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Seth Baumgartner and Jason Van Leuven open the mics for your crop steering and cultivation questions.
Kaisha [00:00:03]:
What's up, grummies? Welcome to AROYA office hours, your source for free cannabis cultivation education. I'm your moderator, Kaisha, and this is episode 115. Shout out to our live viewers on Instagram and on YouTube, and to everyone tapping in on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Thank you so much for your support. And if you like the pod, please do drop us a review because we really do appreciate your feedback. Jason is holding it down solo today. Jason, how you doing?
Jason [00:00:30]:
I'm great. How are you?
Kaisha [00:00:31]:
Good. Good to see you. We're twins today, so that's a good sign. All right, well, let's kick off the show. We've got something really fun to share with our viewers today. You want to walk us through our very cool arroyo irrigation calculator?
Jason [00:00:43]:
We sure do. Special thanks to the marketing team for putting this tool together. Kind of came from spreadsheet that I've been using for a long time to help clients outline how to build out an irrigation schedule. I've done some nice things here specific to cannabis irrigations. If you can see this screen, you'll take a look at the top. It's got a few parameters that we want to set up. Meter rate. So most of us are working with either 0.3 or 0.5.
Jason [00:01:10]:
So let's just put that slider over there. I guess I could have done an overview, but with everything, it seems like I just jump right in and go from there. So, yeah, what this is doing, we're looking at p one and p two times, and we're going to get those calculated. And it's shot sizes, total phase irrigations, total daily irrigations. Those are going to be available in both milliliters and in percentage. So mostly it's just a bunch of simple math that's organized in a very usable fashion. So this is available at irrigation dash calculator, AROYA IO. I'm sure you all will toss a link in here somewhere.
Jason [00:01:50]:
Super easy for our viewers to check it out. I encourage you, give it a try, see if it's helpful for you, give us some feedback, share it with your friends. And I've already used it quite a bit myself because it's just a quick and easy way for me to help clients start to describe what they want to program into their irrigation controllers. So I'll get, I'll dive right back in. Meter rate. Yes .3 is what we're going to say as an example for this. And I have a real world client that we're going to do some calculations from. AROYA.
Jason [00:02:22]:
So if you do have AROYA, you can pretty much set up an irrigation very close to how you're going to want to tailor it. Watch those curves the next day, do some, some full feedback and either tailored up or down. If you don't have aroia, it's still a very helpful tool. In order to figure out where you should be at, go in and take some, you know, manual water content measurements, either with a handheld or a scale. Yeah. You know, and another thing here is these are all theoretical numbers. Right. So as I talked about, for full feedback, it is good practice to get this set up, what, what should be right.
Jason [00:03:02]:
And then you'll go back and monitor it, see, see if ceilings were exactly right. Obviously, if you have some clogged emitters or flow rates aren't perfect or any of that type of stuff, you might see some, some variation in the real world application of these numbers, but it gives us a great framework to start from. I gotta talk a little louder. Yes. So we've got the emitter rate set up here, 0.3 gallons per hour, emitters per plant, you know, and I'm gonna try to use some pretty, pretty common examples here as we use this. And like I said, I'm gonna build it for a real client of ours here locally. So emitter rate, 0.3 gallons, emitters per plant, two. That's pretty realistic.
Jason [00:03:43]:
And now these other sliders I'm gonna work off of to really kind of build out the percentage that I want to recover. And we'll jump into a screen here and show you kind of exactly how I like to do that. So in this case, we're looking at some data from a local greenhouse and going to use the dryback tool right here. And we're going to check out yesterday's dryback and try and prescribe what irrigation we want to do for today. Alright. So in this case, we had a pretty small dryback room average of 5.1%. So when we're making these calculations, we know that I want my total daily volume to be at least 5%. Right.
Jason [00:04:31]:
So I want to be a little bit more than what I was at. And this actually brings up another discussion that I might talk about here on the show later. And that is using percentage runoff in order to also calculate some of this stuff. So if we think of, you know, yesterday's drive back was 5%, that means today or tomorrow's irrigation, we need at least 5%. Whatever's over, that is very likely going to be runoff. And in our first calculation, we're going to just think about a generative strategy. So we're only going to do p one s. But let's jump in and we'll talk about, usually we talk about, you know, three to five minute irrigations for p one.
