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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
AI Generated ...
OHL Ep 82
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[00:00:00] Kaisha: What's up, Grommies? Welcome to Office Hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Kaisha, and this is episode 82. Here's how we do it. I'll keep an eye out for questions in the chat. Drop them any time, and if your question gets picked, we'll get right to it. We're also going live on YouTube, so if you're logging in over there, please Post your questions, and if yours get picked, it gets picked.
[00:00:20] Kaisha: We'll do our best to cover it during the show. We are also live on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. So same thing. Drop your questions in the chat and we're gonna get to as many as we can during the next [00:00:30] hour. Before we get started though, have you heard Office Hours Live? It's headed to MJ Biz Con live and direct from Booth 5 1 0 0 9 5, excuse me, five one.
[00:00:39] Kaisha: 005, and that'll be happening Thursday, November 30th. It's part of three days of amazing programming that we got going on. And there are two ways to tap in. You can join our live audience or watch our free live stream from anywhere in the world. Scan the QR code behind me. You see that? Look at that magic and be sure to claim your spot.
[00:00:57] Kaisha: We would love to see you there. Now, you know, be [00:01:00] part of the experience. All right. Seth is in the house and Jason is coming in remote. How are you doing guys?
[00:01:06] Seth: Doing well. Pretty good. Yeah, I'm jealous of Jason's sunny location. But you know, California.
[00:01:13] Kaisha: I'm in California. It's not that sunny. It's a little chilly right now, but I think we're warmer than Pullman, right?
[00:01:17] Kaisha: I think we decided that.
[00:01:18] Seth: I hope so.
[00:01:19] Kaisha: Yeah, we're well, let's get right to it. We got this question in from Matt right at the end of the show last week. So that's a good place to start. He wants to know what's the best strategy [00:01:30] from veg to flour going into slabs? Do you guys water heavy then let dry back for a couple days?
[00:01:35] Kaisha: Or do you guys set up the veg steer? Yeah,
[00:01:40] Jason: So, I'll get started here. I mean, usually what we consider would just be wording in process and that's kind of set up for if you're flipping it flour, so you're going from your, excuse me, you're transplanting it flour. So right at the time of flipping, you're putting probably 4x4 cubes right on top of the slabs.
[00:01:59] Jason: Obviously, you'll [00:02:00] want your slabs to be hydrated appropriately. And slit before you put your 4x4s on top. Definitely if you have AROYA sensors, a good time to get those in the slabs as well. And when we're talking about burning in irrigations, typically, we're shooting for pretty small irrigations.
[00:02:16] Jason: We might do 3 or 4 shots. Maybe not even that best to look at your data and make sure that, Hey, we are having some amount of total water content loss on a day to day basis. And usually we'll shoot for three or four days of that. And then sometimes we'll cut those back even [00:02:30] farther if if we need to get down to that, say 45 percent water content range before we start our generative steering.
[00:02:36] Jason: What else, Seth?
[00:02:38] Seth: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing to keep in mind, right, is we've got a, That little 4 inch block that we're stacking on top, immediately gravity is going to take effect, even if we're at 65 percent in that 4 inch block. All that water is going to go right down into the slab, and we're wanting to run that balance between overwatering the slab, and also stimulating the root growth down into the slab by running it through the 4 inch cube.
[00:02:59] Seth: So just like [00:03:00] Jason said, we're going for a small amount of 1 percent or less shots, and that's total slab, or total media volume. But what we're looking for is never picking up or going above that shot size or frequency until we start to see about a 15 to 20 percent reduction in VWC. And what that's telling us is that we're actually getting enough open pore space for those roots to expand.
[00:03:21] Seth: and that they have enough oxygen to actually do it. If we keep the slab too wet, typically we don't see a very good in root in process and we end up with you know, a level of rooting [00:03:30] in but kind of a weak root system and not necessarily that really aggressive root colonization and thick root formation that we see with a proper root in procedure.
[00:03:39] Seth: So as much as you want to push those early on, go for it, but at the same time really make sure you're opening up that pore space and not over watering the slab. As Jason said, you know, usually four days, sometimes we see out to five, seven, till we start to see that overall dry back. And then, you know, if it's taken longer than that we kind of want to look at some of our environmental factors, make [00:04:00] sure our relative humidity is in line, VPD is not getting too high, temp's not getting too low, and
[00:04:07] Seth: what else did we want to look for there? You know, overall light input and any other factors that are influencing that dry back. Another big one is incoming plant quality. Thank you. So if you're coming out of VEG and we don't have a well developed, and that's part of the advantage by the way of using the 4x4x4 or 4x4x2 with that smaller media, we're able to keep it heavily oxygenated during VEG with a lot of pulsing [00:04:30] and really push the formation of aggressive roots before transplanting that on.
[00:04:34] Seth: We want to have the healthiest possible plant at transplant to see the best rooting and success.
[00:04:40] Jason: Yeah, and I think, I mean, you know, in a well run facility, building out SOPs, taking pictures of what does the roots look like on the bottom of your 4x4s, so your staff's familiar, like, hey, you know, maybe we need another day of of meds on these plants making sure you're getting plant heights per strain, that'll also help you kind of judge what the right time to get those transplanted is.[00:05:00]
[00:05:00] Seth: Yeah, and you know, personally, in the past, I've worked with different strains, some of which root more aggressively than others, whether it's getting initial clone roots or, Even transplanting. So that's another one of those things you want to pay attention to and decide if you need to, like Jason said, perhaps veg a little longer or sometimes adjust our veg strategy.
[00:05:18] Seth: So we're really promoting that root production right before transplant.
[00:05:24] Kaisha: Great advice, thank you guys. I, that was my problem with my harvest, lack of harvest this [00:05:30] year. I didn't root in properly, but I've learned a lot for next year. So awesome. All right. Keeping it moving. We got a write in from Hydro Kruger. They, it's a couple of different parts, but let me get started with this first part.
[00:05:41] Kaisha: I grow indoors using LED lights and I wanted to know what plant height do you recommend to avoid small, larfy buds. and to get nice big colas. Is there a plant height sweet spot when using LEDs to penetrate within the full canopy? For an example, I overgrew a plant in a two [00:06:00] gallon pot that ended up being over eight feet tall indoors using LED lights and only the top colas were dense.
[00:06:06] Kaisha: Half the canopy was larfy because that LED light was too far to penetrate that far below. What do you guys think?
[00:06:13] Jason: So we got basically a few variation factors in there. First off would be what type of LEDs you're using. Second off would be how do these strains perform. Basically the morphology of that strain is going to dictate some ideal plant height.
[00:06:25] Jason: And then what works for your, the people on site. What types of [00:06:30] efficiencies can you run for different. plant heights. Maybe Seth if you want to elaborate on how those come into influence as far as determining best plant heights per crop.
[00:06:37] Seth: Yeah, whenever we're talking about plant height, I mean we want to look at, you know, number one, are we growing a big or a small strain?
[00:06:43] Seth: That's going to influence kind of what we're looking for. If we have a plant that's 2 or 3 X at stretch, okay, it's going to be easier to have a shorter plant. If we're growing something like a haze, an OG, any of those older sativa strains that we know stretch to 5 plus X. That's going to be a different strategy, right?
