🐂 Afghan Bullrider Pollination, Iron Interactions, and Nutrient Resources, with Brandon Rust

12:56AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

Afghan bullrider

blueberry train

nutrient dynamics

tissue culture

genetic storage

iron availability

microbial synergy

soil pH

water quality

cloning techniques

organic cultivation

seed collaborations

microbe benefits

plant metabolism

hydroponics

Greetings cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow cast doing the podcast rodeo today we have Brandon rust back on the line. He's here to talk about a bunch of stuff. He's been working on his breeding projects with the Afghan bull rider and the blueberry train. Mac talks about some of his products. Talks about nutrient dynamics and some new resources that he'll be dropping on the website and Patreon. So stay tuned for that. I know you're gonna love today's episode with Brandon before we jump into it, though. Shout out to AC infinity. That's right. Acinity.com, code grow, cast one five gets your savings on all sorts of products, including the brand new AC infinity TerraForm. That's right. This is a AC heater, humidifier combo, and it's an amazing unit that'll help you adjust your grow however you need. Use code grow cast one five at AC infinity today to grab whatever you need. They've got grow kits that can get you started growing. Add another 10 to your setup. Lickety split. I love those grow kits. It's a really great deal to just get a whole new space. It comes with everything you need, the lights, the pots, the fans, the filters, everything you need is all in there. And you can even use code grow cast one, five AC Infinity has been making the best inline fans in the game for a long time, but now they offer all sorts of wonderful products to growers, from protective garden wear to sunglasses to plant pots to trimming scissors, like I said, tents, lights, filters, fans, it's all there. They even have the refillable filter that is reusable. I love that that's at AC infinity.com plus their new TerraForm, which will help you get your environment on point. Find it all at AC infinity.com and when you go use growcast One five helps them, helps us, helps you, save I appreciate you guys. Thank you to AC infinity. Shout out one more time. Grow cast one five at AC infinity.com. All right, let's get into it with Brandon Russ. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners, you are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today. Before we get started, as always, I urge you to share this show. Turn someone you know who's growing onto grow cast, or turn a smoker on to growing it's the best thing you can do to help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you subscribe to grow cast podcast.com There you'll find everything, the episodes, the glasses, the membership, the seeds, it's all there. Special. Thank you to the members out there for making this possible. Today, we have an old friend of the show, a fan favorite, really excited to get him back on the line and give us an update about his breeding work and his nutrient work and all the collabs he has going on. We have Brandon rust from Bokashi earthworks, back on the program. What's up? Brandon, how have you been? Man, oh, I've been good. How are you excellent? Doing excellent. Keeping an eye on what you've been doing with you know your rust Brandon page with Bokashi earthworks, you've been all over the place. Man, rocking some collabs, some breeding projects, some nutrient projects, working with cultivators. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you for making time for us, and we're very excited to have you. So thank

you. Yeah, it's always good to be back here on the Grow cast. I think we've, you know, done several episodes in the past, and it's always great to share,

and they like to hear from you. So that's what we're diving into today. Now it's funny, I took a poll with the members. What do you want to hear Brandon talk about on this next episode? Literally, 5050, split between breeding and nutrient work like I thought we were going to glean some information. I guess that's actually good news for you. Means people are equally interested in your endeavors. That's some good data, but it was funny, I decided to do both. Why not do both? I want to get an update on what you're working on with a couple of different lines that you're working on with your breeding projects. Get an update on your grow, how that's going, and then also your work in nutrient dynamics and some new charts that you're producing. This is going to be a really good episode,

but let's start with the breeding you have been

working on this afghan bull rider. You've talked about it on this show a little bit, but I know now you're like, deep in the project, it's already created, I believe, tell us the story of the bull rider, like, what Afghan means to you, and now this, this project

that you're working on, well, so there's the distinction that has to be made, first and foremost, between bull rider and Afghan bull rider, because those are two different cannabis varieties. So the original bull rider, some say that it has been around since, you know, the late 70s or the early 80s. I know that in the mid 90s, or early 90s, my friend Hopper, who was the road manager for the thought mouth kings. He also had one of the first dispensaries in San Diego when it was to under 215

under Prop 215 and he acquired it.

Well, he didn't acquire it, but his friend Rex

and. His friend, Mike gerbo, got a cut from a

from the lakeside rodeo. Is what, is what the story goes. And they got it from, I think, somebody who ran this black guy that ran like a rodeo circuit, and they acquired the cut and they branded it bull rider. They, I don't think anybody actually knows what it was, free them turning it into a brand, but they turned it into a brand. So it was one of the first, early things to come out of San Diego that was one, like, attached to legacy growers that was, like, branded. Did it, you know, T shirts and all kinds of stuff like that. It

was really popular. Then in 2001

my mentor and the guy who showed me how to grow weed, cross bred that, that original bull rider into an Afghani that he got from our friend, Mo had read, who's now passed away.

Out of that, out

of uh, what they ran through, they kept two different varieties, A and B. Fino, I can't remember which one that we constantly grew, but we only, I think, kept, ended up keeping one of them after a little while. We gave

different cuts out to different people. But there was a whole circle

of us that was growing that Afghan bull rider, probably from about 2001 to really heavily until probably about 2009 Wow. Then even into about 2011

some people were still growing it.

But you know, I have some Afghani bull rider. I had a friend of both my mentor myself, had some of the original seeds that he was given to him, and so we had popped some of those, and we found something that was almost identical to what we had before. And so we've been you, I used that in a black line, reserve cross. Oh, I've already made those seeds, but I didn't release anything. I'm not going to release the F ones. I'm going to run through them and release some cuts out of there, like I actually just listed some cuts on my Bucha Seed Vault website of some Afghan bull rider times black on reserve. But I'll release seeds in the future after I worked the line, because the ones that I tested so far were just all over the place. So I have to do sure and narrow down the selection, and it might take a little while to get to like what I'd be looking for out of those two lines combined. Wow, man. Um, the one now is great. I really love it. It's really fast and vigorous. It's very resinous, and it smells like sweet candy, fermented fruit and like tangerine, grapefruit.

Oh, my goodness, that sounds amazing. And what a what a treat to be able to find something that resembles your strain from the past. That's what you're saying, right? Like you have this, you have this reminiscent old school version, and this one, this modern one that you've popped and hunted now resembles that nostalgic version. That's amazing. No,

I mean, it's, it's different from the the parent, from the Mother, the Afghan bull rider. But, I mean, I still have that variety around, so I'm not trying to replace it. I was just using genetics because got it. It's a very robust and, like, vibrant, like loud Turkey profile. So it definitely translates that that over. It's got that going for it. So that's a little thing that actually just, you know, that was kind of a happy accident. Was a volunteer some seeds that I dropped while

I was harvesting.

The seeds when I was harvesting the plant, and so I ended up growing it outdoor. It's still flowering outdoor, but when it was in veg, I took cuts veg, those out, and this was early in the season, put them indoor to test it, and then now I have a full bed of it running. That's

awesome, man, out of a volunteer plant. Yeah,

it was dude. It's fire. It's super, super fire. It's dude. It was like 15 feet tall when it, uh, stopped growing. It flowers fast. It's super resinous. I don't think it would be good, good for half making, but it's a beautiful plant.

Man, people love those

types of story. We just had another volunteer plant story recently on the show. So that is so funny. That's why you never kill those volunteers, right? Let them grow up. See what comes out of them, and then you have a really good story. He found a keeper that was just a, you know, happenstance,

yeah. And what I did early in the season was I took three clones just to make sure I had, you know, backups if one of them didn't root, and then I all three of them rooted. I planted one in the ground, I flowered one out in the indoor flower room, and then I held one back to veg. And then, after I saw what it did in the. Test plot in the indoor I was like, Dude, this is fucking awesome. I was hope I was just doing it to see if it was male or female, but since it was female, I just let it run. And I was really happy. There

you go. Man, everyone loves that, that type of story, okay, but you have the you have this f1 generation. You're holding the seeds back because there is such expressive diversity. You've got a clone release from that f1 line that's awesome, by the way. You can find that at Bokashi earthworks.com

is that right? Actually, it's Bokashi Seed vault.com Ah,

there you go. The genetic site, Bucha Seed vault.com Okay, glad I clarified, of course, Bokashi earthworks.com your primary site, code grow, cast available there, and members getting an additional discount. So thank you for that, Brandon, but you're going to work them a little bit further. Try to narrow down that, that expressive gene pool into a little bit more consistency. What are you aiming for before you're satisfied with the release? With

this project, I just was testing it. I just wanted to see or I was just testing this volunteer that came out. I had run some previously to, like, I don't know, months back, and I didn't really have a idea in mind of what I was even looking for. I was just testing it because that's what I like to do. It's not even a project that's on the forefront right now. It just happened to be that that that that clone, uh, that plant, that female plant, was super fire, so I kept it around, and I'm like, you know, doing a larger production on it in beds.

So it's kind of

on the back burner. I'm just growing it out for personal smoke, because I really liked it, like the effect, it was stimulating and then, uh, sleepy later on, great terpene profile tasted good. So I just liked everything about it. That's great. The main project that I'm working on right now is that blueberry train Mac F twos, even though I did make F threes with a crinkle cut with a fino that I found in a prior hunt. My goal was to do four full hunts, different hunts, over the course of the year, select different finos out of every single hunt, and then run all of those after all the hunts are done together, and compare and contrast and do selections, one more, F, 3f, fours and so and so on.

That sounds amazing. The crinkle cut, this is the one that I've heard about right your blueberry train MAC, which I got to try an early iteration of. I don't know if you remember when we were sitting in Oklahoma? No, it was here in Chicago, and it was one of your tester growers. You gave me a butt of the blueberry train Mac, we were sitting in a car, and that was an early iteration of that. It was really, really impressive. Now you later posted about this crinkle cut. Is that the same one that had a very pungent, skunky aroma?

No, so that is, it was different. Yeah. So there was out of the first round, I picked two cuts. They were totally distinctly different. The crinkle cut, it smells like vanilla, blueberry cupcake and,

like musty Rosemary lemon,

that was closer to what I tried, a really bright sort of leans on that sweeter side, different than the skunk cut. Okay,

yeah, the skunk cut is like a really pungent, acrid Rosemary sage that really translates into it really smells like it really smells skunky. But if I was to define it as like what it was, it'd be like a combination of sage and rosemary, where it has this but with this acrid, like sharpness to it that neither of the plants have.

Sure. Yeah, this, that's the skunk, the skunkness. Well, that sounds incredible, man, is that? Which one is your favorite?

They're both good enough for me to want to keep them around. They're both different. I really love the sweet, creamy vanilla blueberry with the rosemary and lemon. I mean, it's just a beautiful profile, especially when it's like, balanced out perfectly. But I also like that really nasty, pungent, acrid one too. So I don't if I couldn't really choose between the two. That's why I just kept both of them. I found some other ones that are that are different. These F twos are all over the place. I found one number 14 cut in that one, it hasn't been harvested yet, but that one smells more like sweet sourdough and hot dog water chirps.

Hot dog get out of here. Actual hot dog water chirps, yeah, it smells like hot dog water, dude, people will point out to me that I have some bizarre descriptions for smells. I'm not sure I've heard hot dog water before. I do like a good meaty Terp, though I know I know that category of terpene, yeah.

And then I have another one that's very fruity. And very hashy like it. It smokes and it tastes, it's smooth, but it tastes like you're smoking traditional hash.

I love that. That's like, some of my favorite type of, yeah, that hash plant type profile. It's really, really delicious. Man, yeah, you got to keep us updated on those. That's cool that you're going to release clones from the from the f1 of the Afghan, and then now you've got these two legendary clones at the blueberry train Mac you're going to have to stable before you know it, to work with

any fems, or do you only do regs? I built a tissue culture

lab at the Bucha earth works office, and just waiting on the landlord to send back a signature with an amendment to the lease giving me permission to have a hemp license there, and I should have a hemp license, hopefully within a month.

Wow. What

have you learned? Learning tissue culture, and how has it changed your I don't know, like your view of storing genetics and the abilities that tissue cultures unlock.

So the

fundamentals of what you do is really basic and easy. You just have to be very patient and precise, because you're looking at plant tissue under a microscope and you're trying to take out a little sphere, a little cell that's all covered in these tiny, tiny leaves, these microscopic leaves that you have to unfold. That's the hardest part. Doing the meristem tissue culture, the micropropagation isn't so hard. It's It's like taking clones that are, you know, six or seven millimeters. They're not big, but it's just like taking a tiny little clone where you're basically just doing surface sterilization, and then you're putting it at a root, and once it roots, you transplant it into something else. That way, you just know it's sterile, and that's not going to clean it up from viral pathogens. If they're systemic.

What is your primary goal with it? Then, if you're not using it for cleaning up your genetics, are you just looking to store a variety?

Yeah, so if I need to clean something up, or if I'm uncertain, even if the thing, like with hop late and viroid, it has this latency that that it, it won't express itself in it, a test could come back negative, but it could still be infected. Wow. And so there are different varieties of hop late and then some of them have higher infection rates, and they're less detectable, but they might be doing less overall damage, or they might not be expressing a lot of symptomology. And there are some that are harder to spread, that are more viral in nature, and they have a

a greater capacity to express mutations in the plant. So you see them. So

if, if I had something that needed to be cleaned up, or if I had any doubts, I do meristem tissue, if I thought that the plant was good and I and I wasn't worried about it. I might just do micro propagation, and that allows me to just put things on ice, so to speak. Wow. So I have it in a library, but I don't have to worry about keeping a mother plant or constantly cloning all the time to keep that genetic life. That is awesome. Also, there's embryo rescue so old seeds that have trouble germinating. What you can do is you can remove the outer shell and essentially put that embryo inside hormone media, and it'll kick start that thing, and it'll it'll allow them to germinate. Wow.

So if there's any possible life in that seed, it'll get it to grow, and

you can sterilize both the seed coat and the embryo once you open it. So at least you can do surface sterilization. And then, if it grows, and it's able, and you're able to start getting it to produce tissue, you can even mere stem tissue culture it, just to make sure, if you needed to. I mean, there's a lot of things you could do with it. You know, a lot of it, for me will be storage. Offer services to people who need genetics cleaned up, or need embryo rescue, or they just need storage space. That's

really cool, man. But you recommend people, if they're interested, try it and do it, because it seems, it seems like you're saying it's pretty achievable. Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing is, as long as you have an area that's relatively sterile, you can get, like a flow hood or event hood, and, you know, make sure you have alcohol and you have sterile instruments, if you can be sterile and, you know, and do it in front of event fan, maybe have a face mask and gloves on, shouldn't be too much of an issue. I mean, I have a lab built out so it's constant, easy and dusted, and it's all stainless steel tables and everything. So

that's cool that you're so deep into tissue culture cloning. I look forward to seeing what you use that for, and all. The different services you offer. You have a run going right now? You mentioned, no, I think I saw a bed packed out with some of your genetics that you said you weren't gonna run a veg cycle on. You wanna talk about what you're growing now?

Yeah, so that's actually the Afghan bull rider time. Black lime reserve. That's right, I loaded it up. See a green style. So what I did is, when I clone, some of them stayed in the Cloner, and I just put a little bubbler under, kept some water and some nutrients in there, and let them just get big old roots before I transplanted. And some because I need I didn't have enough in cups, but I had these little cups, not the big, not the big beer ones, but the size smaller, and I put them in there just to get established in a little bit of soil while my bed was finishing off. Because my timing was, like, I don't know, probably, like, five days off. And so I let the plants get established in the cups. About, I don't know, six or seven of them were just in the Clone trays with bubblers. And they started growing that way, like, kind of aeroponically. And then I, when I cut my my stuff down that I finished my LA Marilla, my sour cheeseberry, I replanted everything immediately that night, and put 25 and a three by three with no veg. No veg time on, just straight into the bed. You know, they look like just regular clothes. They're probably all about eight or nine inches each. So they were a little

bit bigger when they went in. But you're throwing them right on to 1212, no problem. Yeah, you know, I

uh top. Just a minute, some nitrogen, some calcium amendments. I'm waiting tomorrow. I should have my my results back from Logan labs, where I send my soil samples. Because what I do is, after every run, I should have sent it in a week earlier, but I was like in a rush. And what I do is, I take a sample out, send it to the lab. They say, they tell me how much nutrients are in my soil and the solubility of those nutrients, and then, based off of that data. I re, I talked to us. Re, amend was whatever it is that needs to be put in there. And it allows me to, you know, just maintain nutritional sufficiency in that media. And so I'm just running that bed, you know, I'm sure they'll finish probably around, you know, two and a half, three feet, sure. Nice solids and everything should be, wow, nice run.

