💧Moisture Retention Curve, Reservoir Care, and BluMat Tips with Michael Box

10:20AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

moisture retention

watering techniques

blue mat

soil conference

moisture retention curves

ideal moisture levels

living soil

moisture tension

field capacity

wilt point

irrigation techniques

blue mat sensor

reservoir care

nutrient levels

capillary mats

Greetings, cultivators from around the world. Jordan River here. Back at you with more. Growcast, always the right moisture. Today we have Michael box back on the line. This is a really great episode. I think this is the greatest episode with Michael that we've done. We'd go in depth to watering practices and watering techniques, moisture retention curves, the difference between different mediums, and of course, the new developments over at blue mat. Code grow cast is active at sustainable village.com. Michael likes to put that on for you guys when he comes on the show. Now through the end of April, use code grow cast for your blue mats if you need them, everybody, I know you're gonna love this episode with Michael. And before we jump into it, you know, I got a shout out. AC infinity. AC infinity.com. Code growcast One five, to get your savings and keep the lights on. Here at growcast, we appreciate your support, and we love AC infinity. They make the best grow tents around extra thick poles. They've got nice, durable, thick siding now they have the new side ports. People have been asking for those and AC infinity lists and plus, they've got everything else you need to grow. They've got lights and pots and fans, and they're oscillating fans the cloud Ray system. Check out their humidifiers, the cloud Forge. How nice is your humidifier? Maybe it's time to replace that. The cloud rays are my favorite oscillators on the market. And of course, their cloud Line series. What they got it all started with all those years ago, when we were partners with AC infinity, all they made were those inline fans, and they're the best in the game. So shout out to the entire AC infinity suite. They've got everything you need to get growing from fans to tents delights. Code, growcast one five works at AC infinity.com. You support us, and you're getting some badass, durable grow gear while you're doing it. So thank you to all you listeners using code grow cast one five, and thank you to AC infinity. All right, let's get to it with Michael. 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, share a grow cast, turn someone on to growing, tell a grower about the show. It's how we grow. We're on Spotify. We're on iTunes, Apple Music, wherever you want us. We're there. Check us out and share the show. See everything we're doing and all the places we're going. At growcast podcast.com/action there, you'll see the classes and the seeds and the membership and all the fun stuff, all the codes and all that. Today we have speaking of codes. We have the man himself from sustainable village, the US distributor of the incredible blue matte watering system. Michael box is back on the line. What's up? Michael, Hey, Jordan, good to be here. Thanks, man, yeah. Good to have you back on the show. Of course, sustainable village.com. You know Michael? That is where he is from. He is the mayor of sustainable village, and they are distributing blue mats all over the place to living soil growers to automate their grow. And Michael runs temporary sales code grow cast gets you 10% off all blue mat products at sustainable village.com through the month of April, right? Michael,

yeah, that's right. Kind of happy to offer that to your listeners. Yeah, it's one of the few sales we do. So yeah, take advantage of it.

You guys do not do discounts a lot. You guys are very generous to activate this for us, because you guys don't really see codes outside of this community. So I really appreciate that. Michael and my audience appreciates that, seriously, appreciates that. But today, we've got a lot to cover. You were just recently at a big soil conference giving some presentations, diving deep into ideal moisture levels and moisture retention curves and so much more. Man, talk to me about what you've been up to and how your presentation was at the soil Summit. Sure. Yeah.

So we were just at the soil life Summit? Well, about a month ago, I guess it is now, that was out in Nevada City, the grassroots fabric pots, they kind of hosted this event and put it on and brought together a bunch of cultivators. Was mostly living soil oriented. So a lot of soils, like soil science people and cultivators. And, you know, we did a piece on irrigation. Lot of really great, really great speakers were there and, well, look, I kind of want to bring this up right off the top. You know, I was out there with my team that I like to travel with. And those guys are Izzy Becker and Cooper Didier, and they're both experienced cultivators and real blue mat experts. And with them, we've been doing a ton of R and D work here at sustainable village, using the blue mats to accomplish different things. Basically, get really, really precise with our moisture levels. We've also been doing quite a bit of research on, like existing university based, you know, published studies on what are called moisture. Tension curves. And we'll kind of get into that a little bit as we progress here, about what those are and what kind of data we can pull off of them. But yeah, so between a lot of kind of like functional research and development in regards to how to precisely use blue mats and very small systems and scaled up to very large systems, right? And get extremely consistent moisture levels in soil media for the size of whatever room you're working with, whether it's six plants or or 1000 plants.

I'd like to talk about this idea of the ideal moisture range, because it's a really interesting one, right, especially in living soil, because your oxygen levels right, that's going to determine the type of biology that thrives in your soil, how aerobic that soil is, and the more moisture there is, the less air is going to be there. But obviously too dry is bad also. So it's just funny to see. It's interesting to see someone like you who dives so deep into this one niche aspect, because it's infinitely complex, I'm sure. So you hear about this like 5050, air to water ratio, but I've always wondered, like that can't apply to every plant. That can't apply to every situation. When it comes to cannabis, what can you tell us about like taking a look at the media, whether or not it's living soil or what it's comprised of, and what that ideal moisture level truly is.

So one thing we could start to talk about is this concept of moisture retention curves. And a moisture retention curve is a graph, you know, it has, it has a y axis and an x axis. So you know, you're, you're vertically oriented y axis would represent your VWC, which is volumetric water content. So that's water as measured in the form of a percent. So how much water is in there, essentially, well, yes. And then, on a volumetric level, how much water is in there, and then that that brings with it all kinds of interesting correlations between air the amount of air. So as as water moisture, as volumetric moisture levels increase the amount of air in the soil decreases, right? And as that moisture, that volumetric water level decreases, your EC increases your electrical conductivity, or your parts per million, or however you want to how much material is in the in the water, usually in form of nutrients. That's going to increase as the amount of water in the soil dries out. And then, so that's your vertical axis. And then your horizontal axis is tension, and this is measured in center bars, or millibars, the units of pressure. One bar equals 15 psi. And that's, it's a metric unit, right? So, I never knew that for that formula. That's funny, yeah. So it's one atmosphere pressure, so it's like the weight of all the you know, how much that sea level, what does the all the air above you weigh with 15 psi or one bar, and if you break that down into metric fractions, so you have a steno bar is 1/100 and a millibar is 1,000th of a bar. So those are just units of pressure. So that's how you measure tension. There's a relationship between your VWC, your volumetric water content, your percentage, and the tension in the soil. And as the as the percentage of water drops in the soil, the tension increases, right? And you can, you can make a graph of this, and there's various functional points on the graph that are the set parameters for, basically, your your available water content. So there's a point at the graph where it's flat at the top, you know, it's very high percentage of moisture, and there's a certain point where it starts to fall now, so as the soil dries out, this graph is going to there's a point where the graph will drop. It's flat, and then it drops, and it goes straight down, you know, at some sort of angle. Is sometimes steep, sometimes less steep, depending on the soil moisture type, or, sorry, soil media type, and then it'll flatten out again.

Yeah? It bottoms out at the end. If you Google, yeah, if you google this moisture retention curve, you'll see, and like you said, they've got different medias listed here, and the line looks different for every single media. That's

correct, yeah. So that point at the top where it flattens out right, right, where it takes that first, you know, dive, where it kind of goes off the cliff, that's basically field capacity. That's your field capacity point. And then the place where it flattens out again, that's your permanent wilt point, right? The wilting point of

so now it's just dead. It's, it's, it's gone completely. Okay, so. I see what you're saying. So at the top, so at the top of that first hill, right before it drops off in soil tension, is where your field saturation is. So that tells me that when you're using a moisture meter, like a blue mat sensor or the arometers that measures in M bars, then you're going to need to adjust based on your media, is that what you're telling me,

that's correct? Wow. So what we can do is, if you look and there is, there's some great stuff out there, you know, there's a real there's a video, I'll tell you guys about the the channel is called Science and hydroponics. That's who made the video. You know, it's really, actually, really great material. But there's a video called Understanding media through moisture retention curves. This is a YouTube video, understanding media through moisture retention curves by science and hydroponics. If anybody wants to do the deep dive into the kind of functionality of these graphs, that's a really good one to check out. So but, but, you know, just to get down to the meat and potatoes of this, you know, because I know this, the science part is fun for some folks, and some people just be like, give me What's usable, what's usable data and and I kind of want to jump into that just a bit, you know. So when we're looking at at like a pure peat mix, what we find is we want to keep the soil and again. So you have these two points, right? You have your field capacity, and then you have your wilt point, and all your water always needs to stay in between those two, those two periods, because when it's at field capacity, that means, that means you're getting run off, right? So, so in most irrigation events, we want to not have run off, or not have very much run off, because that tends to be, you know, wasting water, nutrients and that sort of thing. So we want to be able to hit the field capacity point and stay just just a little bit drier than field capacity. And that's really the ideal range to hit, is on that kind of wetter side of things, which would be a lower m bar number, and then the upper limit is your wilt point, which we don't really want to cross, because once the plants actually start to wilt, there's permanent damage that's occurring. At that point, the plant might survive, might be able to bring it back to life, but you've decreased vigor and yields, you know, to some degree, right? So, yeah, so things like we can, we can look at different basic media types, you know, like pure peat per lite as a media Coco, like pure coco coir. You can look at the blends, like more of our, you know, basic living soil blends, which tend to be a peat or or cocoa mixed with pearlite and then some organic material, yeah.

How do they differ? How do the how do those ideal m bar readings differ between those types of mediums,

right? So let's look at, let's look at, like, three kind of types of media here that are very common. So we can look at, like, what, like a living soil blend would be, you know, kind of a, like, a basic

sure, like this is exactly based on Coots mix, like a 1/3 Yeah, Pete perlite compost with a bunch of minerals added in there. These are brands that you might go out and grab, like, yeah, build a soil. Or Purple Cow. Or these are, these are richer, like

this, organics, Miller soil, the really good stuff out there. Now,

the base is nice and airy, but they do have a lot of that mineral content in there. So it's adding, it holds a little bit more water than if you just went and grabbed a pro mix. So I'm interested to see what the ideal watering pressure is, because it's not, yeah, it's not dirt outside, but it's also not fucking pro mix, no.

So, I mean, what you're calling dirt was like, like native soils, we'll call them, tend to be composed mostly of sand, silt and clay, so some sort of ratio of sand, silt and clay, and those are not typically what cannabis cultivators are growing in especially, I mean, anybody's growing in a container, especially indoors, yeah, yeah, anything, any container grow, whether it's indoors, outdoors, raised beds, pots, whatever we're looking at, it's going to be in some sort of low tension soil, right? So, like a potting mix blend of some sort, whether it's cocoa or pee based,

right? And I was told 90 to 120 M bars that range,

yeah, so you can go wetter. So I would say, okay, just here's some numbers for living soil, a living soil mix, I'd go 50 to 100 m bars. Whoa,

that is wetter. And now, now for the first time, listener, the lower the m bar, the wetter the soil.

