Office Hours Episode 104
EC versus PPM, steering to impact morphology, navigating hand-watering, & much more!
Talking shop about growing crops!
On this week’s session, Jason got down to business – and Seth chimed in remotely – about all kinds of illuminating topics! From the challenges of hand watering and the benefits of auto-irrigation, to the nuances of CO2 supplementation and connecting the lighting spectrum to plant growth, & so much more!
Here are some of our favorite quotes from the show:
EC Refresher
“Electrical connectivity – the more salts that we have in solution, the better that it passes an electrical current. And that's what most of the sensors are doing, is taking a look at how well does electricity pass through the substrate or the solution…when we're looking at specifically RO water, it's not going to have any conductivity and that's why it comes through zero. So I like using EC just because it's a direct measurement. It's not derived like PPM is.” – Jason
24-Hour Dark Period Before Flip?
“We haven't really seen any evidence that there's a beneficial effect to having a 24-hour dark period…If you put a plant in the closet and close the door for a few days, come back three days later, it'll probably start to have some pre-flowering going on. But that's not really balanced.If we've got a 55 to 60-day flowering time, a loss of 12 hours of light is still a significant amount of energy input missing out on and might be responsible for a very small percent of yield change.” – Seth
How to Steer Squatty Plants
“If I am trying to get a larger plant, usually I'll only do a very short amount of generative type of steering at the beginning of flower…my favorite all-time example for this is Mac One, it's typically just a real short, squat plant. And so for generative steering, I'll almost never run more than a week, absolute max a plant like that. Really, our goal here is since the genetics are already generatively leaning, we're just doing a quick burst of generative type of cue to the plant at the very beginning of flowers just to help get some amount of bud set and enable it for a pretty significant amount of bulking.” – Jason