🎸Heavy Metal Contamination, Chelation Science, and Humic Acids, with Nik from Rooted Leaf

11:11AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

heavy metals

chelation science

humic acids

cannabis contamination

root exudates

soil health

industrial pollutants

plant adaptation

bioaccumulation

phytoextraction

organic inputs

nutrient regulation

foliar applications

high humidity

vigorous growth

Greetings growers from around the world. Jordan River here back at you with more grow cast podcast, testing your metal and your metal. Today we have Nick from Reed leaf back on the line. We're continuing our nutrient deep dive series, opening this up a little bit further outside of soil, fertilizer elements and into heavy metals. I'm very, very excited about today's episode. Nick talks about all the different heavy metals that can and will accumulate in your cannabis if you're not careful how they operate, how to avoid them, and so much more. It's a really, really good one. I know you guys like this series, so I'm excited about it before we get into it with Nick, though. Shout out to AC infinity. That's right, AC infinity.com, code grow, cast one five, to get your savings on the best grow gear that you can get your hands on. My favorite grow tents. They've got lights, fans, pots, scissors, everything you need. It's at AC infinity.com they've got grow kits. If you need to get started growing, it's the best way to get started, in my opinion, go grab a three by three grow kit, or a four by four grow kit. Use code grow, cast one five and get that whole setup delivered to your door. Everything you need to get started, it's all there at AC infinity.com plus, they've got lots of new and great items, like their new spray technology that they've released. They've got a new cloud forge humidifier now. They have green lights that you can put in your tent, that you can use as work lights during your dark period. AC Infinity has it all. Code, growcast, one five at AC infinity.com, that's what you need to do. That's how you get the savings and grab the best tents in the game, the best fans in the game, and so much more. Thank you to our partners. AC infinity. Alright, let's get into it with Nick from rooted leaf. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. You Jordan, 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 a grower on to grow cast, tell someone about the show. It really helps us out, or turn someone on to growing that's how you help us on our mission of overgrow cast podcast.com is where you can find all the things. There you'll find the seeds in the classes and of course, grow cast membership, just 15 bucks a month for the greatest membership in cannabis. Go check it out, everybody. Special. Thank you to all you amazing members. Today, we are continuing our nutrient deep dive series with none other than Nick from rooted leaf. What's up? Nick, how are you doing? Hey, Aloha, Jordan, how are you man, yes, Aloha, my friend, I'm doing fantastic. We're out here on the islands. We're partying it up. How is rooted leaf doing back on the mainland and beyond?

Oh, we're doing pretty well. You know, we've had a really nice, busy winter, which is always fun, and we've got some big things planned for the springtime down in Oregon. So if you're a grow cast listener and you're down in Oregon, make sure to reach out to me on Instagram. Let's see if we can set something up. We're going to be kind of around the Redmond and Bend area, so, Oh, interesting. Yeah,

we'll have to connect you with Wolf Man down there. That's really cool. Man, shout out. Shout Out west coast, all the West Coast growers in Oregon and Washington and California, Nick has been hard at work, not just with the rooted leaf, you know, nutrient formulation and working with farmers, but we're actually putting together a really cool promotion for grow cast members. I just saw the special edition shirts that are going to be going out to the Grow cast members who are going to take part in this rooted leaf challenge coming up in the discord. Nick, thank you for making that cool little offering to our members, and I'm very excited to roll out more information about this soon, putting forth a challenge to the Grow cast members and then giving them one of a kind merchandise. That's really cool, man, I appreciate that. Nick, yeah,

and it's been a lot of fun working with you and the Grow cast community at large. It's a phenomenal community, and we wanted to show our appreciation by doing something that was a little bit special. So we found a really nice, high quality t shirt manufacturer, and they have the exact same T shirts that we use, which are non GMO cotton, by the way, and they're grown sustainable. I mean, for those of you who have the T shirts, you'll know what I'm talking about, the very comfort. Very comfortable, they're very high quality, and they're very durable, like, I've had the same shirt for like, three years now, and it's not like showing much wear and tear at all. The logo is fading a little bit, but it gives it a little bit of personality and edge, yes, which I think be cool. So, but anyways, we found a t shirt maker that is going to do some cool work for us, and it's going to be a pretty nice collaboration between rude to leaf and grow cast, and there's going to be all kinds of cool stuff. So can't wait to, you know, give out more details coming up soon. Yeah? That's

gonna be fun. Yeah, challenge on getting rude leaf out there into your local grow store. So stay tuned, everybody. That's gonna be a really cool collab. But speaking of collabs, people have been loving these episodes. Nick, there's some of the best receive episode series we've ever done. The comment that I get the most, the thing that people DM me maybe the most, is I listen to these episodes, 234, times over. The listeners say they're just packed with so much information. Man, you've done a really great job. We focused a lot on the soil, fertilizer elements, obviously, to begin with, and then we started. Getting a little bit out there with, you know, oxygen and hydrogen. That was a really good episode. And we're kind of going to continue that path of elements that you might not think about when we're covering the series. Right? Specifically today, I want to cover the elements that we want to avoid. I want to cover these heavy metals. Man, this is a subject that comes up all the time in cannabis, and I mean, all the time. So, Nick, there's no one better to talk to about this. Man, I want to get all the information on heavy metals in cannabis bioaccumulation. You know, how they mess up plants, how they mess up us, how humic acids play into all of this. Are you ready to dive in to the heavy metal discussion? Let's do it.

Let's do it. Let's rock out. You know, I was actually just gonna say that for the introduction the theme song, you should have like a heavy metal theme song in the background. It would be a perfect

Yes, MTV is heavy metal. That show was awesome. Yeah. Let's get it going. Let's rock out, man. Let's rock out. And let's start from the top. I want to start super, super basic. What are heavy metals? Why are they classified as, you know, called heavy metals. Why don't we want them in our plants and ultimately, in our bodies, right?