[00:06:58] Seth: When we're talking about plant height, [00:07:00] there's two factors we're looking at that are really contributing. You know, number one is your flip height. If you were already vegging your plants for a month and a half and starting to flip a three foot plant. Okay, if we have a two, three X plant, we're looking at six to nine feet off that three foot plant.
[00:07:14] Seth: So that's one spot to start. The next is looking at your lighting source. You know, we look at the type and style of LED and then also the amount of power output, you know, just like with HPS the more power we have coming out of that light source, the better canopy penetration we're going to get.
[00:07:28] Seth: And then [00:07:30] looking at how high your light actually is above your plants with a lot of especially lower wattage LEDs, we're looking at a pretty, I mean, you know, within one foot of your canopy, if we're in, you know, a sub 700 watt LED, especially the panels. And then at that point we're expecting to see, you know.
[00:07:46] Seth: maybe 18 to 24 inches of decent penetration at most. So working off of that, you kind of want to look at, okay, how do I fill up this space with canopy and plant height wise, really probably in the three to five foot [00:08:00] range is what you're looking at, just to have a decent easy time getting to that plant structure.
[00:08:05] Seth: But the real big thing to look at is your light penetration. and see how deep you can actually get that. And you know, for a lot of people, sometimes when they switch to LEDs, part of that strategy is moving to more smaller plants. That way they can fill that canopy out and they're realizing like, hey, I don't need six and a half feet of plant height off of four and a half.
[00:08:23] Seth: I can still get a two foot canopy and be a little more compact. And that allows me to get that light down lower to the plants and get a [00:08:30] little better penetration into that canopy. At the end of the day, that larvae bud forms because it's just not getting the right kind of light intensity. And really a lot of times that has to do with flip height.
[00:08:40] Seth: It's surprising the amount of difference one or two inches can make on a final plant compared to flip height. So really take notes and, you know, kind of pay attention to that. And then another thing we've discussed on this podcast many times before is your pruning strategies. So when you're going to set up your plant structure, you know, when we're talking about LED [00:09:00] production, for instance, and trying to produce high quality flower if you're going for A grade.
[00:09:05] Seth: Top shelf stuff. We're looking at that top, you know, 12 to 18 inches of canopy. And if we're looking to maximize the growth there, we're going to take out a lot of that larf early on. Going to that old school term lollipopping, but really aggressively pruning so we're not wasting a lot of time growing that larf.
[00:09:21] Seth: Only to either remove it towards the end of stretch or have a lot of larfy weed to deal with. So that's where you can kind of make your pick and [00:09:30] say what's my goal? What do I want to accomplish? And overall, I would say with the heights you're talking about, especially in a small grow, I would start flipping plants smaller and maybe going with more of them to achieve your same yields.
[00:09:43] Jason: Yeah, and in traditional horticulture crops there's a ratio called leaf area index. So if you're needing to actually set a number for this that you can standardize across how your strain performs and how you're operating use leaf area index. Not the easiest thing to actually measure but it's [00:10:00] basically looking at light penetration through the canopy.
[00:10:03] Seth: Yeah, and you know, one of your best friends is going to be buying a light meter. You don't have to go too crazy high end on it. But just going in with some sort of meter and looking at how much light intensity you're losing going down through the canopy, you know, once you're hitting lower than 500 micromoles, roughly 450, we're going to see quite a bit of larvae production that can help you make the call on how hard you want to prune and also how early you want to flip.
[00:10:27] Seth: So you're not having a plant that's super tall [00:10:30] with just a tiny canopy on top. And, you know, another thing to look at, you know, we always talk about crop steering. If you let your plant get big enough in that two gallon and you can start to bulk it fairly aggressively, that's something we might end up seeing is if you're flipping a big plant in that two gallon, if that's getting enough dry back for you to get, you know, several waterings on it throughout the day in your first three weeks, you're just pushing that to stretch.
[00:10:55] Seth: So that's another thing to look at too is do you have a good plant to pot [00:11:00] size ratio? And when we're talking about, you know, a three to four and a half foot plant. A one gallon is typically pretty good. Yeah, so just kind of look at all your factors and see where you want to end up. We usually prefer a shorter plant with more buds on it.
[00:11:15] Seth: That's that's kind of the profit mode in the cannabis industry right now.
[00:11:22] Kaisha: So the next question they had, maybe we can give them a little guidance here. They want to know what plant height is best for one and two gallon pots so I don't [00:11:30] overgrow. Would you recommend two feet plants in a one gallon pot by the end of flower? Four foot plants max in a two gallon pot? What do you think?
[00:11:38] Seth: yoU know, typically we see a two gallon pot can support a pretty big plant. You know, in a three to four and a half finished height, a one gallon is typically just fine. But that's the balance, right? You know, what is your irrigation system like? Do you have the ability to water automatically or remotely if you're not there?
[00:11:56] Seth: And how high a stress situation do you want to run to push [00:12:00] yields? If you're looking for, you know, small batch, high quality, going with those two gallons is going to allow you to push it as generatively as possible. Your yields are going to take a hit, but that's going to be the lowest effort approach to growing the highest quality flower that you can.
[00:12:18] Seth: So, to answer it, three to five feet for your plant size indoors is typically where we want to see it. If you want to go higher in that plant height, we're talking about that thicker canopy again, [00:12:30] and that's where we typically see, you know, Commercial installations with 1000 watt double ended HPS lights or 2000 watt LED lights that actually achieve that deep penetration and a lot of times that's a pretty big step up in terms of room setup and equipment from a lower wattage LED or a small room setup.
[00:12:49] Seth: So if you are in a small room setup with lower wattage LEDs, growing taller plants is not going to help you produce any more flowers, so really adjusting, you know, how often you want to harvest. [00:13:00] and how long you want to veg is going to be your two biggest tools there. And in terms of media, one and two gallon, like I said, the way to think about it is you'll have the opportunity to bulk that one gallon container more.
[00:13:10] Seth: The two gallons going to be an easy, low effort approach. P1 waterings, you can run it super generative all the way through and produce some really high quality flower with probably mediocre yields. But depending on your application perfectly happy. I know at home, I play a lot with strains that Don't take to bulking very well, so I [00:13:30] run them super generatively, and since I'm not in business personally that's fine.
[00:13:33] Seth: That achieves the result that I want to achieve.
[00:13:39] Kaisha: Awesome, you guys. Thank you for that. Alright. We got a question here from Jason. He wrote, In the greenhouse, my runner crop smokes black, but in spring the same strains smoke and burn, slash burn white. I understand that the carbohydrates in the flour are mostly responsible for this. How do we reduce the storage sugars in the bud?
[00:13:58] Kaisha: My thinking is that in the [00:14:00] winter, the W the VWC is kept higher. What advice do we have for Jason?
[00:14:06] Jason: Yeah, I'll start with just documenting light levels. And that'll give you kind of an idea. Alright, if you're not doing any supplementation, then here's what I'm going to expect as far as diminished inputs for these crops.
[00:14:19] Jason: And then you're going to have to make adjustments to the other variables to match those those changes. If you do have supplemental, then kind of keep thinking about, hey, maybe I need more supplemental lighting. Make sure [00:14:30] you're turning those lights all the way up when you need it.
[00:14:32] Jason: One of my favorite ways in greenhouses is making sure that you're using conditional controls to Turn up or down those lights based on the light intensity that's coming on from outside.
