Episode 8: Crop steering, drybacks, flipping, harvesting, lollipopping, and more

Jason Van Leuven, Philip Malmquist, and Seth Baumgartner do a rapid-fire question and answer session in this week's Office Hours LIVE.

AAA 8

[00:00:00] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Excellent. All right. Hello and welcome to AROYA office hours live, whether you're an AROYA customer or AROYA curious or just super passionate about growing and existing in this industry, these weekly sessions are your chance to learn from the experts about crop steering, share cultivation, tips, and tricks and network with other growers doing exciting things in this emerging industry.

[00:00:21] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: My name is Kaisha. I'll be your moderator for today's discussion. Just some quick housekeeping, housekeeping. Before we get started we welcome lively conversation but AROYA office hours is not the forum for discussing cannabis policy, home cultivation or complaints about the industry. No matter how valid in order to keep these sessions useful for our community.

[00:00:39] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: We thank our attendees in advance for adhering to the following best practices. AROYA office hours is not the time to ask why isn't there an AROYA system for home growers? Are you hiring? Under the regulations in my state, am I legally allowed to do insert activity here or does a AROYA costs?

[00:00:57] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Although you are welcome to book a demo, we can talk [00:01:00] about that. I'll put that link in the chat in just a minute. But AROYA office hours is the time to ask things like what are some ways to go from manual, growing to crop steering with hardware and software. Deleafing is the most challenging task

[00:01:11] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: our team has to deal with any tips on how to deal with this more efficiently? This is the data I'm seeing with my grow, can you help me understand what it means and what is the difference between water activity and moisture content? So there's some examples there with that said let's get started.

[00:01:26] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: We've got a great group today. We got Jason, Philip and Seth from our company here online. Everybody who's in attendance, please do post your questions in the chat at any time. And if your question is selected, we'll ask you to unmute yourself and ask away. So Jason, Phillip, and Seth, we're ready to ask our answer.

[00:01:45] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Our first question from instagram. All

[00:01:47] Seth Baumgartner: right,

[00:01:48] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: let's do it. Yeah. Great. Okay. zdankness would like to know can one crop steer without sensors?

[00:01:55] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that when we talk about crops [00:02:00] steering every crop is being steered, whether it's being steered on purpose or not, or what direction it's going is where the tools come in to really monitor it.

[00:02:08] Jason Van Leuven: So you can apply those tactics. The irrigation strategies can be applied without sensors. But that being said, you don't have a good indicator of what is actually happening in that substrate. So if the steering that you're applying is working appropriately, or how much longer you need to apply that type of steering.

[00:02:28] Jason Van Leuven: Now, when we talk about crop steering, like it's like driving down the road without lines or maybe without a speedometer. That's. So that's definitely. Were those tools give you the ability to really refine and steer on purpose,

[00:02:44] Philip Malmquist: right? People, someone told me once that your crop steering even, you're always crop steering at some point, even if you know it or don't know it, it's only when you have the tools, you can really dial it in and crop steer to your liking and you can really do what you intend to do.

[00:02:57] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah, that's exactly right. [00:03:00] When we talk about crop steering, it's just applying specific irrigation strategies. So most of the time, for the big durations, we're talking about either a vegetive or a generative steering capacity. And I was talking to our data scientists about this a little bit.

[00:03:14] Jason Van Leuven: It's not it's not like you're either doing vegetative or generative, there is a gray part. If vegetative was completely black and generative was completely white, then there's definitely a lot of gray zone. If we're 50% white, 50% black where we're running balanced or are gray. And so that tools let you evaluate how much generative or how much vegetative irrigation strategies that you are applying.

[00:03:39] Philip Malmquist: So not only applying a strategy, but then also seeing how that if that strategy is actually being carried out, because I can definitely see how someone can have one irrigation schedule and then another do gates and schedule one for Vedge one for Jen, not having sensors, believing that they are crop steering, but then actually don't know if they are right, because there is such a huge span of where it can [00:04:00] fall depending on the cultivar.

[00:04:02] Philip Malmquist: A whole bunch

[00:04:02] Jason Van Leuven: of factors, that's exactly right. And when we talk about harvest groups, that's one of the most powerful things for continuous improvement of facility production. And so sure you could be crop steering, but you don't really know what direction happened for that cycle. So if you do it next cycle, you make, maybe try the exact same thing.

[00:04:20] Jason Van Leuven: There could be slightly different results, just depending on variation factors that we've talked about in in some YouTube videos.

[00:04:26] Philip Malmquist: Even like things like root zone development, stage of growth, that's going to also differentiate or affect how you apply your crop steering techniques and the only way to know how they respond is to measure.

[00:04:40] Philip Malmquist: I'd love to, to discuss a bit more when, okay, so now we establish, okay, you need sensors to crops here, or you need sensor to actually know if your crops are in, techniques are working, you're doing what you intend to do. What sensors do you need? What's the minimum viable sensor, suite two Cropster,

[00:04:56] Jason Van Leuven: Terrace, twelves, substrate sensors, [00:05:00] knowing the water content.

[00:05:01] Jason Van Leuven: So w really what we're looking at is how much transpiration is happening in that plant. Historically, a lot of growers go around and pick up the weight of the plants, maybe if they're really trying to apply that they'll have a scale that they'd take around and they can scale it, but that's not the scale.

[00:05:15] Jason Van Leuven: The weight also includes the biomass that the plant is adding. So it's a continuously changing weight that you're trying to evaluate. We want to know how much is available in that substrate. And really the only way to do that is using some type of electrical current throughout that media to evaluate percentage water content.

[00:05:35] Philip Malmquist: Because it's not really about the weight of the water. It's about how you stress the plant. It's about the nutrient concentrate. In the root zone.

[00:05:45] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. And our main, our favorite way to work with modifying your nutrient content concentration, that UC level is by modulating your irrigation schedule keeping track of how much runoff you are and the changes in that UC level, when you do [00:06:00] apply certain amounts of volume.

[00:06:01] Philip Malmquist: Seth, any thoughts?

[00:06:02] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, I think you guys pretty much nailed it there. It's let's say crops trying to drive, trying to crop steer without sensors. It'd be like trying to drive race car without attack tech. You can definitely do it, but you need to know exactly when to make certain decisions what kind of thresholds you're looking at and then be able to fine tune.

[00:06:17] Seth Baumgartner: I can give you an irrigation strategy. That's pretty general, but for you to be able to actually be successful with it, you need to fine tune it to your exact media and facility conditions. And that's also where, just the tariffs is great. All right now, we were able to apply stress, next level, let's tune our environment. So we can also do it from the other side to maybe help control those transportation rates by controlling our humidity and then, help control past disease, all that fun stuff, by being able to fine tune our environment as well.