Yeah, heavy metals. You know, it's interesting. I guess the best way to think about heavy metals is elements that are naturally occurring, and plants have evolved mechanisms to deal with whether they're something like aluminum, which happens to be very abundant in the Earth's crust, something like the third most abundant element. And so plants have been exposed to aluminum for a very, very long time. They've evolved mechanisms which we're going to dive into a little bit as far as how exactly to deal with this. But then, on the flip side, they've also been exposed to maybe smaller concentrations of different elements like arsenic and lead, for example, which may not be as widespread as aluminum, but still nevertheless exists naturally. And so plants have to figure out ways to deal with them. And the reason that they have to figure out ways to deal with them is because these elements that we refer to as heavy metals have certain properties that make them incompatible with sort of the basic metabolic functions of plants. When we're looking at the enzymes and the machinery and the photosynthetic apparatuses, these processes that are occurring within plants are quite sensitive to being disrupted when heavy metals come in, like aluminum, for example, can interfere directly with some of these enzymatic processes, and it causes cataclysmic failure in the primary active sites of these enzymes. That's just one example. There's interference that's maybe directly associated with enzymatic activity, but there's also different types of interference that occur just as a result of the properties of these elements, like I mentioned, if you look at them on a periodic table, you'll find that they're kind of spread all around. But you know, their their properties are what allow them to interfere with sensitive operations within plants, whether it's something like photosynthesis or even something like DNA replication. So some of these heavy metals can participate directly in DNA related processes, whether it's transcription or something like that. You know, they can affect the ability of the DNA to stay stable, and so they cause a breakdown in irreversible damage to DNA. So, you know, they they do everything bad that's possible to be done within the operational framework of plants, I guess you could say, and

that applies to us too, right? That's my understanding of why we don't want, like mercury. You don't want it touching your skin. You don't want to smoke any plants that have taken up Mercury because of similar things, right? It fucks up your biological processes. It degrades your DNA and causes disease and all sorts of nasty stuff, right? Like, you're right, this is, this is like the kryptonite to proper living metabolism.

Yeah, and, you know, I certainly don't want to make it sound like I'm giving medical advice here, but there are a couple of analogies, I guess you could say with, like, disrupting basic metabolic processes. I mean, if you have heavy metal accumulation inside of your brain, maybe some of the basic functions of the brain, like, I guess cognitive function at large could be impacted, and it certainly is. And you know, for humans, it's a little bit different, because we can go through chelation therapy to try to detoxify heavy metals from the body, and there's some maybe more natural ways to do it, as opposed to some of the synthetic ways of doing it, which, interestingly enough, I do think that EDTA is used right in relation there? Yeah, the

one of the one of the uses for that iron EDTA that you guys see on the back of all the low quality salt bottles out there is they give it to people for, like, eye drops, to get mineral build up out of their eyes. It's doing the same thing. It's grabbing onto those minerals, right, and taking it out of the human body and into the fluid and hopefully washing it away. That's so funny. You bring that up, dude, EDTA, eye drops. There's eye drops in your fertilizer. That's how, that's how the nerves would report it exactly,

exactly. And so, you know, the interaction between these heavy metals, like, once they cross the blood brain barrier, it's difficult to get them back out. And so you have to, you know, start putting certain types of compounds, like you can put. Fulvic acid, I think a lot of people will do like a cilantro or coriander extract along with Corona or chlorella. And again, I'm not offering medical advice. I'm just kind of saying, like, Oh, sure. You know, there's ways to to kind of do this, and the mechanisms by which the human body is capable of detoxifying itself of heavy metals are definitely different than those of plants fascinating,

though still the same chelation chemistry, or some of the same chelation chemistry going on, that's really fascinating. You mentioned that these heavy metals are in the Earth's crust, right? I think a lot of the time we think about bringing them into our garden, which may be something we get into later, but I do want to ask you, like, how do they wind up in soils? They're just naturally occurring, right? Yeah.

And, I mean, like, in the larger context of it, you know, all of these elements that are not desirable that we're talking about here, they're naturally occurring. Like, no one has gone to a different planet and, like, or like, reached into an alternate dimension and pulled out, yes, like, evil, evil element that didn't exist on this planet. So it's always been here. You know, it's just know, it's just in varying concentrations. And certainly, a lot of these elements, they are constituents of various crust and they're relatively minor in some cases, like I mentioned earlier, or they're relatively high, as is true with the case of aluminum in particular. So that being said, there are natural, you know, sources, naturally occurring forms of these. But then there's also the result of some industrial activities that release, you know, heavy metals. I mean, I'm talking about things like mining and ore processing when we're making metals like copper, for example, and zinc for building materials and for electronics. You know, oftentimes it requires purification and extraction of some of these other compounds that are not desired away from the parent material, which is typically a rock of some kind. So the the heavy metals themselves become a waste stream for industrial processes. Same thing is true with metal smelting and refining, except this time, some of those fumes themselves can actually carry like lead and arsenic and cadmium, for example, can actually be carried in the air as these airborne heavy emissions, these heavy metal emissions that's gnarly, you know, like it kind of depends on which country we're talking about here. Obviously, some countries are really, really strict, and they require extensive filtration systems to be in place for any kind of company that does manufacturing on this kind of scale. You know, metal smelting and refining isn't something that you just kind of like do in your own yard, yeah. But you know that being said, like coal combustion, cement production, battery manufacturing, even to some extent, the production of pesticides and herbicides, I think also can introduce heavy metals, because sometimes they contain impurities, like cadmium, for example. So, you know, there's also, like, vehicle missions. You know, when you drive around, there's wear and tear on your brakes, brake dust, brake pads, yeah, and the tires, yeah, just little stuff like that, copper, zinc, you know, gets released to the environment and it progressively accumulates. So again, these things aren't necessarily unnatural, but I think the there's certain properties that maybe plants will try to modify in order to prevent them from actually doing harm and doing damage.

Yeah. So it's like the fact that we kind of liberated them through these industrial processes from the earth and now have kind of volatilized them. Now they're like running off into a river, for instance, or, like you said, volatilizing into the air. The question that comes to my mind is like, doesn't the plant know the difference? How would the plant know the difference? How can the plants deal with these heavy metals?