[00:14:41] Jason: That way you can match your DLI on a daily basis. One of the nicest things about making sure that your DLI is the same every day is just being able to standardize how you irrigate from a day to day basis rather than making irrigation changes based on what you expect that DLI to be for the day. You have a set [00:15:00] parameter here that's determining at least that aspect of water usage.
[00:15:04] Seth: Yeah, you know, another big factor I've run into, especially up here in Washington in the winters just the overall ambient temperature in the greenhouse. I know for us here, once you have that nice, not nearly as insulated roof as your walls, it becomes a lot more difficult to keep the heat up inside the greenhouse.
[00:15:20] Seth: And a lot of times it's kind of scary to watch that gas meter just start spinning real fast when you're cranking the heat in there. But yeah, that's what we're looking at is total overall energy inputs. [00:15:30] And the amount of both you know, light energy and radiant energy hitting the plant. More heat and more light are going to cause it to burn up those carbohydrates a lot faster.
[00:15:38] Seth: So, trying to standardize everything from summer to winter as best you can, and then looking at, you know, some other factors down the line like, Hey, are we pushing a late, a high late nitrate load? Are we over fertilizing these plants and pushing them to produce more sugar at different times, given the changing environmental conditions?
[00:15:56] Seth: If we don't have as much light. If we don't have as much heat and we don't have it [00:16:00] dry enough in there, the plant can't actually, you know, take advantage of those carbohydrates. They still have to move around within the plant. So if we don't have any water movement in the plant, those different carbohydrates are kind of just sitting there not doing much.
[00:16:13] Seth: The plant has to actually take in energy to do something with those.
[00:16:21] Kaisha: So a lot more holistic approach that you described there. Stuff to look out for throughout the cycle. Excellent. Thank you for that. Okay. Oh, it looks like Jason has a [00:16:30] follow up. Let's go with that follow up. They want to know what planting density do you recommend?
[00:16:35] Kaisha: We run 1 plant per 1 square foot, 3 to 4 feet plant height. What do you recommend for maximum production in a four liter pot? What I'm really asking is how much substrate volume per. What do you guys think?
[00:16:50] Jason: So I'm hearing two questions here. One would be on substrate, one would be about plant spacing, if I heard that correctly.
[00:16:56] Jason: If you can get good light intensity you know, you're saying you're in a greenhouse, [00:17:00] so in the summertime, that sounds, one plant per square foot it's pretty tight. Right, usually we're talking about having multiple plants per square foot, you know, looking at the range of 6 plants per square foot would be pretty reasonable for something that that size, maybe just a little bit tighter than that even, so.
[00:17:17] Seth: Yeah, you know, if you're, if you can get enough radiation in there to get that good penetration and allow those plants to spread out a little bit, we see strain dependent, a lot of the best results between 9 and 12 plants [00:17:30] per 4 by 4. For reference, that's a great way to think about it is all the pictures you see online of people running slabs, three slabs per light, nine plants usually gives us pretty good results.
[00:17:41] Seth: And then from there, we're looking at, you know, certain strain dependencies. I've certainly grown strains that we can run up at 14, 16 per light, but those are typically strains that do not branch out very well and, or are like a semi dwarf plant where I do have to pack them in to get that yield.
[00:17:58] Seth: But. [00:18:00] I'll say it again, 9 12 per light, as a standard measurement is where most trains tend to land in most situations.
[00:18:10] Kaisha: All right, you guys. Thank you for that. Okay, keeping it moving. We got this in from Presidential Cannabis. They wrote in. Would you say the most common tip burn looking deficiency would be from iron, calcium and magnesium?
[00:18:28] Jason: Possibly. I mean, most of the time when [00:18:30] I see tip burn, it's just related to too low of nutrients and or other environmental factors. I mean, unless you're mixing your own or using a non standard salt that we see on the market.
[00:18:41] Seth: Yeah, typically if you're seeing that burn a lot of times it is a low nutrient situation and heavy pH swings day to day as the plant's trying to cycle through that low nutrient load where if we've, if we're running down at a two, let's say a two EC in the substrate that, you know, number one might be on [00:19:00] the ragged edge of adequate or the plant might be taking up almost every good thing that we give it.
[00:19:05] Seth: And at that lower EC state, when the plant is chomping through those salts, it's swinging the pH pretty wildly day to day because there's not enough ionic load in the soil or in the substrate to compensate for that. So most deficiencies we see, just like Jason said, unfortunately, a lot of times the answer is more fertilizer and correct your pH.
[00:19:27] Seth: Once you start pushing these plants with high light, high [00:19:30] CO2. controlled heat. Now nutrition is one of the weaker legs in our system, right? And we've just got to provide enough. And you know, just for reference, a lot of times when you're seeing some yellowing, uh, light green on new growth, that's we're looking at deficiency.
[00:19:45] Seth: That tip burn is oftentimes related to either pH swing, or we definitely see this a lot. People wanting to push an extremely heavy dry back, uh, early on, especially in generative. If you want to take your coco plants down to like 12 percent [00:20:00] VWC. Anytime you hit that point, we're approaching temporary wilting point.
[00:20:05] Seth: And when that happens, the plant's going to drought response mode, which basically means that all the distal parts of the plant, every part that's farthest from the roots, a. k. a. your leaf tips, is the first part that's going to suffer because it takes so much energy to get water from the root zone to those marginal edges of the leaf.
[00:20:21] Seth: So that's the first spot you're going to see symptoms of over drying. Or a pH swing.
[00:20:28] Jason: And so kind of the [00:20:30] diagnostic steps in order would be, take a look at your phs. Consider what EC you're feeding at. If you're already feeding at a low EC and you see those pH swings pretty simple solution there would be increase your ecs, keep monitoring pH, see if that solves it.
[00:20:42] Jason: If you are in check on the. variables. Sending in for a leaf tissue analysis is a really easy way to cost effectively and quickly diagnose specifically what elements are either in deficiency or excess.
[00:20:56] Seth: Yeah. And you know, then going beyond that, you might be looking [00:21:00] at some water quality issues or something like that.
[00:21:02] Seth: And then another thing to look at is your incoming water quality. Like, Hey is my feed water temp below 70 degrees Fahrenheit? If the answer is no, I mean, that's another thing we got to check and get in line to make sure we're getting good plant health. When we see symptoms on the plant, it's not always indicative of a particular deficiency unless we can eliminate a bunch of different things along that path.
[00:21:22] Seth: So usually plant nutrition is kind of the last spot. Most commercial fertilizers now are pretty darn adequate. I've grown plenty of not plenty, [00:21:30] but as a tester, I've certainly grown some weed with Miracle Gro and I can assure you it worked fine as long as I was keeping up on my parameters.
[00:21:37] Seth: So, check everything holistically and unfortunately, nutrient deficiencies seem like they're always going to be like that silver bullet. Hey, my problem's solved, but usually it's a fair bit more complicated than just switching your nutrient line.
[00:21:53] Kaisha: I love that yellow drop in the knowledge today. I love that you mentioned water temperature. We actually got a question that fits right [00:22:00] in with that. Somebody submitted over Instagram. How would you make a feed if your well water is coming out at 1. 2 EC? Got any advice?
[00:22:10] Jason: The first thing you've got to do is send in for a water sample analysis.