[00:06:45] Philip Malmquist: Yeah. That's super true.

[00:06:46] Philip Malmquist: Cause we have a lot of users, Seth and those, we have a lot of users who are using an AROYA at one facility, then they expand to another facility. Oh. But that facility is on the other side of the country. The environment has changed. So now they try to apply the exact same technique and it [00:07:00] doesn't work and they wonder why your environment has changed.

[00:07:02] Philip Malmquist: Your building is different. You might need to adjust certain things to get the same results.

[00:07:08] Seth Baumgartner: Exactly. And it's pretty much impossible to do that without 24, 7 visibility. A lot of growers didn't know for instance, that their humidity was spiking for, let's say two hours, right after lights off before their d'you could handle it before all they had was like we know that.

[00:07:21] Seth Baumgartner: Really moist last night, we know it hits 70%, but when you know, now we can really tune our back to not only, eliminate that threat, but maybe be more efficient, save some money to not chase our tail all the time. Definitely.

[00:07:37] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Awesome. I'm going to ask our next question from Instagram, but want to remind everybody in attendance today.

[00:07:41] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: If you have any questions, please do type them in the chat so we can get them answered. Okay. Lou farms wants to know, can you explain how crucial air flow is for proper transpiration rates?

[00:07:55] Jason Van Leuven: Sure can. When we talk about air flow, it needs to be sufficient to [00:08:00] homogeneous the entire environment, right?

[00:08:02] Jason Van Leuven: And this is super important when you're using central measurements, because we don't want to necessarily have a microclimate around those leaves that are transpiring, that we're not reading with the sensor equipment. So if we're making. Based on the data being produced, a homogenized environment is really necessary to make those best decisions.

[00:08:23] Jason Van Leuven: And so when we talk about air flow across the leaf surface, those leaf surface is at its poorest, right? We have soulmates that are expelling water content. And so if we don't have enough proper air flow, the microclimate can develop around the leaves because we'll have a higher humidity based upon transpiration of the plan.

[00:08:43] Philip Malmquist: If that happens, if that microclimate is forming around the leaf, basically what that could do, correct me if I'm wrong, but that could affect whether or not this Demana is able to

[00:08:52] Jason Van Leuven: open appropriately. Sure. And we talk about a couple of things. One would be stemmata model conductance. So we do sell and [00:09:00] manufacture here.

[00:09:00] Jason Van Leuven: A leaf barometer that leaf parameter is. The transpiration rate directly on the sample of a life leave. So you can go right, go into the girl rooms, flip that thing on, get an understanding of, is it acting as efficiently as it should? And what do we use to control the model? Conductance is definitely VPD is one of the first and easiest things to adjust to achieve that optimal transpiration rate.

[00:09:28] Jason Van Leuven: So if our air flow is too low, it might have some stagnation in there. We might have a humidity around the plants that's higher than what it should be. And then that's going to reduce the transpiration rate out of those areas that are in the microclimate, right? Yeah. I've

[00:09:44] Philip Malmquist: actually used a leaf parameters.

[00:09:46] Philip Malmquist: Those are really awesome because you can just click it on and then you can get a reading whether or not your stemmata is open whether or not the plan is really breathing. Yeah,

[00:09:54] Jason Van Leuven: it's a pretty cool instrument. Yeah. And when we are using those, we definitely like to set a [00:10:00] baseline, and so if we go in there and our our small conductance is slightly lower than what we'd expect is optimal, but you need to go through the room and say, Hey, this is what the model conductance is on average, across multiple samples in the room. Top leaves, bottom leaves. And then if you are making environment adjustments, does that model conductance go up?

[00:10:21] Jason Van Leuven: Does it drop? Does it not change? And so using a baseline comparison is absolutely the best way, rather than just saying, Hey it's low. Let's make some changes while it may not be low for that strain type or the capacity that you have to grow those plants. Okay. I've been to a

[00:10:38] Philip Malmquist: few a few goes now.

[00:10:39] Philip Malmquist: And when I go into the grow rooms, you have fans, obviously at the top of the room, in the ceilings to circulate the air. Horizontally, if you will, but also in a lot of groves that combined fans that does that, but also push the air down vertically is that only is the only reason for that to really get the circulation going to reduce the chances of

[00:10:59] Jason Van Leuven: microclimates in the [00:11:00] room.

[00:11:00] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't help with efficiently as well. First you talked about half fans HAF that's horizontal airflow, and then you have a vertical airflow finances. And there's lots of different brands of them. The vertical airflow is going to help push that hot air down.

[00:11:16] Jason Van Leuven: If you are heating the room we might as well not put extra heat in the room. We can just push it down from the ceiling and get it down in across the environment. And there's like with ACS lights, for instance. Sure. Absolutely. And there's lots of great ways to achieve optimal air flow.

[00:11:32] Jason Van Leuven: I really like floor fans. I really like HVAC socks or tubes. So that's just a tube that connects to it can be your heater. It can be vertical airflow or excuse me, horizontal airflow fans, and that's diffusing the air. And so those are that's nice because it can be, very close to the plants.

[00:11:48] Jason Van Leuven: It's not necessarily going to be blowing the leaves around and stuff. We'll see them on the tables, running down the center of that. And my favorite example of this is thinking about let's take [00:12:00] a Chicago, right? The windy city, and it's got big, huge skyscrapers when that wind hits the side of it. It's definitely gonna be not as well as if the air was coming up from the streets, right?

[00:12:13] Jason Van Leuven: Oh yeah.

[00:12:14] Philip Malmquist: Yeah. That makes sense.

[00:12:17] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Hey, thank you. All right. I got another question from Instagram here, but this isn't just for Instagram. It's for all of you who are on the call today, please type in your questions in the chat so we can answer them for you. Greedy goods is wonderful. How to increase dry backs in a greenhouse with light assist in cocoa?

[00:12:34] Jason Van Leuven: Let's just hit that in kind of two parts. We're going to just not necessarily talk about Coco specifically, but let's just talk about how to achieve those drawbacks. More drawbacks, right? Basically you're looking at DLI, especially in a greenhouse. So on a daily basis, we want to make sure that those plants are getting the same amount of energy.

[00:12:54] Jason Van Leuven: But so when I, sorry, when I say D DLI that's daily lighting integral, and if we take our light intensity [00:13:00] curve, which in a greenhouse can fluctuate a lot of times, if you don't have supplemental, it's going to be a bell curve, and we're going to total up all of the photons underneath that curve.

