Nutrient management, drought stress, whiteboard debut, & much more!

We were one host down for this week’s session, but that didn’t stop Jason from dropping the science! From drilling down into what’s really going on with pH in runoff, to a rundown of how to root into Rockwool and coco, to celebrating our awesome new visual aid (shout out to Front Row Ag for our cool new whiteboard!) and so much more, the pod is packed with cultivation insights.

Here are some choice quotes from the show:

Stay on Top of Runoff pH

“This is something that we always want to do – continuous checks on the pH of our runoff – because obviously there's a few things that can happen here. One, if we're just simply underfeeding, then that plant's going to be running out of a supply of specific nutrient…Easy fix there is just up our EC. If we are already feeding at an appropriate EC, then we have a couple options here as far as pushing a little bit more runoff, so that we're diluting unbalanced solution and recharging it with the the stock composition from the nutrient supplier that we're using.” – Jason 

What’s Behind Drought Stress?

“When we're talking about drought stress, really we need to dive into matrix potential. And the thing that's nice with hydroponic media like coco and Rockwool and that soilless stuff that we're looking at, usually we have a pretty good idea of what the matrix potential curves look like in respect to water content. That's why we can really use water content to define, all right, where would we expect to see permanent wilting point. where would we expect to see temporary wilting point, and how close do we want to get there at that edge?” – Jason

Manual Readings With AROYA

“Drybacks: you can either do those manually or you can actually use AROYA to log those automatically by selecting when you want to get that dry back. If we want to put in feed pHs, you know, definitely one to keep track of. Leaf temps – great one to have in there occasionally. Node spacing, plant height, these are ones that, you know, are kind of the basis of building a crop steering program. Getting this information documented so not only do you know how it behaved this time, but you can know when you need to adjust your times or how significantly you're steering in order to optimize the size and the output of the crop.” – Jason