Yeah, it is. And really, like, based on the soil moisture retention curve, that's like, what it that's what we're seeing, because so damn and that's gonna and then, and, you know, you gotta, when you, when you're looking at, like, the living soil blend, you really have to take the brand or the mix, or the, you know, the recipe, and do your own moisture retention curve for that. Or. Get the data from the manufacturer, which is sometimes available, and there is ways to do it yourself, which could be another episode, maybe. But, you know, the living soil that that range is really going to be, it's going to be dramatically affected by the amount of compost. There's a biochar in there. What's in there that's holding moisture longer, right? And could be acting differently. You know, compost is great in lots of ways, but it's also problematic in other ways too. So one of them is the kind of unknown, how it affects what your attention is, right? But basically, we're talking like, you know, like peat or cocoa pearlite and compost as your main that's what a living wrinkle. That's what I'm calling the living slope. What? Sure, pure P has a has a wider range, actually, that you could really hold stuff in, probably like as wet as 40 millibars, all the way up to maybe 120 would be a good zone to keep just a pure peat mix in. The range is wider. That's interesting, like pure peat, pure cocoa, really, at this point we're just talking, you know, more synthetic hydroponic style, growing with, like, a soil, less medium. Would

you say the same range for pure cocoa? No. And

here's where it gets. Very interesting. Cocoa is, you can keep very wet, right? It's like 10 to 70. Oh, wow, you'll be where you want it. Yeah, so that field capacity point of cocoa is right around 10 millibars. You know, that's on the wet side, but you can keep cocoa extremely wet and it, it's got a very steep curve, so it's going to dry out quicker than other soil media types and which, which basically lets us say that Coco needs to get watered multiple times a day. Yeah, it's just not really possible to and I'm sure people are gonna maybe have other opinions about this. But you know, if you're looking at it from the from the point of view, and what's your attention curve to you have to be watering cocoa multiple times a day, multiple times within a 24 hour period in order to stay within the the available water content window that

optimal range, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's a lot of different ways that people can can do it, but if you talked about optimal usage of Coco. I think, you know, even like guests like Dr Coco, which is that's kind of his whole thing is it tends to go hand in hand with high frequency fertigation this medium. Now, what I didn't realize is just how saturated that is, down to 10 millibars, as opposed to, you know, the bottom of this living soil range. I was originally being told 80, and now you saying 50, that's still a huge gap. Down to 10, that's wild. Yeah,

it's really, really wet. And you know, so again, when you start playing around in these ranges, then you start looking again. So things to think about, from an irrigation point of view, how much air is in the soil, what's the tension of the soil, what's the volume of water in the soil, what is the EC of the soil, and then what's the pH as well, which is a little bit different, but, you know, the EC, that's another one. So your nutrient levels, again, that's that's part of it. So like with cocoa, when you're feeding it, like a synthetic nutrient mix or something, once it starts to dry down, like, you know, past 70 millibars, the EC is starting to get more and more dense, right?

Why is that? Why is the saturation of water lowering the electrical conductivity? Do you know why that is

because it's diluting it. It's diluting it. So you have to think of, think of soil as a liquid solution. Think of it as a liquid. Think of soil as a liquid, and it's got all these different components, and the more water in it, the more diluted

it is. Wow, I never thought of it like so if you have nutrients in

the soil and they become it becomes drier and drier. It's just like you ever leave a pot of coffee in the coffee machine overnight and you come back and it's like sludge on the bottom of the of the pot ran out of moisture. That's, you know, that's because you take your dehydrated and you just have the thick nutrient mix, so by drying it down too low, and This especially happens in rockwool, but like, because it's such a quick transition, and it's but, but in cocoa as well, if you dry it down too much, you know you're going to get that wilt point just of the lack of water availability. But right before that happens, you're going to get an order over fertilization negative side effects as well. So

you're more likely to burn your plants with that if you dry them back too much, and the soil moisture gets so low that the EC spikes, so you're more likely to get new trim burn. That's wild man. That is so wild. That's why you need a smart watering system, like the blue mats, to keep that shit evenly moist. The order of cultivation our membership program over at growcast podcast.com/membership Hundreds of hours of bonus content. Members Only, discounts on things like grow cast, seed, co seeds and more, members only, Discord, giveaways. There's so much going on in the order of cultivation, you need to get in on it. We are open for the next week. Membership is 100% open. You can find it at growcast podcast.com/membership, jump on in. If you love this show, you will love our community. Like I said, you get discounts on products like Dino, Myco and rain science grow bags and Rimrock testing. A lot of our partner products, members are getting a deeper discount than anyone else, plus weekly live streams. I do grow cast TV Live every Wednesday. It's the greatest show in cannabis. Nothing out there like it, and hundreds of hours of archives, you will never run out of content again, folks, so come and join the community. Find a grow me near you, there's someone in the order who's waiting to hook up and trade cuts and trade buds and get in on all the events and the classes and everything we're doing at grow cast podcast.com/membership, you'll also receive $20 off your packs of grow cast seed co seeds. We've got this super rare rhinos delight up there. I think there's like, two packs left, so check that out at grow cast podcast.com/seed, CO, but make sure to sign up for membership first, so you get that member discount one more time. That's grow cast podcast.com/membership, thank you everybody. Let's get back to the show. I'm sure you've seen the study that's been passed around for a really long time, talking about using a drought period to increase cannabinoids and and yield. I believe the title of the paper is something like increasing in fluorescence, dry yield, weight in cannabis or whatever. And it talks about how they they droughted their cannabis in mid flower. Yeah. What do you think of that, and whether or not that study is true? Do you ever recommend that people toy with droughts like that? Yeah,

sure. So I haven't read that exact study, but I'm gonna send it over very you're talking about, like, dry bags. You know, people want whether it's having, well, it's a dry back period helpful for my plants at different periods in time. And the answer is yes, dry backs are useful and beneficial, but the amount that you're you're swinging the moisture level, you know, between dry and wet, is smaller than people think. And I don't know what the parameters of that study were like. I don't know how they were measuring, how they were drying, how much they were drawing back, or what kind of draft periods they were putting in place on their plants. I don't think like purposely taking them past the permanent low point, right? Good.

That's the thing is, I tell people, you know, even if that study is like, pointing to a true you know, way to increase your yields, like, I don't want people risking crop loss for maybe a slight increase in yield, as opposed to keeping it nice. And even now, what you're saying about swings is interesting, because that's a lot like temperature, right? Which is like, well, if you're going to run a dry back or a dryer solution, make sure you're not then over watering the thing, because that's what's gonna Is that what you're saying, that's what's gonna cause more issues.

Yeah, we'll just don't try it out too much, is the main thing. So, I mean, you familiar with this term, crop steering? Yes, you know, like steering, biological whatever. So crop steering with moisture levels. Okay, so when, when the moisture level drops down, you know, we get to that higher, the higher millibar ratings, and the EC concentrates, you now have plant uptaking the large amounts of nutrients, right? So one of the principles of that steering technique is to dry it down. Dry this immediate down to a point where the EC concentrates and becomes high, and the plant uptakes that high nutrient level, that high EC nutrients. And so it's taking in a lot of nutrients at once, but you just can't take it too far. You can't take it past a point where you're getting like a nutrient burn, right? Or taking you're not getting any kind of, like toxicity through nutrient uptake. Or,

like you said it on the other side, on the moisture side, wilt or anything like that. Yeah.

So on the wish said that too. So you don't want to take it through that. So, you know, to do this, this earring where we're drying out a little bit and then, you know, the plants pulling in more nutrients. You can achieve that functionality through swinging between, like, wetter and drier periods. That's what was happening. And you can do that, but you don't, it's not as extreme a thing as people might use. The other really effective way I've been seeing people use dry back periods is in right after transition, you know, like the first maybe two to three weeks of flower, if people dry back their soil a ways to, you know, more like 100 120 or something like that. Even, what that'll do is it'll, it'll keep the plants. This is, you particularly see this in like, raised bed living soil type grows where you have this big, full canopy. But really, I guess it would apply to anything. So it's really for canopy management. So what you get is shorter, stouter. Plants with like, a similar amount of Bud sights on them, and it just, it just makes canopy management a little bit easier. So instead of having a bunch of really tall plants, you have some, like, slightly less tall plants. That's useful, yeah, yeah. Because so that's, that's a that's a common place. I see people you know, effectively using a drawback period. I was right at that after transition. I like that. I like that. But, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be said about that. And especially the steering piece, there's a lot of science to that. You know, you mentioned using blue mats as a way to kind of keep soil media within a certain range, and that's really what we've been doing is around here. And, this, you know, this is a bit of a plug for what we do, but it's also just really interesting. And this is some of the R and D work that we've been getting. Is just building the blue mat systems in a way that create these particular millibar swings based on soil moisture type. So with cocoa, we can keep our millibar level really, really consistent, but still getting a little bit of a swing back. So you're getting this slight drying period where EC increases the highest uptake and the dilution. So it's almost like it gets a little bit of a rinse after that. So it gets this high EC uptake, because it's like starting to dry out and freaking out and wants to pull up olive oil available moisture, which happens to be super nutrient rich. And then right after that, you have more water coming in to kind of to give it itself a bit of a flush and a little bit of a cleanse. Oh,

interesting. Now, how do you dial something like that in? Like, what does that mean? Are you reworking the valves? Are you getting in there and tinkering with the with the tiny little aspects of that, of that valve, are you changing out the the carrot? Yeah,

with the carrots, just how to set the carrots Right? So there's like a dial in process, which, you know, essentially is, let's, let's jump into this. Yeah, this is a new, new technique, but it's just a clarification of the technique. And actually we're cranking out some videos right now, Vice instructional stuff. I think it's be really helpful for people

that. Where's that going to be? Is that going to be on the website? That'll be on the sustainable village, YouTube

channel, youtube page.

Go check it out. Everybody. Subscribe code, grow cast for the website. Subscribe to the YouTube baby. Yeah,

so sustainable village and Well, anyways, they're not up yet, but they will be. And give or take apart here, what you'll find is, there's, there's the few main components, right? So this is, we're talking about the blue mat sensor, those ceramic cones that people see. There's a bottom part in unscrew that's just the ceramic cone with a little plastic threading on top. And then the cap is really where all the magic happens. There, right the cap, inside of that is a rubber diaphragm, and when it's sealed, the tip of the blue mat, the ceramic parts dries out and creates suction inside of it, and that suction, it pulls down on that rubber diaphragm and opens a valve. So the real trick to dial in carrots is to dial them in when there's no tension on that rubber diaphragm, right? So there's no tension on the rubber diaphragm, which means you're either doing it with the soil completely right, the soil, at least the soil right around the carrots, is totally saturated, so you're almost at a zero millibar level. Or to do it with the carrot itself sealed, but in a bucket of water or, and this is really cool, what you can do is dial in the cap with the bottom actually removed from the whole device. So if you have your pressurized water line, like, say, your eight mil line set up, run to all your pots, and you have it run to each carrot. You can with the bottom of the carrot removed, right? So when the bottom is removed, there's no tension on that rubber diaphragm, so it's completely at rest. And you just go and you open up the little brown cap on the top, and you open it up until water flows, and then you dial it back until you get the hanging drip. This is the same kind of indicator that we have used before, and everybody's used you look for this hanging drip. So again, we have the cap. We have pressurized water running up to it. We open it up, water flows, we tighten it up so we get a hanging drip, which just means there's a little drop of water right on the on the tip of the three millimeter that brown tubing that comes through the carrot, it's just hanging there. Yeah, right. So now that we have this baseline, which is like neutral atmosphere, like there's no no tension on that, we know that if we get that hanging drip and then tighten it up two triangles or arrows, however you want to call them on the top, we're going to hit. This gets really interesting. We're going to hit a certain millibar level based on the pressure behind the system. So that's really. What's changing the Milla bar level? Wow.