[00:13:10] Jason Van Leuven: So we're saying DLI as account of all the energy that those plants are getting through typically a 12 hour light cycle. And if you do have variable conditions in your natural light, it's really nice to have an automated system that will turn on and off or modulate the intensity LEDs.

[00:13:28] Jason Van Leuven: So that's one of the really nice things about the newer led technology is a lot of those can run variable, say zero to a hundred percent or a zero to 120% if they've got a boost capacity. And so if we can hit that, I like, a pretty reasonable baseline is say about 40 as a daily letting integral.

[00:13:48] Jason Van Leuven: If everything else can keep up, that's, cannabis plants are they're high intensity. They can handle a lot of light and they can produce biomass very quickly. And if you get up into that 40 or all other [00:14:00] conditions good, then, if you hit a cloudy day, maybe your lights are on all the time to achieve that that 40 DLI next day, super sunny day.

[00:14:07] Jason Van Leuven: And maybe you won't have to use those supplemental lights much at all. Up here in the Northwest, we have very long days in the summer. And not very long, not like Alaska, but pretty long days in the summertime and a little bit shorter days in the winter time. And so obviously in the wintertime, we are going to have to supplement at both ends of that 12 hour flower cycle, regardless of the sun input.

[00:14:31] Jason Van Leuven: Now in the summertime, we've got a fairly wide window of that light, the apex of the sun. With the angle that it's hitting, the greenhouse is already significant by the time that we're ready to open up those blackout. So it's

[00:14:46] Philip Malmquist: really about applying enough light and he can take a lot of light for the plant to transpire to drive that drive back, basically how that plant suck up the

[00:14:57] Jason Van Leuven: water, suck up the nutrition.

[00:14:59] Jason Van Leuven: And so [00:15:00] what causes drive back? There's two main factors of water loss in a substrate and that's transpiration and evaporation, right? And so throughout the day the plant is blowing water from the substrate and there is some amount of evaporation that water is going to. So in order to get those dry backs to increase those dry backs, we need the plant to increase its transpiration rate.

[00:15:21] Jason Van Leuven: Yep. But just be

[00:15:22] Philip Malmquist: careful if you up your light, because you can rock like a thousand PPFD 1200. You can really get up there, especially with the ladies, but if you do, you really need to adjust your other parameters as well. More light is the quickest way to get more yields. But if you're not compensating with enough nutrition with.

[00:15:41] Philip Malmquist: Humidity, whatever. I just think it pedometers. Yeah, you just have to do that. Not

[00:15:45] Jason Van Leuven: to hurt your plans. We missing anything in there.

[00:15:50] Seth Baumgartner: The only thing I was going to add on that one guys is I think a humidity and BBD can be really tough to control in a greenhouse, years of growing the Northwest.

[00:15:57] Seth Baumgartner: Like at night around here, we're over [00:16:00] 90% humidity and that effectively is zero VPD all the time. So if you have to bring in outside air at all, you have to figure out a way to treat that and decide, okay, overnight, we've got to figure out how to get our humidity down. It obviously always tries to come up and we can turn the lights off.

[00:16:14] Seth Baumgartner: We can't pull any from outside. That's not an option at this point. So do we need to supplement CO2 and recycle the air that we have in the greenhouse? I'm trying to figure out how to keep that humidity in the sweet spot. So we're still getting transpiration. If our humidity is too high, we won't actually be able to transpire that much, despite applying all of that light.

[00:16:34] Philip Malmquist: And as a result, the drive back.

[00:16:37] Seth Baumgartner: That is exactly. Yep. Yep. And that's just like what the micro, the wind problem with leaves if you don't have enough air flow that microclimate climate around the leaves will not let the plants transpire despite everything else seeming optimal. So that's kinda my 2 cents there and that's, I think a challenge for all greenhouse growers everywhere, too dry or too wet, the internal struggle.

[00:16:59] Jason Van Leuven: And I did [00:17:00] want to make sure we wrap up on the second part of that question, which was the media mentioned in the question of was a cocoa, as far as what we were just talking about. That's plant biology. That's. Really happened in any media, but if you're trying to get good drive acts and have the most steerable control possible using the appropriate sized media is the absolute first decision to to get those dry backs.

[00:17:24] Philip Malmquist: Yeah. A hundred percent. I've seen growth. I rocking two gallon, four gallon. Really big substrate. And then they're wondering, why am I not drying back more than 10% or whatever? And it's because it's accumulating water, your root zone is not that big. You're not gonna be able to use that much water and then everything just accumulates and you're not going to get that stress that

[00:17:41] Jason Van Leuven: you're after.

[00:17:42] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. If you're growing really big plants, two gallons reasonable. So keep that in mind.

[00:17:50] Philip Malmquist: Yeah.

[00:17:50] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Cool. Yeah. All right. Trap Canada submitted our next question here. When plants start to transition and flower from generative to vegetative, do you see [00:18:00] pH drops?

[00:18:03] Jason Van Leuven: You can pH is one of the critical manual readings to be taken on your daily run off.

[00:18:09] Jason Van Leuven: You'll want to keep an eye on say if for feeding at five six, if that pH is going way up into the, 6, 3, 6, 4 plus range, we definitely know that there's a nutrient imbalance in what that plan is eating. So pH is potential hydrogen, which is talking about the negatively charged ions in solution.

[00:18:28] Jason Van Leuven: And so when we talk about how a plant is eating, it's, uptaking cat ions, and from that nutrients and building sugars out of it. So if it is pulling an incorrect amount of one type of nutrient, then we can see that pH go up or down based on the imbalance that's in there.

[00:18:54] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Okay, our next question from Instagram and please anyone who's online has questions. Don't forget to [00:19:00] type them in the chat extract, or would like to know what is the best organic boost. There is in flower, except for T

[00:19:06] Jason Van Leuven: Seth. You want to get this one started off for organics.

[00:19:08] Seth Baumgartner: That's a tough one.

[00:19:09] Seth Baumgartner: There's about a million opinions out there on that. Personally. I think if you're going full organic, you're probably in a bed situation with a well-developed soil. If you're just running a soil as mix, you might want to evaluate how organic your whole process actually is, whether or not you're adding salts at any point in a true organic setting, you're going to have components that break down at the appropriate time.

[00:19:33] Seth Baumgartner: So mixing up the right amounts of different kinds of composts, bone meal, things like that. And timing it so that you're putting it in knowing that stuff's made comm plan available in exactly one and a half months. So I'm not going to go ahead and say that there is a perfect organic bloom booster out there.

