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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
Kaisha [00:00:03]:
All right, what's up, gromies? Welcome to AROYA office hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Kaisha. We are on episode 114. Shout out to our live viewers on YouTube and Instagram, to everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you for your support, and if you like the pod, drop us a review. We appreciate your feedback. What is up south? And Jason, how are you guys doing?
Seth [00:00:28]:
Pretty good. Yeah?
Kaisha [00:00:29]:
Good. All right, let's go. I love that y'all are just ready. All right, I'm going to just kick it in. Here we go with Erin's question. They want to know what is the best way to hydrate one gallon cocoa fabric cocoa bags. I use Athena Pro line at 3.4 ec ro water base 6.2 ph and hydrate them until the runoff ph is around 5.8 to 6.2 and let them sit overnight before transplant. I've been running into low ph since I started using dehydrated cocoa.
Kaisha [00:01:00]:
Regardless of runoff percentage or dryback percentage, ph wants to creep down and never reach its input ph or above. Max dryback is 50% minimum dryback, 15% overnight, 6% dryback between p two s and bulking 70% volumetric water content. While trying multiple manufacturers canna cocoa and charcoal blocks. Over to you guys.
Jason [00:01:24]:
Yeah, so we've chatted quite a few times about what's causing ph to be shifted by the mediaev. A lot of times, it's always related to cations or anions that are in that media, in that substrate. And when we think about, all right, when cocoa is manufactured, a lot of times there are some residuals on there, and the best manufacturers are doing a good job washing and buffering their cocoa. Historically, we've seen pretty vast inconsistencies, even batch to batch in some of these manufacturers. And definitely from manufacturer to manufacturer, there is significant differences in how well that processing gives you a clean and ready product. So, I mean, as far as just washing, it sounds like you're doing a pretty good job with that. Um, there are some steps that certain people work with in order to prep their cocoa, and that's, um, actually using calcium nitrate to. To wash it down first.
Jason [00:02:24]:
And what's, what's going on there is that, um, calcium nitrate is going to bind and replace some of the sodium and potassium residual that's in that cocoa. So when we think about, all right, here's our cocoa. If it doesn't necessarily get balanced out, let's. Let's try and wash and replace any of those unwanted chemicals in that cocoa with things that are a little bit more desirable for the plant. Not necessarily going to fix any of the ph issues that you're seeing. Um, I always like to think about, all right, well, how, how much ph shift am I seeing? Kind of my general rule of thumb is sticking within plus or -0.3 right. As long as my ph isn't too far off in my runoff, I don't necessarily get super concerned. I start seeing it hit the edge of my concerns, then I'll definitely consider trying to understand, is the plant eating an imbalance? Is this due to residual in the substrate still? Um, you know, hopefully that residual in the substrate, even if you aren't doing a great job, washing, ends up getting replaced somewhere throughout the cycle.
Jason [00:03:26]:
Um, but ideally, you know, we want the healthiest root zone starting freshen.
Seth [00:03:30]:
Yeah, I think there's just kind of two separate issues to look at. One's that incoming ph on the cocoa. And, uh, if I'm ever struggling with that, one thing I like to do is do a hydration test with just straight ro, get some runoff and see what's actually coming out of that coco. If I can stab a soil sensor into it better, you know, if I get a cocoa block, hydrate it with straight ro, stab into it, and see a 2.0 ec already loaded into the block, I know I've got to wash it pretty significantly to get rid of all of that sodium content that's in there and anything else that may be affecting all the EC, but pulling that ph down as it sits. Uh, personally, with hydration, I do like to make sure I have a more of a flood table situation. Being able to flood it is nice, but also, uh, just being able to retain water and let it wick up over time, rather than just dripping straight across it and letting it run off the tables. You're gonna get a little bit better wash and exchange of ions there. And I think the other really important thing that sometimes doesn't seem intuitive is the fact that, as Jason said, you do need to wash it with calcium nitrate.
Seth [00:04:28]:
Or for a lot of growers, with what's on hand, is just a 3.0 EC feed solution, and use sometimes a pretty significant amount of water to actually wash out all of the sodium that's in that block. And then, as Jason said, you know, the other issue is plants feeding. Later on, depending on what your EC is in the root zone and how heavily those plants are feeding, we do expect that ph to drop. It's just how far is it dropping over a period of time? And what is that telling us in relation to how much EC is in the root zone? If we've got a really low EC situation, that ph is continually dropping. We've got plants feeding at a pretty heavy rate, and that's not necessarily related to any properties of the cocoa at that point. Let's say two, three weeks into flower. And just as Jason said with that ph issue, let's say our ph when planting in is low, it's at a 5.4. Well, if we drop a clone straight into that one or two gallon pot, we're not really going to put on a whole lot of volume of water throughout veg compared to going into that week.
Seth [00:05:26]:
One, week two of flour, where we're bringing it back up to field capacity and replacing anywhere from ten to 30% of the volumetric content of that pot every day.
Kaisha [00:05:38]:
Amazing. Thank you guys so much for that. We also dropped in the chat. We did a blog post on PH a few weeks ago, shared that with you, and then also episode 99 of office hours. We did a really, really great overview on PH. But we do have a couple more questions where folks are sharing their data and their ph challenges. I want to share this one from Nicholas. They wrote, I'm having a problem with the ph going up in runoff till like a 6.4 to 6.5.
Kaisha [00:06:04]:
I've never had this problem before and I'm kind of confused. Growing in five gallon bags and saucers with ocean forest hand water feed is about 2.8 ec and 5.6 ph. Runoff is 4.5 ac, 6.4 ph. Thanks. What do you guys recommend?
Jason [00:06:23]:
Yes. You know, so one of the key indicators here for me that I use to try and diagnose is if you haven't run into this before, was it because you weren't necessarily taking the measurements to recognize it before, or has there been some change in the procedure that's going on? Have you switched up some nutrients? Is it a new batch from the supplier with that cocoa? Different supplier, the coco, running a couple different strains can, can even end up doing this. So that's where, where I would take a step back and start thinking of, all right, was there any alterations between before I started seeing this and when I started seeing this and that sometimes give you kind of an easy highlight on what to address. Yeah.