[00:22:14] Jason: You have to know what's in that water in order to work with it. You know, if we have some levels of calcium in there that's some free nutrition. If we've got levels of chlorine or too much iron, then we know that we may need to be investing in an RO system in order to combat [00:22:30] that. Because we can't get rid of some of the nutrients that are in this solution coming in.
[00:22:34] Seth: Yeah, that's your best first step. Get that analysis because there are other things like bicarbonates and stuff as well that will cause precipitation of nutrients once you mix it, which will make it really difficult to achieve your target EC ratios and specific nutrient concentrations and solutions.
[00:22:51] Seth: So get that test. And you know, if you're a commercial cultivator, I like to get that test and call the nutrient company. [00:23:00] They should have an answer on what they recommend you do with their line. Okay. In spite of this and unfortunately, a lot of times it's going to be investing in an RO system or some other means of chemical scrubbing depending on what's in your water.
[00:23:14] Seth: If it's coming out that high, I would definitely be worried about it being a little alkaline and having issues along those lines. Hopefully you get some good news back from the test, but at least give you some insight on which direction to go.[00:23:30]
[00:23:30] Kaisha: Alright, get that well water tested. Excellent. Alright, switching gears. Another question from Instagram. Somebody wants to know, do you cut off CO2 and drop light levels by 50 percent in the last 10 days? What do you guys think?
[00:23:46] Jason: I wouldn't drop light levels that much. You know, maybe for the last five days, go down 20 percent or something.
[00:23:52] Jason: But typically I keep, I like to keep my energy in CO2 levels pretty much at full potential until the end of harvest.
[00:23:59] Seth: Yeah, [00:24:00] you know, especially with the shift to LED light, we're not getting a lot of radiant heat on those plants. We're not cooking the turps off of it later on, provided the rest of the ambient room temp and leaf surface temps are in line.
[00:24:10] Seth: There's not a lot of reason to try to restrict the two, some of the two of the main things that do contribute to plant development. You know, we already ideally are restricting nitrogen, not applying that as heavily, not pushing plant growth. We want that plant to be as healthy as possible coming into harvest, not declining in terms of overall plant health.[00:24:30]
[00:24:34] Kaisha: Cool. Thank you guys. Sorry. A lot of questions coming in. So trying to keep track of it. Thanks y'all for being patient with us. Trying to get to as many questions as we can. Thank you guys for that. All right, keeping it moving. We got another question regarding LARPyBuds. Somebody wants to know, would you cut off LARPyBuds when you're at day 45?
[00:24:55] Seth: Buy bubble bags. Go ahead. Buy bubble bags. Start making [00:25:00] hash. At that point, you're thrown away. It passed about the day 21, which is where we usually call the end of stretch for most trains. You're just thrown away money that you put into energy to produce that little larfy bud. So, when you get a lot of that Sure.
[00:25:14] Seth: If you don't think there's anything you can do with that material, although on the commercial setting, you know, that's called the weed that goes into your joints, goes into hash production, concentrates, etc. So, next time take notes, take pictures and really document like, hey, when did we do our first pruning [00:25:30] and how did we do it?
[00:25:31] Seth: Because the other thing I've seen too is a lot of confusion around actual pruning. So if, you know, we go with a a technique where we're stripping leaves at like day one early in a flower or not touching it till the end of flower, but all you're doing is stripping leaves and not actually removing those lower buds, you're going to end up with a lot of little larvae buds.
[00:25:49] Seth: So being thorough with your strip and then really tuning your pruning strategies to different strains because some strains there's a wedding cake cut I used to grow that I always [00:26:00] Use as an example, but that thing I would barely clean up the bottom because somehow it had the genetic potential to put out little golf balls down low.
[00:26:07] Seth: It was really good about tightening up those buds. Plenty of other strains I've grown just don't do that. So I know, okay, a few runs in, if I don't do that cleanup hard enough, early enough, I'm going to end up with a lot of little buds. And then that does relate back to our plant height discussion. If you're flipping a big plant, you know, You don't, you want to work with the plant, not fight it in terms of growth.
[00:26:29] Seth: [00:26:30] If you're growing a lot of matter only to chop it off, that's a wasteful process. So now we're looking at, okay, flipping a smaller plant, we're going to get better light penetration and have to do less work on it.
[00:26:44] Kaisha: Fantastic. Awesome, you guys. All right, keeping it moving here. Now, Smokey submitted this question. Thank you again for following up with us, Smokey. We get a lot of questions and can't get to everything, but glad you are on top of it. So I'm going to read all of this, and I think we're going to talk about it.
[00:26:59] Kaisha: All right. [00:27:00] So, hello, I am having some discoloration inside of my flower before and after harvest. I don't notice any mold, but it looks like a very light green color to almost white. The outside of the flower looks great. This is only happening with a couple strains in the room. I have added a ton more airflow to the room to try and correct this problem, but it seems to still be happening.
[00:27:20] Kaisha: I run in COCO at 2. 5 to 3 EC, CO2 1000, [00:27:30] Any ideas what's happening? And then let me read you to follow up. This is week six. Temps are 80 and 50 to 55. Humidity most of the time. I don't see any browning on the stems, just this really light color. It's only happening with the large bud plants. So that's the first part of the questions.
[00:27:47] Kaisha: What do you guys think?
[00:27:49] Seth: Probably sounds like we have betritus issues. It's hard to say without actually looking at the buds. Certain genetics are especially susceptible to betritus. It's an unfortunate reality. [00:28:00] You know, one thing I know Jason's seen this in the past, there's some strains, it's just heartbreaking, you grow these big old baseball bats, and then you break them open and you find mold, like, you know, a couple days before harvest, or you don't see it at harvest, but by the time you've hung those plants up, in a few days that it takes them to dry down, that bud rot's really hit you know, one thing to focus on is your nighttime VPD, and then starting to do some dew point calculations to make sure you're not actually hitting any condensation events inside the room.
[00:28:28] Seth: with those bigger buds, what [00:28:30] we see is a lot of times people, you know, we want to cool it down, try to push that overnight diff to bring out that purple, but if you're not careful, you can accidentally hit a dew point event. And whether it's condensation coming from the ceiling of your greenhouse or grow room, or those plants actually getting cold enough to have condensation on them once there's liquid on there, there is no drying out that bigger bud.
[00:28:50] Seth: And if the plant's susceptible, you're probably going to have Botrytis. Most of us can't really afford to run a surgically clean room. And if you're, you know, [00:29:00] anywhere where agricultural production happens, which is, you know, most of the country, except for in pretty urban areas. And even in those, you know, fruit trees, rose bushes, a bunch of the plants that we like to have around us outside are hosts for Botrytis.
[00:29:12] Seth: So much like Aspergillus, you know, good old bread mold, it is pretty ubiquitous to our environment. So, Making sure your nighttime VPD is in line, making sure when you cross temperature barriers, you're not actually accidentally hitting dew point, and then understanding that when you go below [00:29:30] 70 degrees Fahrenheit, you're opening up, especially at night, you're opening up opportunity for a lot of pathogens to form because they bloom, essentially, you know, in the 50 to 70 degree range, not in 75 to 85, for instance.