So let me just clarify. If people are going to use that method to do the capless dialing in, they would then screw on the carrot and put it into the soil or medium while it was in its ideal state, and then that way, you know, it's perfectly dialed in, yeah. But

there's a couple more little steps that's going to make that even more, like, obvious how to do it. So we know that if, if you're have, like, the back end pressure, is it 15 psi, right, which is, like the standard blue map pressure reducer, and you dial it back two arrows, you're going to hit 80 millibars. Is going to be going to be the moisture level that you're going to hit, and and then what you can do is we have these little plastic cats. They're called protective cats, and they're little plastic cover. They're very, very inexpensive, and they just snap right onto the top of that, the brown dial a little you adjust, and they snap over it, and they make it so you can't adjust that anymore. So now that cap is preset. We know that when I said we know when it's at 15 psi on the back end, we're going to hit 80 millibars. Wow. And so we can just sit there and do you know 10 of those, 100 of those, 1000 of those? Was talking to the guys up at kiss organics the other day, Ben, the Chief Science Officer up there, he was telling me that we showed him this new technique. He's like, Yeah, I did. I did a room. I had 800 plants in it. Just did it in two days. No, dialed 800 kids, and they're all holding the exact same moisture level, pot to pot to pot to pot. God, and

you, but you're telling me, hold on, let me get let me get this straight. Can I then put that carrot into my medium, no matter how dry or wet it is, and it's going to bring it to that 80 M bars? Is that what you're

saying? Yeah, you wouldn't want to do it in like a hydrophobic medium, but yes, so you don't

have to dial in the actual meme that is that is so cool, man. So it's the floating technique. It's the it's the fucking, what is it, Air Jordan technique. You're hanging this capitalist thing in the air. And then you said, what? Two notches to the right. Bing, bang, boom. You snap it in, you lock it in, and that's it, yeah.

And we built a graph. We built a grass so, yeah, 15 PSA, two notches. 15 psi is gonna give you 80 millibars if you had, if you did that, two two triangles at two psi, like, on a gravity system, that's gonna put you at more, like a like, 120 I don't the graphs in front of me right now, but it's right about there. So here's the thing. So if you're running a gravity system, like low pressure, yeah, maybe you just want to do one trying, because you're gonna get, you're gonna get it one triangle at low pressure. And again, I don't have the graph in front of me, but I'm just from memory.

I'm saying that from that about that range,

yeah, it's basically, it's right around, like a two psi. One triangle equals 80 millibars. That is so crazy, dude. And then there's a line you can draw. And so here's where it gets even crazier, because what you can do is you can take you can we call it cap dialing. That's like the little term we've been doing. And this was a big one. Cooper helped, you know, really define this process in a huge way. And, you know, like I said, we got this team of people here that's been kicking ass, and he drew the graph and everything. So it was, it was, it was a great breakthrough on his part. That we can do is we can, you know, tap, we can captile, you know, 100 carats, put them in the pots, and then we can get every plant in the room to hit the exact middle bar level that we want, right. So this is, let me get that consistency right from pot to pot to pot to pot. And it can be done very quickly. They have the locking cap, so you can use it from cycle to cycles, like once the growth like once that runs over. You can just take that carrot out, as long as you don't mess with the with the top. And you won't, because it has that protected cap. It's you just take the carrot out, throw it in a bucket of water, let it store there until you're ready to set up the next run. And you don't even have to dial it in next time around. So you can just go run after run after run without dialing tears, because they're all preset. So then we take that concept where we've got every container in the room held at the exact same moisture level, without any, you know, any fluctuation, without any monitoring software. There's no electricity, you know, it's all analog stuff. And then we take, we change out the pressure reducer, right? So we take out the basic glue map pressure reducer, and we put in this adjustable pressure reducer that we've recently sourced. It actually has a dial on it that we can twist and change the incoming psi. So if you want to dry out an entire room by 20 millibars, all you have to do is walk over this pressure reducer and give it a turn and you're going to dry back that whole room. Wow. Very precise. That is wild, you know. And when you couple that with like the blue map moisture meters, you're. Which we should touch on that too, because I want to give people a real good pro tip on setting those things and resetting them. And let me forget to do that. I got you. I got you. So we can, you know, you can really measure this. And so if you wanted to put that, you know, 20 millibar dry back at the beginning of your flowering period, you can do that. So

you're reducing it from the psi side. You're no longer reducing it at the carrot. You're just going to the source and increasing or decreasing the pressure and locking in. Listen, don't take this the wrong way, but you're obsessed about this. You dream about water retention. You know what? I mean? You're a nerd for this stuff in the best possible way. And it's funny, because I've talked to you over the years now, and you've taken probably the number one complaint from customers, which is dialing this thing in and out. And you've completely resolved that for those who want to do it this way, that's fucking cool, dude. That is really, that is really exciting. But I do want you to talk about this moisture meter, because I like the blue matte moisture meter, man, this thing has been Hardy for me. I know you said the arometers are like the heavier duty your version, but I just have this little moisture sensor. And honestly, I love it. The more

we use these, and the more we mess around with them, and the more I study the soil, soil moisture as a science and everything, what I'm realizing is what an amazing product is, what these, the digital blue mat moisture meter is and, and I'll tell you why, because it's a tensiometer based moisture meter, right? Like, like the arometer, but it measures so precisely at Wet levels, so volume like at very, very wet levels, it's hard to get act it's very hard to get accurate measurements with a volumetric sensor. And there's a couple of high end tensiometers manufactured by like meter group that, but they're very expensive. Can do very accurate moisture levels. The parameters are good. They're like, really nice quality piece of equipment, and they're all analog. But when you want to get, like, really granular down in that like, 20 to 50 zone, like with the blue Matt digital moisture meter, you're able to do that very accurately. And we used to see some kind of inconsistency with these, and really that's been resolved through kind of clarifying this particular recalibration process. So let me just describe that really quickly. Yeah, please. So if you have one of these blue mat additional moisture meters, it's two components. There's a nine inch, probably seven inches. But anyways, there's a, there's the there's the cone, the ceramic cone with the plastic tube attached to it. And then there's the digital meter head, right, and that screws on the top, so the bottom part, nothing you can do with that. It's just the static piece of equipment. The top is where the meter actually is and the digital readout. Now you don't ever want to get that thing wet. Let's be clear about that. But if you're getting inaccurate meetings, what you need to do is take the meter head off. There's some little screws, little phillips head screws you need, like a little watch screw or something like those screwdriver take them out, and you pop out the battery. Take the battery out, and then you put the battery back in, screw it back in, and then you're going to do a recalibration, where you the on button. You're going to hold that down until it blinks 000, on the screen. And now it's recalibrated to atmosphere. And you want to do this with the meter, head off, removed. It's the same principle we want the sensing aspect of it, just like we want that rubber diaphragm to be at rest and not have tension on it when it's being reset. So I think one of the problems we were seeing a lot that people would start to think, Oh, this isn't going to be an accurate reading or something. They do the reset process, which is just pull that button down. But they do it when this, when the meters in the soil and it has tension being exerted on it. So then you're going to recalibrate at the new zero or the new, you know, whatever that calibration is based on the device being on your tension. So that's why we see those kind of results. So that's easy fix. Anybody's got a blue mat digital moisture meter that's having trouble with it, just follow those steps. Take out the battery. Hold down, like put the battery back in, hold the button down with the meter head removed, and now it's recalibrated. Nice,