Seth [00:07:05]:
And if you've looked at all the parameters you're keeping track of, and hopefully it's enough to actually look back historically with the same strain and see behavior and the same growing conditions, you can decide if it's a problem, if that is the case, if this is seemingly coming out of nowhere and it doesn't seem like anything's changed other than, hey, we're seeing some ph rise, a lot of times we'll start to trace that back to just overall plant health. Is that plant feeding uptaking? Are there other factors in the environment that are causing the plant not to uptake nutrients at a rate that's going to pull ph down faster than hydrogen gassing off is going to pull ph back up in the media? And if it's a small swing, you know, if we're talking about a 5.6 input and a 5.8 output, usually I would expect to see that stabilize over time. Now also, really check to make sure that I'm getting the same exact ph input on the table as I am in the mixing tank or what my injection skid or inline monitor says that it is. You know, any sensor out there is liable to go bad, especially ph sensors. They're notorious for falling out of calibration. So sometimes when taking runoff samples, especially if that's the only thing that you're doing and not validating fertigation at the table with, you know, usually the standard is to put two drippers in a cup and measure the volume, EC and pH of that runoff every day. If we're not capturing that whole picture. Sometimes it's really easy to chase down a ph condition when, let's say, the input, we thought that was 5.6 was actually 6.1.
Seth [00:08:39]:
I've certainly seen that. And I like to rule out any simple failure points because usually these problems, you know, the simplest possible thing is oftentimes the solution just not readily apparent until you go through a huge list of simple things to get there.
Jason [00:08:54]:
I think you highlighted a really good troubleshooting process when it comes down to commercial cultivation, even homegrown cultivation. And that is thinking about how do we analyze the stuff with the least amount of variables first. So that identifies any red flags that are going to be compounded when we look at the whole growing picture. So, like you said, check out and make sure that you're not seeing ph changes with incoming water. Not seeing ph changes at your batch tank or just past your injectors. Make sure you're not seeing ph changes at your drippers themselves. Seen way too many growers chasing their tail when they've got algae buildup in their lines. Maybe they're, you know, maybe you need to have a flush system where you're actually pushing an irrigation shot through your irrigation system before you start watering in your room.
Jason [00:09:44]:
I've seen that with facilities that have either significantly large irrigation lines or really long irrigation runs, as the temperature of that nutrient solution goes up as it sits in the lines, we're typically going to see that ph rise. And depending on how much injection modification for ph you've had to do, it can actually rise significantly on a daily basis. Yep.
Seth [00:10:08]:
Make sure you've documented and covered all the possible points where you could have an alteration to that feed or that feed solution. And then, yeah, make sure all of your outputs are recognized. I think that's one of the things that we run, and that's a really common problem, especially when you get long distance irrigation involved where we've got, you know, anywhere from 20 to 200ft of pipe distance between the pump and the room or even between the batch tank in the room. And that's just a lot of volume of water sitting there, warming up, gassing off. And aside from that, that's when we also see a lot of times ec fall out, so different salts falling out of solution because that ph is rising over time. And if we have what, you know, let's say 200ft, I know that's an extreme example, but even 100ft, there's a significant enough volume in there that when we go to irrigate, we're trying to push that line volume out. As Jason said, you know, with that first irrigation, there are plenty of people who employ an electronic dump valve so they can take that first shot and go, hey, I run this for exactly 35 seconds. Then we close that dump valve and actually push irrigation to the table, to the plants themselves, not just past the table.
Seth [00:11:14]:
And that's because if you don't have a way to change that, potentially, you know, a whole first table with, you know, like, let's say it's ten gallons of water, that might be a whole table's worth of irrigation. So you might see some strange things in the room when the first table is actually getting a different ph and nutrient solution than compared to the other tables. That water later in sequence in the room.
Kaisha [00:11:39]:
All right, amazing, you guys. Thank you so much for that. And so kind of rounding out the ph convo for this episode, we got this question from Harry Hussles on Instagram. They write, hey, guys, I've been having trouble with bringing my runoff ph back up. It doesn't matter what strain or room I grow in. During week three to four, from about 6.1 ph, it drifts downward to as low as 5.4. My input ph is 6.2 the entire time. My irrigation is about three shots, 30 minutes apart during p one to get to field capacity in a two gallon cocoa pot.
Kaisha [00:12:13]:
Then one p two shot at week three, it starts to drift down. I'm pushing 500 ML runoff. How should I adjust my feed to get the ph to go back up and what is causing it to drift down? Thanks.
Jason [00:12:25]:
Yeah, and you know, I think, I guess to round it out as well is talking about how different nutrient manufacturers actually, you know, employ slightly different ratios of the macro and micro nutrients in there. Right. What's the element balance between ions and cations in a specific nutrient that is being supplied? You know, fortunately, at this point in the industry, most nutrients are in a quite a bit better place than they were, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago when we were using whatever we could get to feed the plants at the time. And so it kind of comes down to, it could be a side effect of the specific nutrient that you're using. Some of the easiest ways to look at that, and I think I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, either, you know, plant SAP analysis, plant tissue analysis, you can do an input versus output water test analysis. Something that actually breaks it down to the elemental composition of any of those situations. Allows you to get an understanding of, hey, is this related to a nutrient supply? Since it sounds like it's going on with all the strains, either all your strains are similarly eating or it, you know, it's something where you are supplying something that might need to be modified.
Seth [00:13:42]:
Yeah, I mean, you know, also if it's, if it's stopping at 5.4 and you can control it there, that's not necessarily very concerning. 5.4 is not a value where we see massive plant deficiency. But if we've been seeing runoff in the range of 5.6 to 5.7 and suddenly we're shifting down to 5.4 in, let's say, one or two days, that might be some cause for concern. The other thing to really consider here is what is the root zone EC, actually, if we've been riding a pretty low ac in the root zone and feeding nutrients every day, plants pulling them out, we're replacing them. There's not a very big pool of nutrients to draw out of, essentially. So when the plant starts to feed, it drags down that positive to negative ratio faster than if it was in a higher EC state. So that would be probably the most important thing in this equation to get is, hey, let's get a root zone sensor and see what kind of Ec we're seeing in the root zone at different water contents, but especially at runoff, and then try to get a runoff sample from that actual plant. So we're not trying to compare a specific plant to the table average.
Seth [00:14:47]:
While the table average is useful, if we're trying to draw conclusions between a health issue on a specific plant, we want to get as much sampling directly from that plant as we can.
Jason [00:14:58]:
Yeah, and I'm going to reiterate that as well because obviously, I think every one of us has made some assumptions based on too small of data picture, if you will. And, you know, a lot of times we, you know, we're doing everything we can to capture a bunch of data. It takes time, takes investment. But when we're working with thousands and thousands of plants, if we only have a handful of samples, we could be led in, you know, a wrong direction. So making sure that you do have enough samples from across the room, from across strain to strain to kind of evaluate what's, what is the big picture. You know, I published a presentation called, I think it's called growth behavior on, on YouTube here. And it just kind of talks about, all right, how does sampling size relate to biological populations? What would we expect for consistent or uniformity across that population and how to really think about how that sample size is going to affect our standard deviation and averages and which of those numbers we need to think about when making decisions.