[00:19:52] Seth Baumgartner: Probably one of the key things is developing that living soil and then feeding it properly. So when you're using those compost teas, you're feeding all of those [00:20:00] microorganisms, you've built up and grown in your soil. And if they aren't healthy going into that, you're not going to get the effect you want out of whatever bloom booster you put on.

[00:20:10] Philip Malmquist: Okay. So just a lot of you need to have a good understanding of what you're doing before, even adding

[00:20:17] Seth Baumgartner: yep. You need to have a healthy soil biology.

[00:20:21] Jason Van Leuven: And just to mention, some of the difference there's a pretty great portion of our clients that are running straight, synthetic nutrients that's.

[00:20:28] Jason Van Leuven: So that's being salts, A-plus B mixtures. Those those nutrients are immediately readily available to the plants. And that's why we do see a lot of indoor facilities highlight intensities, going to straight synthetic route and like Southwest saying good soil amendments, take good planning.

[00:20:48] Jason Van Leuven: It takes a healthy soil biology, and it takes time for those amendments to break down into plants, soluble nutrition.

[00:20:58] Philip Malmquist: I've never attempted to [00:21:00] grow in, in, in soil, but I know that for non-solar stop straight. The one, there's many reasons why you would want to do. But one reason is because you're taking those some of those unknowns out, you're using synthetic nutrients using non social media and you can know what to expect from time to time, because it is a homogeneous substrate, you know what you're putting your plans in, right?

[00:21:21] Jason Van Leuven: Yup. We're going to get you on some tomatoes here this summer. I know

[00:21:24] Philip Malmquist: Scott and who usually is here.

[00:21:26] Philip Malmquist: And I think he had just started growing tomatoes, among other things.

[00:21:30] Seth Baumgartner: I had some tomatoes and cocoa last summer. Okay. Why not? I'm pretty sure Scott

[00:21:35] Philip Malmquist: is doing a, in a, I think he's doing his tomatoes in Rockwell.

[00:21:40] Jason Van Leuven: Nice. Yep. Pretty sure. In the garage and they're leafy and they have tricombs yeah.

[00:21:48] Philip Malmquist: he has tomatoes as well. Yeah. You had to cover it up somehow. Okay.

[00:21:56] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Great. Our next question comes from mark. . [00:22:00] What is an acceptable humidity, fluctuation range caused by HVAC.

[00:22:07] Jason Van Leuven: I guess the word there to analyze is acceptable. They always want to program your HVAC systems to have the smallest swings as possible.

[00:22:18] Jason Van Leuven: And we've seen God, I'm working with a client down in LA and their data readings are so flat that I just really want to go give a congratulations to the people that designed that HVAC system, because it's incredible, talking about plus minus 3% relative humidity to their set point, which is incredible.

[00:22:39] Jason Van Leuven: Now when we're talking about a greenhouse and Seth mentioned this early. Sometimes you're doing everything you can to stay within a maybe plus minus 20% relative humidity. I Not that might be good if it's drastic conditions outside and you don't necessarily have closed loop system with capacity to deal with it.

[00:22:56] Jason Van Leuven: Obviously when I was growing programming, a [00:23:00] greenhouse takes up a lot of considerations into aspect because we have to modulate heat and relative humidity. And when we have one type of equipment act upon the conditions of the greenhouse, that can definitely push the other one around.

[00:23:16] Jason Van Leuven: Summertime, if it's really hot out, we need to get cooler air and we need to get air flow through that greenhouse. Maybe we could got a pad pump going on. If it's super dry out, we may not be able to keep the humidity up in that room because we're moving so much air just to keep the plants cool.

[00:23:34] Jason Van Leuven: And even more of a challenge, if it's hot and humid out, we're trying to use our pad pump to use evaporative cooling into the greenhouse, but we're already got too much humidity in that pad pumps is increasing the humidity as well. Greenhouses are a fun challenge to, to deal with that. And that was a really vague answer to that question, but the acceptable is the best that your equipment can deal with.

[00:23:58] Jason Van Leuven: And what you're willing to [00:24:00] mitigate the productivity results because of those swings. Yeah.

[00:24:07] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: And I think Seth,

[00:24:07] Seth Baumgartner: I guess I'll just try to put a hard number on there. If you've got a 10%. In between your set points that's going to mess with your VBD enough to affect transportational rates throughout the day.

[00:24:17] Seth Baumgartner: You're doing this with your air, potential, your pressure potential on the plant. So it's not going to be growing quite as evenly. And that's just back to what Jason said, that the minimum fluctuation you can have in humidity, the better and same goes with overnight. You don't want it to go up and you don't want it to go down super massively overnight.

[00:24:34] Jason Van Leuven: It just

[00:24:34] Philip Malmquist: goes back to those. It's just one of those nine Cardinal parameters, right? When you're trying to cross series, just one of those things. Anything you do is going to affect some to some degree.

[00:24:44] Seth Baumgartner: Exactly. Even small amounts, just a few degrees in temperature has a surprising effect on relative humidity and VPD.

[00:24:54] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Our next question comes from Kevin 1 9 8 1 9 8 9 1 8. [00:25:00] When generative steering, you stopped giving why. And you have drain how much drain percentage do you want?

[00:25:07] Jason Van Leuven: Really what I like to deal with on drain is what do I need my EC to do? So if we are trying to stack it through weeks, say it's week two and we're trying to stack our EC we'll shoot for less drain.

[00:25:22] Jason Van Leuven: And if we are trying to pull that ISI back down maybe we're going to be going into some vegetative bulking the week after this one, we would want just slightly more drain so that we can start pulling that UC down a little bit. So what my best recommendation is if we need DC to go up, have less runoff volume, if we need AC to go down, have more enough volume,

[00:25:48] Jason Van Leuven: right? So you have to explain to

[00:25:50] Philip Malmquist: me, so basically what you're doing is when you. Try to not have any dry and runoff at all, basically what's happening is that your nutrients are [00:26:00] accumulating right in the substrate. And the opposite is if you do want some dry or some runoff you don't, you're not flushing it, but you've basically flushing out nutrients with your run-up, right?

[00:26:10] Philip Malmquist: And hence, the ISI will go down and the stress on the plant will

[00:26:14] Jason Van Leuven: go down. So there's one caveat here, and that is this behavior is only happening if you're feeding at least as much or more than your plant is eating. So if your plant is actually eating more, your substrate ISI is lower than your feed.

[00:26:27] Jason Van Leuven: Do you see this? This isn't going to be happening like we're talking about, so if we're painting at say three desks, the Siemens per meter and our plant is eating so much nutrition that our ECE is at two, by the time that we irrigate the next day, those new nutrients are going to pull the substrate.