Jason [00:05:10]:
So I'll just set this at about 180 seconds. And we also, one of the first things we need to do is talk about our container volume. So you click on this dot, dot, dot here. And we have some very common rockwool volumes in here already for cocos and stuff. You might want to do a custom, these are all in milliliters. So just do a quick calculation. If you're using like a two gallon, for example, we're about, I think 7350 somewhere in there. I might just get the exact numbers from the Internet here, do a quick calculation.
Jason [00:05:49]:
75 70. I forgot. 75 70. So that's going to be the number of milliliters that we're looking at. All right. Immediately it's populating this as our p one shot size is about 113.4 ML. That's going to be based on our emitter rate and our emitters per plant. It gives us the shot size now that we have a container volume in there.
Jason [00:06:16]:
So that's telling us, all right, if we did one p one shot, we would expect the water content to increase about 1.5%. This stuff actually comes out pretty accurate when you're looking at sensors, if you have a really good or a decent setup irrigation system. So as we were talking about, we want our totally total daily volume to get up to, you know, a little over 5%. Right. So if we did four shots, we'd be at 5.992%. Yeah, maybe it's now a good time to talk about some runoff stuff. So kind of an industry standard, which I find difficult to use is typically when, when you look at people's drive or runoff percentages, a lot of times they're talking about the percentage of the actual irrigation amount. Right.
Jason [00:07:08]:
And for me, you know, longstanding principle, I've always just talked about runoff as a percentage of our substrate volume. Reasoning being there is that way if I do change my irrigation volume, I still know what runoff volume that I'm looking for as a percentage. Now the reason there, when I'm talking about irrigations, I'm talking about as a percentage of substrate size. So if we can stay consistent against those units, it makes all of our math a little bit easier. So I'm going to just jump back in here, we'll take a look at what that dry back was again, and I'm glad I did this because also a good practice is to think about, you know, if I irrigate it, 5.2% increase in water, I'm going to have my zone four and my zone one aren't going to get back up to field capacity. Right. Anytime we're working with a big population, we're going to have some, some variance, some deviation that really kind of makes it slightly more difficult to make these decisions. Right.
Jason [00:08:07]:
And so I might say, well, I want at least 7.1%. That means my zone four plant is going to get back up to field capacity with some none expected excess runoff. Now if we look at our lowest zone, in this case we're zoned to at 3.4%. These are really low drybacks. Not my favorite example, but we'll use it and keep running. So in that case we'd expect, you know, about 3.8%, excuse me, 3.7% as runoff. Right. So we kind of have to make some, some averages and some guesstimations.
Jason [00:08:45]:
Most of the time, I always want to make sure that my larger plants aren't being deprived. Right. We're not looking for their water content to drop. And that's where it gets to be a little bit tricky starting to manage runoff and stuff. But let's go ahead and assume we are running a generative irrigation and we need at the very least 7.1%. And this is where you can start to play around. Like I said, most of the time we recommend p one shots between three and five minutes. That's, you know, that's not like an absolute requirement.
Jason [00:09:20]:
We're just really trying to give small medium sized shots and space them out so that the media has the ability to catch up, to stabilize. Right. The capillary effect of rockwool, your cocoa, your mixed hydroponic media types to really absorb as much of that water as possible. So I'm gonna stick with 3% shots and just say let's do or, excuse me, three minute shots and that's a shot, 1.5%. And if we went for five of these as our p one, which is a great way to go, you know, we'll do one every 15 minutes. We'll just be at hour and 15 minutes for our irrigation window. Nice generative strategy. In this case, we're at 7.49% of our total volume.
Jason [00:10:07]:
That means in our highest pot here or our thirstiest pot, our plant that's drinking the most at 7.1% dry back, we'd have about 0.3% runoff. Right. And like I said, best practices to do this. Full feedback. So if we prescribe this irrigation for tomorrow, then we have some expectations of what we'll see. If our expectations aren't perfectly met, then let's kind of play around with this. We could up our p one on time just slightly. We could obviously just add another shot if we need to drop our EC and make sure that stabilizes to our feed.