That's a good question. This is kind of like the first piece of the meat and potatoes of this conversation here. Yeah, so how do plants deal with these heavy metal stressors. I think plants have evolved both short term and long term strategies to deal with heavy metal accumulation. One of the short term strategies might be the production of certain compounds like phyllo phytokeletons, which are a group of compounds that are chelating agents produced by plants, you know. So let me back up one step here. Okay, so the basic strategy that plants take, whether it's a short term strategy or a long term strategy, the fundamental thing that they're trying to achieve is changing the level of interaction that's possible to achieve. If they can bind to the aluminum and change its ionization state, they can effectively quench its potential to do damage. And therefore this piece of aluminum can be floating around complexed and chelated because it's not ionized, and therefore it will not interact with DNA in a way that damages it. It will not interact with the active sites of enzymes in a way that damages them. It will not interact with thiol groups on antioxidant enzymes in a way that generates oxidative stress, therefore burning plants physically, all of these things go away when you change the ionization state of the particular metal. So that's the underlying sort of thing that plants are trying to achieve. The short term way of achieving that is to produce certain types of compounds that may be possible to you. Exuded from the roots, root exudates like organic acids. Ironically enough, aluminum does become more available, more soluble when the pH of the soil drops to about 5.50 interesting. Yet at the same time, plants will produce organic acids that are acidic, specifically as a mechanism to capture aluminum in its most available form and bind to it. Wow. So now that this is bound, there's two things that, you know, we're looking at here. One is the degree of ionization, like, how ionized is this particular element? Because if it's totally neutralized, I guess you could say it has no possible interaction with any of these, you know, aspects of plant metabolism that I that I mentioned earlier. The next thing that we want to look at is the solubility. Because the solubility determines the bioavailability of the possibility for certain plants to maybe accumulate some of these heavy metals, or perhaps to precipitate them out. The longer term strategy is precipitation of these heavy metals. And I think this maybe is quite apparent with aluminum in particular, because over long periods of time, you find that the organic constituents, the humic substances, those get built up in the soil profile over time. And what they do is they prevent and inhibit the uptake of aluminum, specifically by keeping it in a form that's not available for plants to take up, that's relatively insoluble, doesn't get released and solubilized. So that's the kind of long term strategy I think that plants have evolved over very long periods of time, is like sending out root exudates that contribute to long term soil health and soil chemistry, but effectively function like filters. They're trying to filter out the stuff that they don't want to take up, like the aluminum and some of these heavy metals,

wow, through the use of humic acids as well. Okay, so that's, yes, that's really interesting. That is what I hear a lot of the time, is you use these humic acid products to bind up the bad guys that you don't want, right, and to make more available the ones that you do. But you make an interesting point, which is, they still exist in the soil. It's not about removing them so much as disabling them, or disabling your interaction with them,

correct? Yeah. And I think it kind of depends on the species of plant that we're talking about here, because, you know, some plants are a lot more sensitive than other plants, like on a kind of, you know, unrelated but yet related note too. There's, there's groups of plants that really like high EC, like 1000 ppms of sodium chloride, they can handle that just fine. And that that would kill most plants. Like, if you gave that to your cannabis plants, like, I don't, it doesn't matter how strong you think those plants are, they're going to die if you give them 1000 ppms of sodium chloride. That's, you know. But there's other countries where that, just like that for them is perfectly fine. They've kind of evolved to hang out in that spot. So, you know, there are plants out there that will take up high concentrations of heavy metals. They can effectively help remediate the soil through fighter remediation and phyto extraction. What are the heavy metals that you see as a problem in cannabis? What do people pop for I've heard about Mercury. You mentioned lead, cadmium. What other ones are really on our radar? Maybe arsenic, to some extent, and aluminum would be another one. You know, those are often times found in the parent materials, like in you know, it doesn't matter. I know that seed plants and kelp extracts gets a lot of flack for being contaminated with heavy metals and so on and so forth. But, like, we just got a lab analysis done on root anchor just recently, the reports came back two or three weeks ago. You know, it has no detectable heavy metals. I mean, there's, there's something like 100 ppms of aluminum inside of the concentrate, but there's no detectable heavy metals beyond that. So, you know, it's worth mentioning too that the quality and purity of your inputs is very important, because if you're an organic farmer and you're using things like manures, or if you're using soft rock phosphates, yeah, these types of things can also carry heavy metals. In fact, rock phosphates can also carry radioactive particles, too, radioactive isotopes, which I think, great. You know, it's an important iteration, too. You know, I'm not trying to scare people. I'm trying to say, if you look at the larger context, is like, heavy metals don't exist only in like, one thing and one thing only, they pretty much exist in all the parent forms because they're rocks. They're it's like the silicate crust of the earth. And I should mention that, depending on the type of heavy metal we're talking about, sometimes they're not constituents of silicate, aluminum silicate materials which make up, like 90% of the Earth's crust. So, like, there's, there's variation here. You know, I'm not a geologist by any by any means. Is that right?

90% of the Earth's crust aluminum? Because I had heard that about silica, I didn't realize that it was aluminum silicate. That's

amazing. Yeah, maybe it's not, you know, 90% aluminum silicates, but I know it's like about 90% silicates, and I would imagine that most of them are aluminum silicates, like the feldspars, for example. I think it's the third most abundant element in the Earth's crust.

