okay welcome to aroya office hours live this is a chance for all of us whether you're right customers right curious or just into growing and existing in this exciting industry to share stories and get all your burning cultivation questions answered each week we'll spend an hour sharing findings talking you through some interesting features having a lively conversation and learning more about what you're doing and we want you to to jump in and ask questions and participate as well that's what the the office hours are about so today's discussion we're gonna be talking about drybacks what works what doesn't and getting a handle on them and what they can do for your roi and as we're going along here if you have questions please do submit them in the chat and we'll get to them and as we dive into the the subject of drive acts we're just gonna talk a little bit about what they are why they're important and jason has some some slides information that he can that he's gonna share on that as well but the word dry back as it's used and as we'll use it today is just about it refers to a period of time when your plants aren't being watered when they're using water and when the water content you'll see drop and it depends on what substrate you're using but in rockwool this might be say from 65 percent or you know high 60s water content in rockwool all the way down to say 35 percent that would be a big dryback of more than 30 percent and what the dryback does and the reason why they are so important is that is because of what they accomplish with poor water ec because as that plant is being dried back and as you know as the plant uses water from the substrate and as it's not being replenished from the irrigation system what you're getting is a gradual increase in the poor water you see which is a which produces a certain amount of water stress for the crop and depending on the phase of growth that the crop is in we would want to use longer drybacks achieving a higher poor water ec in generative phase for example or much shorter drybacks and protecting the plant from any stress during say a vegetative phase so that's an overview of drybacks and what they are when we talk about percent drive back we're talking about as i said before if you go from say a 55 water content to a 35 water content that's we call that a 20 dry back that you achieve during that time and typically and we'll go through some of the the questions some specific questions on these but typically what we're talking about when we're measuring the time of a dryback is we're timing it from that last point that you watered the plant all the way and up until the first watering of the next day that's that's the dry back duration so we'll talk about dry back size and also dry back duration the size we refer to in percentage terms and the duration we're going to talk about a time so did i miss anything on that jason i don't think so it sounded great okay i wasn't fishing but but thank you so some of the subjects that that we wanted to talk about today we'll start with the the first one of what is the benefit and the purpose of dry back in in cultivation as a whole so it's exercising the plant and obviously if we keep that plant at a field capacity or saturation point too long the roots are gonna get lazy on us and so obviously as the transpiration rate is sucking water out of that substrate we're gonna go on a circadian regular so circadian being 24 hour cycle and we're going to get that thing some irrigation every day encourage some plant growth response when we do irrigate and depending on the type of steering or the type of plant morphology that we're we're pushing for we can use that irrigation strategy to change the physiology so when we talk about physiology that's the plant's internal response to what we're doing to it when we talk about morphology that's the desired shape size the outcome of how that plant is growing okay yeah and how how do dry backs affect those things so when we encourage a wider irrigation window and so when i say irrigation window i'm not talking about the total time of irrigation or the total amount of irrigation i'm talking about from first irrigation to last irrigation it's just the inverse of dry back time so if we've got 24 hours and we run a two-hour irrigation window and we'd have 22 hours of dryback you can talk about either of them i'll usually talk about irrigation window because that's what we are changing that's what we're doing to the plant and the dryback is just going to be the time left over there so typically i'll talk about modifying that irrigation window when we've got a wider irrigation window it's going to encourage that plant to grow stalks stems leaves any of that more vegetative type of material that plant's going to usually stretch out it's going to be the infrastructure for that plant to continue its growth now when we encourage a little bit more generative steering we'll shorten up that irrigation window and i think one of our questions was talking about some of those timelines we can jump into that right now yeah let's do it that's great and i'll just actually so i can pull up some old data from the plants that i was growing in my house which might be useful here let me see but actually why don't you dive into that one while i'm pulling up some some actual dryback data to show people so absolutely so when i was talking about a wider irrigation window maybe when we're doing some distinctly vegetative growth some of that vegetative steering will shoot for you know maybe six to ten hour irrigation window this is going to really be dependent on a number of things we're talking about substrate size drip rate what type of strain that you're growing so some strains are going to be naturally leaning on one side or the other of the spectrum in which case you really want to have a balanced growth system that's going to get you the best results so jumping back around vegetative irrigation typically an irrigation window from six to ten hours when we're pushing for a more generative irrigation so that generative is encouraging reproductive growth that's getting our bud sites that's getting nice node stacking in there and really encouraging that plant to produce flower and those irrigation windows are going to be mostly in the range of maybe one to three hours for an irrigation window yeah yeah and that's something i didn't i didn't really understand them that well before i started to try to to achieve dryback with my plants is that