Seth [00:16:06]:
Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, we're always looking at, you know, as growers, plant health, what's going on, specific plants that have problems, but getting, I don't know, I don't know anyone in commercial production that's out there trying to grow a business that's only running six plants on one irrigation zone. So there's a certain level of precision. We have to chase it different ways when we get to at scale production. And also if we're focusing on, you know, those far outliers on the table as our sample size can do a lot of damage to the other plants that might be healthy, especially if, you know, we don't have that long of a production run. Plants grow fast, but if we're catering too much to one specific problem we might believe is there, it's pretty easy to do more damage to the crop than good. If we're really, really worried about certain things, especially if the under, if it's an outlier situation, then you haven't determined what the cause of that is either because of lack of data, lack of time to go collect that data or a factor that you just haven't even looked into yet at all in terms of data collection. But I would rather throw away 2% of my plants on a table, as bad as that sounds, and have the other ones be great than focus too much on that 2% and actually damage the rest of those other plants.
Seth [00:17:24]:
Because most of us are growing at a scale where collectively just a few grams a square foot actually pans out to really improve or decrease the value of a harvest.
Kaisha [00:17:38]:
It's all about picking those battles at the end of the day. Amazing. Thanks to all the grammys for these great ph questions. All right, we're going to keep it moving. We actually had a little bit of a live conversation happening on YouTube. Justin Johnson dropped this question. I understand that we reduce humidity later in flour to reduce mold, but assuming that mold was an, I think wasn't an issue, couldn't you go through flour and high temperature and high humidity for faster growth and more yield? If not, why does reducing humidity cause more yield? Assuming mold isn't an issue, and then our grooming Greg McAllister replied, reduced humidity equals more transpiration and uptake. Would you got anything you want to.
Seth [00:18:17]:
Add to this as far as yields are concerned? Absolutely. If you're growing and this comes back to vpdehdeme. So that VPD is always the guiding value. If it's 90 degrees in the room, we need a pretty high humidity to maintain that VPD value to keep the plant in its optimal zone. But when we're running that hot all the time, that's kind of outside the parameters where we see the best quality production on the plants. So usually when running in a very high, high temperature, high humidity environment, especially without an appreciable overnight diff. And, you know, this is something we see in certain places where clients of ours will lose h vac control for some time and not be able to keep that down. And all they can do is humidify to keep the plants from getting too dry.
Seth [00:18:59]:
However, usually the outcome is reduced nose, so less terpene production. Typically, we see way up at higher temperatures, lower cannabinoid production, and an increased crop lifespan. The longer we keep it warm and humid in there, the longer that plant is going to be allowed to grow vegetatively. And it's gonna be very tough to trigger it to ripen in a way that we want to. To produce the call the quality goals that we're looking for.
Jason [00:19:25]:
Yep. As well as, you know, reduced pigments, less anthocyanin production. And so it. It does it comes down to how do we balance quality and yield. And there's many times that you'll hear us talk about really managing this VPD through the whole cycle. We always like to talk about, let's shoot for 1.2. End of the cycle. We'll talk about getting up to 1.4 in order to reduce molds and mildews.
Jason [00:19:48]:
However, in certain extraordinarily clean facilities and situations, maybe where there are mold resistant strains that we're growing, then we don't have to necessarily push that VPD a little bit higher. We can allow it to keep a slightly higher humidity. And one of the challenges that people come run into as well is when we start doing significant crop steering. We increase the amount of transpiration in the room. We have a lot larger crop than we may be used to running. Well, sometimes we can't necessarily push those nighttime differentials that are optimal in order for the quality, simply because we run out of dehumidification capacity. And so that's, you know, that's a case where we may not be able to push those temperatures down at night as much as possible. So, I mean, to kind of really answer the question simply, it.
Jason [00:20:40]:
It's a balance, right. It has to do with your goals, and ideally, it has to do with tailoring the strain. So making sure that you're making documentation on how does the strain perform with those specific parameters.
Seth [00:20:54]:
Yeah, and, you know, speaking of balance, I think it's part of this exercise here at this question is looking at, like, what is, what is the balance in your facility that you can actually produce? You know, is the reality that you are completely unable to get these temperatures out of control? So we have to run high humidity to maintain the VPDE? Is the issue more related to an imbalance in the system, which is something we run into quite a bit, especially with growers who have upgraded from HPS to LED systems. Now we're dealing with, you know, especially if you did all of this at once, right? Let's say you thought you were low tech, you bought leds, you bought AROYA, and you got some new nutrients, you revamped your whole system, and now you're putting that much more biomass in the room. It might not be that your room is totally incapable of it, but, you know, I think settled saying, like, a goldfish will only grow as big as the bowl you put it in. But really, that dehumidification factor and environmental control is what defines the bowl or the size of crop that we're able to produce. It's not necessarily and I think that's one thing that people struggle with, light or CO2 input. If we can't pump enough water up through the plant early on, especially so, you know, to the point about mold, I've seen plenty of situations where growers are unable to achieve anything above, like a 0.7 or 0.8 VPD overnight. And they don't have mold issues either because of, as Jason said, you know, mold resistant strains, or just they're lucky enough to live in an area where it's not super prevalent and the facility is very, very clean. That being said, if we can't keep that VPD up in an optimal range, way back in bulking and not ripening, were going to be leaving some serious yield on the table for the room.
Seth [00:22:35]:
And at that point, could probably start pulling biomass out of the room. So planting less dense, planting plants at a much lower density, and actually trying to reduce the amount of b grade bud that we're getting out of it. And usually along with that, we're reducing the amount of plant work that's involved in the production cycle. Because if we don't have plants super packed in and buds are allowed to get good light down deeper, if that's the balance, you know, once we hit that biomass cap, we can start focusing on pushing way more towards quality. And I think that's something that a lot of people find very surprising, is if they're at, let's say, on a four by 416 plants per light, one plant per square foot. I can't tell you how many times we've pulled people back to one and a half square feet per plant and they see no difference in yield. Um, and, and that's, I think, really the eye opening moment for. That's like, oh, okay.
Seth [00:23:28]:
We actually, like, we have a lot of room to play here within this yield parameter and start to really, you know, because some strains we will run at 16 per light, other strains do grade it, nine, six. It all depends on the strain and how long you're growing it and what you're looking to do.