[00:26:47] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. What I'm talking about is only if your substrate ECS are higher than your feed DC, which is usually a good way to run. Most of the more successful groves that we see are definitely keeping substrate, ECE above [00:27:00] VDC. And yeah, when you irrigate that nutrition or that ECE level is going to pull the substrate ISI down, right?

[00:27:07] Jason Van Leuven: So our AEC is at say six in the substrate when we irrigate with 3.0 the more we irrigate with 3.0, the more the nutrients in the substrate are going to be diluted. It just

[00:27:19] Philip Malmquist: goes back to what we talked about in the beginning. Like you can have a recipe and you can say, Hey, This much dry runoff, but if you don't measure what's happening in the substrate and you're just not going to know,

[00:27:29] Jason Van Leuven: You can use runoff readings to calculate that ECE as well, but there is, you do have to measure it, but that runoff reading is going to be modified by how that water flows through the substrate.

[00:27:43] Jason Van Leuven: And other factors. So it's definitely really good practice to have your substrate ISI in check. Yup,

[00:27:52] Seth Baumgartner: absolutely. Jason, I think you nailed it. My one comment would be in the perfect world. You'd have zero runoff and you could really control your [00:28:00] fertigation system. That closely for every plant.

[00:28:02] Jason Van Leuven: How possible is that?

[00:28:06] Seth Baumgartner: I think that's possible by not pushing your UC, but you might be, it would take lot of time of really dialing in one cultivar in a very repeatable

[00:28:13] Jason Van Leuven: facility. Okay. So yes.

[00:28:14] I

[00:28:14] Philip Malmquist: If you really manage it for cultivar a and you run that 10 times nearly down.

[00:28:20] Seth Baumgartner: Jason said, if you're not building a, and you're perfectly giving your plants exactly what they need, you wouldn't have run off.

[00:28:27] Seth Baumgartner: And that, so that's the ideal perfect world, right? In reality we watched that graph and go, okay, we need to rinse a little salt out of there. It's building a little quick today.

[00:28:35] Philip Malmquist: That's what we do. So the answer to the question is no runoff, if you can

[00:28:39] Jason Van Leuven: prophesy

[00:28:40] Seth Baumgartner: if you were, if you, yeah.

[00:28:42] Seth Baumgartner: If you just had the ultimate green thumb. Yeah,

[00:28:44] Jason Van Leuven: exactly. That's the goal.

[00:28:46] Seth Baumgartner: Yep. And that minimize his weights too. Cause when you're thinking about it, if you're. Pushing a 3.0 or 3.5 ISI feed and you're running off 10 or 20% and that's a fair amount of solution that you're paying to mix up. Yeah, no doubt.

[00:28:59] Philip Malmquist: [00:29:00] Definitely it's waste it. It's it's costly. And if I'm not mistaken, some of those runoff solutions essentially are not super friendly either necessarily to the environment. I don't know if there's how many states are regulating it, but it's definitely something that's been regulated.

[00:29:14] Philip Malmquist: Like in Holland, for instance, runoff is extremely costly because of those reasons,

[00:29:17] Seth Baumgartner: Here in Washington, you've got to have either some remediation or some other filtering onsite. It can't leave your property at a higher PPM and your water comes in. So you're either doing that yourself or paying, a water treatment facility locally.

[00:29:30] Jason Van Leuven: All right. You guys don't like swimming in algae blooms. Sure.

[00:29:35] Philip Malmquist: I

[00:29:35] Seth Baumgartner: love remediation.

[00:29:36] Philip Malmquist: Yeah.

[00:29:39] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Okay. One of our attendees, I, and armor typed in a question you want to go ahead and unmute yourself. Okay, I'll go ahead and read it here. He's I'm currently budgeting for 14 to 21 days, depending on the strain in Delta eight cubes, which are four by four, by two and a half.

[00:29:56] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Once we flip them, we put them on two slabs [00:30:00] during the transition, we try our best to match up the DLI VPD, temp our age from room to room. But honestly the first few weeks we struggled to hit dry back around 20% plus, and have a rough transition for the most part I know in a previous episode is we're recommended to go to a smaller, medium, any other tips to help the flip transition, go a little smoother.

[00:30:21] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: So for submitting your question.

[00:30:24] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. This is a great to see the detail on how you're doing it. I think that you're extra on a really good route right now. Deltaic cubes are one of my favorite media sizes for vegging. Slabs are definitely one of my favorite medias for flowering and matching your DLI conditions.

[00:30:40] Jason Van Leuven: Very important. So your lighting tendency is going to be going up when we go from an 18 hour window to a 12 hour window in order to get the same amount of energy to the plant that intensity needs to go up. So I really like what you're doing with those. I think some of the things that you might be able to do is just make sure that.

[00:30:58] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah, your substrate [00:31:00] isn't over-saturating when those ruts are trying to get into the slab. So when those roots have a little too much access to water, they can get lazy on you and they won't necessarily begin engulfing the entire slab and they won't be growing as fast as possible. So through that transition period some of the things that we'll recommend is doing, a few small shots in a, for a few days.

[00:31:25] Jason Van Leuven: So say, three, four or five small shots, a vegetative style. And what that's doing is well, keeping your plant alive because the roots are all pulling water from just that Delta eight cube on top, before that they've tapped into the reservoir and the slabs. So for those three days, it could do some what one person would call running in.

[00:31:47] Jason Van Leuven: And that's encouraging those ruts to, to seek. And into the slab and stay keep that plant alive. And then for, maybe three more days after that, you can actually really reduce the amount of feed [00:32:00] that you're putting in there, the amount of irrigation, volume, predication volume. And what that's going to do is help put your slab at a good water content to begin those initial generative shots.

[00:32:11] Jason Van Leuven: And so really what it is keeping an eye on how much water content is decreased in those slabs. And when you hit, say 45% and start your generative irrigations, and that really help get a healthy jumpstart on the dry backs that you're trying to achieve early in bar. Gotcha. So you'd really

[00:32:32] Philip Malmquist: need the ticket pay attention to that rooting in if you will stage and how, the transition essentially is inevitable, but you can make it smoother by, by applying certain techniques.

[00:32:44] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Exactly.

[00:32:48] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, I think what's important to realize there's it seems odd to throw on like those little 1% shots, even though you're already hydrated, but what that's doing is we're getting, probably about 1% run off when we do that at saturation and that's [00:33:00] pushing water and oxygen down into the root zone.

