![[AUDIO Only] Office Hours LIVE Ep. 40: Coco, Feed EC, Mold, Hardware, Plant Pot Proportion and more! - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/podcast/artwork/9vAcwW2l)
Hello. Hello. It's Thursday, 4:20 PM Eastern. That means it's time for office hours, AROYA weekly session for cultivators to hear from the experts and talk to each other about what they're seeing with their grows. My name is Mandy and I'll be covering for our lovely Kaisha today. She's representing AROYA out at MJ Unpacked. So if you're out at Vegas at that event, be sure you connect with her. We're also gonna be out out at a couple of conventions coming up, like Hall of Flowers and MJ Bizcon.
It's super exciting to be a part of such an industry that's growing so fast. So today we're actually here for episode 40, so we're over live on YouTube. So make sure you post your questions for me and I'll make sure I get those to the guys. If you're live with this here and you have a question, you can type it in the chat at any time. If we do choose you, you can go ahead and ask your question or I can ask it for you. But today we're here with Seth and Jason live and on the air.
Hey, what's up guys?
Hey. Hey, Mandy. Hey.
Good to see you. How's your week going?
Good. Yeah, it's it's pretty nice outside here. We finally got a little rain.
Nice. All right. Little turn of the seasons happening soon over there. That's awesome. Love to hear about it getting some more people joining us. Welcome. Welcome. Hi, Laura. Well, yeah we had a couple of questions come in over the week and we had a bunch from Instagram last week. So, you guys have any other messages before we just jump right into the crop during questions?
Let's get started. Yeah.
I love, I love the game faces. Let's go you guys. Alright. Our first question came in from Rich over on Instagram. This week. He wrote, I'm looking into getting a tent to store my mom's. I also plan to use it for root cuttings and to veg out. Do you have any advice before I get
started? Make sure you've got some airflow in the tent is definitely one of the starting places. Make sure your lights aren't overheating the tent. So sometimes, you know, just a good exhaust fan as well as new exchange fan either or mixing fans in there. That's probably gonna be the number one things. Other than that, it's just like having a little sealed silver room for that stuff. And it's a great idea to kind of keep contamination down from from your mom's, your
little cuttings. Yeah. And you know, just remember like if your veg plants in there, you don't have any separation between your moms, your cuttings and your veg. So, if for instance, your mom's get any kind of pests in them, your gonna have some problems with your clones and your veg too. So in an ideal world, you might want three tents for that kind of purpose.
And then the other thing is just I was like to remind people, you know, as far as contamination goes, never go backwards in the life cycle. If you go in and water your moms and check your clones and do your veg watering in the morning, don't go back in there after you check your flower room. You know, simple protocols to help keep your place clean, go a lot farther than trying to spend a lot of money on technology to do that.
Awesome. Thanks guys. We had another question come in from our friends over at River City Growers they wanna know Aqua Lab aside. What's your favorite method for measuring dried or cured finished product?
Aqua
Lab. Well, when measuring it, I like to use a scale personally. Aside from that, I mean, you can really get pretty scientific and try to dry it down to almost absolute zero, weigh the difference. That's gonna be pretty destructive on your, your product though. So outside of Aqua Lab, the snap and the smoke test, I guess is what I always went with.
Yeah, and I mean, I hate to mention it, but some people have used wood moisture sensors. I, I mean an application. That's probably better than not doing anything at all. I don't know how many steps better it is, but yeah, my, my favorite and probably just because I have got access to it, is in Aqua Lab. If you are processing lots of product, then it's definitely a, a good route go to ensure that you're, you're not losing, you know, 1%, 2% over thousands of pounds of product.
And another thing that I always really liked about it that has been a big selling point is the fact that quite a few of your labs that do your COAs are using an aqua lab. So if you use that Aqua Lab, you know that your product should get the same results by the time it gets to them. If it doesn't, you know, just make sure that that the packaging going out the door to get COAs is, is good to keep that product fresh.
Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. I just wanna touch on that too and just say, you know, there's quite a few people I work with that haven't, you know, they haven't taken that step to in the Aqua, the Aqua Lab yet. That's an eventual scale out plan. One thing that has really helped them though, is getting as much monitoring equipment as they can afford into their dry room and then investing in their dehumidification capability and the rest of their HVAC to make sure that their dry room's consistent.
So even outside of water activity, one place a lot of people are starting when chasing that is how well is my dry room controlled? Are we, you know, looking at seasonal fluctuations that we have to deal with? We don't have it sealed off well enough from the outside. That, that is just a big thing too. Getting your processes refined so that if you can hit the point where you're competent, that your quality is very, very close without equipment, you're at least having consistency in your process.
And that's even with the equipment, that's what we're gonna be refining, right? So look at it at all angles. It's not just to having an aqua lab or a moisture content meter. It's also saying, Okay, can I, can I handle those first few days when the plants are really wet and we're dragging down? And can I do that without drying it down too fast and creating kind of a hard outer crest.
So, you know, just focus on as much data as you can and then attacking the problems you can see before, assuming that you need to always spend as much money as you can and get, you don't always need the most expensive tool to view the problem. You might need it to really, really define it and really get down to it, but you can do a lot without it.
Yeah, that's a, that's a great point. Actually just earlier this week I was working with a guy refining some HVAC systems to the place and he was very thankful for absolute humidity reading that we have in the array system. And if you're trying to spec out how much more dehumidification capacity you need absolute humidity is a fantastic tool for understanding the capacity of new D Hs.
Yeah, we can actually figure out how many pints we need, although then you're gonna wish everything was rated a metric after that . Yeah.
Awesome. Thanks guys. We had a question come in over let's see on Instagram today too. Bki Genetics wants to know I'm only running four lights, but looking to maximize my yields with my space. I'm excited to introduce the tariffs 12 into my next run. Is there anything on our website where I can get a guide or how to feed and what to look for to steer either way?
I don't know if we specifically have that. I know in our user manuals and their onboarding guides for AROYA clients, we do provide kind of an outline there. If, you know, you want some, some somewhere to start that explains that kind of thing. So you could check out like one of the floor Flex expert Instagram sites, maybe download some groan white papers. Those are the places that I would start for online
resources. Yeah, I'll definitely kinda expand it. So Flora Flex Tech support is actually like, that's kinda one of the lead ones. They've got a lot of great guides on how to do it without necessarily having access to the equipment. One thing you do need to understand though is there's certain limitations without having that monitoring equipment. So like with the tariffs, with just the tariffs 12 and the sous application. You can have some pretty decent success with success with that small room.