Kaisha [00:23:48]:
All right, well, Justin, who dropped the original question, had a follow up on the topic of VPD. So they're wondering what would be a good VPD to decrease vegetation stage. I'm thinking if I run out of a 1.2 at higher temperatures, at about 82 degrees, I should speed up my veg time. How does that sound?
Jason [00:24:06]:
Yeah, I mean, usually early in the flower cycle and in veg rooms, being at least at 82 is a great place for led rooms. I usually like to be around 82 to 84 degrees. And when we're talking about late veg, early flower, 0.9 for VPD is actually going to be a little bit better, you know, 0.911.1 and start to progress into the flower cycle. We'll step that up to, ideally 1.2 throughout the bulk of them. I shouldn't say bulk because that's a phase. The majority of the flower cycle.
Seth [00:24:43]:
Yeah. As we're raising that VPD to the new leaves that the plant grows are much more well equipped to handle that than some of the earlier leaves that were produced in veg. So we're constantly adapting the plant that, that dryer environment to really increase that transpiration that's going through it.
Kaisha [00:25:01]:
Awesome. All right, well, Justin, thank you for your questions. Good luck. Shout out to the grummy Greg for chiming in. I love that as a community effort here. We appreciate these exchanges. So good. All right, we're going to move it over to instagram.
Kaisha [00:25:12]:
We've gotten a couple of live questions over there. Doctor Milliman was wondering. They're looking for the best ph for anthocyanin expression higher or lower through weeks seven through nine. What do you guys think?
Jason [00:25:27]:
Yeah. So, you know, obviously ph here is going to relate to some of the nutrient solubility in the plant. I don't necessarily know that that's going to significantly increase or decrease some of the anthocyanin production. Most of you know, what we see with anthocyanin production is related to light spectrum and temperatures that they're running at, you know, especially that night. Daytime differential. Yeah.
Seth [00:25:52]:
I personally have never tried to run a study or anything like that on whether ph would affect anthocyanin production. One thing I could see is that as we have a potentially falling ph towards the end of the flower, it can be a limiting factor on that nitrogen uptake. Especially that being said, because we know that's a limiting factor on other nutrient uptake. It's probably more preferable if it's a nutrient issue that we're targeting with that ph to eliminate that issue via our nutrient mixed rather than trying to modulate ph too much, because going well outside of certain ranges is certainly detrimental to plant growth for trying to push it there. And we do know quite a bit about the relationship between overnight temperatures and anthocyanin expression in plants.
Jason [00:26:36]:
Yeah. And, you know, just from personal experience, making sure that you have a good supply of micronutrients to the plant can definitely help with coloring and expression in the flower.
Seth [00:26:46]:
As well, yeah, we need all those micronutrients and secondary nutrients just to really bolster all those processes that are producing those ancillary compounds that aren't just THC or CBD. When we're talking about things like anthocyanins, it's. Well, it requires the right building blocks to be there. Right. So if we don't have everything necessary to build those proteins, we're also not going to get as much expression. But it is a combination of environmental, genetic and sometimes nutrient factors. Usually the nutrient factor has more to do with not running the right mix for the right time in that plant's particular lifestyle. You know, we've spent a lot of time over the years talking about how some plants are more sensitive to late flower nitrogen and other nutrient changes compared to others.
Seth [00:27:35]:
And it's also very important to kind of log that as you're going down this road of trying to determine what on this specific strain might work. And I think one of the most frustrating things is I love using tissue culture as an example, because no matter if we're doing cannabis or chrysanthemums, if I bring a new cultivar in to go into tissue culture, I might do anywhere from 20 to 50 different trials of various hormone ratios to actually get success with that particular cultivar. And that mix might be quite a bit different than the mix I use for a different cultivar. That's still the same species of plant, which is odd to see once you really start diving in the differences that some of these respond to. And unfortunately, there's some research around that. But like a lot of things, we're still learning a lot about plants and why they do the things they do.
Kaisha [00:28:26]:
Plants are amazing. All right, doctor middleman, you heard it. Good luck. Thank you for your question. We're moving on to a question from MC hammers, which is very exciting for this gen Xer from the Bay area. They write, why are my leaf temps so low? The room is 84 degrees, VPD is 1.8, CO2 1200 pods 1100, relative humidity 50%. Their leaf temps are around 83 to 84 degrees. What do you guys think?
Jason [00:28:54]:
Said room temp at 84 and leave temp?
Seth [00:28:58]:
Yeah, that doesn't sound too low. Maybe we got a typo value.
Kaisha [00:29:02]:
There may be a typo we had. We got the leaf temps later. So maybe he. Maybe they meant that the leaf temps are 83, 84.
Seth [00:29:09]:
If they're that high, we definitely want to get that down in that 80 to 82 range for veg, vegetative growth like in veg, as well as generative growth in flower, that's 80 to 82 degrees. Leaf surface temp is where we see optimum plant metabolism. So that's when those cells are producing sugar growing, dividing at their max capacity. So that's the target. There some different things that can influence that are lighting type. You know, we've got HPS lights that, as a rule of thumb, generally run plants anywhere from, you know, one to three degrees, sometimes a little more above ambient room temperature, depending on how close to the lights they are, that particular leaf on the plant is. And then with leds, we'll often see quite the opposite, where it's, you know, one to three degrees cooler than the ambient air temp. But I've certainly seen situations with both types of lighting that break that rule.
Seth [00:30:01]:
We'll see situations where we have an HPS room that has actually incredible amount of airflow. And the way that the dynamic of that room works is we're actually running leaf temps that are pretty close to ambient. On the flip side, we'll see led situations where, because of the way the airflow is in the room, we're running right at ambient or a little hotter or surprisingly, you know, we would think it might be a negative three degree differential from the ambient temp to the leaf surface tempesthe but because we've got, and this is something we see on double tier setups quite frequently with, you know, ducting for each small section of the bench, sometimes we can get that airspeed high enough that we're actually cooling down the plants, you know, four, five, six degrees below room temp, and then we can start to entertain. Okay, where, where can we actually make up for this? Do we have more airflow than we need? You know, are we past that point of diminishing returns and actually keeping the room fresh and I inspiring the plant to transpire a little more? And maybe instead of messing with that ambient temp and cranking it up, we just need to reduce the airspeed in the room or change the direction that some of that ducting is going to help balance it out.
Jason [00:31:10]:
Yeah, so, kind of just to recap, influencing factors on leaf temperature are going to be, obviously, ambient room temperature. We're going to be looking at radiation, so long wave light photons that are heating up the surface, we're going to be looking at transpiration rates, airflow, and then to some degree, irrigation or substrate temperatures.