[00:33:02] Seth Baumgartner: And that's a big thing that roots need. If you look at a lot of the original science on rock wall, they're pushed for a 50% dry back before you gave any water. And the idea was that you're pulling air into the media and the roots are chasing that water down into the pores.

[00:33:15] Seth Baumgartner: So we can emulate that by adding that 1% shot and encouraging water and oxygen movement down into the media. When the roots are stagnant, they won't have explosive growth if they don't have access to oxygen, which is what happens if you wait a long time to add any water to the system.

[00:33:33] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Cool. Great. All right. Our next question. Oh yeah, no worries. Thank you so much for submitting your questions. Do you have any others please? And everyone on in attendance, please do type them in the chat. Cap eight cap ain't cabins, but these handles wants to know what's the VPD levels for every week of flower.

[00:33:54] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: I have a feeling he's asking for a benchmark target. [00:34:00]

[00:34:00] Jason Van Leuven: So both will go for it, Seth.

[00:34:01] Seth Baumgartner: I've got it pulled up. I'm sure. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right here. Alrighty. Week one, we're looking at 0.9 to 1.2 week to 1.0 at 1.2 week three, 1.0, and 1.2 as well, week four, 1.1 to 1.3 week five, 1.1 to 1.4 week six, 1.1 to 1.4 week seven, 1.2 to 1.4 and week eight, 1.3 to 1.5.

[00:34:26] Seth Baumgartner: And that's our

[00:34:27] Philip Malmquist: crop suing guide, right?

[00:34:29] Seth Baumgartner: Yep. That's right off the list there. And it, and I get away to think about that as getting into later flour. If you're. Like for years, I'm a lot more familiar with relative humidity than VPD. So I love looking at those numbers and I'm thinking about, okay, and late flower, when I go over 60% humidity, anytime those last three weeks, you're asking for to try it as potentially, if you've got it in your environment.

[00:34:51] Seth Baumgartner: So as the buds get bigger, we want things to get dryer. There's more plant mass to pull that water up from the root zone into. So we need greater [00:35:00] pressure potential in the air to accomplish that. So we want that trend of drying it out. And this is typically where a lot of people struggle because you're adding so much biomass early on and in the middle of growth that suddenly you just have a massive amount of matter to deal with.

[00:35:17] Seth Baumgartner: That's all transpired.

[00:35:20] Jason Van Leuven: I know. And VP's really one of the best ways, one of the best indicators on how to manage your environment, because you can really say. This is the temperature that I want to operate at and then match it with your humidity. Or if you have equipment constraints, sometimes you say we can only achieve this humidity.

[00:35:39] Jason Van Leuven: So this is the temperature that we need to run to get the best growth out of it. And as you get later into flour, a lot of people successfully do night, day differentials. And so as you're changing that temperature, you really want to make sure that your relative humidity is in check so that your VPD doesn't get too wacky in [00:36:00] them.

[00:36:00] Jason Van Leuven: And that's assessed talking about is making sure that you're at that right point in your VPD so that you're not more susceptible to vote. Tritus molds mildews, but you're also optimizing the plant growth.

[00:36:16] Seth Baumgartner: And sometimes that difference can be just a few degrees at different points in the day is why, it's just important to have that 24 7 visibility.

[00:36:26] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Wonderful. Okay. is wondering about a good, healthy ratio of Cal-Mag professional for flushing plants per gram.

[00:36:37] Jason Van Leuven: It's gonna really depend what else you're feeding the plant.

[00:36:40] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, exactly. A different nutrient lions have different levels and different types of calcium already added. You don't necessarily want to overdo it. However, if you're talking about flushing, we typically don't recommend a flush.

[00:36:52] Seth Baumgartner: A lot of times you can use Cal-Mag in a flush, just, to avoid total osmotic shock to the plant by having some easy in that water. [00:37:00] But typically we recommend backing off and not going for a full flush. And the reason for that is when you'd go with straight water, you're introducing such a different osmotic environment into the root so that you can actually like rupture cells on the surface of your.

[00:37:16] Seth Baumgartner: It's a huge shock to the plant.

[00:37:19] Jason Van Leuven: They get hungry when you go straight flush. And so of that kind of comes down to what the cat on exchange capacity in your media is, right? And so when this, when the F you know, a flushing and aro tactic is applied to Rockwell, Bronco's got a very low cat ion exchange capacity, which means that it's not hanging on to the ions in solution by the molecular structure of that substrate.

[00:37:46] Jason Van Leuven: So it's going to be very reactive to a change in the nutrient concentration. So if you go to an aro feed in Brockwell, you're going to see that easy, [00:38:00] just bottom out, very quickly, within a day, that stuff's going to be way, way lower than what the plant needs to even stay alive. And if that's happening, if this plant is starting, you're going to see necrotic.

[00:38:13] Jason Van Leuven: Necrosis death inside of those bud sites as that plants go in. So rather than, maybe having a really clean finish, you're actually inducing probably some amount of plant waste because of it. And anytime that there is necrosis going on, those dead plant cells are a very susceptible site for for disease.

[00:38:35] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Okay. Next question. From pro-line dry backs, they want to know when is the best time to lollipop.

[00:38:45] Jason Van Leuven: So lollipop. So a little bit of like early daily thing that I think is what they're talking about. I was going to be genetic based and at flip

[00:38:57] Seth Baumgartner: go hard go or. If you're playing, if you [00:39:00] find yourself pulling bud sets off later, especially after stretch, you're pretty much just throwing all the energy, the plan put into that button.

[00:39:06] Seth Baumgartner: You're throwing that away. If you can minimize those lower sites that you know, aren't going to produce early on, that's better. So usually day one and then do a cleanup later on, in late stretch.

[00:39:23] Seth Baumgartner: And there's a bunch of different D-League strategies out there, but when it comes to lollipopping, that's what I say. Cause if you do it too late, also, you're not giving the plan enough time to regenerate, produce more sites in the spot you want. So you want to hit it early. And when you lollipop, generally, that's, you're talking about two to three nodes.

[00:39:40] Seth Baumgartner: So if you're doing that on day one to flip, then you've got the rest of stretch to develop bud sites in the area, in the canopy that you want.

[00:39:51] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Wait, excellent. Just a reminder for the folks who are on with us, we've got. 10 more minutes in the program today. So please do submit your questions so we can address them live. [00:40:00] River city growers wants to know what NPK ratio do you recommend and what food program is your preference. And their second question on that is what is the target VPB.

[00:40:13] Jason Van Leuven: So I think we did answer the target VPD earlier just week by week. Just refer to this video earlier on to, to go over that question, get it answered. And what is our favorite NPK ratios? There's a lot of good nutrient brands out there that have a fairly well balanced NPK ratio. So that's the composition of those nutrients.