Jason [00:10:47]:
You see, all of those are really good options. So that's kind of a good example of a generative implementation of this. Now, let's say we are ready to go to a vegetative bulking type of strategy. And this is where these p two options are going to come in really handy for p two s most of the time. I'm not trying to push much for runoff. I'm really just trying to, one, keep our plants a little bit higher in the water content and more importantly, stabilize where our EC is at for the day. Every time we do a p two shot, we're encouraging plant growth. We're giving the plant a response to continue building itself, basically.
Jason [00:11:27]:
Right. And so in this case, most of the time, our irrigation window, when we're talking about vegetatives, can be anywhere from six to ten hour irrigation window. Meaning what is the time from our very first p one irrigation to our very last p two irrigation? And how we can calculate how big our p two s should be. We can also use that dryback tool. So let's jump in to our program here and let's say this is a great example where we are in generative and we're going to go to vegetative, let's say tomorrow I'm going to zoom in on the chart and I'm actually going to use the dryback tool. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure what our transpiration rate is with lights on because that's when we're going to have p two s. So in this case, I'm going to shoot for about 11:00 a.m. and then I'm going to measure till about 12:00 a.m.
Jason [00:12:30]:
here. So it says I'm losing water content on an average of 0.5% an hour. Right. So if we did a p two shot, let's say every hour, then let's go in here and make a calculation where our p two shots are about 0.5%. So p two shot size. Hey, look at that. That's not so bad, right? About a minute is about 0.5%. Super nice configuration.
Jason [00:13:04]:
So let's say it took us an hour to get up to field capacity. So we've, well, hour and 15 minutes. We've ran our p one shots, and now we're going to run our p two shots for, let's say, six or 7 hours. We'll do one an hour. Since we're losing 0.5% water content an hour, we hit these shot sizes at 0.5% an hour, meaning that we should have very little runoff. But we also shouldn't see our water content decrease overall very much. And here is our prescribed vegetative irrigation strategy in this case. We know we're running these p one times, same as I did for generative, but now our p two times simply planned out.
Jason [00:13:46]:
We have our total daily volume, we have our volumes of each shot, we have our volumes of each phase, and we've our percentages of all that broken down as well. So it's super nice way to do the math. Build out an irrigation schedule. Like I said, go use it. Go enjoy. If you want more information, you can go down to this. Get a. I'm sharing the wrong tab.
Jason [00:14:12]:
Get, get a demo. See a Roy in action. If you want to learn more about our system, if you want to learn more about the calculator, fill that out. Reach out to us. Like I said, we love feedback. And I have to just give a huge shout to our marketing team for building out this calculator and giving us the tools and giving the cultivators a really nice tool, clean tool to do this. It's free. So go check.
Jason [00:14:33]:
Go check it out.
Kaisha [00:14:34]:
We couldn't have done it without you, Jason. You got the ball rolling. So thank you for the inspiration and absolutely shout out to Ross and Raymond on the marketing team for getting this going. Thank you for that walkthrough. This is what an incredibly valuable tool for people out there. I do have a question and I'm going to read it. And if it's something that we can kind of use the calculator for, let me know. This one came from Edward.
Kaisha [00:15:01]:
He writes, I use a four by four by four cube on a 36 by six by three Rockwool. Total volume of the slab is 10,500 ML. If I'm at 60% field capacity, 6300 ML, what would you consider to be 10% runoff?
Jason [00:15:19]:
Yeah. Love this question because it rolled in. You know, I don't want to steer people wrong. Like I mentioned earlier, I have a preferred way to do it which isn't as standard in the industry, as I would like to see. And I think it just kind of comes back to what was easier five years ago, ten years ago, when we were thinking about some of these standards and we weren't looking at water content lines on a computer, right. We were measuring how much volume we were applying to our substrate. And so maybe we said, all right, if I put 500 ML on and 50 ML came out of the plant, and then it's 10%, might have been a lot easier math back then. Right.
Jason [00:15:58]:
Now, if I'm looking at a chart, since that chart is in relationship to volumetric water content of the substrate itself, for me, it's easier to think about runoff as a percentage of the substrate itself. And for me, mostly it's because the less variables that I'm changing, that can be a standard percentage, right. So if one day I have 5% runoff, and I know I need to get to 10% runoff, well, if I double my irrigation volume, that's not what I want to do. That's not going to get me there, right. But if I, I add 5% irrigation volume to my, to my plants, then I am going to get 10% runoff. So it just breaks it down to, let's use the most common units and go from there. So maybe give me the question one more time. I got caught in my own head.