[00:29:44] Seth: So that nighttime VPD is really important when we're looking at that. Knowing that some of these diseases are ubiquitous in the environment, or at least their spores are looking at how we can go about, you know, either saying, Hey, this plant's not practical to grow [00:30:00] here. I need to, you know, this is where pheno hunting becomes fun.
[00:30:04] Seth: If you're, I used to say we did a lot of mold screening when we did our pheno hunts, but that, that was something we had to look at. If we pop 20 seeds, that's a, that's an evaluation factor here. Like did any of them not mold? Yeah. If it didn't mold right there, that's a selection trait for us as a big winner in the greenhouse because seasonally, that's a huge challenge and then, you know, if you're determined to keep some of those genetics, like many of us are, finding alternative [00:30:30] strategies to reduce that bud size.
[00:30:32] Seth: So, that's where, you know, we typically talk about not topping, not doing things like that but this is where you know, one thing I've had success with in the past is a late topping towards the end of week two, beginning of week three, I'll go take off. All of my apical buds that I know are going to form my strong dominant big nugs and really just, I know that I'm sacrificing yield, but if I was going to drag a bucket around and throw away a bunch of product anyways in a month and a [00:31:00] half, let's just get it out of there and try to reduce the contamination risk.
[00:31:06] Jason: Yeah, and basically you're my approach. Hitting everything that Seth would hit here as far as environmental factors and and plant stuff. I would also just try and understand is this uniform across the strains? You know, what is the susceptibility point in this? Is it in a specific area? And then kind of analyze it from there.
[00:31:29] Jason: If it's ubiquitous [00:31:30] across all crops and all the room, then it's probably going to be absolutely environmental or maybe something related to plant health that you can work on. If you do, Find something that is more isolated, like I said, per strain, then work on that strain. Try and identify some management points.
[00:31:47] Jason: Maybe you need to do a little bit more crop management or canopy management on that specific strain. Maybe we need to get it in a slightly higher airflow area. If we do have striations in airflow, then you did say that [00:32:00] you increased your airflow, but. Is that airflow uniform across the room? So, you know, bringing canopy management into there and isolating the circumstance might also be helpful.
[00:32:11] Seth: Yeah, one of my favorite things to do if I'm finding mold in a room and I just can't find, you know, what, why is this, where is this coming from, what's going on, is to try to get in there during a cold event or right after the room starts warming up, but look up. We have a lot of cables strung around these, a lot of conduit in these rooms often times we've got things like de hues that are actively [00:32:30] pulling water out of the air, so there can be leaks there, there can be condensation inside the unit.
[00:32:34] Seth: We talk about ACs or ducting, that can be a huge issue. I've seen plenty of times where an uninsulated duct will form a lot of condensation on it. And then we extend that to like light fixtures, cables, and all these things that have they're not designed with a shape that allows water to drip to the sides of the room.
[00:32:51] Seth: So anywhere that cable's dipped, anywhere on that fixture that condensation can drip off, once that hits a bud, that's going to form mold and that can [00:33:00] sometimes look very sporadic across your facility. make it really hard to figure out what's going on. And since also generally most of us aren't just standing in the room when the lights turn off and turning on a green light and staring at the ceiling looking for drips, it's hard to spot those.
[00:33:15] Seth: I mean, you know, you've got quite a few square feet and it's dark in there. No one's in there. So it's tough to have eyes on some of those dew point events. And that's why it's good to look at. Just a small dew point calculator and you can look back and see if it's likely that you have been hitting it or [00:33:30] not.
[00:33:30] Seth: And then also looking at, hey, some of these uh, I don't want to say micro events, but sometimes when your AC kicks on, you're going to have a condensation event just on the ducts, things like that. So really trying to identify like, is it susceptible? Is it a susceptibility issue? Is it a VPD issue? Or, you know, is it just a machinery issue in the facility, and I need to adjust my set points to make sure that I'm not accidentally introducing any liquid moisture into the room that I don't want to.[00:34:00]
[00:34:01] Kaisha: You guys gave a lot of great advice to Smokey. The other part of their question was, could this be a result of underfed plants, or higher VPD swings, or maybe just blowing up the buds too big for the EC that's available? But it sounds like you... gave him gave all the different considerations and things that you need to be taking a look at this point.
[00:34:19] Seth: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And that's the other thing, you know, when we're talking about IPM and plant health, your first best defense is healthy plants. Deficient plants get sick easier. [00:34:30] They can't, you know, they're not as sturdy. They can't resist invasion by fungi. So plant health is always at the core of this.
[00:34:36] Seth: And that also ties into our environment. If your environment's been transplanted. out of line for quite a while. Your plant health might not be quite as optimal as you'd hoped and your plants are more susceptible to infection.
[00:34:52] Kaisha: Awesome, you guys. Thank you. Good luck out there, Smokey. Keep us posted. Alright, we got another question in from Instagram. Somebody wants to know, [00:35:00] What do you guys recommend for feed environments for the first 10 days? I see you're looking for some parameters.
[00:35:09] Jason: First 10 days of the plant's life? So basically clone feeds it's going to be dependent on the nutrient manufacturer.
[00:35:16] Jason: We've got some nutrient manufacturers that are currently actually successful feeding near full strength. So I know some of the most common ones on the brands right now are looking at 2. 5 to 3. 5. for clone feed strengths. Historically, [00:35:30] with some of the nutrients we're used to, it's a little bit lower than that until those bugs have rooted in.
[00:35:34] Jason: And then we'll move up. So I would go for it's to our nutrient manufacturer for places to start with.
[00:35:41] Seth: Yeah, typically right, as Jason said, right around the 3. 0 is where we're seeing a lot of them come in. One of the biggest things you want to be careful for, and this is where I highly recommend people invest in some sort of a scale or load cell for your clone room.
[00:35:52] Seth: Okay. But you can start keeping track. You know, one way I like to do it is just a little piece of masking tape or a clipboard, but keep track of each tray [00:36:00] or measure a few and try to see like, hey, we want to see, you know, 30 to 50 percent of the water come out of that block of cubes before we water it again.
[00:36:08] Seth: And then, you know, on top of that, making sure that you're burping your domes effectively and keeping your clone room clean. You know, that's a, that's an eternal challenge when for most of us, our clone room is usually jam packed with clones. It's not exactly empty enough to just go. Nuke that thing out with some heavy duty cleaning sprays.
[00:36:26] Seth: So, cleaning as you go is ultra important. And then also, you know, [00:36:30] really watching your clones and finding out like, Hey, I've, you know, I've seen situations where we suddenly have a mold infection in one tray. Okay, anyone that goes in the clone room needs to know how to, you know, Number one, check all the trays.
[00:36:42] Seth: Number two, identify that. Number three, start filling out paperwork to throw that tray away and get it the heck out of your clone room so it's not starting to infect others. Other trays and then working backwards, hopefully to go, okay, what day did we take this clones? What was going on? Let's do a little investigation and see where this point of [00:37:00] infection came from.
[00:37:01] Seth: Did it come in off of the mom? Did an employee bring it in the room? Did someone leave a banana peel in the trash can for a week because we know it was cloning in there for a week You know, what's where did that come from? So and then the other thing with clones, you know, is a stable environment, you know, if you're, if your clone room is the last thought in setting up your whole grow, you might want to revisit how well you're able to maintain temperature and humidity in there, because the younger the plant is the more susceptible it is to [00:37:30] environmental swings, and that doesn't just go for clones rooting, that goes for clones rooting into your initial media, whether that be a 1 2 gallon or a 4x4x4.