that basically what what you're doing to achieve this dryback is you're either reducing the like if you wanted to achieve a larger driveback you would either reduce the the number of waterings or reduce the the you know the frequency or the the shot size of those of those waterings and then that especially during the generative phase you want to get them into a small window a relatively tight you know say two hour you know two and a half hours get all your watering's done so that you can have a dryback over the rest of that time is that right absolutely yeah and you know when we talk about what generative is doing and we can jump into some slides talking about p1 and p2 type irrigations as well but when we're talking about generative that's usually p1 irrigations and that's getting to saturation reasonably quickly i like to see you know getting the saturation within you know an hour of that first irrigation if possible yep and we always recommend if possible to do a number of irrigations as well so not necessarily one large shot to get there you can get run through you'll get runoff without necessarily let the capillary effect the substrate catch up with the rate of irrigation so you know a good p1 you know maybe you do three four five irrigations in a one-hour irrigation window yep try to get up to that that saturation point or that field capacity would be the best scientific name for where we're hitting a point where the water is not going to hold anymore it's going to be turning into runoff yeah at that point if we continue yeah that the that point you just mentioned about

about multiple waterings that's really critical and it is something that that you know you're not going to achieve the giving the plant the the water and nutrients that it needs in a single shot unless you're using maybe a different type of medium that isn't that isn't rockwool but so it is important to to look at your irrigation shot size and frequency as the dial that you're turning to be able to achieve what you want to in in dry back is that right absolutely yeah let's let's see if i can get yeah okay this is this is again when we use examples from my tent grow they are the the data quality are not the highest so is that is it on two yeah there we go and okay nice so this is and this is an example of a line this is how my plants were watered in a this was in a vegetative phase of growth and you can see that we started out here at 32 percent water content we got all the way up to wow 38 this was this was not super awesome but you can see multiple waterings throughout the the day from from 10 a.m all the way until the evening you know say like it looks like five o'clock then i stopped and one thing to note in aroya this is a really basic function if you want to save the dryback that you were able to achieve in any given day you click on this button right here and you click drive back and if i was going to measure my drive back i'd say well my last irrigation was right here and this was when i started irrigating the next day and that's my dryback so we have a calculated dryback of 5.3 percent again not not super awesome but i can go ahead and log that drive back and it's it's saved in the in the journal so jason do you want to pull up those slides on the the p1 p2 p3 and and show those i can jump out of this absolutely i also did want to share while you were doing that logging into dry backyard okay right it saves as an annotation down there in the bottom and we can also do a manual reading so that's that dry back number is a manual reading and if you do dry back calculations on a daily basis or maybe every two or three days you can chart that using your manual values just click on just oh okay i see so and it's going to automatically be a manual value based on calculations oh okay so you could just put it in by clicking here and also just manually entering it i believe that you might be able to i'm not i'm not sure what to do this is a real time drawback yeah so you could you could note your drive back here even though this is not correct 10 i'm in my zone here date and time comments record when reading so yeah you can do it manually if you want to actually we did have a question on that can drive x be calculated without a sensor sure it's going to be much more labor intensive and i'm also going to talk about when you do log a drive back you're only looking at one zone here but when you log a drive back in array it's going to do it by those zone averages okay if you've got eight zones in a room it's going to do eight manual readings of those drybacks you kind of see a nice clean representation of that calculating drybacks without a sensor i guess it depends what a sensor is if a scale yeah is not a sensor or if a handheld reading is not a sensor yeah then you might be able to obviously you'd need to go in and weigh the plants at last irrigation and then go away at initial irrigation and do some water content calculations based on the dry media weight and the weight of the water that was dispersed from transpiration and evaporation during that time frame but you know when we think about that on scale effectively i guess the answer would be no well yes i i agree that if we're talking about no sensor but but that that would have been my only miles suggestion if you don't have a sensor you could you could get a kitchen scale out and you know and actually weigh the the individual plants and and understand how much they're they're drying back the other thing about this graph is you can see that the the rate at which the plant is using water is a lot higher when the lights are on obviously than when the lights are off so these are two different relatively constant rates of of water use throughout the throughout the you know plant growth process and irrigation and the area where we're not doing irrigation so and you can see that that that rate at which the the plant is using water returns to that higher level once the lights come back on the next day there's a couple contributing factors and i already mentioned evaporation and transpiration those are really the two places that your water content is going obviously ignoring runoff because we're not going to necessarily see runoff in the water content on the sensors you're going to have evaporation and transpiration during the daytime the transpiration is going to be much higher when we've got light hitting those plants with a bunch of photosynthesis just being active and your evaporation is probably going to be slightly higher as well maybe just due to some radiation from those lights obviously that inflection point when the lights turn off we can see a change in slope which is actually a very good thing because that's indicating that our plants are transpiring significantly so a bigger bigger change in that slope at that inflection point it's going to really tell us that that plant is pulling hard yeah because you're going to have evaporation overnight and that's why we do see some amount of dry back overnight and your plants probably are going to do some transpiration when the lights are as well sure sure well and another interesting thing that that really was clear when i started to grow the plants was that the plant's capability of pulling water out of the substrate is very small when the plants are really small you know when your plants are are a foot taller foot and a half tall they really don't have a root structure they don't have a you know their their leaves and things aren't their leaves aren't well developed and you're really not transpiring that much it's not doing that much work and even if you want to achieve a big dryback to stress the plant it's probably not possible because the root structure isn't there to pull all that water out of the substrate and actually use it that's exactly right and that falls into it another question that we had that was talking about ideal drybacks during different stages of the growth cycle and this is one of the reasons that we absolutely encourage and love using recipes using that those different phases in your grow in your harvest group because we want to know what are we trying to achieve during that time frame and a lot of times we know when those plants are really small maybe we just transplanted we're not going to necessarily see the types of drybacks that we will later we're going to be shooting for just trying to get that root zone going and get those roots into the new media so that it can tap into the entire volume of that substrate okay and that's the root in phase that's right before that's when you're flipping the plants let's say that you're you're putting a coco bag on a coco bag or you're putting a 4x4 block onto a slab of of rockwool the that that's getting the root develop development that you want and that's a period of what four or five days is that typical for rudin or yeah probably three to five days okay okay so so there's the root in period and then right after that plants are still really small my my guess would be that what we're really looking for is is you mentioned the word recipe we're looking for a a a time frame of a couple of hours get all the waterings and we're really targeting the dryback duration more than we are the size because we're not going to achieve that much with really small plants right at the beginning of flowers is that right that that is exactly right and after running in you know you might go a few days to let that slab get down to a lower water content so you can build a regular irrigation schedule for it the next coming days it's i don't like to get into the specifics of exactly how long you might want to run that initial alternative stacking because it is very very strain dependent right yeah you could talk about anywhere from one week to four or five weeks depending on what what type of genetics you're working with okay and that's a it's a critical and a little bit of a challenging time because obviously it is labor intensive to keep an eye on daily drybacks and modify irrigation parameters based on what you saw yesterday and so a lot of times you know you'll start to see those drybacks get gradually more and more every day that you're hitting that and at some point you may need to up your irrigation schedule to keep up with the new growth those that br area that's boiling water and then obviously when we look at transpiration that's talking about surface area that leaves so transpiration happens from those stomates being open having water vapor leave the plant so the more surface area we have the more pores the more stomates that are pulling water from the substrate yep yep did you want to show that slide on p1 p2 p3 to just because we we do talk about that sometimes and just to to give a visual of what we're talking about there sure should i just share it in this google me yeah okay let's go right here