What's that spacing like if you're going to do no veg time? And I know this is cultivar dependent. I know that for a fact, but you're pretty familiar with these Afghans, yeah? Well,

look at so what I did was, they're clones. They're untopped clones. And I did, I think, three or four nodes at the very top, and they're small, you know? They're only again, there were clothes when I put them in there. And so there's 25 in a three by three area, so five divided by three feet. I don't know what that is,

20 there's 25 plants in a three by three area. Yes,

wow. And they're untalked. And then I trimmed everything up. I have basically swathed them just to the very top, so they're just going to grow out the tops and fill out that canopy. And the whole thing is getting the yield without having to do any veg, right? And if here's the idea, right, you I can do this on a small scale, but I can also do it on a large scale, and when you're doing it at large scale, it means that you're saving a ton of money, right? Because of the water usage, the electricity, the labor, the nutrients and the time, the veg time that they're exposed to pests and pathogens, those are all set that have an overall effect if you take really nice healthy clones from really nice healthy moms, and you dip them before you plug them, and then you dip them again after they're rooted, and then you put them into the media for maybe three to five days just to get established, and then you flip.

Then

you know you can have fast turnarounds while decreasing your resources, you know, your cost of cultivation. And then also on the flower side, since the plants aren't massive, you're not removing, you know, two thirds of the plant, which is kind of a waste, you know, you go through all this veg time to build all this biomass, and you go into flower and you remove it all. And some people will argue, oh, well, now you can do under canopy lighting. And it's like, well, you don't have to do any of that. If you just, if you do it like this, if you, if you do this type of style, it makes it more efficient, because you're not going to have to remove a bunch of biomass. The cleanup is going to be quick, efficient and easy. It's not going to take much time, and then you're not going to have to do it again either, like you're not going to have to go back at day 21 and fucking remove more shit and stuff like that. It's just more efficient

overall. I

think that method is a really good idea, and, like you said, super, super efficient. So I'm excited to see how that how that finishes out. Well, we're. Gonna

put a 2000 lighter in California, and

it's gonna be done just like that.

How many plants under? If you're doing 25 plants, and you're three by three, how many plants you're gonna put under 2000 lights? A lot. I mean, if your propagation technique is efficient and cost effective. You

just need clone space, you know, yeah, directly into your flower rooms. And I didn't do any veg online. If I didn't already have plants in there flowering, I would have done maybe three days, let them get a little bit established before flipping. But today will be day four. I'll have my Rex back tomorrow, and I'll do some more top dress amending. That'll be it for that, and it's ready to go.

That's really cool. Front load that calcium, I'm sure, huh, have been listening

did that? I mean, I always re amend with calcium, even like I know instinctively, kind of what is going to need to be done. So I went ahead and added the base amounts of what I thought would be, and anything that I need to add, I'll just add that as extra and then adjust the micro nutrient levels. That's the only thing that I do that I didn't do. So you threw in

the calcium, is what I'm assuming. But I know you've got a bunch of different products, right? You've got some products, collabs, you've got some genetics collabs. You want to talk about that? Your work with green Bodhi and yellow Wolf and Mama Wolf,

yeah, so, uh, John is a friend of mine, green body, and he is another breeder and grower. He's does organic cultivation. He was looking for products for his grow. And so I was like, Hey, I have some stuff that you might be interested in. Slow release, agglomerated organic nutrients. Sent him to him, he tried them out. Really liked it. His plants are always beautiful. And so we did a little collaboration on some nutrients, which is the green Bodhi top dress, veg and flower nutrients that's on the Bucha earth works website. We're also doing a seed collaboration. There's going to be 100 packs of two different varieties, which is Afghan bull rider times hazy girl, and then Afghan bull rider times 89 NL, Northern Lights, nice. And so that's coming up pretty soon. The nutrients are already available, but the seed we're just working on. All the packaging, we have special packaging, rolling papers, all kinds of little stuff. And then the mama Wolf, which is yellow wolf Mom, I'm doing the breeding for their their cannabis brand, and then I'm also connecting them with different cultivators that I work with throughout the country to do like branding and marketing to where it's like mama wolf Kush. They'll be cultivating certain variety that I've hunted out for them, and it'll say mama Wolf Wolf Kush, the variety, and then cultivated by whatever farm. Oh,

it's amazing. Using your products. Are these going to be organic lines? Do you know?

Yeah, these are all, all the people that I've been hooking them up with raw people, sure. System they use my soils and nutrients. That's

That's what these influencers and celebrities and rappers, that's what they need to be doing. Man, to be honest, that's where they all go wrong, right? They don't go to legacy growers like yourself. They, a lot of them go corporate, and I think it was really smart for them to team up with you. I've seen the cultivators you work with. Man, it's very impressive to do that at scale. You know, like we help home growers at home achieve that. And let's be honest, it's easier when you only have five plants to watch after. It's much easier. But you do a really great job out there, and your product freaking works. Your lineup is, you know, I was, I was asking you off air, do you have any developments and additions to your line? And you're like, my line only has a few parts. It's complete. It works great. I'm not really looking to add to it. And I thought that was a very, very revealing and cool answer. So what do you recommend people? Let's say I've got a listener who is like, just tuning in for the let's say they just started growing. They're just tuning in here in Brandon rust. What is the one product you would have them run out and add to their grow from your

line, micro plus, but also the calcium silica is, it's basically like amped up Cal mag, where it's not going to be too much magnesium, where it antagonizes potassium or calcium, but it also has 53% silica and contains iron also. So it's, it's an awesome product, and of course, micro plus multi functional probiotics, cycles nutrients out, competes pathogens, has plant vital hormones in it.

Can't go wrong. Magic in a bottle. Grow cast membership. It's where you need to be. If you're a grower, growing should be easy and fun. It should connect you more closely with this amazing plant and with the other members of the community, and that's what grow cast is designed to do. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, we make growing easy and fun again. We'll walk your hand through any problems you have. It's like insurance for your grow plus you get access to a ton of bonus content, of educational resources and even members only discounts that are going to save you your $15 membership fee. Work, and then some. It's all waiting for you at growcast podcast.com/membership, jump in. Jump into a regional chapter. Meet gromies in your area and start coming to meet ups, trading, cuts, trading, seeds in the trading. Bizarre. There's so much going on in the community. You won't believe it. Plus, you can connect directly with me and Mary Beth and rise of rich and the whole team. We're all waiting there for you right now. We have multiple challenges going on. We have the grand fino hunt. Of course, somebody's gonna win $1,000 for having the winning cut in this amazing community, fino hunt. And we have these running on repeat. Folks, as soon as this one ends, we're gonna start up another one. Shout out to high grazyme for sponsoring the grand fino hunt. They were so impressed with what we were doing for the community that they jumped at the chance to sponsor it. So they are supporting us. We really appreciate them, and now we give, give away $1,000 to one lucky member who grows the cut that rich works with. It's the grand fino hunt. It's just one of the many things that we have going on. We have but of the month competitions. We have a cloning challenge going on. We have an upcycling challenge coming up. You won't believe it. It's all waiting there for you. What are you waiting for? Grow cast. Podcast.com/membership, I will see you there. Go and join today. You will not regret it. We are waiting to take your garden to the next level. Grow cast, podcast.com/membership, let me ask you this. Let's get into the nutrient dynamic stuff, a lot of people use gypsum as their calcium source. What are your thoughts on calcium sulfate, and why you like calcium better or different?

Well, I also use gypsum. I like gypsum a lot. Calcium sulfate is a little bit different. It does have a higher solubility than calcium silica, but it also has 50% the amount of calcium that the calcium silica does. So the calcium silica has twice as much calcium. It also has the silica in instances where my sulfur or more sulfate levels are already high in soil, I don't want to add more gypsum because of the like, I don't know, 18% sulfate that's in it. Instead, I'll use the calcium silica. Like, raise those calcium levels, help balance pH, get the silica in there,

you know, and

the sulfate levels, you don't need too much, right? Like, if you're looking at total addition, like you said, if you're doing, like, a Logan labs type test, sulfur is one of those things where you don't really need super, super high levels, like a calcium, right?

So sulfur is very important, especially for oil producing plants, for Turkey producing plants. So you you want a good amount, but there's kind of a sulfur is a double edged sword, because too much will cause osmotic stress and will cause the EC of the media to increase, especially if you're doing dry backs in flower. So managing your sulfate is really important to help with osmotic water regulation.

This is great stuff. Man, this is why I asked these questions. This is great stuff. Now back to the microbe, plus, great explanation on the cow. So back to the microbe. Plus, that's your bacteria blend. Why do you love it over other products? Why did you formulate it the way that you did? Tell me something special about micro plus,

well, I didn't formulate it. It's actually formulated by Dr tiro Higa. I was just fortunate enough to be able to have all of the spores and make mother culture. It's very it's, it's, um, you know, lactic acid bacteria, Bacillus subtilis, photosynthetic bacteria, and fermented yeast, Saccharomyces. And it's a consortium. And so all of these microbes, they work better together. So they they create synergism. And I can give you an example. When yeast is breaking down organic compounds, it produces CO two, a photosynthetic micro organism utilizes CO two during photosynthesis to create other or complex organic compounds. So the CO two that's a byproduct of the yeast is then you being utilized by a photosynthetic bacteria that's in that same consortium to produce more complex compounds. Those complex compounds are things like organic acids, phytohormones, different types of compounds that are going to have bio stimulating properties. Or they could be Sadia force, things that chelate and keep micro nutrients available. Or it could be enzymes that solubilize phosphorus, or enzymes that break down chitin. Or it could be a number of different things that depending on the strain you could you have other micro organisms, like photosynthetic bacteria that are using that CO two when they're creating amino acids, and then those amino acids are being utilized by the bacillus bacteria to make. Lactic acid and acetic acid and anti microbial compounds that help suppress pathogens. So they work as an engine, because they're able to produce compounds that each other can use for growth and reproduction, while also producing a wider variety of secondary metabolites. So it's like if you had a bunch of cannabis plants that were all producing different terpenes and different cannabinoid profiles, and then you harvested all of those, and then you blended those up into one blend, the effect would be radically different than if you were just to take one of those varieties and smoke it on its own. Hell yeah, Brother, don't I know it. So that's a good analogy on how these microbes work. When you have this specific consortium, they actually function even better. So all of the metabolites, all the compounds of the producing they all work synergistically together. I

did not know that the formulation was based on the work of Dr tarua Kika. It's my understanding

tiro Higa. I may be from this mispronouncing it, but it could be easy to do that. That

was really cool. I was looking into his work developing stuff to remediate after the soil, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah, that's really neat. I did not know that's what it's based on. Very, very cool. It's

not just a plant pro soil and plant probiotic, but it's used for bio remediation, waste remediation. It's used in aquaculture, like fish farms, crab farms, shrimp farms. It's used in animal agriculture, they're giving it in water or putting it in food as a multi functional probiotic for the animals. So it can be used in a wide array of different applications. And because of that, I started to think outside the box. And I was thinking about a movie that I had seen with Jack Black and Ben Stiller called envy, and Jack Black makes this spray called vaporize, and it makes dog shit disappear. It says, vanishes out of thin air. Now I can't make dog shit vanish out of thin air, but I can help it decompose exponentially faster and not smell with this same formulation. So we're going to start a new product. It's not a new product, but it's a new packaging that's marketed towards the pet sector, that can be used in cat boxes, can be used in horse manure or cow manure. Compost piles can be used in the backyard where your dog shits, and it'll help decrease overall smells, and hope it'll help break down the that waste material really fast.