Okay, wow, that's really cool. Man, I've learned a lot on this. Yeah, it's

amazing. Your constituent. But like the you know, again, the point is that when you have certain species of plants that are very old, like biophysites, for example, like some of the oldest rooted plant species, these are oftentimes the plants that have mechanisms to deal with high concentrations of heavy metals, because maybe they were present in larger concentrations prior to soil formation. Jeez, that is so cool, yeah, like 500 million years ago, roughly, there was no soil on this planet. There was just, you know, hard

mercury and lead, like, hellscape, exactly, exactly that was

the, yeah, that's what plants grew out of. No, it was just, you know, it was just silicate, you know, rock material, basically. And so over time, you know, through photosynthesis, plants have produced soil effectively and as a constituent and component of soil, there's things like humic substances, humic acids, that do a really good job of filtering out some of the stuff. You know, they don't participate directly, but rather indirectly. They have the ability, because they've got multiple charge sites. These are very complex molecules. They can effectively bind and wrap up these heavy metal elements, so that, you know, in like a three dimensional it's almost like, think about a heavy metal, like a base, like a baseball, and think about a humic acid, like your hand. You've got 123456, fingers. Is that? Right now, I'm just kidding. You've got five fingers on each hand, right? And you can form multiple points of grip on that ball, on that one ball with all of your fingers. And so if you have your entire hand with all five of your fingers wrapped around this ball, it's a very, very tight grip. And that's effectively what is going on in the soil when humic acids, humic substances, interact with heavy metals. This is the sort of mechanism by which they bind to the heavy metal and prevent the plants from taking it up. The plants not going to out compete the grip. It's not going to be able to break that grip that the humic material has. And that's sort of by design that. That's why I think there's a long term strategy associated with with this. And it's certainly true in the literature. You know, if you, if you, if you take a look and see what some of the strategies are, oftentimes, when plants are subject to heavy metal stress, you know, to produce a lot of secondary metabolites that interact directly with those heavy metals to neutralize them, to prevent their damaging effects, by changing their ionization state and rendering them kind of neutralized. Some plants, like poplar and Willow are really useful at just sucking up those heavy metals from the soil. And then what they do is they just sequester those heavy metals inside of the vacuoles, far away from any of the enzymes, any of the active processes. And so they effectively can render those heavy metals to be, you know, not damaging at all. It's kind of an interesting strategy, very useful for like fighter remediation, like, if you're dealing with like, an acre of land that's contaminated with heavy metals, oftentimes, a really good strategy might be to plant some poplar and willow trees, because they grow really fast. They're giant transpiration pumps, and they will suck up all of the heavy metals from soil, clear them, move them somewhere else, and now you have soil that is been cleaned effectively. Yeah, it's interesting. So

I've heard of that, right? Like, bio accumulation is the buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. They say it about cannabis. They say it's an amazing bio accumulator, and that, like you're saying it, it actually will take up and store these heavy metals. Can you talk about bioaccumulation? How rare is that? Like, how many plants do that? How many plants just get sick around the mercury? How many plants, like take it up and tell me more about the bioaccumulation process? Yeah,

you know, it's interesting. I guess I'm not an expert in this particular area, but I will say, you know, a lot of plant species do have this unique ability to take up high concentrations of heavy metals that would otherwise disrupt you know, most other plant species, like the ones that I just mentioned, willows and poplars,

they're using pretty commonly. I'd only heard about this with cannabis, basically. Yeah.

So it's basically, like, phyto extraction. You know, when you're dealing with really toxic soil, you can't just dig it up and, like, start over. It doesn't really work like that. So what some researchers have noticed is that in conjunction with beneficial microbes and the right kinds of soil chemistries, you can take land that's like literally not arable at all, and plant some poplars and willows, and they'll kind of suck up all of the heavy metals that gets concentrated inside of the actual vacuoles. It's a good strategy that plants have evolved to deal with. They basically make really soluble forms of these heavy metal elements, and then accumulate them within the vacuoles. So but again, you know like it's important to understand that the ionization state has been changed. They're effectively neutralized. They don't pose a threat, even in the high concentrations that that they can be taken up. This is a clever strategy for some of these plant species. Not all plant species do this. I should mention, yeah, that's very fascinating. Maybe some of the other ones, like poplars, Willow, some species of Fern and mustard, Penny grass as well. I think that there's some evidence to suggest that cannabis plants, hemp does take up cadmium in particular. I don't know what. Extent it could be considered a hyper accumulator.

It seems to be like a magical process. I don't like how it gets demonized sometimes as like, you got to make sure, obviously, if you're doing smokeable flower, that's why we test for heavy metal, right? But I almost feel like we demonize this ability that the cannabis plant has and other plants as opposed to utilizing it. You know, you know, the big rumor is Nick that they were growing cannabis at Chernobyl after the disaster to remediate the land there. I don't know how true that is, but that is what I heard. And, yeah, I mean, if you're going to use that for hemp, Crete or whatever, it really shouldn't matter, right? Yeah.

And, like, I said, I mean, there's something to be said about, like, what's, what's the, what is the underlying reason why the heavy metal is so toxic and so detrimental, and it has to do with a particular set of properties or qualities as a result of it being ionized. You know, the strategy for plants is twofold. One is to change the ionization state, and the second is to change the solubility of it. Ultimately, they try to either exclude it from being taken up by secreting certain compounds into the soil that will limit the uptake ability, I guess you could say, you know, the bioavailability of that heavy metal. And then, on the flip side, they also have strategies to deal with that heavy metal. Once it's inside of their tissues. They can say, Okay, well, it's here. Now. How do I deal with well, you know, they're not like the they have, you know, they've kind of figured out before that, but yeah, they have this ability to take up those heavy metals and high concentrations and put them into places where they can exist in a soluble form without actually damaging any of the components you know associated with either primary or secondary growth. So it's interesting, yeah, and it's it's tough to give like a specific answer, because sometimes it's such a delicate process. When we're talking about plants that are being grown in heavy metal, you know, contaminated sites, it sometimes is very delicate, like, if you don't have the right species of beneficial microbes, the overall amount of heavy metals that can be extracted by poplar samillas may actually be quite variable. So you have to have, like, all the right relationships in place. All the chemistry has to be allowed in. You know, heavy metal accumulation and even uptake is quite a risky thing. I mean, these heavy metals, again, they have these fundamental properties depending on where they're at in the periodic table, that allows them to, like, really disturb all of the primary processes that plants rely on for, like producing energy and capturing it and storing it, and even basic growth hormones, you know, DNA replication, cell wall enzyme activity, like you name it, and heavy metals, Yeah, that's wild man.

