behind the scenes. Thank you to everybody for joining us for this week's AROYA Office Hours.

[00:57:24] Kaisha: We do this every Thursday, and the best way to get answers from the experts is to join us live. To learn more about AROYA, [00:57:30] click the link in the chat that'll get you a demo with one of our experts. They'll tell you all about how AROYA can be used to improve your cultivation production process. As always, if there's a topic you'd like covered in a future office hour session, post questions anytime via the AROYA.

[00:57:44] Kaisha: Feel free to drop us a note in the chat. Send us an email at support.aroya@metergroup.com. Send us a DM over Instagram and all the socials we wanna hear from you. We record every session and we will email everyone in attendance a link to today's [00:58:00] episode. It'll also live on the AROYA YouTube channel, like subscribe and share while you're there, and if you find these conversations helpful, please do spread the word.

[00:58:08] Kaisha: Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye.