Field capacity vs drybacks, diagnosing brown roots, steering in large pots, & More!

This week, Seth and Jason hit the ground running covering a bunch of cultivation and crop steering topics – from explaining why field capacity is more important than drybacks, to a reminder of why we don’t say flush, to considerations when crop steering in large pots and more! Then we closed the episode with news about our upcoming AROYA GO giveaway for the growmies!

A few gems from this week’s session:

Crop uniformity is key

“In crop steering, we're looking for those drybacks, we're looking for irrigation timing, but we really can't forget about pH and EC management. And what that requires is crop uniformity, right? So if I don't take all my population that's on a single valve and try to get it back up to field capacity that day, that means I've got a bunch of this population that's now living under slightly different conditions, and then that can tolerate more or less dryback. And when that's happening, if I'm not pushing that runoff every day or every few days, I'm losing my ability to manage pH and Ec as well. So it's kind of a fine balance.” 

– Seth

Each strain needs a baseline

“When we're thinking about, all right, how does this strain behave, the best things that you can do is, 1) make some documentation on how it's performing, how is it reacting to the environment in this case, especially the nutrients and the regiment that I'm applying to it. And then 2),  make some analysis on what you're seeing from that plant response.” 

– Jason

No flush refresher

“We do want to get away from flushing, because if we're only giving it those inputs and the media doesn't have any buffering capacity on its own, if we're wildly adjusting that root zone EC from a six one day to a 1.2 the next day, because we flushed it out and then trying to stack it back up, we're really wasting time in production because the plant actually has to take energy and put it towards either consuming sugars in the root zone or stocking the root zone with sugars to help adjust to that osmotic pressure change.” 

– Seth