Kaisha [00:16:50]:
Absolutely. So we're dealing with a four by four by four cube on 36 by six by three rockwool. Total volume of the slab is 10,500. If I'm at 60% field capacity, which is 6300 ML, what would you consider to be 10% runoff?
Jason [00:17:11]:
Yeah, so it, it kind of just reiterates with what I'm going to, and that is, let's use the, the most simple, most consistent variable there, and that is the substrate volume. In a lot of times. And this, I'm going to dive into a kind of a side topic here. When we think about stacking substrates, a lot of times I just don't even calculate the top substrate when I'm considering volumetric water content or runoff percentages. And that's because a lot of times our top, our cube is just going to end up being root crown, you know, for the first, say, ten days of the plant life cycle. Sure, those roots are still active up there. They're reaching down into that slab. And by the way, great setup.
Jason [00:17:55]:
I love grown in slabs. Um, but once those plants are fully rotted into the slab, that upper substrate is going to offer a fairly minimal amount of water holding capacity, especially usable water holding capacity. For the plant, a lot of times it's just going to wick right into that slab. So let's take 10% of 10,500 and we're going to say, you know, 10% of that is going to be about a literead. So, you know, 1050 ML is going to be a 10% runoff with using my type of calculation, right. We're using some older industry standards. We can't answer that because we don't know how much volume you irrigated with case and.
Kaisha [00:18:44]:
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Thank you for that, Edward, thank you for your question. He actually had a part two, so moving away from irrigation, but I, he was also wondering what would be the ideal input ph for Rockwool?
Jason [00:18:56]:
You know, the ideal ph for Rockwool most of the time is 5.6. That's where the tip, typically all the manufacturers that I have worked with recommend a ph of 5.6 going into your rockwool and bring it bringing up kind of another side effect here with doing volumes. So, you know, a lot of manufacturers, let's start off with Rockwool because that's what we're talking about right now. You know, we think about, okay, it's a six by six by six, Hugo, for example. Well, they're, they're actually based off of metric measurement. When they're manufactured at the manufacturer, when they're manufactured at the manufacturer, when they're made at the manufacturer, they are actually cut to a metric length. And so when we think about that, Hugo, I was talking about, we call it a six by six by six because we're Americans and we like inches. And it's pretty damn easy to say six by six by six rather than six point whatever.
Jason [00:20:02]:
By whatever. It's actually not exactly 6.6 point or six by six by six. The measurements would be 15.2 by 15.2 by 14.2 cm. So when we are doing volume calculations, really the best way is to actually just measure the substrate yourself. And that way you don't have to rely on whatever resource that you're using having the exact measurement. So just measure your length, times your width, times your height. That's going to be the volume of that substrate. Seems true for cocoa.
Jason [00:20:37]:
Lots of times I've seen one gallon or two gallon cocoa bags that just aren't exactly one or two gallons. And easiest way there, just measure it out with, with your lengths times your width, times your height, and that's going to give you the volume of that substrate. Don't forget to convert units as well because obviously as I had mentioned a lot of these manufacturers we're working with using metric for quite a bit of the stuff, metrics a little bit easier to actually use, but for so many of us, we're used to using standard measurements. And so don't forget to make those changes. There's actually been a couple plane crashes in the history because people forgot to change their units. So don't kill your plants because you forgot to change units.
Kaisha [00:21:23]:
Change those units, y'all. We're not a metric country. Fantastic. Great advice, Edward, good luck. Thank you so much for those excellent questions. All right, well, the live questions have started coming in. This is a good one from Danny. He writes, I always see my runoff drift a little lower on the ph over time, except for this run, it's actually rising.
Kaisha [00:21:43]:
What would be a common cause of this? Since for the past ten plus runs, this has never happened. The only change I made was a different fertilizer that has a little more potassium. Could that be the issue? They're both cannabis specific nutrients. What do you think, Jason?