So long as you can really nail down that consistency in there. And then, you know, the next le level is like, okay, how often are you there to take those readings? If you can get a reading every hour, we're gonna have a lot greater control than if you can get a reading twice a day, for instance. So you can't accomplish quite a lot. Yeah, and, you know, just kinda look out there. There's, there's a lot of good information and you know, a lot of it comes from sources you, you might not expect.
Like the groin, white papers are a great resource. You can go to their website, sign up, read about crop steering in other crops, and start to learn some of the fundamentals behind, you know, What does this irrigation strategy do to plants? And then, you know, the more you understand about that, and if you're very passionate about the cannabis plant in our different phases of growth, you can kind of start to put together, Okay, here's why we are steering generatively during this time period.
Stretch. Here's why we're bulking when we're bulking, and here's why we're ripening when we're ripening.
Yeah. You know, if you plan to you know, get bigger than that at some point, you know, you right in a production facility or you know, a hundred lights or something like that size, then I definitely like the university extensions as well. Many of 'em have greenhouse manuals that they provide to their students that are enrolled in those programs. Download 'em and, you know, start to just dive into the science behind cultivation. I found that really helped me out when I began cultivating.
Yeah. You know, if you, you can read a, a set of irrigation instructions over and over and over, and if you aren't looking at what kind of physiological changes and morphological changes we're producing with the plant, then you, you're kind of just waiting to see what happens. Right. You know, it's, it's kind of in, in, when you're in business. Trial and error experimentation is really, really expensive. We all know that.
I will add to that though, if you are, you know, working off of a caregiver model or some legal cultivation, definitely hit up our sales there. You might be surprised with some of the people we're able to help out as long as they have the proper licensing in their area. Great. So
there's a couple of different ways you can approach looking for resources, but it's all about kind of having an understanding of horticulture Yeah. And the science behind it. Mm-hmm. . Awesome. Thank you guys for that. We did have a question come in over on YouTube. Gabe wants to know, will the open sprinkler integration be able to operate through Xtra as well?
No, not, no. No current plans for that. Yep.
Okay. Awesome. Thank you guys for that. We had some more come in on Instagram. Okay. So we had a user ask about different thyroids the infectious entities that affects plants. They're asking about do we know all of all 15 of them that typically affect cannabis plants. Do you guys wanna talk about some of them? Some of the most detrimental ones that you guys have seen?
Yeah, I mean, so probably way more than any other thyroid that we hear about top blant. And you know, over the last few years it's definitely been fairly destructive on some crops. The fact that it's, it does take a lab to verify that it is hop latent. Typically you'll see some plants being gutted and not all plants are symptomatic, even if they are infected. And so it's, it's a tough one.
Definitely worth worth getting your mom's tested before you make large number of cuts and being very diligent with cleaning. Deer cutting tools.
Yeah. You know, full fore foreclosure. I'm not a certified or licensed or . I have some plant pathology education, but I can't rattle off 15 s for you off the top of my head. At the end of the day though, when we're talking about production systems, you know, we, we have a certain limit to how we can treat different things, right? Like, if you've got hop latent, what are we looking at doing? Well, hopefully putting something into tissue culture and completely ning the facility.
So at the end of the day, you gotta look at, okay, how much is it to you know, Combat this vi, this vade. And what does it take? Well, at the end of the day, it takes cleaning out the facility. It also takes that tissue culture clean up, which is difficult cost and time consuming. Can it be worth it? Absolutely. But then going on from that, you know, the more important thing with VIS is to look back and say, Okay, where did it come from? How did I get it?
You know, I mean, before we started to see hops late, you know, one of the bigger ones was bringing in mites or root aphids or, you know, all the results of bringing a potted teen into your facility from another facility. Well, the same's true of the virus. And at the end of the day, we can explore each of those thyroids. But, you know, cleanliness and avoiding exposure is really the only way to keep him outta your. Good notes
for people out there who are looking to avoid those. We had a bunch of questions come in over on YouTube in just a minute. So Jason wants to know, Huh? Another Jason out there. Hey, AROYA team. I'm the DC for a license producer in South Africa. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on pollination prevention and high temp in greenhouses and how can I get AROYA hardware?
Yeah, let's start off with the AROYA hardware. I not positive we can sell in South Africa right now. I think I'd, I'd have to check with our team and some of the licensing on our radio for those devices. We'd love to get you some systems. So, you know, call our sales team and, or I can check on check on if that's an area we can sell to as far as reducing pollination. We'll start off with that one. We'll talk about high temps ways to combat that in a greenhouse.
So my favorite way of Avoiding pollination is pressure positive greenhouses. So in a lot of greenhouses that we see, traditionally older school designs, they will have exhaust fans. So this is going to create a negative pressure box. That's what's pulling the air through the, the intake. A lot of times that's a pad. And so if we actually run pressurizing fans, then we're not creating a vacuum.
So any of the leaks in our greenhouse, if we are negative pressure, they're gonna pull in things like pollen, pasts you know, dust, any of that type of stuff. And a lot of the newer greenhouses, especially high tech ones, we're running positive pressure in there. So that's my favorite way of waiting. Pollination. What, what are your thoughts there?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I completely agree. Treat your greenhouse like a flow hood. You know, pollen can't move upstream in airflow. So if we have airflow pressurizing the greenhouse, we're also not only, you know, Pushing air out of, you know, the bigger or offices or vents and everything, but even the small parts that are really difficult to seal up. And that can not only help with pollen, but things like threats and mights and other stuff that's trying to crawl in from the outside, you know?
And then the other side of that I think is starting to identify, you know, where do your pollination problems come from? Are you within a mile of a, a traditional hops field? Are you really close to a bunch of outdoor grows? In my experience and maybe this is personal, you know, I found that when I had pollination issues in the greenhouse, usually that was from hering plants.
And unfortunately, I would find that if I was grown, say seven different strains in there, some of 'em might, you know, throw a. There any kind of herma trait statements at different times. So I might have some that like to do it early. So then, Alright, well I'm seeing some pollination in some part of the greenhouse around week five, but then I've got other ones that drop it week seven and then I don't really see like full seed formation.
I see little seedlets that are, you know, don't even have a developed embryo in 'em yet. So really look around and see, you know, is it outside or is it happening inside? And especially sometimes when it happens early and without a lot of prevalence with those hering plants, we can see a lot of seeds deep inside the bud that get set before we enter bulking. So really, I mean, yeah, there's some good tips to avoid it.
One of the better ones though, is really trying to figure out exactly the source of that pollen. You know, it's kind of like we talk about hops laton just recently, well, if you can guess it came from hops because here in the northwest we have a few regions that are really good for growing hops and happen to have a lot of people that wanna grow cannabis there. So you add in, you know, the recent push over the last decade to establish hemp agriculture.
And we have a few lo locations in the Northwest that are just a perfect environment for that. And then at breeding and the traffic of clones and the lack of certification regulation for the clone industry right now. And now you kind of get to where we're at, so, always try to find the base of your problems. Yeah.
And I think we can lead into his next question here is obviously to help reduce any her mathematic trades, you can decrease some of the, the stressor points or beyond stressor points of your plants. So one of those would be heat in In a greenhouse, and I'd imagine down over in, in South Africa, that is a real concern a lot of, lot of portions of the year. So, couple ways to, to deal with that. And we probably just talk about the, you know, the typical equipment ways cable vents.
If you've got riffs that can pop open, that's gonna naturally allow the hot air that's rising to escape. So rather than just being a vertically exhausted greenhouse or a vertically or excuse me, horizontally, exhausted greenhouse or horizontally pressurized greenhouse, you can run those, those fence. If you are positive pressurized, which is awesome, typically you'll see less gradient from front to back of the greenhouse.
You may not even have a front or the back of the greenhouse like you would with a, a horizontally exhausted greenhouse. So make sure that you've got nice cold water in your pad pumps. If you've got well water, that's ideal. One of the things that I did try when we got, we got beyond our cooling capacity was actually put ice in the pad pump. And that made a pretty significant difference on a day to day basis.
Not probably what you want to do, but you know, if you run practical to two or three days in a row that are, are way beyond what you can handle, give it a shot.
Even getting a water chill in there in there can help a lot, honestly, especially if you've got a good return rate, you're not evaporating too much. But you said though, water quality's key. If we're pushing a lot of hard water through our pad vent, that means we're gonna have to clean it a lot. And also from personal experience, if you do have hard water, don't turn off your pad. Vent through that run. , all that scale's gonna shoot outta the pad. Vent all over your crop.
Blackout. I, when I did programming on some local greenhouses, we, I would basically have a high heat setting. So it was through a flag. And when I got, you know, 15 degrees over my set point, I would basically go into an emergency heat standpoint. And what I'd do is end up closing the blackout a certain amount, right? So, sure I'm jeopardizing some of that free light that I could be getting, but when my heat's going that far up, at that point, I'm just trying to, to salvage plant health.
And so I know I'd close it like 25% if I was 15 degrees above that point. Go to 50% if I was 20 degrees over set point or all the way. Those probably aren't the exact numbers that I used, but just trying to evaluate, hey, how much can I sacrifice in order to, to keep that temperature down? And obviously a lot of good blackouts are, are silver on the top side. And they'll help just reflect any of that, that solar radiation coming through.
If you do have the roof, you know, and a reflective blackout, it's gonna play a huge factor in, in keeping the, the lower portions of it. Cool. If you have hydraulic bench heaters, a lot of times you can actually run that cool water through the hydraulic system and keep your root zone even cooler as well, and that, that can play a pretty big factor, especially if you can't keep the air
temperature down. Yeah. You know, and one thing I always find myself reminding cannabis growers about is, especially when you get in the greenhouse, utilize, I mean, we always talk about plant empowerment as being a good resource. There's several other resources about greenhouse growing and.
Well, I mean, there's a whole series of textbooks, , not, not one series, but several that have been written over the years that talk about how we can calculate airflow needs, humidity needs, and how, you know, greenhouse designs. So it doesn't matter what we're growing in the greenhouse, if we have X amount of humidity and X amount of heat to get rid of. Those are calculatable things, especially when we know some of the environmental conditions.
So if you look into that a little further, you can really start to analyze for yourself, like, Hey, here's my, here's what I'm stuck with. Now. I'm seeing way too high bpd, way too high heat. Based on these changes I'd wanna make, which one might be the most effective based on movement of BTUs based on, you know, gaining or losing humidity in there? What do we want to achieve? And that's probably the best way to go about it, to be honest.
Just try to learn as much as you can about greenhouse design. That way you're not throwing money at a problem that. You don't have quantified, you don't know how much money it's gonna take, start there and then go forward, You know? And then the other thing too it's gonna sound low tech, but hey, if your heat is way up and you just can't keep your vpd under control we're, we're just joking about this before the show actually sounds low tech. Get out there at the hose and hose down the floor.
You know, if you got a big concrete pad in there, get it wet a few times a day. Unfortunately, to keep your vpd in check at 90, 95 degrees, we need like 80% humidity. So, you know, just follow your vpd chart and start to make decisions based on that.
Wow. Thank you guys. That was super educational. We had about five questions come in in that time, so, and a couple of shoutouts Mista says, thanks for the reply. We'll be in contact for sure. We have a question from Grateful. Have you ever seen or used scales under rockwool to determine drive back percentage and shot scheduling?
Sure. So let's talk about load cells a little bit. In Dr. Greenhouses, you'll see 'em all over the place. People that are running, you know, the high, high bay greenhouses doing cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, you know, they'll be running 15 foot high plants. They'll be running the entire bench on load cells to evaluate water usage. So, on a really large scale, that load cells are a great way to do it.
When we go to evaluate our sensors or do new sensor design, we're always cross-referencing it with, with the scale in order to, to get those, those dry downs and stuff. So, In, Yeah, in application. It's fantastic. When it comes down to deploying those type of sensors, it can be a little bit trickier. Obviously the cost of doing a, a load cell setup in a greenhouse is it's pretty tough.