Yeah, that's wild. Man, yeah, that's why we need to avoid this stuff. And, you know, it's funny, you mentioned, I definitely see people who do extensive testing, like soil growers, being really in tune with this, and they'll add a product and see the levels go up, and they're like, oh, that manure I added, you know, it must have had heavy metals or something, and they pop hot. I've also seen good old fashioned salt liquid fertilizers pop for this stuff. Like, back in the day, I remember some reports coming out that it was like in some salty lines too. I know it's hard to say, like across the board, but do you see kind of the worst culprits for this sort of thing, or do you just need to constantly be aware of it and constantly be, you know, conditioning your medium. I mean,

nowadays, realistically, most of the hydroponic fertilizers out there from, like the major reputable brands, you know, particularly the ones that are US based, they're probably doing a pretty good job of sourcing clean materials, good some of the organics. You know, it's tough because there's so much variation on the organic side of things. Like, if you're getting blood meal, for example, it just kind of depends on, like, which slaughterhouse was it? Which animal was it? Yeah, which day did they mop the floor on and squeegee out all the blood and then dehydrate it? Like, so there's a lot of variation there, and I feel like oftentimes the risk of contamination is higher when your you know, variability increases too, right? At least with the production of conventional fertilizers like nitrates. You know, there's purification processes in place there, and the final materials are pretty much always batch tested. They're extremely consistent. Oh, and, you know, particularly nowadays, with certain brands like, you know, some of the largest nitrate manufacturers, like Yara is a good example. Yarsa. Yar is based in Norway, and I think they have a pretty energy efficient process for manufacturing nitrates. But yeah, they can do without any, not even any trace concentrations of heavy metals present in the products are all they can do that on global scale. So I

guess that's one of the benefits of the of having those like staple fertilizers on the flip side for the natural guys, at least you have the natural soil biology and humic acids to kind of take care of it, right. Like, I guess the worst case scenario is growing in some medium that's not. Conditioned, and then having these inputs in there, does that make sense? Because, like, you're right, your organic input might be bringing in something undesirable, but hopefully you're putting it into a system that's like a no till, system that's been thriving and is full of those humic acids you mentioned. You know what I'm saying. So I feel like there's a buffer on one side and then good thing. There's kind of testing on the other side, regulation on the other

side, yeah, and, you know, it's worth mentioning too. Like, if you're, if you're taking food scraps and composting, those chances are, like, as long as you're eating good quality food, I'm, you know, it doesn't have to be like, triple certified organic, or whatever, in the wild craft or anything like that. But like, if you know where your food comes from, and you trust the farmers, or, if you just, you know, kind of trust the brands. Chances are your food scraps aren't going to contribute to any kind of, you know, accumulation or increase in heavy metals or anything like that. It's when you go to the store and you buy, like, the bag of worm castings that came from somewhere else that you're not exactly sure where it came from, where the rock phosphates that you're not exactly sure where it came from, totally those are the types of things where you're likely to see that contaminated stuff kind of come into play. And in fact, even some of the you know, I don't want to name any names, but there was a compost company around here locally that a couple of years ago we were doing a little bit of work with, and we ended up determining that their compost tested, like, ridiculously high for lead in particular, and cadmium. Wow. It actually required remediation, yeah. So it was like, it was not very good. But even the compost companies, like very large compost companies, you know, it's tough for them to kind of filter stuff out and, you know, make good, clean product every single time. So it's not like they're out there. You know, every single batch is is hot, but you know, every once in a while you might come across some of the organic inputs that are a little bit harder than they should be.

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How do you feel about avoiding sea products? That's something that kind of divides a lot of organic growers, is, I won't use anything from the sea because of, like you said, the contamination. I see other people saying, Hey, if you consciously source these things, like certain brands, certain areas of the world that they come from, you got to get the cold water, Icelandic kelp or whatever, right? And then you're good. What are your thoughts on this idea of avoiding or not avoiding products from the sea?

Yeah. So root anchor has a, you know, close to a dozen species of sea plants in there. We use single celled algae. We also use a whole bunch of different kelp, and that kelp is certified organic. It's intended for human consumption. It is grown in really cold waters, very pristine environments. We do get one kelp from Iceland. It's a relatively clean region, like there's not a whole bunch of industrial activity, right? I mean, you also have to consider aquaculture from farmed fish as one of the contributing factors for. Of spreading just the, you know, organic waste in the ocean. So if you can kind of get away from all of that stuff and grow seed plants and really cold waters where the solubility of heavy metals decreases significantly, they're not likely to be floating around in the water anyways. And so, you know, even the sea plants there won't really interact with them. But having said that, you know, all of the like, you know, there's a lot of seed plants. Root anchor is extremely concentrated in kelp. And so this is one of the reasons that I think it's not really a well founded argument to make, because I, you know, I just, we just got some heavy metals reports back on root anchor, and it's below the detectable limits for everything, with just a little bit of, you know, residual aluminum inside. But it's like it's 100 ppms in the parent material, which, if you you know, factor it out to, you know, doing, I think, anywhere from the light to the medium and heavy feed chart of root anchor. You're not even coming close to, you know, what plants are known to be able to handle in the soils. I think it's like maybe 5% or 10% of the actual threshold. So again, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the crust of the earth. Plants have evolved very clever and sophisticated ways to deal with it. And just a tiny little bit of aluminum coming in from some kelp extracts, to me, is just like, it's not even it's not it's a non issue. Basically, you know,

it's negligible versus and listen, garden the way you want to garden, right? But to me, I feel like there's a lot of magic in the ocean that you're missing out on. Man, like you said, you see what these, these kelp products can do. See what root anchor can do. First of all, I do think there's a lot of magic in the sea that being said, I understand, right? Everyone's going to garden their own way. But my goodness, man, that that kelp is especially the root anchor. It's magic sauce. It's, it's like you say, it's dank sauce for your roots. That's right. So, yeah, I just wanted to give you a chance to talk to queue up and talk about the that sourcing. I didn't know that it was Icelandic. I was kind of making a joke. So that's amazing that that was actually true, and I expected so did you probably, you know, source the highest quality ingredients that you can get your hands on, because you guys really care about your line

for sure. We do a lot of, we do a lot of Pheno hunting. And I keep, I keep meaning to bring up those pictures too. But we did a Pheno hunt for some lavender a couple years ago. We've, you know, hunted like, four or five different types of lavender to figure out which one was the best for making our products. Yeah. So we ended up, we ended up finding one phenotype in particular, but the, you know, like, the color difference between them was just amazing. There was one that was just like a white bud with, like, pink, red hues to it. And then the other one was the more traditional lavender bud, which is like that, that, you know, lavender, purple kind of hue to it. You know what I'm talking about. Yes,

that sounds like the most fun thing in the world, Pheno hunting lavender. That sounds so fun. Man, yeah.

You know, we try to Pheno hunt as much as we possibly can. For all of the ingredients, it is actually a lot of fun for me to, like, go out there and try to figure out, like, Where can I get the best possible Moringa or the best possible AMLO or safflower? I'm actually getting some matcha from the UJI region of Japan, which is, like the mecca of Japanese matcha production. Amazing. I'm gonna try making, like, the next, probably in the next few weeks, I'm gonna get it, and then I'm gonna start making batches of solar rain with it, and see, you know, how big of a difference it makes, but, yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's like, that's so cool, getting the highest quality in the cacao powder that's in root anchor. That chocolate powder, like, I'm telling you, you know, you got to try drinking it, because that cacao powder will will blow your mind. It's like, it's ceremonial grade. It's grown in a super high altitude in Peru. It's like, very grown, you know, grown by a small cooperative. Ah, that's cool. Heirloom varietal. You know, it's not alkalized, so it's a high fat which is why root anchor is so oily on top. I don't know if you've seen that or not, absolutely oil sheen yet, because it's, it's a ceremonial grade cacao powder, like you would, you would make, like, the ultra premium chocolate bars that cost like 10 or 15 bucks at the store using this cacao powder, and we're sitting here making fertilizers, but it's all clean. There's no heavy metals in there. There's nothing that's like a trace contaminant. And that's why we can use such high concentrations of things like the plant extracts that we're working with that we're actually making from the plants, and then also the seed plants, in particular, because the parent materials don't have heavy metals. We're buying really clean, high purity, high grade, whole plant material and then making fertilizer out of it. And there's no heavy metals in any of our products. So I

like that you you obviously care, dude, you've got a great passion for this, so I really appreciate that. And the products are amazing, guys. Rootedleaf.com, code grow cast 20% off if you're not completely 100% satisfied with how your plants are doing, just give relief a try, even if you are. Just go grab the solar rain. Go grab the cow, mag, fuel or the root anchor. Use code, grow, cast. It supports them. It supports us. And man, that was a really good I just liked what you were saying about about the sourcing. That's so cool. You guys are in it. Yeah. There was something I wanted to say, coffee, coffee and heavy metals and pesticides, and it was interesting when you said bringing things into the garden and food scraps, right? Are there any food scraps that you do worry about? One thing that I've always recommended for people is that they compost their coffee grounds. And the reason that I recommend that is because coffee is heavily, heavily pesticide, man. I mean, it is arguably the most heavily pesticide crop in the world, some people say. And I want to make sure that people are kind of running that through the compost key later machine, before they're putting it directly on their plants. I don't know if it's going to be a problem, but I'm hesitant to give someone advice, if it is going to be I know you mentioned, like you said, if you, if you're conscious about your food, you don't have to really worry about the pesticide input. But what would you think about something like, I don't know, going to grab Starbucks coffee grounds and using that as an input? Are you personally worried about heavy metals at that point?

I would be over a long period of time, yeah. And it kind of depends. So like a lot of the pesticides that are applied to these crops, they're not meant to be soluble in water. They're meant to stick to the leaf surface. So depending on how they're processed, how they, you know, become transformed as a result of the roasting process, right? Depends on the pesticide. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole bunch of different, there's a whole, you know, hundreds of different pesticides we could be talking about here potentially. Here potentially, maybe not hundreds, but let's just assume it's a very large number. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I would be concerned about that. It definitely makes sense to drink something that's clean. Clean coffee is always good. And then just, you know, compost, that I do think that there's a difference between green compost, or, you know, fresh compost, and something that's maybe been composted a little bit further, a lot of times, parent material that's really hot or really active will give up those qualities relatively quickly. So if you take, like, fresh coffee grounds, it doesn't require, you don't need to have a breakdown for like, six months. All it really takes is maybe just a couple of weeks, at the most, one or two weeks. Let it, kind of, you know, get rid of those soluble constituents that maybe are, like, really potent biologically, and then work it into the soil from there. Or what you could do is just cut it into something larger that you're letting, you know, compost for a little bit longer and break down anyways, like, if you've got some orange peels or something like that, a lot of times, you know, they lose that acidity fairly quickly, you know, especially if they're, you know, sitting with some green leaf material or something like that. So, yeah, it makes sense to kind of have have an area where you're preparing the compost, so to speak, as opposed to just dumping fresh, raw compost, unless there's tea leaves. Tea leaves are like the one thing that you can just dump anywhere for any reason, and magic will happen.

That's right, yep, you're a fan of the I see that. I like that, though, which is, we do have an opportunity as people who are, I mean, people like you, man, have a massive opportunity here, but we're taking other plants and sometimes even waste products, right? Like coffee grounds, that's amazing. Tea leaves, fallen tea leaves, these are magical nutrient and microbial powerhouses that are just right there in front of us. And to utilize those and repurpose those, it closes the loop. It makes your plants extra happy, and I want to always recommend people do it. But like I said, I worry about that pesticide application. So it does help when you can get something that you know, you know the farmer, or at least it's certified in a certain way. That's always good to know. So you got to be wary of this stuff, man, you got to be wary of this stuff. So, heavy metals. Any final thoughts here? Anything else you want to cover before we do a Hawaiian Pheno hunt update and then wrap this up?