That's awesome. I remember what a poll envy the vape who riser fantastic. And if you could invent that, I mean, you'd be a billionaire, let's be honest, man, you're a dog owner. But, yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome that the microbes are the magical helpers, you know, in this in this scenario. So I'm excited to load up my outdoor garden this next year with some calcil, some goodness like that. Very, very excited. You sent me some work that you're doing. You've generated these charts. When I say charts, they are going to be created into visual graphics. I know you'll have them done up all nice by your artists, but basically just these learning resources to help you understand nutrient dynamics. I'm looking at a list of macronutrients and micronutrients, and then in this chart, it'll show what their functions are in the plant. It'll show what they synergize with, what they antagonize, different pH ranges. Really cool of you to show this to me here and listeners, you will again see this. If you follow Brandon rust on Instagram and follow his Patreon, you'll see these when they're all done and made up pretty this is some really cool information. It's good to deliver this information in a multimedia format like that, so people can understand it and digest it. I think people really struggle Brandon with antagonizing relationships. I think that's something that people run into that's not just as simple as like, hey, stop over watering or under watering when the balance of their medium gets thrown off, or they're using a subpar nutrient line, and there's all these issues, maybe you can just give a few examples. Have you seen like consulting with people and working with farms? Examples of where something gets out of whack and antagonizes another mineral?

Yeah. So the thing that comes to mind first and foremost is going to be sodium bicarbonate and chloride, those three elements are often found in higher levels in water, and they compile over time, causing issues over a period of time. And so oftentimes I'll get somebody that's reaching out that's going on. My first three runs were really great and have any issues, and my fourth run wasn't so good, and on my fifth run is just taking a shit. I can't figure out what's going on. And so what we're looking at is something like, like sodium. Sodium will block out the uptake of calcium, magnesium and potassium, wow. Because they all have similar charges, so they they can bind on to clay COVID And this. Terms of organic matter, and they compete for those sites. So if you have too much sodium, sodium takes all of those sites up, and then whenever, whenever you're watering that sodium is falling into solution instead of calcium or magnesium or potassium, and so the plant isn't getting proper uptake. That's why they call it an antagonistic relationship,

and this is usually from the water source itself. This is dealing with just shitty water, essentially,

typically. So as an example, something that just immediately came to mind was water, but also when it comes to sodium and chloride and things like heavy metals, ocean inputs. So you're

watching out for your water quality, and then this is one of the reasons that you don't like to use a lot of sea based inputs, right? And I know that a lot of people do different styles, and we'll say, I get it from this source or that source. But you're worried about not just heavy metals. You're worried about sodium.

A lot of the the inputs

that come from the ocean are both going to be high in sodium and chloride, because salt is in the ocean sodium chloride. Now they're not bonded together as a salt, but they could just be individuals that are in that but also you see a lot of heavy metal contamination. It's very, very common with organic kelp meals, castation meals, all those types of different things, and so I just tend to not use them as an agronomist and someone who gives recommendations all the time, it's something I can't trust. And so I just eliminate it all together, because there's other sources that I can use. Most of the things that I do when I add into these systems are mineral based. Anyway. They are natural minerals, but they're not really organic. Some of these are soluble salts, like iron sulfate. It's natural. It's, you know, comes out of the ground, but it is actually, you know, salt. So

the chloride you mentioned goes right along with that. Is that usually where people are getting too much chloride as well, yep,

usually from their inputs. Also, you could be getting too much chloride from synthetic nutrients too. If you have things like calcium chloride or potassium chloride as one of the ingredients in that fertilizer, and you're not maybe flushing enough, you're not doing enough volume of water run through, you might be building up that chloride level in that media, and it becomes an issue. And bicarbonates

was the last thing you mentioned. Now, all of these just antagonize a whole host of nutrients you mentioned, a handful. These are the things we got to watch out for the most.

Yeah, bicarbonate does the same thing as sodium. It also drastically increases soil pH or media pH as well. And if you're in hydroponics, you don't want you really don't want that, because when you have a higher pH, your phosphorus start binding with calcium and magnesium. From

a home grower perspective, like if we're running a water softener, isn't that adding a ton of sodium to our feed? Well,

you shouldn't really be doing a softener. You need to be testing your water to figure out if there's an issue with it to begin with, I'm lucky enough that my well, where I'm at, has just great water, some of the best water I've tested so far, which I'm very lucky. Sometimes it's just a little bit of high sodium. If you just have a little bit of high sodium and everything else is good, you just need a sodium filter. Or you might just need a sediment filter. You might need a ro you might need special filtration. It just depends on the quality of your water. To start with, what determines water quality is, what is in that water, how much sodium chloride and bicarbonate is in there? How much calcium, magnesium, nitrogen, potassium, boron, copper, zinc, how much of all the nutrients that plant use are actually in that water? And the answer should really be, the less is better, because less means that more of those nutrients can fall into the solution when you water, or when you're adding something to it, that water will be able to hold on to those those ions in solution, there's more room for the things we want. Yeah, that's another thing with water. If there's a bunch of stuff in your water, less of what you're putting in there is going to stay in solution and be taken up by the plant through mass flow.

Well, it makes sense that you say that these are common problems, because it's coming from, like the tap water itself, right? Like, obviously people will go overboard with some top dress or some input, and they might throw things off. But this just occurs from proper watering. Like you said, maybe you have three, four really good runs, and then over time, this builds up. So yeah, important to do that testing right? That's why you need to get a Logan labs test if you're relying on your soil beds. Invest that? What? 6070, bucks?