There's, it's, it's a lot of money that's going into there, and if you're looking to retrofit, almost never pays off. And that's where we see the effectiveness of wireless sensor. Like the Terras 12 is, anybody can get that purchased, you know, if they're in a 5,000 square foot greenhouse or indoor, if they're in a hundred thousand square foot, they can have that system up in a day without any engineering. You know, any saws, any any construction workers revamp in that place.
So if you, if you've got 'em, absolutely take advantage of 'em. You know, as far as the principles. Pretty much the same evaluating water content. You know, another advantage that TRA 12 s do have is you get temperature and electrical connectivity in those substrates so that obviously you'd have to evaluate somehow else if you are using load cells.
Yeah, and you know that, I think you nailed it there. It's really an implementation problem that using wireless technology overcomes here. You know, if, if, how many load cells would you need out there? If you had one per hundred square foot, that would be so many load cells in a given facility and the cost is gonna be so much greater. But currently, right now, where they come in handy, honestly, is cloning. So where your dry rock will slab, wet it up. Weigh it.
And then now, you know, every gram is a milliliter of water. We can figure out how much water those clones are pulling out. We can watch 'em getting lighter. We can watch 'em not getting lighter. That's, that's kind of at this point where scales and load cells come in. The other thing is you know, over the years looking at it, if we, we've gotta correct our measurement on a load cell because we're building weight in the plant above it.
So at the end of the day, it is a really cool measurement, but all we can really look at is the difference between right after we water. And then later in the day and always know that we have a little bit of inaccuracy because we have a changing by the minute weight above the pot.
Yeah, that's, that's what I was gonna mention as well as you know, the high tech growers that have used them in traditional horticulture, they have biomass accumulation models in which that they're using to offset that load cell. Unless you really wanna dig into the science of it and you know how fast your plants grow as far as their, their carbon buildup, then it's gonna be quite a bit of work to get there.
If you're running a new genetic you know, when you're dele, these are all weight attributes that are gonna adjust the, the load cell and, and you're gonna have to account for those when you're using it for water content if you want.
Yeah. And, and I mean, a way I like to look at it too is you know, using the load cells can kind of go back, you could compare it to trade to calculate total transpiration across the greenhouse based on, you know, leaf surfaces, bpd, and approximately leaf area index. Well, I know my leaf area index is gonna be a very, very rough estimation. In fact, I'd just say it's a guesstimation because it's gonna be wildly inaccurate.
So I know if I'm calculating transpiration rates and water usage that way, I'm gonna be. Looking at pretty wide averages isn't something that's very approximate, and that's kind of the same way we look at that load cell, unless you spend the time and money to take it to that next level. And right now, most cannabis producers are too busy trying to make money.
I, I will say, your, your time is better spent building your business and making sure it's gonna be there next year and the year after than it is pursuing expensive research in your little fac in your not little, but any particular facility right now. It's, it's just expensive. You know, don't, don't take chances unless you're willing to throw your weed away. That's kind of the way to look at it. Well,
when you put it that way, it's an easy decision. Thank you guys for those questions that are coming in over on YouTube. We did have a couple more. John wants to know my new stock is in Pure Coco this next run. As for your advice, since there's a ready to roll you said recently it takes longer for full spectrum l e d to rip in. Can you gimme like a ballpark?
Not, not confidently without knowing genetics and environment and light intensity at that canopy. I, you know, maybe if, you know, you're riping it over seven days, you might see 10 to 12 days of ripening, but it's gonna be quite genetic dependent. You know, when we look at that, that spectrum change, it's, it's affecting different different chemicals in there, right? So when we look at Cyros, cryptos those are secondary tabloids.
And the concentration of those is, is widely different from cultivar to cultivar. And typically those are the ones that are modifying how quickly we
ripen up. Yep. And I, I wish I'd prepared some pictures for this question. I have seen many, many examples of growers that have both i d and L E D rooms. Typically they're running a little bit longer, sometimes in that four to five day range. Some strains I actually get quicker under their LEDs with full spectrum. Like Jason said, it's genetically, it's really hard to make that or tell you for what you're growing, what's gonna happen.
But back to the pictures just because of the spectrum and type of radiation that's hitting those buds and that plant in general throughout its life, a lot of plants will look morphologically different under an L E D versus an a, an hps. So like, and what I mean by that is when we look up the L e D might just have a little bit different shape. We might have a taller bud with the i d in a shorter fatter bud with the L E d, we might have a little slightly different color.
We might have a little darker green with the i d versus the L E D or vice versa. So there's a lot of little differences to look at. And then even when we get into the world of LEDs, . You know, do we have a far red supplementation? Do we have UV supplementation? There's a lot of factors in that spectrum that are gonna influence that.
And this, this is a really fun area of study. Yeah, for me, because traditional and agriculture, there hasn't been a ton of energy spent in the sciences of was photo morphogenesis. And that would be talking about how plants, physiology changes over time in respect to The light. Mm-hmm. , and that can be light intensity, like be intensity combined with spectrum as well.
So really neat things that we're seeing especially moving to LEDs and we see some LED manufacturers doing adjustable spectrum and their LEDs as well. So if you are using adjustable spectrum, probably good to start doing some AB testing on rooms and, you know, playing with the, the blues maybe earlier on. And then playing with some, some infrared to see if you can't trim down your right time.
Yeah. Then make sure you know, I mean, back to any kind of experimentation, make sure you document it properly, you know, if you're gonna be playing with that document. Every change you've. At every time. And then also, you know, we're talking about the effects of light spectrum on plants. Go back to it. We've gotta look at that holistic run.
So if I just change the spectrum for two weeks in the middle of the run and I wanna call that a difference, or one week or two days, I really need an extended period of time for that to actually morphologically change the plant.
Awesome. All super important things to keep in mind. John, I hope that answered your question. Yeah. Follow up with any other questions you have. Just for asks, what pH ranges have you guys found most successful in rockwool?
5.6.
Yeah. 5.6. 5.7. 5.8. 5.9. Usually right at 5.6. Going in though, cuz you don't have quite as much variability as you would say co.
Yeah. I'll add one caveat on that. When we are wedding up a rockwool that has a surfactant in it, a wedding agent, then sometimes we'll actually wanna go just slightly lower because typically those surfactants are more basic. And so if I'm, we up rockwool for the first time, a lot of times I'll go in it like five four just to make sure that I am dissolving the that wedding agent out of the product. And then I'll be at that, that standard 5, 6, 5 7 after the the we shop.
Yeah. You know, a good rule of thumb for rockwool or Coco is VDC feed pH, that's what you're, what we're typically going in at. And then if we test runoff, test the plant, like coco for instance, if we've got something that's super salty , well you might wanna rinse it out a few times per the instructions, test it to make sure it's good.
And yeah, at the end of the day, I think best practice is always when you've got either an old or new media, wet it up with the solution you're gonna use, test it, make sure it's sitting where you want it to sit. Try to get a little runoff, make sure you don't have anything that you don't wanna be planting in. You know, that's just best safety practice for your plants.
Awesome. Thanks guys. Laura had a question. Laura, do you wanna ask your question? Sure. Hey guys, I'm just curious to know what exactly Coco is made.
Coco Courier is made out of coconut husk and it is crushed and shredded and then it's washed and dried and sometimes it's compressed into blocks so that it stores and ships well.
Yeah, it's a, it's actually a byproduct of the general coconut industry that has been around ever since. They started stripping coconuts can and sending 'em over and sending 'em overseas, so pretty neat.
Awesome. Thanks. Super neat. Thanks, . Thank you. Yeah, learning, learning things every day. Back to some of our Instagram questions cuz we have a ton. This is a little bit longer, so bear with me. What's the easiest way to raise your substrate ec while generative steering? So I use smaller shot sizes. So do I use smaller shot sizes or do I lower the frequency of irrigation events? During my P one, I'm currently doing ten four percent shots until I hit Mac saturation.
And then sometimes I'll add a couple of maintenance shots so I don't dry back too hard. I'm using six inch Hugo Blocks. It's been difficult to get my EC up past two yeah, 2.0. I'm also wondering if my sensors aren't working properly. It's another system that I won't mention here. . Jason: So , yeah, we, we won't mention that. Part, either. Well, I
don't think we have to discredit them with this one though, . Jason: So a couple things. I mean, the easiest answer, if everything else was right in, in track, then reducing runoff would be, that's, that's the easy answer. Couple things going on here, though. So we're really glad that you included the details.
You know, if you're running in a six by six Hugo and you have to do the maintenance shots then it's gonna be tricky to do some of that, you know, reduce and runoff and, and keeping your ec stacking. So if your plants are big enough, you might just consider going in a little bit larger media you know, possibly into some slabs and and or run like an eight by if you don't like slabs for some reason. I personally love slab.
Yeah, so those, I guess those would be kind of the, the more advanced solutions to it. And then also look at your cdc. If you're feeding too low, those plants are gonna be eaten up the nutrients and they won't stack. Right. And so, you know, if you're going in anywhere under say, two and a half with a two part salt, then you're probably just running outta nutrients, and that's why it's not building.
Yeah. And you know, I mean, one really important factor when you're trying to dial all this in, especially these shots, and look at like, okay, how much, how much runoff can I push and look at, you know, what my EC is doing after that? Right now it sounds like there's a good chance that a lot of the time, especially with the maintenance shots, like Jason mentioned, you're just washing back to your CDCC basically.
And another thing to consider too is if you are trying to stack it up, you're, you can't keep up with it. We didn't come out of veg with a high enough ec. Sometimes we gotta up that vdc, you know, upping from a 2.5 to a 3.0 is a good place to start if that's where you're at, which is where, you know, the highest, a lot of traditional mixes will come in. Even going up to a 3.5 or a four sometimes is necessary. If we've got a plant that just cannot stack ec, but we always wanna balance that.
We always need some runoff. So, yeah, modulating runoff is typically the way we, we stack EC on the AROYA program.
Great. Thanks for that advice. Jason also over on YouTube has another question. What's your strategy for plant Dr. For plant not drying evenly in our greenhouses? Overate the slow feeders or underwater, the strong plant, the stronger plants. Thanks for any information you have.
Process review and understand what's resulting in those inconsistencies is where, where I like to go with it. Obviously prevention is ideal, so if there's places in your cutting processes that you think you can improve, if you need to tear out your drip emitters because they're clogged and not run any any TOC based additives in the future.
Those, those are definitely things, you know, making sure you got enough pressure so that those PCMs are operating appropriately across all of the, the plants. So my first step personally would be just to review why we're running into those inconsistencies. And then obviously if I had to energy left leftover from that, maybe I would, I would try to compensate with, with what we're dealing with,
right? Yeah. So I mean, a few things there. You know, number one, we gotta go find those. We gotta establish, do we have a micro climate problem in, in this facility or do we have a irrigation problem? So number one, if we've established that the irrigation works, it's consistent. Alright. You know, number two processes. Alright, we, you know, how are the plants coming out of veg? Do we actually have consistency? But you did say one thing that tipped me off, which is greenhouse.
Now a lot of cannabis greenhouse houses that I've seen, you know, some of 'em are changing that, but typically I have a longitudinal airflow, which means we have a pretty big gradient from where the air enters the room and where it exits. The other side of this is the trend in horticulture in general, especially pre cannabis, which is carried into cannabis, is to install your benches. Parallel to that longitudinal flow rather than perpendicular.
And what that means is now we have irrigation zones that are running a longitudinal differential across them. So we have a zone where one end is drying out faster than the other. Effectively. It doesn't sound exciting, but sometimes in those situations you know, ideally we'd re reorganize the room so our zoning was correct. Well, sometimes we've already invested all this money into this bench layout and stuff. What's the next option? More zones. Buy more solenoid.
Zone it off so you can, you know, be more precise with your irrigation application and treat those parts of the room that you know you're having problems with. But it, but it really all starts, like Jason said, foundationally, look at your processes, look at your greenhouse and actually isolate that problem. Cuz again, if we have a big differential and we put in the most consistent crop, but it's all in one irrigation zone, then our, our ability to treat any one plan is kind of out the window.
Yeah, I I did a video just on kind of the statistical basis of population data, and so go check it out on our YouTube channel. I think it's called Growth Behavior or something like that. And it might give you a couple ideas on how to identify those issues. So obviously if you do see a very clear gradient, like Seth's talking about it is probably climate related. If the consistency is spotty based, then it's probably more likely irrigation or plant consistency based.