You know, I'm not sure. I mean, I think it's important for people to, if you're trying to avoid heavy metals, which you should be, don't get, like, super paranoid about it. You know, these, these are naturally occurring elements. Plants have strategies to deal with them. Just make sure that you're sourcing the right material, whether it's food that you're eating or medicine that you're, you know, medicinal flour that you're smoking on, just make sure it's coming from a good, clean, reputable source. And people aren't trying to do things like cut corners and just use the cheapest possible, you know, stuff that they can find on the market. Right? Sometimes, you know, if you spend a little bit more money on high quality, high purity, high cleanliness inputs, you're going to get so much of the potential headache removed from it. So it kind of makes sense to, you know, invest in your health in that way. Just try to source good, clean materials if you're building your own soils. You know, definitely helps to have USDA organic certification if you're dealing with materials that are intended for human consumption, or even just feed consumption, like alfalfa. You know, a lot of people work alfalfa into mixes, you know, stuff like, that's always good. Just be mindful about what you're sourcing and where you're getting it from.

That's a great recap, man. And I'll add for the for the different styles of growers out there, the bottled growers, I love what you said about you know, don't worry too much. Get your bottled nutrients from a good, reputable source, right? Like rooted leaf. Don't go to wish.com And get yourself some fertilizer right. And then, for the organic guys, make sure you're enriching that soil. Make sure that you're, you know, pouring on additional humic acids through liquid fertilizers like yours, cultivating the worms and compost teas and things like that. That is a buffer and an innate guard of the soil from these, these heavy metals that interfere with both plants and animals. So really, really good stuff. Nick, really good recap, and kind of put our mind at ease a little bit we it was that didn't leave us in a more anxious place than when we started. So I like it good

again. I feel like this episode was definitely a lot easier to do than the one on redox chemistry, because that one is like, well, how deep you know, down the rabbit hole Do you want to go? Because it defines all of life here. It's a little bit more concrete and mechanistic for us to talk about heavy metal. So I hope that people that listen to this got a lot of good information. If you guys have any other additional questions, hit me up on the discord. I'm always active as much as I can be in the the order. So, yes, I

love it, man. I love it. Get in there, guys. Yeah, grow cast membership. Nick is hanging out there all the time. Shout out the order of cultivation. Nick, I just, I just went over to the property and checked on the plants, and I'm growing out here in on Molokai, and I'm gonna ask you about dealing with heavy humidity and how that affects fertilizers, or how plants feed. That's ultimately where this is going to lead. But I want to give you amazing props on the rooted leaf line and tell you where I'm at growing outdoor or outdoor here on Molokai is insane. The environmental pressure is unlike anything I've ever seen. And the guests that I've interviewed from here have said as much like they say, Yeah, it's hard growing out here, man. You know, you gotta plant three crops, one for the bud moths, one for the rippers, and one for yourself. And you know, kind of had a laugh about it, but now that I'm in it, it's it's wild, I'm seeing it. My seedlings got eaten by rats. They have these giant ship rats on Hawaii, and if they get to your ceilings, they'll eat them. I did another round. And then, and then there were biting insects that were that were biting at the where the soil meets the stock, and kind of felling them that way. So, I mean, it's, it's a it's, it's high pressure. And what I realized Nick was vigor being the most important thing, and vigorous growth being the most important thing when it comes to dealing with any type of pressure. I think a lot of people get this idea in their head where, like, where they're like, I want a mold resistant strain, or, like, a pest resistant strain, where the pest goes to bite it and he's like, Oh, yuck. I mean it. Sometimes it might work like that, but really what seems to be the case, more to me is you need to get vigorous genetics and then put a balanced nutrient regimen in place, like rooted leaf, so that you get really vigorous growth. It's almost like outgrowing the pressure, as opposed to avoiding it, like the ones that have survived and done best are the most vigorous plants, and applying the rooted leaf early I realized was super, super critical, super critical to save it from the constant pest, erosion and the wind I needed to get that silica skin started really, really young because of the wind, we actually need wind breaks. But man, Nick, it's crazy growing out here, and the rooted leaf really, really helps them take off and survive the many, many perils You once told me, though about, you know, you're about to enter a wet environment, and something about the way plants feed and nutrients act. Do you have any recommendations on the many pressures I just said, or the high, high humidity, which is the other pressure we deal with

here? Yeah, you know, it's interesting, because the dynamics are a little bit different. I mean, usually, in most environments, you have really wet soils, or I'll say, mediums that retain moisture very well. And then in controlled environment agriculture, you have air that always tends to be drier. So that creates this dynamic where you have this VPD curve that's applicable because, you know, the roots are soaking up water from the medium, and they're pushing it out of the leaves, and then the dehumidification equipment is working. And so these plants are basically pumping water up and out, right? I mean, it's literally water pump, is what it is at that point. So this is fundamentally opposite, because you're dealing with high humidity. And chances are, I don't know the soil profile of Molokai, but I'm guessing it's fairly low in organic matter and kind of high, yeah, so it's a, it's a high alkalinity, low organic matter, volcanic rock, basically silicate rock, kind of like what we've been talking about all along. So you have this medium that perhaps drains a little bit faster than the air, which holds the moisture, so the flow of water may actually be reversed a little bit, you may actually find that it's a good idea to do foliar sprays on the plants and try to keep the application. I mean, are you watering these plants often, or how often are you

