Jason got this week’s session started with a deep dive into our cool new irrigation calculator – a free resource we created to help the growmies dial in their irrigation strategy! He demonstrated a couple real-world scenarios before inviting everyone out there to give the tool a try, then got back to the business of answering viewer questions on topics ranging from calculating runoff, to rooting-in indicators, to managing pH, and more!
Check out this crop of top quotes from the show, then be sure to visit us in Booth A427 at Hall of Flowers Santa Rosa next week!
“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. That's plant growth that we put nutrients and time and electricity all into – labor, call it labor costs – into getting that started. I really don't want to cut it off and throw it away, especially if it can turn into some flowering products.” – Jason
“I've always just talked about runoff as a percentage of our substrate volume…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 is 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.” – Jason
“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 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…but once those plants are fully rooted into the slab, that upper substrate is going to offer a fairly minimal amount of water holding capacity, especially usable water holding capacity.” – Jason