[00:37:39] Seth: or anytime you're rooting in. So we want to make sure it's warm, you know, leaf surface temp up near 80 to 82. Want humidity to be pretty high in that 9 range VPD and not have it dip down a bunch overnight basically. Want to keep those plants really babied in their happy zone so they can focus on [00:38:00] rooting and not have to spend a bunch of time opening and closing their stomata.
[00:38:04] Seth: To try to adjust to that swinging VPD in the room.
[00:38:10] Kaisha: So you guys, I think I phrased this question more for the first 10 days, but they're really asking for environmentals for the left feed environments for the last 10 days.
[00:38:19] Seth: The last 10 days of flower. .
[00:38:21] Kaisha: Okay. They just said last 10 days.
[00:38:22] Seth: So ripening, you know, we're looking at trying to run a higher VPD just to avoid some of the mold situations like we were talking about before.
[00:38:29] Seth: You keep [00:38:30] your VPD in that 1.3 to 1.6 range, day and night as a goal. It's pretty likely that you're not going to run into any dew point issues. However, a bunch of people listening to this will definitely say that's impossible at 65 to keep it that high depending on your HVAC setup. So that's where you kind of start to draw some lines and evaluate where you want to take your risks.
[00:38:50] Seth: If I'm dipping down to a 5 VPD going down to 65 degrees, but at 70, I keep it at 1. 1 overnight. Personally, I'm going to choose 70 because I know my [00:39:00] chances of mold are going to be way less than down at 65 and I'd rather harvest a usable bud, not moldy bud. And then other than that, you know, we're looking at trying to achieve at least a 10 degree ambient room temp differential.
[00:39:16] Seth: The bigger your differential, not necessarily the colder, but the wider the spread is what's going to really affect that purpling coming out. sO yeah, we want to run it typically depending on HPS or LED, but. We want our leaf temps to be [00:39:30] 75 to 77 in the daytime, maybe up to 78, 79. And then we're going down to about 65 degrees at night, provided you can keep VPD in line, which Most cases that's going to be 43 to 45 percent relative humidity at 65 degrees.
[00:39:45] Seth: So that becomes a challenge. But also when we're looking at those room environments, don't ignore the substrate. We want to be in a substrate size that's appropriate, a substrate that is appropriately sized so that you can [00:40:00] run a full 22 hour dry back and really push some of those ripening characteristics.
[00:40:06] Seth: ANd the big thing here is consistency. We want to be able to go straight over to generative and not go generative for a few days and then start to add more P2s and just vary it up, you know, we want to be able to be consistent and nail that every time, which starts way back in VEG when we look at plant uniformity and how we're treating those plants throughout the entire process.[00:40:30]
[00:40:31] Kaisha: I mean, an overview of optimal environmental conditions from root in to ripening. There you go. Good luck out there. Y'all. It's amazing. I learned so much on this show. All right. Keeping it moving. Spin as a 415 drop this question. What's the highest EC you would push in the substrate given you have optimal environmentals and light intensity?
[00:40:58] Seth: That's a loaded one.
[00:40:59] Jason: Really good [00:41:00] situations where we're feeding it a little over 4 EC.
[00:41:04] Seth: Yeah, once, once we get PPFD up into that 1250 plus range those plants can actually eat through close to 2000 ppm of salt every single day. So we are feeding up into that 4 range. And as far as baseline ECs go, you know, while we're looking at maybe a 4 to a 6 under HPS a lot of times we see really high intensity LEDs come into play.
[00:41:25] Seth: I'd be pushing that up to like an 8 to 11 baseline EC [00:41:30] and then quite a bit higher is all I'm going to say on that dry back depending on what phase of growth you're in. So the key though is not shocking your plants. You want that EC to ramp up throughout your stretch at a pretty consistent rate. We don't want to be playing this game where you're spiking it up and flushing it out, spiking it up and flushing it out.
[00:41:51] Seth: We want that to be A nice day to day, if we looked at that low point EC and the upper point, we want both of those lines to be linear, [00:42:00] not exponential, up or down. And if you can't, and this is where, like Jason's saying, feeding at a 4. 0 or, even 4. 5 sometimes. We're only doing that when you see that the plan is absolutely using up so much that you're unable to stack more EC into that media.
[00:42:17] Seth: But again, the key is that even stack. If I hit the end of stretch and I've only achieved a 4. 5 EC as the baseline of my media, if I continue to try to jack that up during that time period or raise that throughout [00:42:30] bulking, that's not going to be the most optimal for the plant, optimal for the plant to push more flower production.
[00:42:38] Seth: We're introducing stress at a time that we kind of don't want a whole lot of it. You know, ideally our EC range is actually going to go. Not the overall rain shift down too much, but the difference between the EC at the wettest point and the driest points of the day is going to be smaller during bulking just because we're watering later out into the day and experiencing a smaller [00:43:00] dryback.
[00:43:01] Seth: So the answer is if everything else is in line, pretty high. You know, with these LEDs, that's what's been kind of driving this is growers out there going like, hey man, everything's perfect. Why am I seeing these bleached buds? On my LED plants, this room is like the, it's the Ferrari of grow rooms, you know, I have everything ready to go and like, I know, you know, compared to older knowledge that I had, I'm feeding these things adequately, when in reality, there's just not enough EC for the plant to build more [00:43:30] tissue.
[00:43:32] Jason: Yeah, and just clarification for listeners here, when Seth is talking about baseline EC there, we're looking at a time series root zone EC data and that's basically the root zone EC after irrigations, right? So probably the lowest point in the day.
[00:43:47] Seth: Yep, and if you're, you know, a Solace user out there right at the end of your P1s, your P1 irrigations, when you actually hit field capacity and achieve true runoff, not channeling, that's when we want to look at our baseline EC.
[00:43:59] Seth: Okay.[00:44:00]
[00:44:04] Kaisha: I love it. So while we are on the topic of EC, we just got this question. What is a good EC in flower till the end?
[00:44:13] Jason: So, typically you know, I like to recommend a fairly easy system in which we're modulating our irrigation sizes based on how much runoff we are getting and how much EC we want to build up in the substrate.
[00:44:27] Jason: So, typically from day one of flower [00:44:30] to, you know, right until ripening we'll push those full ECs. So anywhere in the range is usually like it says three to four depending on light source and environmental parameters. That being said during ripening that's kind of one of the areas where you may or may not make some EC adjustments.
[00:44:48] Jason: Typically if we're not reducing the nitrogen load in our nutrients. We'll talk about going half to three quarter nutrient strength. So reducing that EC, decrease the nitrogen available, [00:45:00] availability to the plant. That being said, if you are substituting and getting rid of the nitrogen you know, I'll typically stick between three quarter and full strength nutrients, even through ripening.
[00:45:12] Seth: Yeah. And you know, if you don't have, you know, 24 seven time series EC monitoring. It's really hard to pinpoint that point in plant development where the plants start to enter senescence and stop uptaking a vast majority of nutrients. So, if you're blind, keep it simple. You know, that's my best advice.
