This week we had the whole gang back together in the studio answering your burning cultivation questions! The community came through with the goods, and Jason and Seth covered everything from monitoring EC in living soil beds, toaccepting limitations and trade-offs in the garden, to managing VPD to prevent mold, and so much more!
Check out these nuggets of wisdom from this week’s sesh:
“Daily lighting integral is a count of the total number of photons that's hitting a specific area over a photoperiod. And so when we think about, all right, this plant's growing using that energy from these photons, when we transfer from veg to flower, we want to make sure it's getting at least the same amount of energy as it was.” – Jason
“In some cases, it's sadly more cost-effective to not plan a bench, turn off a row of lights, and then grow better product in a more efficient way inside a smaller portion of the room and not spend money on the rest of the room until you can make those HVAC upgrades. Because you're frequently not going to see an increase in yield whether that row of lights is on or off if you have dehumidification, AC, or for instance CO2 as a limitation.” – Seth
”Plants are going to keep getting heavier and heavier, right? And so when we look at a lot of traditional ways of measuring water content in there, it's using load cells across a whole bench. Well, in order to effectively do that, you actually have to have a model of the crop weight in there, subtract that from the total weight. So you gotta kind of keep that in mind as well as, all right, how heavy would I expect three plants in a wet slab to be when the plants are smaller? Well, what's that weight look like when it's heavier? It's one of the major advantages of using a direct water content sensor is it doesn't really care how big the plant is as far as giving you an accurate reading.” – Jason