Yep, that's a good point. And then we're looking at that too. You know, remember we're always, we don't have a sensor on every plant. We don't have a valve for every plant. So at the end of the day, we're always playing a game of averages and working on a range for every, every parameter we're looking at. The best we can do is try to equip ourselves so we can make that range narrower and narrow.
Awesome. Thanks guys. Moving on down our list from our questions from Instagram this past week. In our Y Garden is asking I'm looking for some guidance on Target ec in the first 20, in the first 21 days of Bloom and target c 21 days until the end of Flower. Do you guys have any advice?
What's your EC coming out of Veg? That's, that's where we'll start. EC is a very it's not a static Ranger number. It's a dynamic value that If we're gonna approach what's optimal, it's not even for each strain we're going down to, you know, each facility. Do you have h i d, do you have l e d and then run to run. How consistent have you been? Where did you come out of veg at and what can we expect to stack up to at these plants?
So some plants, if we come out of veg at 1.5 or two, once we put those into. , I can guarantee you most plants aren't gonna stack up very well feeding at a 2.5 or a 3.0 because they're gonna chop through that salt faster and we can get it on there. Now, when that's the case what am I looking to do? Am I looking to really jack up that EC right away? Not necessarily. I'm gonna go look at plant health and say, Okay, I might like to be in generative up in maybe this four to nine range.
That's not gonna happen, this run. So what do I gotta do? I've gotta go back to managing plant health. And when we're talking about ec, the biggest thing to remember is that the plant can adapt to that EC only so fast. So during stretch, we're gonna be building up, ideally. But if we couldn't build up in stretch now we're gonna be running a little lower in bulking and a little lower in ripening. That's just how it works.
So, I mean, I know it sounds weird that we're always hesitant to give exact numbers and that's because there aren't exact numbers. You know, I could, same thing we were talking about the same strain under l e d and h I d I can show you the same strain. The same guy grew one finishing out at, you know, over a 10 ec and then the other one trying to flush, trying to taper it down. And guess what? The bud does look a little different, but neither of 'em are bad.
And neither of 'em have a heavy black ash or any problem like that. So, it really comes down to your trajectory and then how well you can be consistent run to run, to really dial that in.
Yeah, and I think he's he's one of our clients up there in Canada that's got AROYA system. So set your target ranges and alerts in your harvest groups and and then, you know, if, if you don't have time to be looking at the graph, maybe, you know, every single morning, then our system can kind of just help you keep in in those adjustment timeframes when you need to make modifications to that are easy that you want.
Yeah, and typically, you know, I, I actually don't recommend that people set alerts for their ec. I always recommend you set an alert for your water content. Your high EC spike is always gonna correspond to an over drying event. And then at that point we just gotta look at how well did you try it all the way down to wilting, how far did we go? And then evaluate the damage there.
Thank you guys. So one love Rebel wrote in on Instagram crop steering and larger pots, five gallons and up. Do you guys have any advice from me? Any
general tips, Grow your plants outside, say big
plants. It's all about pot to plant size proportion. And then also one thing to consider about those big plants. Hey, I, it's pretty cool to like veg indoors and in May put out a six foot plant into the ground that, you know, is gonna get to be 14 feet tall.
You know, the danger, one of the dangers about that is we tend to see a lot higher rates of root pathogen and infection in l plants that are in a big pot for a longer amount of time, just cuz we can't get consistent oxygen penetration into that pot. So we end up with anaerobic pockets and depending on your environment, you could be exposed to fusarium or pythium or a number of other soil diseases that we don't want in there.
So, yeah, basic advice if you wanna do that, you're going big and then, you know, I, all I can say is send me pictures down the line.
Go big or go home. That's what I'm gonna say for this one. Awesome King Green Beast rode in too. Why are people convinced that product comes out better when grown in coco instead of rockwool? Have you guys heard that?
Yeah. I'll touch on that for a second. Because coco looks like dirt And I will say there are some people out there that are running kind of a hybrid system where they are throwing a lot of different organic inputs and mixing up their own soilless mix with coco. So there may be certain additives that you can get in there that people are not able to add to the rock wall. But man, I I, I need to see some quantification because a lot of, I hear, a lot of it, I hear is.
Well, I just feel, and you know, I, I personally don't think there's a whole lot of, if I'm running the same nutrient line in rockwool or coco, as long as I'm running that, and as long as I don't abuse either of those plants and they come out fairly consistent in terms of the way I grew 'em, I probably, I would defy to tell the difference, you know, we, we can go back to those old wine tasting things where they had the cheap wines unlabeled next to some expensive ones.
And, you know, even some of the fine wine people couldn't tell the difference when they framed it in the right way. , Jason: I mean, yeah, maybe it's better because rock or Coco's more eco-friendly than rockwool, you know? Yeah. And that, that's debatable too when we talk about, you know, carbon footprint. Yeah. Shipping something across the ocean.
Yeah, like I said, I personally think it comes down to, it looks like dirt and it, it has a different feel, you know, And then on either have their hand too. You don't typically see many people running rockwool outside of a commercial application.
Yes, it happens, but people at home tend to have a lot more, a lot better luck watering hand watering coco than rockwool just because if you miss a day with your rockwool, we all know that run screwed or at least the yield on that run is so the coco better results over time.
Huh. That kind of makes some sense there. River City Growers also gonna end another question. What would the recommended parameters be for drying and curing, like temperatures, times relative humidity? Do you guys have any advice
for. Kind of what I start off with without knowing anything else about what's going in as far as, you know, product size or the goals of the facility. 60 to 60, 60 for 10 days. That's kind of just, just the starting point. So 60 degrees Fahrenheit, 60% humidity, 10 days. Obviously you, it's pretty tough to hit those. Exactly right. You know, the first few days you're probably gonna be pushing your HVAC as hard as you can to, to get close to 60.
But if without any other information, that's, that's kind of what I'd like.
Yeah, I, that's, that's a very reasonable goal. They, my biggest thing to say there is again, the consistency. Like Jason said, it might be tough those first few days to establish that, but that's where, you know, dialing your HVAC comes in and saying, Okay, we need X amount of extra du capacity for the first three days.
Then we can back it off to maintain that 60 and 60, I think One of the worst things you can do is dry too fast, too quick and really kill some of your bud quality there because it's hard to it's hard to get that jar peel back after we've really crunched up the outside of the nu then throwing it in bins and tumbled it around. I mean, hopefully we're not beating it up that much, but hey, it's reality.