[00:45:29] Seth: [00:45:30] Just like Jason said, run the manufacturer's recommendation. Full strength, especially, you know, now that we're seeing more finishing products coming out from various manufacturers, that eliminates a variable. And when we're guiding those plants right into harvest, we don't want to... Shift that EC range too much, too quick, because that's when we'll see, you know, basically root health root health complications and then.
[00:45:54] Seth: You know, hanging a potentially not optimal plan.[00:46:00]
[00:46:00] Kaisha: Great overview, guys. Thank you for that. Alright, Frank, unfortunately, sounds like he's dealing with russet mites. So he's looking for any advice on dealing with russet mites in mid to late flower.
[00:46:15] Seth: Go in your flower room last. Our condolences. Don't go from the flower room to the veg room. There's, you know, one of your best friends is going to be trying to maybe order some beneficials. Go check out Coppert or Arbico and see what they've got on there [00:46:30] for russet mites. I know there's quite a handful out there that you can use.
[00:46:33] Seth: At this point, you can play with spraying some sanitizers. Those probably aren't going to do the trick. I would avoid spraying too much just because you don't want to be smoking that stuff later. And then at this point... Man, go buy some duct tape and tape your door shut every night. I mean, that's about all you can do.
[00:46:53] Seth: There's old school techniques. Sulfur fumigation, that's not that great. That's going to leave residue on your plants and walls. [00:47:00] So, quarantine. wHen you finish this round, nuke that thing out. Don't be scared of bleach. Don't be scared of pyrethrins. Really go hard on it. And yeah, make sure you don't drag it backwards in the cycle depending on how big your facility is or if you're lucky enough to live in a place where you have access to, let's say, a buddy or a different farm or whatever that you can source clean genetics from again.
[00:47:25] Seth: Really try to go investigate how extensively those Russet mites have infected [00:47:30] your facility and hey, if you're finding them in the moms, in the veg, just absolutely everywhere, start nuking it out and get ready for a reset. That's about the best you can do and be rigid from now on about your IPM protocols going in and at this point now that you know you have them, you know, we're looking at most likely a couple knockdown sprays going into flower.
[00:47:55] Seth: with various heavy duty pesticides before bud set and then [00:48:00] moving pretty immediately to a beneficial insect program. Get those beneficial bugs in there early before your populations get out of control. And then, you know, another thing I like to point out to people before we started seeing the good old yellow sticky traps show up in cannabis grows their traditional application, the reason they have little square inch grids on them is so you can throw those out for a certain time period.
[00:48:23] Seth: count how many bugs you actually get on a card and establish levels of infection and levels of action that [00:48:30] says like, hey, if I get X amount of russet mites overnight on this card, that means I need to spray. If I see that I've got over X amount, okay, now they've gotten out of control. This is a heavy action item and start establishing protocols that way you stay on top of it because there just isn't a whole lot we can do once bud set has happened to kill the bugs and preserve a good crop.
[00:48:54] Kaisha: Frank, sorry, you're dealing with that, but that's the advice and you know, let us know how it works out. Good [00:49:00] luck. All right, we got another question here from YouTube. Johnny writes. How are you guys? Love you guys show. I have a question. What's the best method for irrigation strategy for 10 gallon pot from week 1 to week 8?
[00:49:15] Kaisha: I know not the best pot size. Just need to finish this round. What advice do we have for Johnny?
[00:49:22] Jason: 10 gallon. Well, hopefully we're outside or in a high intensity greenhouse. Hopefully somewhere more southern than [00:49:30] Seth and I, usually. Yeah, if you're in 10 gallon, hopefully you've got a really large plant.
[00:49:35] Jason: And you're going to be able to do a few more irrigations than a typical indoor sized plant. And we're just talking about that because a 10 gallon plant or a 10 gallon substrate, let's say field capacity, it's a 45%, maybe if it's a soil or a perlite, um,
[00:49:51] Seth: Yeah, I would hope you'd have a lot of perlite in there in the 10 gallon.
[00:49:54] Seth: That way we're, you know, those big pots, it's when you go above low 30s in water content, we [00:50:00] typically see some root rot starting to happen.
[00:50:03] Jason: Yeah. And so an example, I'm just trying to give, you know, an idea of how often you'd need to irrigate that. So let's say it's 30%, right? We got lots of perlite in that 10 gallon.
[00:50:13] Jason: So that's 3 gallons of water holding capacity. You know, on a typical 3 to Five foot size plant, we might only see a quarter to half gallon of water usage a day from evaporation and transpiration that plant's using. [00:50:30] So if we have three gallons of available water, that means we're needing to replenish every, say, Six to 10 days of a full amount of water.
[00:50:40] Jason: So that might mean we only need to irrigate every 3 to 5 days. And so I guess the best thing that you can be doing there is just monitoring how much water content you have. And if you are pushing more generative, wait for those larger drybacks before you do irrigate again. If you are trying to do a vegetative maybe half, [00:51:00] you know, do that timeline in half and do a few irrigations throughout.
[00:51:05] Seth: Yeah, you know, and if you're going to be using the 10 gallon pots for a long term of time, that's just what you found you really like and seems to work for your particular product quality. yOu might want to look at getting a soil moisture potentiometer. That's going to allow you to pretty easily, it's not going to give you VWC, it's going to give you negative pressure, but you can start steering in a similar way that grape growers and raised bed growers grow.
[00:51:29] Seth: which [00:51:30] is keeping that substrate within a range that will equate to, you know, usually 20 to 30 percent water content. But you can at least get some sort of number because obviously picking up a 10 gallon pot's not going to be the easiest all the time, especially if you've got a bunch of plants. But getting some level of measurement on it so you can start to decide when you're going to irrigate because, as Jason said, a lot of the times we're looking at a long dry back, you know, many days.
[00:51:55] Seth: Okay, in that situation. If we can put numbers on it, [00:52:00] we can start to say, okay, we're going to water every day, but we're not going to bring it back up to field capacity necessarily every day. And that's where some different feeding strategies come in. As far as getting this crop out, I'd keep it simple.
[00:52:14] Seth: Probably make sure it gets run off every other day at the minimum and start going from there. Keep it simple. I mean, a lot of us for years grew in big pots, just watering every morning and wait until the next day. Go water the garden in the morning, then go about your day. [00:52:30]
[00:52:32] Kaisha: Today's theme is keep it simple.
[00:52:33] Kaisha: I love it. All right. Thank you for that question, Johnny. Good luck out there. All right. Carlos wrote in going from generative to vegetative, pore water EC 12 to 6. I lowered EC down from the previous two days and wanted to ask how do I time my P2s now that I'm not going so hard on dry back? I'm doing two hours after saturation to reach max [00:53:00] VWC and maintaining the same 5 to 10 percent dry back up until two hours before lights out.
[00:53:06] Kaisha: Is that okay to go into vegetative bulk?
[00:53:11] Jason: It sounds like that's a little bit more of a generative strategy and too small of a substrate. You know, typically, you know, 5 10 percent between irrigations is going to be less vegetative than usually what we're shooting for. So, most of the time when I'm in a vegetative state, I try to determine, well, how hard am I trying to [00:53:30] steer vegetatively, right?
[00:53:31] Jason: And that'll determine the number of irrigation events and how long my irrigation window is. So, when I always talk about your irrigation window, it's from first irrigation, to last irrigation throughout the day. Typically for P1s, we'll get to field capacity within about an hour of that first irrigation.
