AROYA Office Hours Episode Sixty: VPD Calculator Reveal, Thermal Cameras & Your Questions!

Amazing things happen when you get this much knowledge and people passionate about growing in one virtual location. Like AROYA Office Hours, our gift to the cultivation community. And this episode, we had a lot to show you, starting with our newest tool for growers. 

Jason unveiled our new VPD Calculator, and talked us through some best practices when it comes to determining whether you’re in range. Then he walked us through some pictures he’s taken at grows with his thermal camera, showing us and our virtual audience the wide variance of temperatures he’s uncovered with this piece of heat-detecting imaging technology. Of course we touched on leaf temp. And then we got into a real good crop steering Q&A. Thank you all for submitting your questions to us via all the platforms! Get ready for the key takeaways from this sesh, they’re some of Jason’s bests.

Want to crop steer? Get to know your plants with data.

“It just comes down to: How aggressively do we want to steer? Are our plants healthy enough? Is everything else balanced to push them that hard? And what does that genetic prefer? That’s all information that you have to do run after run to get acquainted with what your strains look like when you do these types of techniques.” - Jason Van Leuven

Grow, gather data, repeat for best results.

“Getting all of that information into one system where you can start to look at strain-run analytics and cultivar profiles, that's how you start to make better decisions—is being able to save it enough times that you know where to go with it.” - Jason

When to move a sensor…

“I usually try not to [adjust placement of the TEROS 12]; the only time that I'll move a sensor is if I'm getting some really weird readings from it, indicating that there's an air pocket in that substrate.” - Jason

Get the full picture of what’s going on in the garden.

“In general, I like to keep my sensors in the same plants throughout the cycle. I like to get a little bit of variation, as far as spatially how they're in the room and make sure I'm getting ones that are a little bit towards the corner towards the aisle, maybe towards the center of the canopy as well. And that's going to help get you a full picture of how much differently your plants are operating in there.” - Jason

The balance between defoliating, economics, and your plants.

“We don't want to strip more leaves than needed for photosynthesis, because then we're going to slow down with the rate of growth of that plant. Really, the fine balance comes down to: What is our plant spacing? What's the morphology of the plants? How much labor do we have? How much extra money do we have to put into labor to manage these things? And then making sure you don't overdo it.” - Jason