easy. Well, you got to defrag the hard drive sometimes. Man, I remember, I remember how that works. Yeah? But yeah, I do recommend, I seriously recommend that everybody get a moisture sensor reader, like hand waters especially. I understand liking the hand watering process, but blue mats are going to free you up for sure. And even if you're not going to get a full blown system, you absolutely need to grab one of these. It just helps you understand so much more. I so much more about your whole setup, and you can really, really dial it in. And I'm excited, man, I'm excited to run a bed with the with the blue mat. But you guys aren't just doing, you know, living soil styles only, right? You do? You have different applications. You You've been running nutrients through some of your products, doing a more hydro style. Al, do you want to talk about that?

Yeah, you know. So, I mean, we've been very popular in with living soil, because we're able to, you know, maintain these kind of semi static moisture levels in the soil, which is, you know, promotes biological activity, you know, the kind of like a hydro neutral state for the rhizosphere. But we found that watering cocoa systems with synthetic nutrients is actually very effective with blue mass, also for these same reasons, because we can mess with the moisture levels so precisely and consistently from container to container to container. But yeah, so sure, we can run any kind of synthetic nutrients through the system. No problem. We recommend people use a little bit of hypochlorous acid or maybe even drip clean product with it to keep them clean. But that's a requirement of any irrigation system that you might install. And yeah, so we're, we can institute these dry backs. We can do it, you know, consistently across the room. We can, we can have that monitored very precisely and really just seeing great results with that? Yeah, I've been doing some R and D stuff with a couple of local grow facilities here in Boulder, and maybe the next time we come on, I'll share some results. But what we're seeing anecdotally is like going to be a massive yield increase. Switching over. They were hand watering a cocoa like synthetic nutrient cocoa program, and really killing it, you know, doing a great job. But I think we're gonna, we're gonna really knock it out of the park. And we'll actually have data on that, I don't know, couple weeks, two weeks maybe. So maybe next time I'm on here, we'll share it. I want to do. I think this one might have already aired, but we're going to be in Oklahoma for canacons. Oh, see you there. Man, yeah, no, I'm looking forward to it. And I think that's like March 31 and April 1, something like that. We're going to do, I'm going to do a seminar there on irrigation techniques. I think Disney is going to help with that as well. We're going to that. We're going to be down in Albuquerque too. So that is Albuquerque can account. I want to say, like around the 19th of May, like that. But you know, one of the things we're talking about there is, like, for commercial growers, how your systems can improve your bottom line, and the how quickly the ROI is on an automated irrigation system. It's pretty dramatic when you start looking at all the labor savings and the other savings that are associated with like easing the strain on the HVAC system, heating and cooling water usage, nutrient usage, you know, like a decent blue mass system will pay for itself, usually in the first run. And so if you're a commercial operator right now and you're feeling market compression, and you're not using an automated watering system, you should be really, I mean, if, if we're pension pennies, there's not an easier way to just Institute something with a very fast return on investment that's going to decrease or increase your bottom line really quickly. So with living soil stuff, there's one kind of narrative about how we talk about things and how we use them, and then, you know, there's people that are doing cocoa and salt, so we're doing, like, large facilities now that are doing lots and lots of cocoa containers. You know, we can go right into those expandable cocoa core blocks. You could carry it right in there. We have these, like drip ring type emission devices that we can use with them that work very well. But you got to run nutrients through those, right? Oh, yeah, no, we can go through the carrots. We can run nutrients through that. I mean, you know, because there's no nutrients actually going through the the cone itself, that's a sealed, you know, that's just, that's sealed. The kid, that carrot is just a valve. It's an on, off valve that, like, depending on the soil moisture level, is pinching or un pinching, a valve, and that, that valve is the three millimeter line is pitching that three millimeter line that runs through the top, that's getting pinched on and off based on the moisture level in the soil, right?

I was saying not just the carrots, like the you were mentioning, the capillary mats as well. Yeah.

So capillary mats too. For veg, those expandable cocoa pots. You can set those right on a capillary mat, and they just like, you know, kind of pops right up. And that's pretty neat. And then you can, yeah, if you're, you know, doing a salt kind of thing, you can very easily run, run your veg through, through the capillary mass. And it's really the way to go for large veg production. I mean, you fit a ton of plants on there, you know, keep really low moisture level, like humidity levels in your in your room, if you want to, you're not getting a lot of evaporation. There's a ton of benefits with that. With both living soil, like we're doing a pretty amended mix, or, you know, that's going to get transplant to a larger container, or we're just, we can actually. Run, you know, like nitrogen dominant veg Mixes through the capillary map, and have that wicked up through the through the pots before they're either transplanted or moved to

a flower. I want to try that style. Man, now I'm going to get a bed going. So I'm going to need some soaker some soaker tape. I'll pick that up at sustainable village and Yeah, and so that one is going to be fun. But what I really want to try is this capillary mass system. This sounds really like it, yeah, I would really like to do that. And maybe in conjunction with the bed, like you said, either in a veg type scenario, or run some nutrients we've

talked before about the, you know, using the bottomless pots. Yep, that's what I want to try. Yeah, and then plug it into my bed. I just set it on top, and off you go.