[00:53:50] Jason: And then for P2s, we'll talk about usually say five to seven or eight hours of irrigation window for P2s. [00:54:00] A lot of times I just start with a general Place and go sell all period once an hour. And those don't necessarily have to bring you up to field capacity. They are going to stabilize your EC. So you don't need to necessarily make EC changes in your feed EC.
[00:54:16] Jason: And that's another thing to kind of keep in mind. There is a how fast your drip rate is on those emitters. If we've got a really high drip rate, we might just do twice as many irrigations. [00:54:30]
[00:54:30] Seth: Yeah, I mean, I would say if you don't have time series data to really help you out determining how quickly that dryback post P1 is happening.
[00:54:38] Seth: You know, our goal is to let it dry back just long enough that we're exceeding the amount that we're going to put on in those P2 shots, right? We don't want to be bouncing off field capacity and flushing out that media in the afternoon. So if you're doing it blind, putting, you know, one to one and a half hour gap in between the end of your P1s and the beginning of your P2s.
[00:54:56] Seth: And then shooting for a more like a 1 to 2 [00:55:00] percent shot on those P2s, as Jason said, starting every hour is a great place to start, especially if you can accurately get down to a 1 percent or less irrigation. If you don't have technology to look at, you can always use your good old eyeballs and go in there and make sure you're not pushing runoff with any of your P2s.
[00:55:18] Seth: That's the main goal here, you know, if we could look at a chart, the peak of those P2s can be a horizontal jigsaw. It can be a jigsaw that's angled down, like a really simple drawing of some mountains, but what [00:55:30] we don't want to see is that jigsaw topping out at our field capacity at every point and just flushing that media out.
[00:55:38] Seth: And as Jason said, you know, the more vegetative we want to go, the more bulking you're going to do. But an important thing to remember is that when you're first making that switch, we might start out with, 2, 3, maybe 4 max P2s on that first day. And then as that plant gets more and more into that bulking mode, it's going to drink more.
[00:55:58] Seth: So you're going to go back and [00:56:00] start adding those P2s over that next week or two and pushing it harder and harder. The flip has always got to be gentle. It's not going to happen overnight. Sometimes it can if you're on the ragged edge of plant to pot size. In which case, you know, I'm going back to looking at graphs of Hugos.
[00:56:18] Seth: A lot of times that's what we see. They're ready to go, but then now we can't go back generative at the end.
[00:56:25] Kaisha: Awesome, you guys. Thank you. We have one minute left, but we covered IPM a little bit [00:56:30] today and somebody wrote in asking for advice on cleaning between runs. If you have any advice on cleaning products, what would you recommend and what dilution?
[00:56:37] Kaisha: They're wondering when cleaning pots, trays, and floors, would you go with bleach and how much per gallon? Any insights you have just based on your experience in commercial cultivations? Good cleaning products. Bleach. What do you guys think?
[00:56:49] Seth: Bleach is great. Get good industrial grade bleach though, if you can.
[00:56:54] Seth: If you go to Walmart or your local grocery store and get bleach, that's usually a 6 percent dilution rate. And [00:57:00] you want 0. percent bleach to do a decent sanitizing job, usually leaning on the heavier end. So if I get a 6 percent bleach gallon, that's only going to make what? Six gallons total of cleaning solution.
[00:57:13] Seth: So keep that in mind when you're buying bleach It's not like doing laundry where we just put a little tiny cup full in the whole thing We actually want it to be fairly strong and then Hypochlorous acid, Sanidate, having a few different modes is always a good idea So hitting it with [00:57:30] something like bleach and then you know, well bleach at least two sanitizers and then good old elbow grease So my favorite is a pressure washer I've seen some pretty sweet setups with steam cleaners and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, these grow rooms get filled with living gunk.
[00:57:47] Seth: We get biofilm all over everything. There's dust. No amount of just spraying is really going to get rid of getting in there and scrubbing out the facility and getting in the nooks and crannies. You know, and once you start [00:58:00] dealing with different pests, you might even find you happen to have a caulk gun around and now you're in there caulking up the corners of your rooms and your expansion cracks and then starting to eliminate the spots where you find dust and organic matter buildup in your room.
[00:58:14] Seth: And then, you know, don't neglect some of those important areas. Like, you know, my rule, top to bottom, everything falls down. So I like to start cleaning at the top of the room. I like to get up there. Compressed air is always one of my great friends. Get in there with the mask on. [00:58:30] Blow out the top of the room.
[00:58:31] Seth: Wipe everything down. If you can pressure wash, that's always the best. And then do your sanitizing washes. Bleach, Sanidate, Hypochlorous. And then finally, clean your drains. perlite.
[00:58:52] Seth: You might not be paying as much attention to those as needed. That's a good connection point. So making sure you sanitize your drains and then you know, [00:59:00] probably one of the big things that I run into is contamination coming from the irrigation system. So if you can, as much as you clean that room, If your pipes right once they hit the hallway are filthy, going back to your main water supply all you're doing is injecting pathogens into that room every time you irrigate, so cleanliness all the way through and once you start finding those, always track everything back to that point of infection.
[00:59:25] Seth: But man, yeah, I can't stress enough the elbow grease. I wish there [00:59:30] was a magic bullet there fumigation that made it all better, but You gotta get the filth out. Roll up those sleeves.
[00:59:38] Jason: Yeah, I I was gonna second the pressure washer there. It's, you know, doesn't, it's a good practice to spray, scrub, and pressure wash, basically.
[00:59:47] Jason: anD one of the last steps that I like, if you can in your facility, do like a chlorine dioxide fogger. Get that room to be, have a cleaning agent atomized in there. Obviously there's some health considerations and equipment [01:00:00] maintenance stuff that you got to keep in mind. So it is to only be used in the right application.
[01:00:04] Jason: But it can make wonders as far as getting to the nooks and crannies that you can't get with a sponge.
[01:00:10] Seth: Yeah, and you know, like back to our Russet Mike comment, I gotta throw this at the Acacia, you know, once the plants are out of the room too there's this concept called a bug bomb, but basically using pyrethrins and other things that you didn't want to spray on your active buds and treating the room in the downtime, so you're getting, you know, not just sanitization, but also [01:00:30] poison for specific pests that you're targeting, but don't give up.
[01:00:34] Seth: That's the key. Go to work every day and keep it clean, you know.
[01:00:37] Kaisha: Yeah. Oh my God. You guys gave such great advice today. This is a juicy show. All right, we're going to wrap it up a little. We're running a little late, but I love it because that means we got a lot covered. Thank you, Jason, Seth, and our producer, Chris, for another great session.
[01:00:50] Kaisha: Just a quick reminder, Office Hours Live will be headed to MJBizCon. We're going to be live and direct from Booth 51005 on Thursday, November 30th, you can tap in, be there [01:01:00] live, be there in the virtual live stream, click, scan this QR code and sign up so we can keep you posted on everything that we're doing.
[01:01:06] Kaisha: And we look forward to seeing you in Vegas. Thank you all for joining us for this week's AROYA office hours. We do this every Thursday. And the best way to get answers from the experts is to join us live. To learn more about AROYA, book a demo at AROYA. io. One of our experts We'd be happy to walk you through all the ways the platform can improve your cultivation production process.
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