Jason [00:21:58]:
I would say if you are used to it typically dropping and you've changed nutrients and now you're seeing it rise, sounds like you've isolated your own variable. There. There are so many different variables here that can play into what happens with a ph, especially over the course of a whole run, that you know that it's hard to break down. If that's the only variable that you've changed, that's. It's very likely that that's what's causing it. Since I am sharing my screen, I might as well pull up some other resources here. All right, let's go slideshow. All right.
Jason [00:22:44]:
Yes. Basics for cultivation. Here's the resources page where I pulled most of this information for. But basically, you know what we're looking at. When PH drifts after coming out of the substrate, it's going to be due to what is the balance of anions and cations in there, right. And so we can see potassium is a cation. So it, you know, it's going to be a positively charged nutrient in there. And it's very likely if it does have higher potassium, that there's a chance it's going to affect how your ph is running.
Jason [00:23:18]:
That being said, you know how much your ph is changing, it's kind of going to dictate whether you need to make actions or not, you know, and when I see a 0.3, you know, plus or minus more than 0.3. So if I'm feeding it 5.6 and I start to see a 6.1 come out, then I try to investigate. As always, the plants are one of the best information of this. Obviously, the, the reason that we are taking ph is because we want to start checking that out as early as possible. We may not see the plants showing negative side effects of a higher ph until a week or two. After that we've detected it, so it is good to investigate it. That being said, you know, if it's, it's stabilizing there. It say, you know, I'm feeding at five six and I'm stabilized at six six one, if I'm not going to start seeing, if I don't start seeing effects in the plant, I'm not going to get super caught up with it.
Jason [00:24:17]:
Right. And I dealt with a client just last week that had this exact stuff going on where last run they saw the same phenomenon. They had excellent yield and very good THC numbers in their plants. And, and so I told them, you know, you got other things to worry about. Let's, let's just keep, keep that in the back of our mind and try to understand. All right. If we modify a variable, what, what's going to happen there? Um, yeah, you know, another thing to ask yourself is, uh, are you seeing benefits from that nutrient change? Uh, you know, are you doing some cost savings? Is it easier to mix better, um, better supply chain for it, uh, better chemo type output, better yield any of that type of stuff and, and just break it down like it says it, you know, there's so many things that could cause it to go up or down. You know, when we break it down, it break down to the simplest of anion cat on balance.
Jason [00:25:11]:
But what it could be is how is that strain feeding? Do we have a different spectrum that's causing a different amount of food in that plant? We changed irrigation schedules. That's causing higher salt buildups. Any of that type of stuff can, can cause it. You know, we change nutrient lines. Are we feeding a little bit less because it's a slightly more concentrated nutrient? All of those could end up with a difference in your ph output, but comes down to, comes down to the end product. So try and, try and realize how, how much energy do I need to put into diagnosing something but keep it documented, right. If we see it this run and your ph has been creeping up, well, if you end up running a different strain and it stays flatter, creeps down, well, then you can start to eliminate. Well, maybe it was that specific strain rather than the new nutrient line.
Kaisha [00:26:06]:
Fantastic advice. Yes. We've got some chatter here, Danny wrote. Yeah, pretty sure it's the nutrients, but I figured I'd ask. It's going up to 6.4 from 5.9. Plants look good. I'm in cocoa. Been like this for weeks.
Kaisha [00:26:20]:
So got a little, got some investigating to do over there.
Jason [00:26:23]:
Yeah, yeah, sounds, you know, another thing to think about too is what are you using for a ph modifier? Both ph down and ph up have multiple options, multiple commercially effective options on the market. And you know, some of them are more concentrated, some of them are a little bit better at keeping stabilized. Now your amounts of calcium in there are going to impact how well the substrate buffers ph. These all kind of come into play and if I. But yeah, you know, if you're happy with what you see it's been doing, you know, plus 0.5 ph climb for a few weeks and your plants are still looking great, then probably not worth losing sleep over.
Kaisha [00:27:06]:
Wonderful. Thanks for that overview, Danny. Thank you for so much for these questions. Keep us posted, take some pictures, let us know what's going on. All right, we're going to move on to our next live question here. Also from YouTube. This one came from rich. They write, is there any truth to feeding bloom newts early can trigger flowering?