That would be amazing. So I might, I could. I could be pretty close to that setup, if I want, because I think I'm going to do a bed, finally, do an indoor bed. So it's going to be my first time in a tent, in a bed, and it'll be, it'll be really fun. Man, so, you know, I'm going to be rocking the blue mats. But speaking of blue mats, we have a little bit of time here before the top of the hour. This feed has to come from somewhere. You talk about, if you're running living soil, or if you're running nutrients through it, wherever it leads to this reservoir, right? And I would love to talk to you about really like, what you would and wouldn't recommend adding to reservoirs. It's a question I get a lot. Can I add this? Can I add this? How often do I change out this? Is this going to make it stink? You know what I mean, what should and shouldn't we add? You're totally

right. If you're if you're putting additives into your supply line, you generally need a reservoir. There's our ways we do it on larger scales, like dosatrons and stuff like that, but for the most part, you're either having a reservoir that you're doing a mix in for, like a home grower might be mixing up a nutrient mix and gravity feeding it into their plants, or maybe they're mixing up a larger reservoir and then have a pump system that's pumping water out of there and into the blue mat system. Either one of those is really normal and simple. And, you know, the designs are very clear for that. What can you put into it? There's one question we're gonna we can talk about that, and then how to how to maintain it and keep it clean. So what you can put in there. I mean, really, you want anything water soluble. You want fully soluble products. If you put stuff in that has a lot of particulate like a really thick compost tea or something Sure, you're going to get some build up in the system. You can also get mineral deposits if, if you have a high EC synthetic mix that falls down, starts to fall out of suspension. But both of those things are actually quite easy to manage with, either using like PEC acid or hypochlorous acid are two generally accepted and very safe, benign products that you can use to kind of clean out your systems. So if you're doing an organic mix, you're probably going to see biofilm growing on the insides of your your reservoir. Sure some like slime up on there on the edge. Yeah, yeah. Bacteria. The PEC acid works great to knock that back, keep everything clean. What about like enzyme products? Enzyme products are really good too. Like the SLF 100 interchange, a good one with

those acids. Yeah, they're a

little different, but enzymatic cleaners are great too. No, they're a little more expensive, sure, that's the main thing so enzymatic cleaners, heck, acid, that's spelled P, E, K, or hypochlorous acid as well,

keep everything clean. Because, yeah, like you said, anything that's going to have that, that biology breeding in it, anything that has, like, organic matter, right? Like, that's going to be a problem, yeah? But

again, it's not like you can't run organic nutrients through the systems. It's no problem. It's just, I mean, if you have some that have a lot of microbial activity in the container, like some there's some nutrient mixes. When you mix up a drop, like you hydrate a dry mix, they'll eventually, like, sometimes, quite quickly, turn into, like, a really kind of thick like sludge, sure. So if they're if, with like a blue mass system, you're not just heavily watering all at once, you're kind of slowly watering over time, so your reservoir has time to kind of sit

around. Some super alive nutrients need to be used right away. And those are, don't, don't, not use those in your setup. But hand water those in that's exactly what. Yeah, right. Sure, yeah. And

water, man, or get the dry version. You know, a lot of those levels products have a dry version, so like pre amend your soil with that, or just top dress in the dry stuff as well.

Nice. Yeah, that's a great suggestion.

You know, if you have something with a lot that has trouble staying in solution, you can do some sort of either heavy aeration or, like, recirculating pump. You. Right? I was looking at one these arrow mixers. They're pretty cool. They're like a recirculating pump kit that you can buy. But, you know, there's lots of different ones, just having a recirculating pump in the tank, right? And

it just keeps everything moving, keeps everything clean. Now, I like what you say, with the recirculating pump you can also grab, like, if you're, if you're like me, and you're in a home grower setup, and you have this tote you can grab, like an aquarium pump, is basically what it is a recirculator, and it's just pushing it's pushing water along. It's in taking water, it's submerged, and it's pushing water along, as opposed to, like an aeration pump, which might, which will also mix everything up, but it will aerate. So one of the products that I use, we like king crab. It's just a clean bacterial product, and it worked great in reservoirs. But when you bubble it, it tends to bloom and bust faster, so you get, like, a little bit of foam, whereas if you just recirculate it, it seems to be very, very clean, and keep everything nice and clean.

The one thing you want to think about it's like a recirculating submersible pump, is you want to, just, you want to run that on time, or just don't keep it on continuously, because those things, they heat up. So true. And then they'll heat the water. I've seen this work. Here you go through a reservoir that's had one running for, you know, a day, or something like demon, and the water is hot, yeah? Water is like, actually hot. Yeah, that's, I've seen

that exact same thing, man. Really good. Call. It should just kick on and off, you know, have it kick on for five minutes and then stay off for what, you know, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever, and kick back on. That's the way to do it, for sure. And, and the aeration ones are good too. But if there's any bacteria in there, the most aerobic ones are going to repopulate, right? And kind of, like I said, their population is going to boom and then it's going to bust, and you might be left with a lot of dead bacteria in there. Yeah. So again,

we don't want to see a lot of particulate blue mics actually don't clog that much because there's not, like, a drip emitter associated with them. So like, the narrowest point they have to get through is the three millimeter tubing, which is actually really pretty big for irrigation emission devices. Another thing with like blue soap, if you're seeing like the blue soak, the soaker hose splitting, probably what's happening is you're there's some sort of liquid input you're using that's getting that's like, over time building up inside the blue soak, and so the blue soak itself is having to over pressurize in order to push through whatever film has built up on the inside of the soaker hose, and that increase in pressure is causing it to split.

Oh, wow. So it's like creating a seal which is increasing the pressure. Yeah, exactly.

Wow. So that can be, that can be resolved through cleaning products like PEC acid or hyperchloric acid or an enzymatic cleaner. And really, I mean, it's part of proper maintenance of any irrigation system that you might experience, you know, anything's gonna have that.