we can just kind of run through these slides that it's got context to what we're talking about as well here's a little bit of that you know an example and i do stress you know example when i talk about this because it it's going to be dependent on genetics depending on the goals of the facility etc so you know just thinking about okay this is really flipping that stuff around a little bit to get the best growth out of the plant

this slide is showing an example of some water content and the left side over here we're talking about a p1 type irrigation and these irrigations can be closer together in time spacing where they can be a little bit larger size shots and the goal there is to get to that field capacity fairly quickly so we are looking at more vegetative growth in this slide we can see we've got p1 so we're getting up to that saturation point right here could be anywhere from 45 for coco cocoas are a little bit they're dependent on the pith size you know how much that coco is chunked up how how loose it is etc and then up until probably about 65 or 70 percent maybe a little bit more for rockwool that's the fairly consistent field capacity we like to see out of those sensors so yeah that p1 those shots are obviously working to get to the saturation and then the p2 shots are trying to maintain saturation or field capacity for the duration of the irrigation window and i really don't talk much about p3 irrigations because that's just there's no irrigation there p3 is just your dryback it's it's not necessarily something you're doing to the plant your p3 is going to be a side effect of how well you achieved your desired p1 and p2 irrigation sure and this slide's just showing a little bit of some of the recommended time frames before irrigation and after your last irrigation i think we might have had one question about this