Jason [00:27:25]:
Um, it's not very likely. Uh, usually what's happening is between veg and bloom noods, there's just a different balance of NPK. Um, you know, there might be some slight adjustments on, on the others. You know, there's a couple older nutrient lines out there that actually don't have veg or bloom. It's just a, you know, a two part, the whole run. Um, for cannabis, you know, we're looking. Well, other than auto flowers, hopefully that was obvious enough. But other than auto flowers, cannabis is photoperiodic.
Jason [00:27:58]:
It's not very likely to start flowering under an 18 plus hour photo period. So, um, probably not the most effective thing to do. If you did run out of veg nudes, then I guess do what you got to do or something. Um, maybe buy more veg nudes. Uh, but yeah, it's not likely going to flower because of veg nudes or because of bloom nudes during 18 hours photo period or.
Kaisha [00:28:23]:
Fantastic.
Jason [00:28:24]:
If you get really old, may or may not be strain dependent, but most of the time, no.
Kaisha [00:28:31]:
Yeah, our grummy Greg responded, flower trigger equals dry back almost to wilt. So yeah. Got some combo on that. All right, well, Rich, thank you for your question. All right, we got this right in from Cubby 204. They want to know how many plants per four foot by four foot and how tall do you get them before you flip them? Do you top them at all? Got any advice for Cubby?
Jason [00:29:00]:
Yeah. Hey, that's a very generic question that I'm going to try to hammer out. So when we don't know anything about strains or anything about the plants that we're growing, I usually shoot for, you know, 0.6 plants per square foot. And so whatever that turns into your six by six or your four by four tables. And how tall do we run plants? I personally like to run a little bit taller plants. You know, for my bigger strains, being in a four and a half to five and a half six foot plant is a nice way to go. If I have the ceiling space, obviously facility dependent. If I need to run on multi tiers and stuff, I usually, you know, push generative a little bit harder and shoot for a three and a half foot plant.
Jason [00:29:48]:
Um, topping. I'm, you know, I'm not a huge fan of cutting the top off the plant. If I am running out of vertical height space and I need to keep those things down, I'm trying to really run a sea of green strategy, something like that. I just pinch or fold those tops. You know, that. That's plant growth, that we put nutrients and time and electricity all into labor, call it labor costs, into getting that started. Um, I really don't want to cut it off and throw it away, especially if it can turn into some flowering products.
Kaisha [00:30:20]:
All right, cubby, you heard it. Good luck. All right, we just got this question in from Instagram. They're actually asking about some advice for flipping. And so they write, hey, director of cultivation here. I tried to push the one week veg, then flip 1.25 plants per square feet. Would you recommend this.
Jason [00:30:43]:
Again? It's really going to depend on some of your practices most of the time. One week is pretty quick for, for a veg. Yeah. You know, one week to ten days is some of the, some of the, what some of the best cultivators are doing with really strong ridding clones. Would I recommend it? Did I guess the easiest question to answer is, did your plants veg to your expected end of veg? Plant height? Right. And we talk about crop registration is a very important number to keep record of for sops, for crop steering. And that that's really what we're going to have to evaluate is, can I get to my plant height that I expect at the end of veg in those seven days? If not, then maybe I need to run that strain to ten days. And why is that going to be important? Well, that end of veg plant height is how we're going to stay on schedule to getting the largest mature, ready, ripe and ready to cut plant by the end of flower.
Jason [00:31:44]:
Because most of us don't have the option of saying, oh, I need to run a nine week flower instead of an eight week flower this cycle. Typically in our commercial facilities, that's just not within the options. Maybe we can push a day forward or a day back with some of that going any further than that, it's going to goof up all the rest of the scheduling that's going on there at the commercial site, labor room availability, all that types of stuff gets all messed up.
Kaisha [00:32:10]:
So tracking, he actually dropped a clarification. Let me give you this info. So it looks like they're pushing for yield, not terp, and finish at day 56 no matter what.
Jason [00:32:20]:
Yeah, you're gonna. You're cutting a tight ship there. Like seven days veg and cutting it 56. Yep. Like I said. Still, you know, trying to hit that plant height that you expect is gonna be how you can achieve the yields that you expect. Those three days of veg could, you know, cost you a lot in the end. If you're not hitting the plant size that you want at the end, it really kind of comes down to a balance as well, because when we take these numbers, it's going to be based on, you know, I like plant height at the end of edge.