Seth [00:31:34]:
Yeah, that's an important thing to look at, too, because if we were to go take those leaf surface temps throughout the day, we would actually see a difference as we irrigate the plant and transpiration increases. The plant's going to be cooling itself off a little bit. So that's another thing to consider is when. When are you taking those in the day and trying to build a picture of what, you know, just a more complete picture of what's going on in the room and ultimately what's going on in that one to 2 mm around that leaf surface, which is what we're actually trying to influence.
Kaisha [00:32:04]:
Awesome. All right, NC hammers, thank you so much for your question. Good luck. Okay, we're going to keep it moving. We got this question from Loki recently. We weren't able to get to it because it was so, such a full episode, but they wrote in a perpetual harvest greenhouse, when setting dehums to a VPD trigger, should there be limitations with relative humidity? Say, if temps get high enough, should dehumes be triggered to turn on at a higher rh levels, like 68%, would these higher rh levels be at risk for mold growth and late flower, even if BPD is within set parameters? Thanks and love the show. Appreciate you, Loki. Yeah.
Kaisha [00:32:41]:
What do you guys think?
Jason [00:32:42]:
Great question. Most of the time for this, and this sounds like a greenhouse application. If we're having difficulties with high temperatures, most of the time when we're trying to deal with combating high humidities, it's when we're doing those low temperatures towards the end of the cycle and we've got too much moisture in there. So VPD target for dehumid control is actually, it's a really good way to operate and make an assumption that you are in a greenhouse here and that you have some difficulties with too much, too much temperature and that's allowing your humidity to build up. It actually kind of sounds like a nice issue to deal with. You might think about getting your shade curtains pulled or partially pulling your black out to start reducing how much heat you have in there. Think about possible other levers that you can pull so that you're not running into high temperatures. Because, you know, at that point, you know, especially here later in the cycle when you are worried about molds and mildews, you're really not going to want those super high temperatures, especially if it is both night and day.
Jason [00:33:48]:
So try and maybe get creative and think about other options that you have in order to avoid that type of situation altogether.
Seth [00:33:56]:
Yeah. You know, if it is a high temp situation, especially that temps climbing 85, 90, approaching 95, you know, obviously we're already out of pretty optimal conditions. And like, for us here in the. In the northwest, we do hit conditions like that sometimes mid summer, pulling your shade curtains, trying to get that temp down is a great option and employing as much ventilation as you can. And a lot of times, you know, if we can't get it down below, like, let's say 85 in the daytime, you're going to start humidifying rather than dehumidifying to keep yourself inside that VPD range. Because as it creeps up, we're losing transpirational efficiency past that 1.41.5 mark. So if we're getting the VPD that high early on in generative or during bulking, that's actually going to slow down plant growth to an extent. So we want to keep that VPD in range.
Seth [00:34:46]:
And then, yeah, just look at all of your options on levers you can pull. If you can raise the humidity, sometimes you'll have to do that. Is the nighttime humidity or temperature. Are you able to actually get it low? You know, that is one thing around here that we don't really struggle with typically, is getting a low nighttime temperature. But there are plenty of places where, hey, getting that nighttime temp below. I was down in Arizona about a month ago, it was still 80 degrees at 11:00 p.m. at night. Okay, that's a.
Seth [00:35:12]:
That's a whole different animal than what we've going on here. And as far as mold's concerned, if the temps aren't even approaching anything below 70 degrees, we're probably not going to see a lot of mold proliferation. We might see some powdery mildew, if that's present, and highly problematic. But above 70 degrees, to get fungal pathogens, particularly types of mold, it's got to be incredibly, incredibly humid. And then once we pass that 80, 85 degree mark, you're probably not going to see much mold in the room, if any at all. The only time we'd probably see that is if we had a huge differential where it was 85 to 90 degrees in the daytime, and then it slammed all the way down to like 55, 60 at night, at which point we're back in the mold zone for temperatures. And we could have some dew point issues in the greenhouse because it's difficult to control that if we're already having trouble controlling the daytime. That.
Kaisha [00:36:05]:
Cool. Loki, thank you so much. Great question. Appreciate you. Yeah, we're going to keep it moving. And just a reminder, y'all, if you have any questions and you're on with us live, drop them in the chat for a chance to get them answered right now. Okay, we got this right in recently, if you are running a very stout plant that you would like to be bigger, would you rather veg that plant longer or apply a vegetative sear during veg and the first week of flower? If the latter, what is, what are the best practices, practices for vegetatively steering a plant while it is rooting into, say, a slab from a four by four by two and a half? Got all that?
Seth [00:36:45]:
I think so. You know, when we start putting that slab on that cube on top of the slab, either way, we're going to have somewhat of a vegetative irrigation schedule, right? We're not necessarily going to hit it with 14 shots in the day. The first week that it's on there, we are going to hit it with a series of shots throughout the day to help encourage that plant to root in. My example here would be running something like a Mac one that is a semi dwarf plant. It typically doesn't get very tall. And when you're looking at growing a plant like that, there's a few options, right? One, we can flip a bigger plant knowing that this one doesn't get as big under our normal schedule. Another thing we can look at is actually not putting nearly as much of a generative irrigation strategy, the plant. So if we're looking at something, I like using Mac one as an example.
Seth [00:37:32]:
If I don't want to alter, let's say, my veg program, because I've got one plant that needs to get bigger, which would mean potentially vegging that one strain to one to two weeks longer, at least to try to get that size, especially on ones that are stubborn. What I might do is just never go that generative. I might be pushing during early flower a four or five hour irrigation window rather than a two hour irrigation window. Or I might start by going two weeks generative and switching over into bulking a little earlier to help increase some of that stretch. For instance, if I'm trying to get that short plant up to the lights. The other thing though, to watch out for with some of those short plants is if we go, you know, on the other hand, too generative and we got a very mold susceptible strain, we might get a bud formation that's a little too tight in between them. So really it's about documenting like, hey, I applied this to the strain, what was the outcome? And start measuring certain things on strains that, you know, height sensitivity is an issue. If I've got one that's way too tall every single time I grow it in my system, I want to start tracking some of that Internet spacing at, you know, the same points during the grow and see in real time, like, is what I'm doing effective compared to the last grow? Is it not? And my, you know, rules for how I'm going to try to irrigate that are, you know, the shorter feed window I can get in the morning and the longer dryback, the more generative I've gone.