No, I think it's like 25 bucks for water test. And you can learn how to interpret one of those tests by going to the very first blog post on the bukashi earthworks blog. You. And it tells you all of the targets that you want to see. And if everything is below those targets, you know your water is good to go and you don't have to worry about

it. There you go. Bucha earthworks.com, check out the education section. I look forward to these charts. Man, that's going to be really cool to be able to peruse over those. Share those with the community. Uh,

let me just go over them real quick. So what I did is I wanted to do the base fundamentals of soil nutrient dynamics, and some of those things were understanding whether they had a positive and negative charge, what form they were available in, what their primary function was in the plant, what synergistic and antagonistic relationships they have with each other, with optimal pH ranges for each of those individual nutrients, how they are uptaken, if it's mass flow, diffusion or root inception. And then, you know, the key role in what what they do with plant metabolism. And then also for each of those microbial processes that influence the availability of those micronutrients. And then I made the same thing for all of the macronutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and secondary nutrients, calcium, magnesium and sulfur. And so it just gives you all of their charges, all that information that I just said, and it'll give you the base fundamentals. It's like being it's like having a good base fundamentals at any sport like you can't progress unless you have all the base fundamentals. And this basically covers all of the things that you would need to know to build a solid foundation on understanding nutrient dynamics. In poker,

we have a range chart. It tells you, like, what a good hand is based on your position, what a bad it teaches you the fundamentals, essentially. So this is like, essentially. So this is like a soil range chart as I see it. I'm excited for the for the drop, man, you know, we were talking about these, this content and these resources off air a little bit, and I was asking you about different minerals and what you're kind of involved in researching. And one of the things you brought up was iron. I wanted to make sure that we make a little bit of time for iron at the end of the show, you know, you talked about why it's an important limiting factor that you need to make sure that you have addressed. There's a lot of stuff that I've read that's like, oh, iron deficiency is like, not that common. But you tell me, is it? Is it a deficiency that we run into? What's the importance of iron in the grow? It's not

so much deficiency in the actual soil. It has to do with availability, and it has to do with oxidation and reduction, because what happens is and pH, right? So iron, ferric iron, which is it's available, available, divalent form, which it means it has two positive charges associated with it. It oxidizes very quickly into oxidized iron, which is an unavailable form for the plant. Plant doesn't have great access to it when it's in that form. So it has to be it has to be reduced into its fair form to be available. Now the problem with that is the pH range of availability is usually around 4.5 to 5.5, is ideal. Now nobody's cultivating unless you're doing blueberries in pH ranges that are that low. And so that becomes a problem, because when you're at 665, the availability of iron decreases, and it decreases. You know, the higher you are, the neutral

and so it's not that

it's could be, it's it, the limiting factor really becomes to is because of the chemistry of iron. However, there are some processes when it comes to increasing the solubility of iron. And there's a couple things that you can do, and one of those things is using different microbes. The trichoderma in the bacillus subtilis is one of the things that I use in my bio crop steering protocols. And it's almost it's not used exclusively for this, but this is one of the main benefits, because it that combination of bacteria and fungus together, they work synergistically, and they have the highest percentage of hydroxamate sedia for production of any microbe that's been studied. And what that is, it is a secondary metabolite that chelates iron and holds it in a biologically available form. Jeez, you'll see is, you'll see higher solubility on a saturated pace test with soils that have been inoculated with triderma and the bacillus subtilis

that is wild. Is that why you're, uh, you've said this for a while, man. I mean, I'm sure you like fun guy and different people's grow. But you say, you know, Myco is popular on the market, but I skip it. You always said you do trichoderma and you combine it with bacillus subtilis. Those are the only two that's the main microbe kind of base in your soil. Yeah.

So here's the deal with the Myco versus trichoderma. So there has been science that shows both synergistic and antagonistic relationships, right? So it's all comes down to. To the amount of resources, soil hydrology, soil pH, soil structure, temperature, all of those things and nutrient resource. If everything is in homeostasis, these microbes could potentially play nice together, but once things start going sideways, the more dominant variety will take over for those resources. That's just how it is. That's how it is in nature, in

any system. Now, I've seen science that

shows, you know, trichoderma taking over, but I've also seen it where it works synergistically. Given you have the right resources, they could work synergistically, but I don't care if they work synergistically together, because trichoderma does the exact same thing as micro it works as an endo mycorrhizal. It is systemic. It is an endo fight so it makes an association with the root. It creates fungal filaments. It transports nutrients. It creates phosphatase it creates anti microbial compounds. It does all of the exact same things that endo and Ecto mycorrhizal fungi do, but the metabolite or the chemical compounds that it produces are a lot more powerful, and they have a lot more benefits, especially the with the hydroxamate side force, plus the out competition ability of trichoderma is second to none in the micro world. That's a good IPM, no type of everything. Oh, just absolutely despise trichoderma, because just one small contamination can wipe out entire tubs. They could just lose entire harvest because of that microbe. Now if we're talking about things like leaf septoria or from cerium or botrytis or powdery mildew, those are all fungal pathogens that that can just be eliminated, that just are wiped out with the application of this T 22 trichoderma. And again, when you're using the bacillus subtilis with the trichoderma, the bacteria will live on the fungal filaments that the fungus is producing, and they're creating similar metabolites that work synergistically together, so you're getting increased efficiency and efficacy when you add both. And so I just don't see a reason why to spend that much money when you could just do an inoculation one time in veg, once, maybe mid, mid, at transition, and then once, maybe at three weeks of flower with the microbes, and be done with it. And just make sure that you're protected from blood, rot and PM, and all that other stuff.