And when you clean your res, like, let's say you're gonna be going through there, what do you recommend people use, just something simple, like H 202, or what? Well, again,

those products we just mentioned, hypochlorous acid. We have one on the website called a biofilm buster. You can buy that. That that works really great. That'll clean it, and that'll break up. That'll break the bonds between that biofilm layer on the inside of the reservoir and the bacteria itself. And it'll help flush that out. Drip cleans the product, the house and garden, Home and

Garden. So you just clean with that same stuff too. Just scrub it. Scrub you just use that.

Use as directed. Yes, Use as directed. Cool. Well, let's just use run through the system. It'll kind of clean it up. If you want to take the reservoir apart and, like, have it disconnected from your Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, between runs and stuff, yeah. I mean, or even, like, a light bleach solution, you know, we'll be fine. You're just cleaning, just cleaning plastic. So whatever cleans plastic well for you and you feel comfortable using, yeah, Project brush side. That's fine too. It's sure too

nice man. Well that, yeah, that's good stuff. And I think you're right, like, you just need to be super selective about what you put in there and make sure that it's all super soluble and it's not going to end up stinking on you and being too biologically active. Just hand water, that stuff in. That's what's perfect about the blue man system, right? Is you got the you got the reservoir on autopilot. And then I take my, you know, certified organic nutrients, my food nutrients, or whatever, and I water them hand, water them in. And then the blue man adjusts in real time. So I'm really excited to get back to this high tech. I consider this high tech like high tech, automated, indoor, organic grow. I'm super stoked for it. Yeah. And, you know, you kind

of mentioned this earlier, but what we've really been trying to do over this, like, last big spurt of R D, is solve some of the most common problems that the blue mass have

had, like, any good product, man, I love that about Yeah, yeah. We got a lot of use out of it. Then we got,

you know, some feedback. And this is like, things that are happening. So it's like, okay, let's dive in, and let's put the time and effort, and, you know, spend a lot of money on staff dollars, trying to figure this out. And we did, I think what we can do now is a whole nother level of how we can irrigate, and it really is kind of the cutting edge, and it's exciting to be like, to be worked. Get that muscle. So, you know, just to put it out there too. Like anybody that is looking for a design, we do our blue mass designs are totally free, completely free of charge. And that's like a fully designed system with, you know, really nice quality drawings and parts list as well. You know, itemized parts list. So if anybody's interested in having a blue mass system, whether it's for their home or their commercial system, you then go to the website, sustainable village.com, there's a quote request button right there on the main page up at the top. You hit that, you fill out some information, and we'll be in touch with you and get back to you with the design. We can also do more traditional drip irrigation systems. We've been doing some really large hydro facilities lately that are all engineered out. We're doing big engineered outdoor fields, some really huge projects, medium projects, whatever you've got, like, if it's irrigation, particularly if it's cannabis. But we do a lot of just we do actually do fair amount of traditional AG, too. You know, give us a call, fill out a quote request, whatever. And you know, love to, love to work with you and and share some of our expertise with with folks. You do

a great job over there. Sustainable village, man, uh, people call you and you sit. I hear it time and time again. I just got to sing your praises here before we wrap it. Wrap it up. Of course. Code grow cast 10% off at sustainable village.com the blue matte products will get you 10% off. Code grow cast through the month of April. But I have heard time and time again in my Discord community with the members, and they actually recommend it to other people. They say, call blue Matt. They will design you a system. They won't sell you shit you don't need. I've heard, I've heard four people, five people say that, and they'll design something that's going to work for you. I just, you know, I want to pull the trigger on a blue map, but I don't know how I'm going to integrate it into my thing every time. Just call sustainable village. So yeah, I really appreciate that, dude. I've heard nothing but good things. When people ring you,

I appreciate it, man. It's really great to hear that, that we work hard to for the commute, customer service side of things. It's really what we what we hang our hat on.

I have no joke. Probably seen that five or six times in my Discord server. So shout out and again. Thank you for the code. It's active through April. Everybody grab them now. Code grow cast at sustainable village.com It works on the blue map products. I'll be running these again this year. I'm super excited about it. And yeah, let us know how you liked this amazing episode with Michael. It's really cool that you dive deep into this thing. Man, I love the science about the the water retention curve and and applying the the measurement of pressure to these different mediums. The reservoir care stuff was awesome. And I just look forward to you guys dialing in your products even more and coming back on and teaching all of us, growers, no matter of our style. More about irrigation. So thank you, Michael. Do appreciate you, man,

you bet man, my pleasure. Yeah, it's fun as always. And you

listeners, I appreciate you all. Make sure to check out growcast podcast.com forward slash action to see everything you can catch all of our stuff up there that is all for today. This is Michael box and Jordan River, signing off, saying, Be safe out there everybody and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you, Michael box, and thank you for tuning in today. Before we wrap it up, I gotta remind you. Oklahoma community cup is coming up May 7. Now. We got three things going down on Sunday May 7, at the Oklahoma City Public farmers market starts at 11am goes till four, and those three things are first a day of education. Your favorite speakers like ok kalys And Brandon rust and Nick Nikolayev and soil guru and Kyle from the foop and so many more, we're all going to be speaking all day long, so you're not going to want to want to miss these amazing cultivation presentations. Then you've got the People's Choice cup. That's where you can be a judge, and you judge Oklahoma licensed cultivators, or just simply bring your home grown and enter into the home growers showcase. That's home growers flower judged by the speakers. So come and check it out, everybody. It's a day of flower and fun and education. There's going to be food there. It's going to be so good. You do not need a med card to attend and enjoy the education. You do need a med card for the judges kit and the home growers showcase. If you're out of state, you can get a temporary med card in Oklahoma. Just check the website. Find it all at growcast podcast.com/community, cup. I'll see you there, everybody. It's the greatest event we've thrown so far. It's gonna be huge. This is gonna be worth the drive down, grab those judges kits before they sell out, and we will see you at the first ever community cup Oklahoma. See you there. Everybody? All right, I hope you're doing incredible things in your garden. I will see you on the next episode. We've got old friends. We've got new friends. So stay tuned. Don't touch that. Dial Bye, bye. Everyone.

You ever take a part here.