Seth [00:38:51]:
And opening up that feeding window to, you know, like I said, three, four, five, 6 hours might give us a little bit more of the desired growth. And then, you know, long term down the line, like there's a strain called candyland that I used to grow. And at least the cut we had was a semi dwarf. Okay. It just didn't really turn out to be commercially viable in our production system. It was very difficult to get it big because we'd have to veg it for four or five weeks to get the same performance out of a 14 or 15 day veg from a different plant. And the quality was there. It was really cool to look at, smelled great, but didn't make the cut at the end of the day in comparison to pretty much everything else in our library.
Seth [00:39:33]:
When we looked at what is the economic value of 1 our growing space, and it turns out that one just couldn't pay the rent.
Jason [00:39:41]:
Yeah. We think about general strategies here. Obviously, we break down a cycle into vegetative, vegetative and some ripening, and each of those phases is going to have a duration and an intensity. And hopefully, you know, in the case of Mac one, for example, it's already a very generative leaning type of plant. So we have both options. We can either increase how long we're running vegetative bulking and, or we can play with what's the intensity? Right. So maybe we're not going to do really significant generative type of steering. Maybe we'll do a little bit more balanced and then roll into bulking.
Kaisha [00:40:27]:
All right, well, we're going to move from steering vegetatively to steering genetically. I'm terrible at saying these words sometimes. This question came from Trichome Valley a while back. They wrote, I'm hand watering in cocoa. Is it considered steering generative by just the simple act of watering once a day, or is it more related to a specific dry back target range? And if so, would have the pots fully saturated weight be the target weight for generative? Thank you for your expertise.
Jason [00:40:57]:
I think this rolls right into exactly how I ended the last question there. And, you know, it's going to depend on some of your other factors. Yes. Typically when we irrigate once a day, it's going to be a little bit more type of generative. However, if I was in a very large substrate straight, we could go even farther generative by irrigating every other day or every third day. And so we really have to kind of look at what that root zone Ec is doing and some of the dynamics in the plant. Right. And so when we think about, okay, you know, what would be a balanced type of strategy? We can't just have the irrigation schedule itself.
Jason [00:41:32]:
We need to see some of the dynamics that the plant is responding to. So what is our EC increasing or decreasing on daily basis? How quickly is it changing? And then the easiest way to answer your question as well is with crop registration. Then take a look at how, what, you know, how much is my plant growing on a daily basis during stretch, are we seeing an inch plus on a daily basis? Well, you know, it might not be responding as generatively as you would assume based on the irrigation strategies.
Seth [00:42:02]:
Yeah, it seems like, you know, there's a lot of, especially because there's so many different, I don't want to say crop steering approaches so much as guides and ways to explain and execute. Right. Like a big thing we spend time talking to people about is that difference between saturation and volumetric water content. How wet is your growing media and how are you measuring it? We can get the same results using both scales. Have to make sure we're on the correct scale. And, you know, in that same way, when we look at in crop steering, irrigation strategy and dryback percentage, it's important to really look at like what do those two values mean and how do they affect to the plant. So when we're applying those irrigation strategies, we're shortening up that watering window and creating less time that we're actually giving the plant water, giving oxygen and kicking off that transpirational curve and really putting the plan into growing mode. Now, when we get to vegetative, you know, we're opening up that window, encouraging that plant to grow all day.
Seth [00:43:01]:
That dryback percentage is going to be highly variable, dependent on how big is your plant, how big is your pot and what kind of temperatures and humidities, what kind of VPD are we seeing in the room. And when we're talking about running a generative strategy, just like what Jason said, with a big pot, instead of watering it every day, you might water it every other every third day to push it more and more generative. The generative versus vegetative definition has a lot more to do with that time span that we're not watering or we are watering than it does with achieving that specific dryback goal. That being said, there's a few basic rules on what kind of dryback we want to see, right? We want to see at least a 10% dryback in volumetric water content, because that tells us the plant is drinking, you know, an appreciable amount. That's a good mark on a fairly appropriately sized plant to pot ratio. Maybe on the small plant to pot side, but that's going to depend on where you are in the growth cycle. That dryback is going to increase as we get more foliage above and the plant starts to suck up more and more water. But that dry back percentage, aside from telling us that we have a healthy, vigorous growing plant, is not what's necessarily going to define generative or vegetative.
Seth [00:44:15]:
For instance, if I had a really tiny plant that I watered and only ever got an eight or 10% dry back in a three gallon pot, that might be totally okay. If I have a pot that only ever hit 36% water or volumetric water content and had a 50 50 cocoa perlite mix, because I have enough pore space and oxygen in that root zone to not go anaerobic. And if I have a pretty small plant in a big pot, I might be watering that every other day and applying an incredibly generative steering style. Or if I have enough, let's say, perlite in there, for some reason, I was running 90 perlite and 10% cocoa or 100% perlite. That dryback at that point isn't necessarily going to matter because I have to go very vegetative just to maintain enough water content for the plant not to see a reduction in yield and growth. So I think it's really, really important for growers to understand that it's not. Your steering style or irrigation strategy is not defined by that dryback percentage. That dryback percentage is an indicator and a tool that we can use knowing volumetric water content as a dryback indicator of how much we need to calculate to put back on the plant with a higher level of precision every day.
Seth [00:45:31]:
If I'm watching that dryback get deeper every day over, let's say, the first two weeks, I can start to really dial in my irrigation strategy and go, you know, I used to adjust this weekly. Well, now I'm adjusting it every other day. And I'm approaching a level of efficiency that, you know, was never apparent before. And also seeing these yields increase because these small differences are really like that last 10% can be 50% of your yield easily. When we're talking about making some of these small changes, that can be a little bit painful to evaluate from a business perspective. But that's, I think, why the term kraft cannabis has stuck around. Even though we're producing it at some of these bigger facilities, it still does take a lot of attention to detail and dialing in to really achieve those high level results.
Jason [00:46:19]:
Yeah, I think one of the most obvious things that we have to digest when we're working in a hydroponic media is that the volumetric water content itself, what that value is, has very little impact on how the plant is growing as long as we're up above, you know, a borderline matrix potential, you know, which would cause temporary wilting point. Right. So temporary wilting point is a matrix potential that's so low an amount of vacuum, a significant amount of vacuum that makes the plant have to struggle in order to get water right. And for most situations in hydroponic media, that's going to be a very low amount of water content. Most cocos, we're talking about less than about 15% water content before we even get into temporary wilting point. And for co or for Rockwool, way even lower than that. So a lot more of that information is going to be about how often are we watering, what are you see dynamics. And really the bulk of what Seth was saying here.
Kaisha [00:47:24]:
You guys are the best. Thank you so much for that. Dropping some results of a poll here that we took, we asked everybody what facility type they're working with. We got 66% dealing with indoor, 33% dealing with homegrown, and so far, 0% for greenhouse. But I'm sure they are out there watching, listening. We appreciate you all. I'm going to keep it moving. We got this question from Justin on YouTube.