You've been recommending

that for a while, and the proof is in the pudding, because your soil does really, really well. So I don't know, I think that's really cool. And it's interesting that it ties into iron, producing the most abundant enzyme, I'm sure to you know, like you said, make that iron chemically available. Why is that so important for cannabis,

specifically iron. Well, most

of the media that we're running is these living soils or these modified growing mixes, which are, you know, they're highly porous, so they have really good gas, air and oxygen and water exchange. And given those conditions, iron oxidizes, so it becomes solubility becomes very low, even if you have a lot of it in your system. And so it's just something that needs to be managed. It is a photosynthetic element. It is responsible for, let's see, I wrote all these things like photosynthe and respiration. It's used for chlorophyll synthesis, enzyme functions, and electron transport. So it's got a bunch of functions it's needed. And, you know, it's just one of those things that I see oftentimes when people, like, I can't figure out what's going going on with my plant, and they have, like, whole plant yellowing. Oftentimes it's it's iron, and sometimes it can be due to over watering. Oh, sure, that can Dec iron availability and too wet of soils. And, yeah, just there's a bunch of different factors that makes a lot of sense. What you said about the air ratio oxidizing iron, and then maybe you couple that with over watering, which a lot of beginners growers tend to do. I mean, I've been growing forever, and I still find myself over watering sometimes and and then your plant is having trouble feeding right, due to the lack of oxygen. If you let it dry back too fast, it's kind of a vicious cycle. Well, that's really cool, though. Focusing on the iron availability, you're saying it's there, it's just not ready for the plant to take up. So you want to have these different processes in place, like adding specific microbes to unlock it

and make it available. Yeah,

micro plus helps with solubility of some of those nutrients that are available at lower pH ranges. Because while you're you're watering temporarily, your solution pH is lower because of all the organic acids in the micro plus and your soil pH will buffer that. It's not going to like, have a negative impact. But. For that short period of time, you're getting a higher solubility of those those nutrients. So being able to hit it with a little bit of micro bus every other week helps with the solubility of those micronutrients, which it over has an overall net positive impact on, you know, the quality in the eel.

Well, listen, man,

we flew through an hour here. I have some more points, but we're gonna have to save it. We'll save it for a grow cast TV for the members. I want to get you on there as soon as possible. I know you're a busy guy. I appreciate you making time for my audience. They love to hear from you.

I gotta do some gardening anyway.

You get to it, man. But before you go, where can people find you? Where can people follow you? Of course, Bokashi earthworks.com listeners, you can get 10% off, I believe, with code grow cast. And then members of grow cast membership getting 15% off, appreciate that additional membership discount. Where can we find you, other than Bokashi earthworks.com,

so you can find me on IG, at rust dot Brandon and at Bokashi earthworks, Facebook also. And then we also have the bukashi seed vault website, which we just launched. We have some variety some seeds on there. We have some clothes on there. Those clothes aren't going to be there for more than a couple days, so I don't know if the people that listen to this I'll even have a chance to scoop them, but I do drops on there periodically, very exclusive. I'll do stuff that I find in Pheno hunts. I'll release them like maybe once, and then maybe twice, and then that's it. So if you can't get it, you can't get it, you gotta find somebody that bought it and try to get it

from them. Do you want to get them on the email list? Do you send out an email when those drops go live?

Definitely. So if you want to sign up on our email, just go to our website and you can sign up for the newsletter right

on the

right on the web page there. Yeah, you have some good content coming out. I'll see your Bucha earthworks recently coming in with some educational stuff, and then a sale here there. That's That's good stuff. Man, newsletter is looking good. Yep, I guess that's why we're working on all these fancy charts and stuff. Keep doing your work. Man, listen, like I said, we appreciate you. You're kicking ass out there. Thank you for making time, and please come back again soon. Okay, awesome. I'll talk to you soon. All right, man, that's all everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Stay tuned. Growcast podcast.com is where you can find us. It's where you can follow us all of the things. It's all there that's all for now. We'll catch you again soon. This is Brandon rust and Jordan River signing off, saying, Be safe out there, everybody and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you everybody that is Brandon rust at Bokashi earthworks.com. Use code grow cast there. Come and see what we're doing at growcast podcast.com we have the membership. We have the seeds. Jump in membership, folks. It's 15 bucks a month. You save so much discount on our seeds, discount on a whole variety of products, including Bucha earthworks. It's a really, really great place to be if you're not already in there. So jump in, and I hope to see you soon, real quick, before we go the natural farming immersive is our next big class. It is October 19 in Oklahoma. Very limited space on this one, guys, if you're thinking about a natural farming class this year, this is the one to come out and travel for. We're on ok, call X's property. We're going to be going in the woods and foraging and scavenging for different inputs. We're going to be making IMO and labs and liquid IMO and all through all the different steps and numbers, and he's gonna do it in front of you guys. You can film the whole thing. We get to all be together and have lunch and, you know, have a little camp out after and smoke up. It's gonna be so much fun. There's only a dozen spots left. Grow cast podcast.com/classes, brings you right there. Grab your ticket now, because they're going to sell out. It's October 19. Grab your spot. It's in Oklahoma. It's gonna be probably one of the best, most unique classes, certainly, we've ever done. So check it out right now, before those spots are gone. And thank you to okalux for doing this awesome class. So cool to be working with this guy. So I'll see all you natural farming heads there, and then I'll also see you here two weeks from now. We're doing episodes every other week. The video project is coming along. We've got the studio up and running. We're doing video content for members, obviously, already, but we're just stockpiling some content and taking care of some other stuff. So by the end of the year, you'll be able to tune in video on this show, but you don't have to. You can keep listening right here on your podcast app. So don't worry about it. Go enjoy your garden. I love all of you listeners, and especially you members. We'll see you next time bye bye

smells like hot dog water. I.