maybe not oh yeah start and finish when you start finish dryback okay so typically we like to see irrigations in between this says zero and one hours we could say zero and two hours after lights off to be to be a little bit more realistic of what what facilities can achieve realistically and then same kind of thing you know after irrigation you don't want to irrigate all the way up to lights off that can lead to some extra humidity in the room a little bit of root stagnation possible pythium or other types of diseases in the plant so typically you'll want to stop irrigating even if you've got a wide vegetative irrigation window zero to two zero to three three four depending on how wide your irrigation window is

this is just showing pointing out okay each of these is oftentimes an irrigation depending on how the how many shots you are giving sometimes you'll not necessarily see it just defined peak from that sensor data and that has to do with a couple things one could just be the capillary effect of the substrate buffering each of those events

this is just showing okay here's dry back over here drive back calculation saturation minus the starting point so here's your dryback duration in this case it's 15 hours and we can see that vertical difference is going to be the dryback percentage and the horizontal is going to be that dryback duration that you were talking about

this next slide is showing generative steering irrigation in this case we can see we've pretty much ignored any p2 type of irrigations we're doing some p1 irrigations to get up to that field capacity and letting that dry back window be much much wider

anything i missed well i think i mean one interesting thing in looking at this at this slide is that you know if we were to plot the ec on top of this we would see pretty much in most cases that the ec is going to increase for that entire duration of the of the dryback is that right yeah absolutely i might have some data here that reflects what we're seeing there as well let's jump in just to zoom in here

jason while you cat while you gather that data i just want to remind everybody on the call today we're so happy that you're here and we want to answer all of your questions so our topic is drybacks today please feel free to answer any questions you have in the chat and we'd love to address them during this presentation back to you jason thanks this is some real-life data this is one of our development partners down the road here in pullman washington they're doing a great job and have allowed us to use their data for examples and also we collaborate with them testing new equipment at their facilities so we really appreciate that opportunity to work with them in this case we're looking at a fairly moderate type of irrigation strategy this is fairly well balanced and i can also zoom in here to show what scott was talking about specifically with ryze and you see when we see that water content drop so zooming in here we can see all right we're hitting some field capacity fairly quickly that would be your p1 event right there and then a good number of p2s right here a little bit of dryback lights off we can see that change in water content loss of that substrate and we can also see that ec rising up so obviously that irrigation when it happens it's going to push the ec down in the block it's going to basically refresh the nutrients in there a lot of times that's going to drop closer to your irrigation feed concentration so sometimes we do typically see that that nominal number down here a couple points maybe one two three points higher than your actual feed of the ec or the feed of the nutrients just gonna depend on your media your nutrient type how you've been steering those plants up to that point as well but so we'll see that distinctive drop that substrate is getting refreshed with new balanced nutrients closer to our feed ec and after this irrigation stop we see that ec rise fairly quickly while transpiration is pulling water from the substrate reasonably fast and then obviously overnight it tapers off but it still rises why that water content drops and correct me if i'm wrong but the reason why the ec goes up is because the plant is pulling water and some nutrients but not as much nutrients and the nutri and the you know those the the salts become more concentrated in the substrate is that right correct so that that's the scientific reason why this works and and i should say you know as we're talking about dryback the reason you know people talk about in the industry a lot dry back dry back dry back in the reason we do dry backs isn't so that we can remove the water it's so that we can achieve a particular poor water ec that we're going for that sends the signals the signal to the plan especially generatively which is okay there's some stress now i need to focus on reproduction which is partitioning it's its energy toward bud sites or flour and when we send those signals if we do it in the right way we can get higher yields is that i mean did i i mean it is is that the right way to explain it like what we're trying to achieve is the is the stress the dryback is how we do it but what what the plant's feeling is this poor water we see is that right yeah for the most part that is right and maybe i'll deep dive and hopefully not get too scientific with with this real quick but so when we look at and i talked about matrix potential a little bit last week and i think we're going to be posting some great videos that your dad did about matrix potential in different types of hydroponic substrates but so major potential being how how much does that re zone i mean how much pressure or vacuum would be it's a negative pressure so how much vacuum do the roots have to apply to the substrate in order to pull water from that substrate when we look at rockwool for example it's got a pretty what we would call a high matrix potential so you know you may only be seeing i don't know negative 20 to negative 100 kpa yeah and that means that these plants even when we do get pretty low in water content and rock wool they're not necessarily having to pull extremely hard they're not they may not be feeling an irrigation deficit yep that is applied in traditional agriculture or horticulture techniques like like grapes for example right correct like if we want to stress grapes and and people do this all over the world it's basically reducing irrigation so that the matrix potential of the soil stresses those grapes in cannabis we're not doing that because there's plenty of water there but we're stressing them with the salt with the nutrients is that right yes absolutely and so what we know what we talk about is osmotic potential osmotic effect it happens in tons of biological applications it's happening in you right now it happens in me i just drank some water and my cells are absorbing it and when we look at a plant that osmotic potential is going to be the differential in salt concentration within the cell versus the salt concentration within the substrate and a larger osmotic differential is going to increase the pressure so the cells are going to try and swell quicker based on the the water intake obviously when we let the ec rise we're decreasing that osmotic potential and therefore trying to encourage the right type of morphology based on that physiological response potential yeah yeah and and i i think of it as like if you if you have a let's say a you know the water as it comes into the to block so the drippers put the water into the block that the plant is growing in and there has to be a differential osmotic differential between that that block and the roots and then there has to be an osmotic different differential between the roots and the stem and then there has to be a differential between the stem and the leaves and then there has to be a differential between the atmosphere and the the stomates right and the water has to make its way all the way through that that process and like if we talk about vpd for example that's you know there has to be the right differential for the the plants to to transpire they you know there has to be some type of energy moving water and you know by by default nutrients through that process as well so it's just kind of a cycle and dry backs are are part of that so we reduce the water and concentrate the nutrients but the stress that the plant feels is through the the concentration of the nutrients so let's let's get to one of these questions if you're saying well i've never done this before what's the way to start using drybacks to help increase my yields where is a place to start

a good place to start is running a control harvest group so having some reference of your data before you make changes is the absolute best way to begin crop steering and you might say well you're not grab steering but you have to have a great understanding of what we are doing to those plants you know how did this harvest group run without necessarily making any changes and that's going to give you a wonderful baseline so when you do start tweaking when you do start to crop steer you can make moderate some mild adjustments to to get to that and the the best way and the reason that the control is a great spot too because i run into a lot of clients that you know maybe they have traditionally done hand watering where they've got a one large irrigation in the morning for those plants then we've also run into you know lots of clients that may just do you know a vegetative drip irrigation through the entire harvest group right and so the way that you can start is building up a good recipe and i did want to mention so we've got a cultivation quick start guide available for any of the subscribers of the roy system it's down in our resource center bottom left there's a question mark and it's going to cover a lot of the topics that we're talking about here today let me just pull that up real quick so it's on here it's is it in this resources okay so go here cultivation quick start right absolutely okay so we go on here and

yeah there we go okay so talking about the phases of growth different definitions of things here's the plants it is going to talk about the steering crop steering water and irrigation the different substrates so yeah i agree i've i use this you know i've read through this a number of times but it's funny because when i started out trying to grow plants in this small tent i had really basic problems like how to get them to actually be watered like making the the timer work you know and lots of lots of simple problems that are very frustrating nonetheless and so i keep on having to go back and read this again because once i figured out some things then other pieces other pieces of this document start to make more sense so yeah here's here's the document that you're referring to yeah so this is a great place to start and i think it does start from the beginning i'm glad that you talked about getting other variables in line so obviously having a you know a good operating facility is going to be the best place to begin crop steering that's also why we we always love to have some control data is because it it can highlight maybe some areas that could be improved before crop steering is employed it's like if i'm driving down with some really loose ball joints i might have a hard time steering down the highway because because that rack and pinion or my all my ball joints are loose it's gonna be wobbling around so if i get those tightened up i'm gonna have a lot better success when i do start to be serious about crop steering yep and the environment is i think a little bit overlooked sometimes when we do get so excited about having root zone data and shooting for crop steering making sure that light intensity is going to help us produce the transpiration rates we need for the appropriate drybacks to steer it's absolutely critical having your temperature and humidity balanced to get the vpd that allows for the most still model conductance as possible that's going to get those transpiration rates where you need yep yep and that's in the in the generative phase and i mean so correct me if i'm wrong but but the reason i keep on talking about like you flip the plants into flower in this early generative phases is i've often

heard it referred to as this critical time you really need to make sure that you're doing things properly and you set yourselves up yourself up for success by nailing the the generative steering in that in those you know you said it could be anywhere from one to five weeks depending on the on the strain but during that phase what what and and implementing drive x in that phase you say something like the vpd is also important so what what vpd ranges are we looking for in that in that generative phase typically usually we'll be shooting for about 1.2 you know you might when you start the harvest group yeah be it around 1-0 you know during that written session and climb it up to say 1.2 for your your first generation that stacking section sure sure so i do totally agree with you about getting that control again getting that that harvest group where you use it as a control like hey and let's say it's just a client who's always been steering vegetatively even i mean they might not even call it that but they're you know they're just doing lots of waterings throughout the day keeping the plants super happy all the time and there are even some strains i think was it mac one you said likes to to be steered vegetatively like it's just kind of a weird strain that way great example yeah you know it's a stubby chunky plant anyways it's not necessarily prone to a lot of the stretching it's going to get the infrastructure it needs to yield well without doing too much generative steering yeah yeah now so an example like that you might have a client who's going mac one running it vegetatively the whole time and then just introduces a little bit of of say generative cues in that in that early flower phase and might see an improvement but maybe not as some but as much as somebody who would be like i don't know an og kush or something a different type of dream is probably the other in the spectrum so blue dream likes it it likes that generative cues it's a tall stretchy sativa type of plant absolutely so so that that's one way to get started is is put that baseline down and then look and then make a change to one thing like like say okay well during these first three weeks of flower we're going to get all our waterings done within two hours and shoot for a drive back like you know say 20 to 30 and watch our ecs during that time and then watch the plants as well is that is that a good starting point that is a good starting point yeah and one of the things i did forget to mention i was talking about before we cross steering is also making sure that our substrate size is appropriate ah yes yes okay we did talk about this before this just does not get enough play is and we i showed you i think i showed you like an outdoor thing where they have you know they're growing in like 20 gallon pots or something like that you know are you gonna get a dryback in a 20-oun pot no not not really so what in in coco and rockwool do behave differently we see coco typically as being more forgiving we see rockwool as being more more responsive is that i mean so so with between those two substrates how that you know how would you look at size if you're growing in coco for example i mean what what might be a reasonable size of you know a volume of substrate to be able to achieve a dryback in 22 hours yeah i i mean my favorite is at you know one and a half to two gallons of substrate or plant that's going to give you enough capacity enough reservoir in there to steer generatively without running into really low water contents that matrix potential curve is a little bit different for coco so we can't get quite quite as dry before that plant might feel some actual irrigation deficits right some water stress as opposed to osmotic stress exactly and you know the goal is not necessarily to actually stress the plant we just want to to make it think that it needs to change its physiology i like i like i heard bruce bugbee our our friend at at apogee in utah state he once told me you know human plants are like humans they operate bust under a little bit of stress you know it's like well you know you're ambitious you want to achieve you got a little bit of stress that's how plants do as well too much stress and they they break down just like us that's exactly right yeah and so you know when we think about crop steering let's say we've we're growing some really big plants and we've got a maybe a six by six by four rockwool cube for our substrate we're going to we're going to really struggle to steer that thing generatively because the plant transpiration rates are going to exceed the capacity of that block everything's going to run into you know 10 maybe lower if it's a really a happy plant and there's well if the plant is happy the it's gonna pull a lot of water it's transpiring a lot and you're gonna run out of your reservoir yep out of water out of fertigated solution in that substrate so obviously having that volume appropriate for the size of plants that you're growing is what's going to allow you to steer one way or the other so if you're running in a six by six by four for example you might have to always be with a 10 maybe even a 12 hour irrigation schedule just to to keep those plants out of the danger zone of water content yeah no that that's really well said and you know i've seen people with tiny substrates and you know it used to be kind of popular a few years ago to be to be like in a six by six by four for each plant it's more common for the the places i go to see too much substrate you know that that people are using like three gallons of coco or something like that and you're really not going to get much enough dry back a shout out here to gonzalo at grizzly peak we went to to meet with him was really impressed by the work he's he is doing there and he actually took some of the data traces that people had posted on social media that he thought was doing a good job of crop steering and he put that picture on his wall and he said well i want to make my drybacks look like this and and he figured out that the way to do that was to use a smaller substrate than he was he was in two gallons of coco and he just just decided to do lesson it's going to be different for everybody your facility and the way that it's run and the you know the the irrigation system that you have particularly i mean some people struggle with getting drybacks because they don't they don't have a precision irrigation system and they're doing ebb and flow or you know other irrigation approaches that aren't just netaphim emitters in in in each plant but i was just really impressed that that he just through looking at the data traces and the pictures of how somebody was doing a drive back he figured out i need less substrate very cool

that's very cool and for anyone who's on the call today we love to hear from you know we love to hear success stories we love to hear what's working and what isn't actually billy just posted a comment here a question and sorry i just lost it here billy wants to know are there any targets for nighttime dry back in vegetative phase