Jason [00:32:51]:
And for the first few weeks of flower, excuse me. During our generative stacking, I like to have plant heights two, three times a week so that we can track are our plants responding to the generative stacking cue that we're pushing them on? And so when we see that plant height, the slope of that plant height decreases. Well, when the slope isn't increasing anymore. Right. Or we've effectively curbed the stretch, we're towards the end of the stretching period of this plant, and we know we're about ready to hit vegetative bulking. So when we take those, you know, two numbers and we look at our veg height into stretch height, and that is going to directly correlate to how much yield that we're getting out of there.
Kaisha [00:33:41]:
One more clarification. They wrote, I look at root mass more than plant height. With one week veg, it shoots up day twelve through 20 flower.
Jason [00:33:51]:
Yeah, that, that's actually a pretty good practice. Is looking at that root mass. One of the challenges there is it's much harder to quantify when we're looking at root mass. I always talk about being ready to transplant when we're between 60 and 80% root hairs covering the bottom of a Rockwell Cube. And, you know, that's kind of just a visual inspection unless you've got some, some smart camera or something that's going to be based on somebody's eyes. And so it is a little bit more tricky to implement as an SOP. But, yeah, no, you're exactly right. If you have good root development, then there's better than last time, for example, then you might have a plant that really, it really strides through our generative stacking.
Jason [00:34:44]:
Right. It might even end up, you know, getting it stretched on earlier than it should. But that being said, you know, we got to set some standard measurements here. And if you can do that with rip mass, awesome. For most of the facilities I've been into, it using, plant height is a little bit more familiar and a little bit easier to translate.
Kaisha [00:35:10]:
You rock. Thank you for that. Thank you to touchdown for dropping that scenario on Instagram. We appreciate you and good luck. Okay, we got another question here from Instagram. This person writes, day one, a flower plants are in a two gallon, but not big plants. What to do when drybacks are not even, are not that even. Some are wetter than others.
Kaisha [00:35:32]:
I hand water.
Jason [00:35:34]:
Yeah. Day one of flower in a two gallon. This is going to depend a little bit whether you have just transplanted those plants today in the two gallon or if you've been in the two gallon for a few weeks. If you know you have just transplanted them, then I wouldn't be looking at drybacks at all. I'd just be applying a fairly general roding in strategy where I give a few less than 1% shots on a daily basis just to encourage that risk growth to follow the water down into the new substrate, provide fresh nutrients, fresh oxygen. Make sure that it's just not drying out before those roots have availability or access to the full water content. Availability. If you have been transplanted for, let's say, five days in the two gallon, make sure that you do have a good rooting in process when you did do that, really, it's kind of one of the most important things to staying on schedule.
Jason [00:36:35]:
Having explosive root growth is making sure we're nothing, allowing those roots to stagnate in an overly wet environment in the substrate. And if you are day one flower, you have been in there for five days. I wouldn't worry too much about water contents not being even. Obviously, it does make it harder to standardize your irrigation practice. If you're hand watering, then, you know, you might take the time and just pick up some of those blocks around knurl around your grow room. I said, I don't know how big your grow room is. Hopefully it's, you don't have too many thousands of plants. If you are hand watering.
Jason [00:37:13]:
And see, is it, you know, is it related specifically to the plant? Some of these are heavier than others. Is it related to maybe who is watering in a section of the garden? Maybe they're a little bit heavier waters. I was just talking to a client today that was hand watering, and they do a pretty good job of it. But when we think about, all right, maybe I hold the wand on the plant for 10 seconds. Maybe I got bigger substrate, hold the one on the plant for 10 seconds. Well, if. If I count too fast, I might have done 9 seconds. Well, if I count too slow, uh, or, excuse me, if I count too fast, I've done 11 seconds, you know, 1234, I had eleven, uh, if I count too slow, I might be at 9 seconds.
Jason [00:37:55]:
Well, that difference is 20% of your irrigation volume difference. And so when we have such high flow rates, like withdev hand watering, it makes it really, really difficult to be consistent or uniform across every single plant. So if you are looking to correct it in your hand watering, then just pick up the plant real quick before you hand water it and make a mental note. Well, I need to irrigate it a little bit more, a little bit less than the next one. However, typically through the first couple weeks of flower, some of those plants are going to start to stabilize things. Look, slower plants catch up to faster plants. They have a tendency to kind of become a little bit more uniform in the first couple weeks of flower. That's what I got.