I'm in. I'm actually in bed. So I'm really happy to say we're in. We're in like a mix outdoors. So because you're right, it's like lava rock and red. Dirt is the natural soil. So we have some beds, and we have a sprinkler system, but I keep it a little dry, barely sprinkling them, because the water dries so slow, and that allows me to go in there and hand water I take, like a four gallon jug and hand water this bed that had 15 to start, and now we're down to about 10 and, man, I'm telling you the growth rates on the ones that survive, only the strong survive. You got to grow to get out of there, and ruid leaf made it possible. Man, it looks great. The cookie Truffle Shuffle by riser Rich is just beast and in the sun and only the strong survive. Man, so I love that. So you want to go for some more foliar applications and not just rely on the slow process of the soil drench and water pump, as you put it, yeah, exactly,

because it's going to take longer for that soil to dry back when the air is wetter, anyways. And if you can get a soil that you know maybe likes to stay a little bit drier just naturally, maybe it's cut with a little bit more perlite or something like that, less organic matter in general, then what ends up happening is more of that. You know, humidity is going to get absorbed through the stomata as they open and close in conjunction with photosynthesis. I mean, most of the water gets taken up and metabolized at the leaf surface. Anyways, that's where photosynthesis happens. So it's nothing for the plants to be able to take it out of the air, but then move those photosynthes, those solubilized sugars and organic acids and compounds and move them down through the roots as root exudates. Wow. So you effectively get this flow of water coming in from the air through the leaf surface and then pushing down and through the roots. I mean, this is something that you're going to experience a little bit of plasticity with. Maybe some phenos are going to be better equipped to deal with it, because they've been exposed to this environment from a very young and early age. But certainly, if you were doing like long term breeding work, if you were out there for a few years doing breeding work, I think you would find eventually that you could effectively select for these types of traits, you know, for plants that don't require to be watered in the roots, but do really well with foliar sprays and really high humidities that exhibit remarkable disease resistance, no mold pressures, things like that.

You understand this stuff, man, and that's why they grow like two strains on the island, because of what's what you just said. And to make it even more complex, Nick, this is a wet season, and it's especially wet. So the thing is, my buddy Molokai, Kevin, was saying, like, you find a strain that makes it through this season, or let's say, you find five strains that make it through this season, you got to bring them through to the next year to see how they do in the hot season, because it's 1212, all year round here. So they just keep the runs going. And you end up selecting just a few, you're right. And a breeding program changes it over time. And they say even the cuts acclimate over time, they change in the environment. So cool, man. So freaking cool. So,

and along those lines, too, I will say that one of the things that you would find is that the roots and the root exudates and the profile of metabolites produced by those plants would partially revolve around any kind of, I don't know, heavy metal toxicity or heavy metal so you'd end up with plants that produce a profile of metabolites that allow them to better deal with that heavy metal stress over time. You know, yeah, little things like that. But it does take time. I will say it's not just something like you pop a seed and you have this plasticity built in. It actually does take a couple of generations, and you've got to do a really good job selecting So, yeah, that's

really cool, man. Very, very cool. And I just want to say it's it's been amazing. It's a great learning experience out here. I've put up a bunch of member videos in the Patreon about growing out here, and I'll be updating you guys more. The grow cast, seed, cofino Hunt, rude leaf, of course, the only nutrition we're using, rooted leaf.com, code, grow, cast, and then shout out to riser rich. The cookie Truffle Shuffle is probably in the lead right now. There's a peach buzz out there that looks great. I'll keep you guys updated, and I'll update you members as well on TV. Nick, any other updates before we wrap this up? This was an amazing episode, man, really, really good heavy metal breakdown. Where can people find you and what else is coming up for? Rooted leaf. Rooted

leaf.com Check us out on Instagram. The rooted leaf. Feel free to send me a message if you guys have questions, like to chat with people definitely hit me up on Discord too. It definitely helps when, you know, we got community reaching out and chatting and, like I said, I'm active on Discord quite a bit at the order of cultivation. So yeah, definitely check it out. Like I said, we're going to be, you know, we've got some cool stuff that's in the works, not primarily in the cannabis industry. We're, you know, starting to branch out more into conventional agriculture now. So pay attention. This year, we may actually be growing some hops. If all goes well, there may be hops that are growing through to leaf, IPA. IPA, that's right, extra dankness. R, L, A, I P, A, yeah. R, LA, IPA, you know, like someone asked me, Hey, can your products help increase the concentration of terpenes. And I was like, Does a bear in the woods? We're not trying to figure out who built the pyramids here. You know what I'm saying. So, yeah, it's going to be fun to do some work in the hops industry. We've done a little bit of work with like strawberry. Berries and rooted, you know, root vegetables, like carrots, for example, and potatoes. So it's going to be really interesting to see what the flavor profile is like in a hobby, you know, hop forward IPA that's grown with rooted leaf. I bet you it's going to be extra turkey. Wow,

yum. Like you buzz up to date on that. Man, yes, I

definitely will, yeah. And if there's a beer that has our products in it, I'll definitely let everybody know there's not going to be any heavy metals in it, so you guys can feel good and safe about

drinking. Thank God you're into some cool stuff. Man, I gotta say that. That sounds really cool. And, yeah, keep us up to date on on everything inside and outside the cannabis world, man, we'll have you back on real soon. Cool, and we'll continue this episode. People love it. I know you audience members love it. Give the show a good review. Give us a like whatever you're listening to us on, we're on. Spotify YouTube everywhere. Make sure you subscribe to everyone so you can catch more episodes with Nick That's all for today. Thank you so much everybody. Grow cast podcast.com check out everything up there. Got membership, seeds, classes and then, of course, relief.com. Code growcast for 20% off. That's all for tonight. Thank you so much, everyone. This is Nick from rooted leaf and Jordan River me signing off saying, be safe and grow smarter. All right, that's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Everybody. Shout out to Nick from rootedleaf, of course. Rootedleaf.com code grow cast saves you 20% on the best nutrients around you will absolutely love those. Growcast podcast.com/membership come and check us out. We got everything up there. You can save money on seeds. Get those members only discounts all the content. It's waiting for you. I'd love to see you on the inside and see everything else at growcast podcast.com. We got the merch up there, seeds, whatever you need to wait in for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. We got some good content on the way, so don't touch that dial. And I hope that we taught you something cool that you can utilize in your garden today. Take care. Everybody. Be safe. Talk to you later. Bye, bye. You Oh,

let's do it. Let's rock out. I.