sure and i'm just going to jump in here and take a look at

our cultivation resources so that i stay consistent with exactly what we have published

and then i tried to sidetrack but there was one thing that was hit in my mind while you were talking there scott it's also very important to have really healthy plants coming out of edge yeah so you know a lot of this conversation right now has been about the flower period it is critical to have fast growing plants during veg that veg obviously being 18 6 light cycle you need to start getting a lot of light to those plants and then make sure you match your dli going into flowers so that they get the same amount of energy even though it's a shorter window yeah yeah well and actually after billy's question here i want to you know you talked about that difference one week to five weeks or whatever i want to talk a little bit about plant height and and that as well so so let's let's do that after we we get to your resource here yeah billy so during vegetative we'll typically talk about drybacks for rockwool and this is assuming the appropriate sized media because obviously your media side is going to change how much volume this percentage equals right so a dryback percentage in volume is going to be that percentage times the volume of the substrate so i'm in a 1 gallon and i have a dryback of 10 percent we're going to see 0.1 gallons of water that has evaporated and transported from that substrate so for you know vegetative steering typically in something like rock we'll talk about 10 15 percent you know if you've got a really large plant sometimes it'll be a little bit more and that's assuming that appropriately sized substrate and coco anywhere from five to fifteen percent would be a more typical vegetative dryback and those these aren't exact numbers there's just something to work off of so there's a lot of variables that can play in here i just wanted to share a comment from eddie eddie posted here i found with my veg timeline of 12 to 14 days that three and a half to five liters of substrate is best to achieve 20 plus drybacks for generatives signals eddie thank you so much for sharing that if anyone else out there has any thoughts as well for what's working for them we'd love to hear it please post it in the chat and eddie is that is that rockwool then that's across rockwool and coco okay i mean it's it's interesting you mentioned that because i do because you know because i i've seen people in industry that are finding like two gallons is a little bit too much which would be you know roughly eight liters is that what you're seeing as well yeah when i'm running those veg timelines of two weeks typically won't see a 20 dry back until the plants in like five six weeks of flower and usually during that time depending upon the pull to bar i'll want to be having a vegetative dry back for bulking so yeah exactly yeah yeah great that's that's really useful

great i have another question here from one of our fans on instagram they want to know how much should my media dry out in between waterings

oh that's a great question and i would put a lot less emphasis on those those intermediate dry downs than i would the total amount of dry vac from last irrigation to first irrigation and a little bit can happen here so depending on your irrigation scheduling capacity you know maybe if you're working with a lower grade controller you may not be able to irrigate as many times as you'd want to during that p2 but with with an appropriate size substrate between irrigations during vegetative we talk about maybe two to five percent between irrigations and for generative up to five percent but when you are running generative you know typically that's just p1 irrigations so your your goal is to just get to field capacity reasonably quickly and so you may not see those dry downs in between your irrigations for generative but for for vegetative p2 when you're running those maintenance irrigations you know maybe six maybe 12 irrigations after you've got to capacity then two to five percent probably a good reasonable range yeah and another so and before i forget we we're talking about the plant height thing so it for those plants that are in that early phase

and you talked about doing control as well so that's what peak might pique my interest if you're doing a control is a good idea to do a really good job of using aroya to note the plant height and the node the internodal spacing of your control group so that you can compare it once you start trying to to crop steer your cultivar more aggressively absolutely and exactly like you said you know you know the next steps after you have implemented some types of crop steering is to begin refining what your recipes look like so you can get that repeatability and continuous improvement based on the observations you're taking when it comes to plant height i absolutely encourage it and this is and how often jason