If we got 200 pounds of, of product to pull down from a dry room and if that product has been dried in away, that makes it fall apart, we're gonna have problems. Right. So just, just that consistency and being patient,
it's so important to be patient. We had a couple more questions. It's that simple. Four 20 is asking when calculating 1% shot size for coco, do you use US gallon four liter or nursery trade gallon,
three liter. , I try to get the actual volume from the manufacturer. So if the manufacturer says a gallon pot, does it say four liter or does it say three liter, or does it say 3.78 liter? So typically just try to get the actual value from the manufacturer and maybe look to where, where is your product made? If we're talking about Canada or Europe, you know, when they say one gal, it's gonna be that four liters we're talking about the us it's gonna be 3.5 probably.
And when in doubt, major
it yourself. Yeah, exactly. There's there's no crime in that. Dump it out and measure.
All right, there we go. Anyone on the chat with us, please submit your questions. We are rounding out our hour with Seth and Jason. We can go ahead and get your questions asked. I had one more question from Instagram. When, when you cannot get your vpd down at the beginning of flowering what do you do? What are some what are some tips you have for lowering p
d? I mean, so usually, you know, temperature, probably you're hitting the temperature that you want. So if your VPDs too high, it's usually because we're having a hard time getting enough humidity in the room. A lot of times you will see that early in flour simply because your plants aren't large enough to transpire and add as much water to the water vapor to the air as you will see later in flour. So increased humid humidification capacity would be probably the easiest.
Yeah, I mean, for a lot of people I've talked to, it's come to that realization. They've hit a room size now where their small plants can't keep up and it's actually making that, that first time installing a humidification system. Yeah. You know, sometimes depending on your, your size of the volume of the space you're grown in. Before it wasn't an issue and now it is, you know, and we see that a lot with people that move into like warehouse spaces with very tall ceilings.
Greenhouses particularly because you have a lot of radiant energy coming in and actually warming up the air compared to just having grow lights. So it's actually in the summer can be quite hard to maintain that humidity. So don't, don't be scared to either buy a humidifier or we go back to it. If you got concrete floors in your greenhouse, low tech spray some water on the floor. If it's getting that bad.
Yeah, and you know, we were just kind of discussing like when, when you do run into those issues, if, if it's a one off thing, you know, it's for, you know, two days of the cycle, then you may not need to justify some type of humanification system. You know, if it's, it's just barely get something, you know, really cheap to, to get that humanification system.
If it's a significant impact, it's happened every time through the cycles all year round, then then you're, you're way better financially ahead just to, to get something in there.
Yeah. It all comes back to return on, return on investment and cost benefit analysis. If we don't need this all the time, maybe we can't get around it, but when it's time for a serious infrastructure upgrade a lot of times it's a lot cheaper to take care of the problem rather than bandaid it for a long time over and over and throw that labor at it. . Yeah.
You know, it's kind of interesting when we look at the plant life cycle. So if we look at the room for improvement it's the largest younger the plant is. So as our plant grows, our you know, impacts of making an improvement to that, that plant environment, irrigation decreases cuz that plant has less life left to basically grow off the improvements that we've made. So if we can keep things as, you know, as tight as possible early on, that's really gonna pay off towards the end.
And vice versa, we have obviously a lot more plant value as the plant gets older. So if we can build that value as fast as possible, then then we're making the right choices
in the room. Yeah. And then, you know, taking, taking a second to think about what when you are making those choices, you know, prices side, sometimes obviously there's an obvious winner when I'm looking at two products, there's price versus quality or price versus one on one product versus another. The other I can't afford, but. You don't always want to go as cheap as possible.
Anytime you're upgrading, always think for the future and say, Okay, You know, if we're talking about deh, it's the same thing as humidifiers. If I'm getting a dehumidifier and I need to double my capacity, I don't want one more, I probably want four more smaller ones, just cuz now I have a greater degree to control. The same would be apply to your humid humidification system. All right.
In this room, I'm starting to look at the room size and at the area of influence that one humidifier can have, and then also how does it perform? How consistent is it inside that area of influence? Well, In reality, if my room's 2000 square feet instead of one or two big ones, I might want a system that has, you know, 12 or 15 different nozzles and access points that are more evenly distributing that humidity that's around the room.
That way I'm not just accidentally blasting the front of one bench, meanwhile 10 feet back, it's perfect and 20 feet past that, it's bad again. So, you know, just really when you're doing that cost benefit analysis, try to think of every aspect of that improvement and that upgrade, not just only that delta that we're calculating for.
Great. We had a couple more questions coming over on YouTube, so I'm gonna try to go through those real quickly. Gabe wants to know, do you have any advice to avoid white mold buildup on top of Hugos?
I mean, you can always put a cap on 'em. That's not my favorite thing to do. I typically, the molds aren't gonna affect the plant growth too much if it's on just the substrate itself. So I usually don't get so worried about it. Obviously, it is unsightly and not the best thing in the world, but when we look at how much energy it is to combat versus how harmful it is to our production, it's usually towards the bottom of the list on corrective actions that we
need to be taking. Yeah. And you know, I mean, some to look at there what is causing the mold, typically what we'd see is a lot more algae. Do you have a root drench that you're doing that has an organic component that stays behind that the mold can grow on? What, what's going on there?
Typically that question comes a lot more from al. And again with the mold, probably what I would do afterwards is just start dissecting those blocks and saying, Okay, like algae, we could pull apart a, a Hugo and I can start shaving it down and show you that the algae actually isn't competing with the plant for water or nutrients. And we can calculate that the uptake of that algae. And it's the percentage you're losing in efficiency in your system is negligible.
You're losing more to run off than you are to algae. And then again, that's the reason to go and at the mold and dissect it, is that actually like, do I have good roots? Do I have good root growth, or is this mold happening because I have root rot in this top block, in that that dead organic material is actually what's feeding it.
So look, it's, it's an indicator that you might wanna look deeper at what's going on, but just like Jason said, once you've investigated the problem, I mean, I've even said this about fungus snaps a bunch of times, you know, and I do a lot still talking to coco growers, especially ones that wanna run compost teas. You know, and then do a drench for fungus Nats. I'm going, Okay, well quit chasing your tail here.