[00:40:33] Jason Van Leuven: And if, if you have a preference line that you've been going with and you start implementing a AROYAa, definitely, don't change too many variables at once. If people that are being very successful doing similar stuff too, as you are. And they've got a preferred line go with that.

[00:40:49] Jason Van Leuven: There's, probably a good two handfuls of quality nutrient brands out there. A lot of those nutrients actually come from the same source and it just depends on how they get packaged and [00:41:00] mixed.

[00:41:00] Philip Malmquist: But basically don't change up what you're doing, even if you S if you're new to crops steering, new to sensors don't change up too much

[00:41:07] Jason Van Leuven: immediately.

[00:41:09] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. You want us, you want to set a baseline and right. And you want to any, you

[00:41:12] Philip Malmquist: want to see what affects what, like with any change you want to change a little bit and see how that changes things and and go from there.

[00:41:20] Jason Van Leuven: So after you got any input on.

[00:41:21] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, I'd say the same thing.

[00:41:22] Seth Baumgartner: There's no blanket answer that, almost every commercial product out there, there's a different MPK ratio and guess what? They all work to some extent they're still in the market. And a big thing to remember is you're targeting a certain amount in PPMS of different types of elements, right?

[00:41:36] Seth Baumgartner: And the number on that bottle or on that bag of salt is highly dependent on how you mix it. So if you dilute it a lot, it's no longer the same numbers, so get ready to put it. So you need to figure out how to do math and target, the actual amount of different elements you want, if you're going to fine tune any of those values.

[00:41:53] Seth Baumgartner: And that remember that it's probably good to generally start with a little lower [00:42:00] value across the board and then work up your comfort, mixing stronger salts and stuff like that.

[00:42:10] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: It's a perfect segue into our next question, which comes from justhereforthememes2222. Do you recommend keeping the sensor in the same plant and same holes, the entire run?

[00:42:22] Jason Van Leuven: Yes, we absolutely do. And so I guess this kind of comes down to, to sensor density as well as you want to have enough sensors that you can appropriately attribute the population and follow the root zone patterns in one substrate throughout the whole life cycle of that plant, or as much that life cycles you can capture in that media.

[00:42:43] Jason Van Leuven: And the, the second part of that was in the same holes. Yes, absolutely. Every time that. Censor. If it's, if it gets installed in fresh media, it's going to have good conductivity with that substrate. And those pens are going to be touching in all the spots [00:43:00] of that media. If it gets reinserted into an old sensor site, then there's a good likeliness that you'll have air pockets or water pockets.

[00:43:10] Jason Van Leuven: So some capitation in that media housing readings that don't really represent what's going on throughout that whole substrate. So always use installation template at the appropriate height for your media, always install into the homogeneous and fresh part of your substrate. And keep in mind, any inconsistencies, if you are running, say a mixed media type

[00:43:33] Philip Malmquist: I actually had a customer calling in not too long ago, asking for it was using a AROYA and he did do that, but he also had a spot measurements and he was inserting the sensor every day at the exact same location. And he saw differences in his readings differences that he couldn't quite explain.

[00:43:48] Philip Malmquist: And the answer was just that, that he was just using the same holes and the substrate, and those were not no longer representative. It was air pockets around the sensor and he couldn't get a good reading.

[00:43:58] Jason Van Leuven: Good reading. Yup. And [00:44:00] do keep in mind TEROS 12 has a volume of influence one liter. So that volume of influence is basically the amount of substrate around the sensor prongs, that it is pulling that current reading from.

[00:44:13] Jason Van Leuven: So even if you are installing it into some fresh media to make sure it's well outside of any any hole or existing holes in the substrate. And another thing to think about which probably would be good to talk about here, if you are in round pots and you're trying to install that sensor horizontally, then a lot of times you won't be able to get that thing flushed and your prongs will have a little bit of air around the edges.

[00:44:38] Jason Van Leuven: Almost every time I see that you're going to have more erratic readings in your EC. Usually they're going to be much higher than what water contents can be lower because it's actually reading that air around the prongs. So jar and round hard pots a good route to go is cut a rectangular slot out of that hard pot and get that sensor all the way [00:45:00] flushed into the media so that those prongs are not exposed.

[00:45:02] Jason Van Leuven: Same thing there

[00:45:03] Philip Malmquist: though, if you do that or, you drill in or whatever you don't push into the. So that you deform it before you get a chance to install your sensor in that fresh media.

[00:45:11] Jason Van Leuven: Sure. Yeah. So if you're in a square hard pot, for example a great method of doing that is take the sensor.

[00:45:17] Jason Van Leuven: Those prongs are very sharp, so you can just just lightly tap it on the side and that'll give you three marks. I think we use a three-sixteenths drill bit is a great way try not to push that drove at too far into the media. Check it up as far into the drill as you can, and just drill through only the plastic, that way those sensors go in and they have full contact with the substrate in that square hard pot.

[00:45:43] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Excellent. I norm or submitted another question. Let's go ahead and get you on it so you can add.

[00:45:50] Jason Van Leuven: Hey guys, how's it going? What are you guys' thoughts on the different types of slabs? Like as far as like just the regular

[00:45:55] Seth Baumgartner: Grodance labs, the Pardot and the red rock would

[00:45:57] Jason Van Leuven: Go into Pardot slab to help me hit the

[00:45:59] Seth Baumgartner: 20% [00:46:00] drive that faster.

[00:46:02] Jason Van Leuven: Yeah. As far as different plot brands probably there's differences in how they manufacturer. I know the most of those on how the Grodan slabs are built. So you're picturing slabs. They actually are blowing the fibers vertically, and that's why they call it the quick drain. And so when we think about waterflow, it's going to be faster if it's perpendicular to the fiber strands.

[00:46:24] Jason Van Leuven: So that's their quick drain. think their traditional slabs they're blown horizontally, right? So that water content is not going to flow through quite as quickly. And then I think they do have a next gen where supposedly they're blowing those fibers. Cross to try and get the best of both worlds, that oxygen pulling capacity of the vertical and and that water retention of the horizontal Seth, any thoughts,

[00:46:49] Seth Baumgartner: Don't go into the quick green will help with that, but typically trying to get your VPD dial in your light ups, going to be a bigger factor in getting those drive backs.

[00:46:57] Seth Baumgartner: And then, to dial in your,

[00:46:59] Philip Malmquist: I was just about to [00:47:00] say, cause I've met customers who tried both red rock and Grodin slabs and they've seen minimal differences. Pretty much, yeah. It's rock bull. It behaves

[00:47:08] Jason Van Leuven: about the same, but other

[00:47:09] Philip Malmquist: factors affected more than the actual stock material,

[00:47:15] Jason Van Leuven: but a reputable

[00:47:16] Philip Malmquist: brand is what I would choose.