Kaisha [00:47:47]:
He wrote, we inoculate with my corsair. Do we have to constantly keep adding them or will they grow along with the roots? I get the feeling that I'm wasting product when I keep adding experience with that.
Jason [00:47:59]:
It's going to depend on some of the other products that you're adding and how sterile your media is.
Seth [00:48:05]:
Yeah, I mean, if you want to run things like mycorrhizae, you do need to make sure your media has a, generally a carbon source. A lot of times charcoal. Mix in with the media for those microbes to live on and then understand that, you know, certain ones you might have to replenish if you want to get that action. That kind of leads down a path that goes to say, well, what are these particular microorganisms doing for the plant, especially in a hydroponic application? So if we inoculated a pot with a symbiotic fungi mycorrhizae that both help the plant and grow on their own, it's a beneficial, mutual relationship. So both are surviving not only off of each other, but off of some of the ingredients that are in that media. If you have a very sterile media, that has nothing to support that, and we're in a true straight hydroponic application. I've seen some increased success with transplanting, usually in things like charcoal that do have a little bit of biochar in them. And other than that, if you have to keep replenishing it, then it doesn't seem to be a symbiotic relationship for the plant.
Seth [00:49:10]:
Both organisms aren't benefiting. And at that point, you'd really want to look at your quality data, yield data, run after run, and probably try one completely without it and see if you noticed any difference. For most of us cultivators out there that are running in Rockwool or cocoa, probably not going to see a very huge difference in using or not using that product so long as you're executing the other parts of your whole growing production cycle correctly. Yeah.
Jason [00:49:40]:
And, you know, if you, if you want kind of an easy way to make sure that there is some availability for those to grow, use a compost tea. You know, whether it's instant compost tea or brewing your own, that's going to provide some of the nutrients that the microbes and the bacteria need to grow.
Seth [00:49:59]:
Yeah. And keep it in parameters. You know, when we're talking about trying to build something like what we call living soil, there are certain considerations. You know, a lot of those microorganisms won't survive. If we start to see an average VWC reading down in the like, let's say low twenties to high teens. A lot of times we've killed a lot of the life in that soil. So is using that product compatible with the style you're trying to go with? Or maybe there's a consideration that you need to think about where, hey, I'm in a one gallon pot, I'm drying back maybe too far to really give these things a chance to show what kind of benefit they could do. Maybe I need to go up to a two gallon pot and not push my drybacks down to 20% every day and be in a little bit more comfortable range for the goal I'm trying to hit.
Seth [00:50:42]:
And usually when we're talking about running things like living soil, beneficial microbes and stuff. The idea is quality over maximum production potential. So if it is maximum production potential, you also want to monitor that, but make sure that every run, you're tracking what your hoped outcome would be from using that particular thing, because you have every single run as a chance. As long as you can isolate your variables, every single one is a chance to figure out if that product worked or not. And then the more you research, the more you can understand. You know, hey, if I am using it by mycorrhizae, for instance, I don't want to push my dryback too low. That's going to kill the benefit from that. Is it worth it? Because as growers and, and cannabis producers, anyone involved in this business, it's a.
Seth [00:51:32]:
It's still a fairly new industry and still a market where there's a lot of growth for people just like us that want to sell you fun tools. Right. But it's sometimes like, you know, number one, there's some things that are too good to be true, some things that are difficult to use. And usually, you know, if someone's bringing something to market, it probably has a benefit somewhere in there. It just isn't always for every single grower.
Kaisha [00:52:02]:
Sound advice, y'all. Thank you for that, Justin, good luck. Appreciate your questions today. All right, last few minutes of the show, we're going to try to get in these last few live questions that came in. This one came from Nick. They write, if I have a nutrient reservoir with a chiller keeping it at 65 degrees fahrenheit, would you still use an air pump in stone in the reservoir? As I'm in a good range of temp for dissolved o two, I also use a powerful reservoir calculator. Any advice?
Jason [00:52:31]:
You know, the thing about air stones is they're fairly cheap to purchase, they're fairly cheap to operate, and they're not going to hurt.
Seth [00:52:37]:
Yeah, I mean, it's either an air stone or, you know, a recirculation system where you're basically pumping that up through a pipe and water, falling it back in to keep that dissolved oxygen. And if you do have a chiller, I'm assuming you're trying to get that water temp down. Even if we lower that water temperature from, let's say, 75 degrees down to 65, we still have to get oxygen into it at some point. It's just that the dissolved oxygen potential at 65 is a lot greater than it would be at 75. So, yes, absolutely, run an air stone, or we do see systems out there that are recirculating that entire nutrient mix every 1530 minutes an hour. And part of that is that waterfall where it's dumping into the top of the reservoir and creating a situation where it's injecting oxygen into the media, or not the media, rather. Sorry, the nutrient solution.
Jason [00:53:25]:
We're trying to get it in the media.
Seth [00:53:26]:
Trying to. That's the adventure. Exactly.
Kaisha [00:53:32]:
Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Nick. Good luck. Keep us posted. Okay, we got this question from Chuckwild. They want to know, when using AROYA, what is the process for the last two weeks for EC ramping down for root zone? Should it be zero before harvest? How much should it drop every day?
Seth [00:53:50]:
Well, if you're using arroyo, you can flush, you can not flush, you can lower, you can keep it straight. So I think what we got to look at there is, what is the goal here? Like, lowering our EC? And there's different reasons to do that. If we're running a single mix all the way through with the presence of a lot more calcium nitrate at the end, we do want to ramp that EC down. If we have control of the mix and we can start eliminating that earlier on, then it becomes a point of what's. What's most economically feasible. We know we need to provide these micronutrients. We know we need to provide p and k, but how much is necessary to sustain growth? And that's something that's going to come down to individual genetics, observation over time, and understanding when they want to stop feeding and start going into senescence, and then making sure that we're still seeing, you know, decent ph readings in the runoff and that our nutrient balance is still good. And fortunately, we're growing cannabis, which hasn't hit, let's say, the price of grapes or apples yet per unit quantity.
Seth [00:54:50]:
So fertilizer is not usually something we want to be on the low end of availability on. We want to be a little higher up. So as far as ramping that EC down goes, you know, a lot of times, once we can identify that a strain stopped feeding, we'll start to lower it to, you know, one 2.5 down to a 2.0, sometimes down to 1.5, chasing that down, but never going to a straight ro feed, for instance, because that's not going to do a whole lot to affect the salinity and certainly nothing to affect the ph in the root zone, which, at the end of flower, we want to keep them wet, and we want to keep ph in range. We want to make sure we're isolating the plants from nutrients that don't do a skit and providing the ones that it still needs.