Kaisha [00:38:46]:
That's great. Super helpful. Thank you so much for that. To our grow me on instagram and drop that question. All right, we got this one in. This is a really good one. And we're going to wrap up a little bit early, folks, but not before. I have a couple announcements.
Kaisha [00:39:00]:
So we're going to make this our last question today. But someone writes, what indicates that the plant is rooted enough? Is there visual? Is there visually something? Or is it how long the plants dry at full saturation?
Jason [00:39:13]:
Yes, both. So what we're doing when we're talking about a rooting in process is we're watching the dry back rate, if you will. Right. And so if we do have a good system for looking at water contents in the substrate. We'll notice that every day of rooting in, we're losing slightly more water than the day before. Right. That that plant's getting access to it as it's growing up, it's transpiring more, it's able to pull more out of that substrate that we're monitoring. And so, you know, maybe let's use our earlier example.
Jason [00:39:48]:
I measured that we were losing 0.5% water content an hour during photo period on. Right. Well, if we're in the rooting in process, the next day, we might be at, .6 and the day after that, 0.7, the day after that, 0.8. Right. If I really want to know, you know, I'll just peek into the substrate if I want to know. Hey, have I fully rooted in. Well, regardless of even looking at my, my moisture content curves. And honestly, when I'm helping people, I do just spec, help specific water contents to say, okay, when you hit that, let's just assume that you've done a good job rooting in.
Jason [00:40:26]:
Right. But if you, if you don't have access to that information, then, yeah, just, you know, pull up the skirt on your media and take a look. Do you see some ruts poking out if you got mesh sided cocoa bags? Super easy. Do we start to see some of, some of those hairs protruding, becoming air pruned right on the side of the substrate? If you're in a rock wool slab, still pretty easy. You know, just poke, poke your head in or poke your eyeball into the slit on the media. If you're in a hugo block, just pull the plastic away a little bit. If you're in a cocoa plastic bag, you know, one of those not, not translucent bags, you can feel it. That substrate is going to start to stick together pretty well when we've become fully rooted.
Jason [00:41:16]:
You know, you can stick your hand in there. Sometimes you can pull on the stem just a tad bit. And that's actually one of the easy indicators. If you're like a four by four on a slab, for example, that four x four should be concreted to the slab. When we're talking about fully read it in, there's any movement between that four by four and the slab. You're not fully ready yet.
Kaisha [00:41:41]:
Fantastic. Those are great indicators. Wonderful. Y'all dropped some great questions today. We really appreciate you. Before we wrap up today, I got a couple, couple of really fun announcements. So we're going to be at hall of Flowers in Santa Rosa next week. You're going to want to check us out at booth a.
Kaisha [00:41:55]:
427. Meet the team. Me and jason will be there, but not just us. We got some more of the team members coming. Come by, learn about what we do, and just say hi. Use code arroyo 50. That's aurora 50. You can save 50% off your festival day tickets.
Kaisha [00:42:10]:
Head over to hallowflowers.com for more information and for tickets. And then the second thing is, we don't want to leave the east coast out. We're going to be on the east coast, too. Our client success manager, Noah, is going to be at free seed day Connect new England on September 22 in Massachusetts. This is a free event. You just got an RSVP and then you got to show up. So we are going to drop that link in the chat. We would love to see you.
Kaisha [00:42:34]:
Come by, take some pictures, tag us if you see us. And, yeah, we're really excited to see everybody. Anything you want to say before we wrap up today, Jason?
Jason [00:42:43]:
Have a great day.
Kaisha [00:42:45]:
Yeah. All right. Use that irrigation calculator, y'all. Send us some feedback, all right? And with that, thank you so much, Jason and producer Chris, for another great session. And thanks to all of you for joining us for this week's AROYA office hours. 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. Email us at salesroya IO.
Kaisha [00:43:12]:
Send us a DM. We're on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and we definitely want to hear from you. And if you're a fan of the pod, please do leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We appreciate the feedback. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. Thanks, y'all. We'll see you. Episode 116.
Kaisha [00:43:32]:
Bye.