[00:47:21] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah, my experience that Parker I've just drains off much easier. Sorry, sorry to interrupt you. Occasionally. It just usually doesn't hit quite as high of a water content and that doesn't hold it as long. And Bruce into a Jason said, that's just because it's running off super easy. That being said, though, it's also, you can get the par grill on and cubes are great too, just because they do pull water and air through quicker.

[00:47:45] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Nice. Awesome. Thank you so much for submitting that question. We have a few more here and it's not too late for anybody's on the call to submit their questions on the chat at air Stafford wants to know can feminized seeds hermaphrodite easily within the first stage of flower [00:48:00] weeks, one through three.

[00:48:04] Jason Van Leuven: Seth. You're probably our resident seed expert here. Most everything I've grown.

[00:48:09] Seth Baumgartner: So every feminized seed comes from our hermaphrodite plant, whether that was purposefully induced or not. So you're already dealing with a plant that has a tendency to throw standards. So that's something to think about when exactly that happens going to be highly dependent on, that individual plant and the environments in the environment that it's in.

[00:48:30] Seth Baumgartner: So you've already selected genetically for that to happen potentially. And then it's okay. How easily is it for that plant or how easy does that plant her amount? How much stress does it take? And in my experience, some of them it's going to happen. It's not about if it's about when you know that's right, right now with the state of the industry, it's very tough to get good.

[00:48:52] Seth Baumgartner: Good information on your genetic lineages in any kind of guarantees on stuff like that. So [00:49:00] that's my 2 cents on that one. Thanks. So

[00:49:04] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: yeah. Thank you, Seth. Okay. Gas how's gardens is wondering how to maximize stretch on a plant that doesn't naturally stretch much. What can I do?

[00:49:15] Jason Van Leuven: Oh, to maximize stretch.

[00:49:17] Jason Van Leuven: Usually we're seeing things the other way if we're trying to maximize stretch, I think about strains to like Mack one, I think I've talked in previous videos. It's a fairly stubby stocky type of plant that can be run generative or very much of its life cycle. So if we are trying to get that plant to stretch out, then definitely be pushing a little bit more vegetative type of a.

[00:49:41] Jason Van Leuven: Type of strategies. You may need to run the vege cycle longer. That 18 six, so you have a lower level or lower intensity of light, which also encouraged us plants for that vegetative infrastructure, which is that stretching that we're talking about. Those would be the two strategies that come right to the top of my mind.[00:50:00]

[00:50:02] Seth Baumgartner: Yeah. If we're at trying to, are we trying to encourage stretch, to discourage mold? Are we just chasing bigger yields overall, if it's just bigger plants, like Jason said, we can try to stretch them and veggie, you can also consider just vegging and bigger. If you've got a plant that takes longer to grow and vege its stock, even though you're pushing it, vegetatively, it won't grow.

[00:50:19] Seth Baumgartner: Go ahead, grow it up a lot taller than the other plants you flip, you keep flipping a planet, 20 inches tall and it over only ever hits 33 inches will grow it up to 33 and flip it. You, yeah. That to me that's the easiest solution there. Yeah.

[00:50:38] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Thank you guys. And then, I think we have time for one more in this last few minutes here, pat goat wants to know what weeks of batch flower cycle should shot sizes, change in size for two-gallon cocoa.

[00:50:52] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Let me read that one more time. What weeks of edge or flower cycles should shot sizes change in size for two-gallon Coco?

[00:50:59] Jason Van Leuven: [00:51:00] There's going to be a lot of stuff coming into play for that one. Right off the bat, we like to follow our prop steering guidelines for a baseline number of shots chop duration, volume per se, and then keeping in mind the plant transpiration to logically those specifics.

[00:51:18] Jason Van Leuven: I'd recommend looking at a crop steering chart. That outlines what he's shooting for. As as far as the specifics, when we're running a little bit more vegetative having an irrigation window. And when I talk about your irrigation window, that's time from first shot to last shot, not the duration of each shot, but so for vegetive a lot of times we're talking about six, 10, maybe 12 irrigation events in anywhere between say six and 10 hours for that year arrogation window.

[00:51:50] Jason Van Leuven: And then per generative, we're talking about early a short irrigation window, so maybe only one or two hours from first to last irrigation. And, even if you are running [00:52:00] generative, trying to get that P1 irrigation period up to field capacity fairly quickly. We always do recommend breaking that down into multiple irrigation events what those multiple irrigation events are doing, helping the capillary action of the substrate.

[00:52:16] Jason Van Leuven: So cap their action, thinking about how does a sponge work, right? The water transfer through the media material itself. And so having multiple irrigations, even if you are trying to get up to saturation or field capacity very quickly does help that substrate stay homogeneous and consistent water content.

[00:52:35] Jason Van Leuven: The visual that I've used in the past is thinking about, a dry sponge, right? Or maybe even just a mildly wet sponge. If we have it under the sink and we are letting the irrigation just drip onto that. It's going to get fully wet before we see water start running off of it, dripping off.

[00:52:56] Jason Van Leuven: But now if we turn up the faucet say on [00:53:00] this same starting wetness of sponge, a lot of times those coroners are still going to be dry, but when the water starts pushing off, pushing down to the bottom of the sponge,

[00:53:12] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: that's great analogy. Wonderful, amazing. Thank you so much. Jason, Philip and Seth, what a great conversation. Thanks to all of you who joined us today and everyone who's watching. Office hours is your time. Any questions you have about a AROYA, how it can be used to improve your cultivation process production process, any topics you'd cover in the future.

[00:53:33] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Feel free to let us know in the chat. Shoot us an email@supportdoteroicaatbeatergroup.com or send us a DM on Instagram. We definitely want to hear from you. We record every session. We'll email everyone in attendance, a link to the video from today's conversation. It will also be live on the AROYA YouTube channel.

[00:53:49] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: Feel free to like and subscribe while you're there. And if you find these conversations useful, please feel free. Feel free to forward to anybody else who you think might benefit. Thank you all so much again, and we'll look forward to [00:54:00] seeing you next week.

[00:54:01] Philip Malmquist: Thanks. All right.

[00:54:02] Seth Baumgartner: Thank you. Alrighty, thanks, everyone.

[00:54:04] Seth Baumgartner: Thanks

[00:54:05] Kaisha-Dyan McMillan: everybody.

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