Jason [00:55:32]:
Yeah, you know, one of the things that makes it way easier to talk about EC, if you are using something like arroyo is, is talking about what's the lowest EC on a daily point. Because usually during ripening we have a fairly generative type of irrigation schedule and we're pushing that point at points where we'll see that EC rise significantly during the drybacks. And so, you know, when people tell me, oh, you know, what's a, what's a high EC during ripening? Well, some of those high EC points are a little bit frightening, if you will, especially for people that haven't been through a ripening cycle using a very hard generative type of irrigation schedule. And so, yeah, on a say seven day, ten day ripening cycle, you know, talking about exactly what Seth said, where we're trying to push our feed nutrients to probably around half of what we did for the majority of the flower cycle. And you're going to see, depending obviously on what media type that you're using, you're going to see that low point of the EC, what the EC, after your irrigations, it's going to drop on a daily basis. Do you want it to get to zero? No, I would definitely rather not because at that point we're supplying absolutely no nutrition to the plant. But if you are seeing your low point of your EC chart at about half of what it was for the rest of the cycle, that's a great place to be if you are supplementing your nitrogen. If you cut the nitrogen out, you can probably be a little bit higher than that.
Jason [00:57:05]:
Still see really good results.
Seth [00:57:08]:
Yeah, it's, it's all very situational. And then another thing to consider is what was your actual low Ec every day throughout the growth cycle of the plant, if we've seen that steadily rise, plateau, and then start to fall at the end, we're okay. You know, if we see that rising, rising, rising, flush out, rising, rising, rising, and we exercise the roots that way, there's going to be a little more temperamental behavior if we've already potentially done some damage to the roots or we haven't kept them at a fairly consistent salinity level for long amounts of time. You know, roots can adapt and adjust to those varying EC levels. And we've talked about this a bunch about sugar content in roots and how that interacts with the salinity outside of the root. But really they're very sensitive to quick changes and if that plant's been in a higher EC environment, like a yemenite, a lot of led growers we work with are running a low ec of seven, eight, nine, potentially in flower, depending on what's going on and how well they've been able to manage it. But because they are starting out feeding, sometimes even at a 3.54.0, they're able to stack that up in a pretty linear manner over the first two weeks of generative and then maintain that salinity level. And because they're able to see what's going on, they can hold that right where they want to by modulating their runoff and keeping that ph in range rather than watching it again, you know, rise up and fall down over, like, let's say a weekly basis and being reset.
Seth [00:58:37]:
And if we're already built up that long going into ripening, a high EC states not necessarily going to kill the plant or be detrimental to it, but the presence of that calcium nitrate is going to contribute to more sugar production, less finishing. And then at the end of the day, you know, we do talk about cannabis being lucky and able to have higher inputs than a lot of other crops, but there are still places we can save money, right? If plants aren't uptaking nutrients, how much do I really need to put on and why am I putting it on? And if the only goal is to maintain ph, then we're ph and not flush out too much EC, then really can back that off because we're not seeing a benefit from keeping that high EC level in the feed. Unless you have, you know, your says, your eight different rooms on one injection skid and or one tank, and you don't have the ability to do that, then that's when we're looking at pushing a little more runoff to push that down and some other strategies or deciding if the reinvestment in fertigation upgrades would be worth it if it's going to allow you to push your quality and increase your premium that you're able to get for every strain that you have.
Kaisha [00:59:52]:
Amazing. Okay, thank you for that question. I have one more I'm going to ask before you wrap up. We got this one on Instagram. Someone posted. Can you tell me what the signs of too many bulking shots would look like on the plant? Single weird looking leaves, for example.
Jason [01:00:10]:
I don't know necessarily about too many bulking shots. Yeah, I don't personally find a huge difference between, say, twelve and 24 bulking shots, if you will. You know, the thing that I really watch for is if I've switched back to bulking shots too early in the cycle. We'll see that plant restretch. Ironically, I was actually talking with a client yesterday and he, he said, man, one of my strains grew an inch and a half yesterday. And I was like, oh, well, definitely take documentation on that and know that we need to run that one a little bit longer with a generative strategy.
Seth [01:00:48]:
That's exactly where we see it most of the time, is going to that bulking a little too early. One thing I have seen recently, not that it's prevalent, it just popped up to my mind because I talked to this guy two weeks ago after he had worked on solving this situation, but we were chasing down the hay. We're hardly bulking at all. They were having some severe nutrient mixing problems, having to deal with some water quality and equipment issues and kind of to round out the episode, starting back at the beginning, they were getting about 1.6 ec in their actual drippers. They were having severe fallout issues in the tank in the line. You know, unfortunately, they didn't have a lab on site to test exactly what was falling out. But the plant growth would suggest, you know, single leaflets, very little flowering, stretched buds basically way off on the NPK ratio. Most of their p and k, potassium or phosphorus was falling out, out.
Seth [01:01:43]:
And those are some of those tiny details that really point out why crop registration is so important, because they had chased this down the whole irrigation road and, you know, they're good growers. They've been doing great for a while. Trusted the irrigation system, trusted the fruit system, and it just let them down, you know, and then fixing the problem turned out to be, hey, let's do some equipment repair, let's get this fixed and find, find the solution to this mixing problem and deliver the plants what they actually need. So it can be a few different things. Over bulking, though, typically has to do with that timed switch. And then there are certain plants that, you know, rather than single leaflets, we might just see stay flowering for longer. That certainly is one thing that happens as well.
Kaisha [01:02:31]:
You guys rock. So many great questions. First of all, thank you, gromies, for dropping those, whether it was today or weeks ago. We appreciate you. We're going to go ahead and wrap up. Just want to give a quick programming note. We're going to be traveling next week, so there will not be a show, but, you know, we'll be back. But I want to thank you, Seth, Jason and producer Chris for another great session.
Kaisha [01:02:51]:
And thank you all for joining us for this week's AROYA office hours. If you want to learn more about AROYA, book a demo at AROYA IO and our team will show you the ins and outs of the ultimate cannabis cultivation platform. If you have any crop steering or cultivation questions you want us to cover, drop them anytime in the AROYA app us at Salesroya Dot o. Send us a DM. We're on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and we definitely want to hear from you if you're interested. If you're a fan of the pod, leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast. We appreciate your feedback, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Thanks, y'all, and we'll see in episode 115.
Seth [01:03:27]:
Bye.