how often do you have a chance to go in there and do it every every day every two or three days okay yeah so which you could just you could just load that up as a task in the recipe for example it's just taking a plant height yeah yeah and you know the real critical time there is when we're when we're looking at that first generative stacking phase so you know a little bit before that a little bit after that we want crop registration information like plant height and what's going to happen is effective generative steering is going to reduce the stretching of that plant and it's also going to give you an idea what time frame what plant height that you are going to expect to change steering strategies in the future okay so internodal let's see node spacing is how it's it's done here i don't know what's it what's typical node spacing one and a half inches okay yeah 1.5 here on node spacing so i was just showing people how you can go in in the and very easily note these things probably the hardest thing is just remembering to do it and and making sure that that you're that your grow tax actually take the time to put it into the to the notes but then when it once it is in the notes and i can go here let's hope this actually works oh actually this is the wrong one so we'll go to here i go into my groups my harvest groups here's my first batch i would i will actually say i i harvested my plants the other day it was awesome but let's see analytics so if i go down here and i did i didn't take nearly enough my heights but i did take a few and you can see that they're noted here in the analytics of the of the harvest group and the the slowdown in the increase in plant height so once those plants start leveling off what's that i mean why is that significant it's usually a great time to consider going to more vegetative bulking type of strategy yeah so you know really what we've done there is curved some of the stretching that's indicating that you know that plant has has got enough infrastructure from earlier on that that we can switch back that bulk or that stacking phase excuse me is really setting the stage for you know the amount the quantity and the quality of those plants going in so once once that real vertical shooting has stopped we can we can start thinking about doing some more vegetative steering yep well and one one other thing i wanted to say and you mentioned this earlier is like you go in you look at your drybacks on on a particular day and you decide oh i want to actually to achieve a little bit more dry back and and then you adjust your controls and and that typically involves going to a different system whatever your irrigation system is and changing those settings either the the number or the the spacing or the size of the the shots that are being given to the plants and i i do i do think this is a critical point which is that that the system that's doing the controls you know controls are about telling you what happened or what is going to happen controls isn't about telling you what should happen and that's what your role as a as a grower is is to to figure that out to use the data and analytics to say this is what should be happening here are the changes i need to make to to my controls in order to achieve that so let's say you were in that situation as a grower and you wanted to tweak to achieve a little bit more dryback what what do you do what how would you achieve that you either you know you'd probably shorten up your irrigation window so you could either decrease the time between shots or you could just you know drop off a shot two three depending on how how you want to go and i think typically and we in our quick start guide we talk about you know as opposed to vegetatively the shot size we you know we recommend using a bigger shot size during that that small window we're trying to get all the the watering up done and get to field capacity and then stop is that right yeah absolutely so you know if we saw say a you know 25 percent dry back overnight you know that that drive back that we talked about maybe it was 22 hours and we saw a 25 decrease if we're trying to get that 25 percent replenished within an hour maybe we've got five five percent shots yeah yeah well and so that's my only point about controls is that controls doesn't necessarily equal control you know the the things that the that system is doing is helping you to execute because it makes it possible to do all these waterings automatically without having to go do them manually and that's great but each day the plants are growing you know each day the that the environment is changing you know maybe your your crew goes through and does all the the you know plant pruning and that changes how the plants are going to are going to act because they don't have as much surface area as they used to so so that's that's the challenge as a grower is to use the the control system whatever that is and use the analytics that that we're providing through the the production platform to be able to do that really difficult job of just nailing it when it comes to to each batch that you're growing that's why annotations are so so very important in here because it starts to characterize you get that metadata into the dynamics of the room you know if we've got some de-leaf parameters in there and we see that you know our humidity in the room has dropped because we don't have quite as much then you know it's a good time to to keep in mind for the next round maybe we need to also have a little bit of an hvac check or an hvac modification as well yeah those other tasks so your vpd doesn't go up yeah no exactly

hey scott and jason the last couple of minutes here billy wants to know if we can touch on generative drive back and ripening sure yeah so you know ripening is probably one of the more controversial phases in here i have clients that are pretty successful employing significant generative during that ripening and some people that don't necessarily push it quite as much and so as far as drybacks go for for ripening you know you're gonna be looking at a similar to to that stacking phase a lot of times we'll we'll see a little bit of a decrease in nutrient concentration during that time frame but but you got to be a little bit careful with that and that that final ripening is going to be extremely genetic dependent so some some types of plants we had a pineapple that they really like to foxtail we'd get lots of white hairs out towards the end and ripening will help combat any of that get you a nice amber trichome get your plant to bulk out as much as possible before it's time to cut yeah and the the swings that you'll see on your graphs in a row would be huge during that phase as opposed to the early flower when you're not you know the plants aren't even really that big so you'll see more you know i mean what i've seen is is higher differentials you say when you're running generative in that ripening phase is that is that right yep we're more dynamics yeah

awesome well i think we're at about the end of this week's office hours thank you all so much for attending and for submitting your questions we do this every week this is your time any questions you have about aroya how it can be used to improve your cultivation process any topics you'd like us covering us to cover in the future office hours please let us know in the chat or shoot us an email at support. aroya metergroup.com or feel free to dm us on instagram because we really want to hear from you just let you all know we record every session we're going to email everyone in attendance the link to the video from today's discussion it's also going to live on the aroya youtube channel please like and subscribe while you're there and if you find these conversations helpful feel free to share the video with anyone else who may find this information used useful thank you all again so much for coming thank you scott and jason and we'll look forward to seeing you all next week thanks kaisha

you