You're spending money on the compost, then you're spending money on the drench, and then you're putting more compost tea on and you're getting more nats. And the reality is those, those fungus nats don't feed on your roots. They feed on the fungus in your root zone. So where fungus Nats really do well is if you bring in organic soilless mix and you've got decomposing matter in there and you've got beneficial fungus in your soil, that's what those fungus nats eat.
So if you're just worried that you see a fungus nat or a few around, eh, you might wanna put some sticky cards out. Start evaluating, Okay, how many am I catching inside of a certain time period? At what point do I think there's so many fungus snaps in here that are gonna like, stick to the buds and people will see 'em in the jar? Like really identify is it a problem that bothers you or is it a problem that actually affects quality and output?
You know, And the same can go if you here's a classic one, switching from generative to vegetative. Washed my ec out, ran too much runoff. That happens all the time. Okay. Try to build it back up a little bit. But I got some burnt tips. I got some yellow leaves cuz I was deficient for a few days while I was trying to get that back up. The plant didn't like it. Well those leaves aren't gonna turn back green.
So part of, part of I guess being a grower is learning when you need to let, when you can let things bother you and when you need to put 'em down and say, Okay, that does bother me. But that is not a a factor I need to worry about for profitability in my system. Cuz at the end of the day, if you're too worried about your garden, I mean, we all gotta go home and sleep. We gotta have a life outside the garden too. And you know, I don't think anyone's in this to have a bad time.
Most, most cannabis growers are I find to be fairly passionate and enjoy what they're doing. So I like to do my best to keep it that way for 'em.
Thank you guys for that. They did have a follow up. They don't have any organic inputs and they've never appeared on my plants. They're just unsightly. So sounds like that's some good advice for them. I'm gonna go, sorry.
You could use just a, you know, a small concentration of hyper course acid in your feet as well. You know, that's gonna do two things to help keep your lines clean and sanitized and give a little bit more dissolved oxygen to that roots that'll help prevent any anaerobic areas in.
Substrate. Yeah. And to that point too, I do know a few growers who do a very light zero tall spray in, they're under canopy early on after they've cleaned it up just to keep the tables. And it's, it's a sanitization maintenance spray. You're not actually ducking the roots or putting, you're not getting any into the root zone. You're just doing a light mis for sanitation reasons.
And a lot of times that's places where they've had history of you know, fusarium or pithia in their trays or irrigation system, and they've just developed some great sanitation measures and sometimes developing that can also help the some of those accessory problems, like the mold and stuff. If the rooms, if there's no mold in the room, that also helps as well. You know, finding that source of, okay, is it in the bedroom? Is it in the flower room?
Where's the mold in my facility for these sports to come from? . I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't appear entirely out of nowhere. Although sports are ubiquitous. If we've gotta control the environment, it is. But if we've got a controlled environment, we should be reducing some of that compared to having a trashcan full of moldy bread in the room, you know, for instance.
Yeah. I wonder if like a UV air purifier would, would help in that kind of case too. Yeah.
You know, any kind of air pur via air sanitizer, you know, even though I'll, you know, like you said, those mold supports are everywhere. They're ubiquitous to our environment. , any effort does help. Anytime you seal off an area and you do start cleaning the air, you know, getting too surgically clean in that room. Yeah, that might be kind of hard. But anytime we reduce sport count it's better. Less rates of infection. I mean, that's even why we see for compliance purposes and testing.
You know, we don't, we don't say, Oh, it can have zero bacterial fungus fungal spores in it. No, we have a CFU count that it's allowed to stay below. And that's just because we know if you go above well, we're more likely to see problems with bacteri and mold in the product.
Awesome. Thank you guys. I'm gonna quickly cover our last question. Jason, over on YouTube wants to know what you see. Do you expect to see in runoff during week four flower compared to going in? I'm seeing pH drop in one cult in one cultivate, one cva. How do you interpret a pH drop? Staying steady or rise in runoff pH?
Usually pH imbalances come from the nutrient composition, the way that the plants up taking it. So you know, if you're seeing one cult bar in an area that the pH looks good on runoff no drift, and then one where it's too low, it's likely that other cultivar is just just trying to indicate that it has an imbalanced nutrient pull up. Meaning that the nutrient composition of feed is not getting eaten up in proportion for the elements in that nutrient on
that cultivar. . Yeah. And I mean, you know, treating that there's, there's a range of things we can do. Typically the easiest to do is to start to up your ec in your feet and push a little more runoff to try to correct that imbalance. What it is really often a sign of, again, if it's drifting down, you're plants feeding, It's pulling those negative i, those cat ions outta solution.
Pushing that down, making the solution more positive if it's going the other way, well , why, why are those negative ions accumulating? Why are we going the wrong direction? And usually we do want to see a, a fairly static, if you know anything, a slight drop in pH, but not much.
Great. Thank you guys for that. That was all of our questions for today. Yeah, we covered I feel like a record amount. I think I've said that before, but we got through 'em all today. Thank you guys. Any other messages you guys wanna tell our audience before we sign off for today?
Well, if if you're at Hall of Flowers next week, come say hi to me. I don't know if we'll be doing office hours. Maybe. We'll we'll have a chance just to highlight some of what's going on down there at that, that exhibit. And Seth can hammer out all the knowledge on his own.
Yeah. Hopefully we'll have some live coverage next week, but who knows? We gotta, Jason, Jason's not a full news team. We don't have a van to send for him. So , we'll see what happens. Who knows? We'll have,
we'll
have planned. Yeah, she's, she knows a little bit more about that than we do. There
we go. Who knows? You guys are gonna have to log in and see . With that, I'm gonna go ahead and sign us off. So Jason and said, thank you so much for another great conversation. It's always a pleasure to learn from you guys, and thank everyone for joining us this week on AROYA Office Hours. Thank you guys giving us some shoutouts. We do this every Thursday. This is the best way to get answers from our experts, is to join us live. So go ahead and sign on with us.
If you have questions about AROYA, we do recommend that you book a demo with our experts. They can tell you all about how it can improve your cultivation process and all of the ways that we can help your grow. As always, if you have a topic that you'd like us covering on office hours, please do chat us. Shoot us an email at support.aroya@metergroup.com or send us an Instagram dm. We'd love to hear from you.
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