🌶️ Best Veggies for Canna Growers, Watering Technique, and Easy Soil Mixes with Kyle from...

10:30AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Kyle

Keywords:

vegetable gardening

organic nutrients

horticulturalist background

cannabis cultivation

pepper growing

tomato varieties

lettuce room

microgreens

soil mix

watering technique

pH management

nutrient uptake

biochar benefits

plant health

grow tent setup

Greetings, cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here. Back at you with more grow cast. Hot off. The podcast presses today we have a brand new guest here to talk about vegetable gardening and growing with organic liquid nutrients and growing all sorts of different species of plants. Kyle from the foop, is here, and today's episode is going to knock your socks off. Kyle is a long time second generation horticulturalist. He knows a lot about plants, and he's gonna blow your mind with a very entertaining and very educational episode today, before we get into it with Kyle though, shout out to AC infinity, baby. 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 in AC infinity list, 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 race 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, where 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 to lights. 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. We got some big giveaways coming up, so stay tuned, everybody. All right, let's get into it with Kyle. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners. You are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today before we get started. As always, I urge you to share this show, send this episode to a grower that you know. Get someone growing for the first time. It's the best way you can help us at growcast podcast. Share this episode. It's going to be a dope one, and see everything that we're doing at growcast podcast.com/action, that's where you can find all the action, the membership, the seeds, the classes and everything. So everyone today, we are back on the show for an amazing episode all about other plants that will be growing, all about organic gardening and maximizing our yields and our Sticky, sticky harvests using liquid organic nutrients. Today, as a first time guest, we have from the foop. It's Kyle. What's

up? Kyle, Hey, man, how are you? Hey everybody, thanks for having me. I am doing

excellent. Thank you for coming on the show, everyone. Kyle is an incredible grower. He grows a lot of plants, not just cannabis, lots and lots and lots of plants. You can find him on Instagram at Green Ninja growers and see everything he's doing. He's also good friends and working over at the foop on their liquid organic nutrient lines. Kyle, it was dope. Meeting you man, hanging out in Virginia, you are a deep well of knowledge when it comes to not just cultivating cannabis, but cultivating a lot of different plants. Man, you were showing me you're growing flowers, you're growing vegetables, you're growing herbs. Can we start there? Can we start with your background? What brought you into horticulture and what brought you into cannabis as well? Yeah,

so I am a second gen horticulturist. My mom was a plant person. She grew up in the industry, and actually, later I found out, even my grandmother grew African Violets on my father's side for ribbon awards back in the day. So weirdly enough, I come from a background of plant people. My growing industry, I have been in the ag industry. So production for Hazels, flowers, shrubs, trees, a lot of production for garden centers. If you went to go buy plants at a store, I grew them. So I grew, I grew, I don't know, a few million plants a year overall, you know, million basil plants seasonally through COVID especially, exploded. So we had a, yeah, we had a lot of production happening. So when it comes to growing, you know, a lot of stuff, you know, my specialty is in woodies, which is trees and shrubs. But along with that, with native perennials, you know, I'm one of those people that like always point out exactly what something is when you're walking down the street and nobody cares but me, but I'll tell you what the Latin is on the tree. So that

is true. I did experience that firsthand, but that is really cool, man. So all the Home Depots, all the lows, these types of stores are nurseries. Is that who you were? Slang in these millions of basil plants to

Yeah, the place I worked was had their own two retail stores, and they did, they had a lot of production, and we sold a lot of stuff to Virginia, Maryland. And then previous to that, I worked at a couple other. Tree farms, and was a retail horticulturist, big nursery. So very cool. My life has been plants. You know, I started getting into it a young age. I was raised a little free, so cannabis was a little bit more of a not so much of a faux pod. My family, sure. So it was a little bit more of a casual growing experience when I was younger, too. I did have a couple plants in the garden and so forth through the years. So been growing just everything and anything for my whole life. Jesus,

so you've, you've been growing cannabis for a long time too, then, huh?

Uh, yeah. I mean, even through the years, yeah, pretty much my entire life. I tell people all the time, it's just been a plant to me, you know? It's just how I was raised. Never hurt anybody, never done anything wrong, just kind of one of the plants I grow. So that is, people don't ask me questions. When they see big grow lights in my house, they just assume I'm growing some weird

Yeah, good call. You're like, yeah, I got, I got basil to grow, you know? Yeah, when the

officer buys trees from me at the nursery, local nursery, they don't ask questions. Oh, boy, sounds nice.

Which trees were you after? Officer, so just really quick before we get into the specifics of your growing, of all these different plants when you're when you're doing those huge grows to sell to nurseries and hardware stores and stuff like that. Are you popping from seed? You pop all those basil from seed and then sell them. Yeah,

actually. So there's a lot of ways you could do it, but the cheaper you know, the better, right? You're always growing for pennies in that industry. So you can get little plugs and little 500 plugs in one tray, which are very tiny, but what we got down to were seeds. So we were seeding pretty much. I was seeding a few 100 trains a week, just seeding them. And a week or so later, about 10 days later, they were growing big enough, and I would get them out to the stores, wow. And then we also, and every year, once a year, we did a tomato sale, which was a to z. So it was a one tomato, at least one tomato for every letter of alphabet. And I would seed over 15,000 tomatoes with me and just a couple ladies, my helpers, and it was just three of us, and I would be sitting there, seating from six, seven o'clock in the morning to seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night, with a headlamp, you know, headphones in just just seating tomato seeds. So yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways we do it. But I Yeah, we single handedly, with a team of three or four, would see millions of

plants. That is wild dude, that is so cool. You know, every day, all day. That is a a big kind of trend in the cannabis industry that I've noticed, which is, cannabis truly is a gateway drug, but not how they say it is. It's a gateway drug when you start growing it, because you start growing cannabis, and the next thing you know, you want to start growing everything else. It's a trend that I've seen with home growers, and it's something I want to kind of dive into here with you, because you have experience with all these different plants, you know, and not all these plants eat the same, not all these plants act the same. So I'd like to ask to you, for those cannabis growers who are looking to expand into other plants, right? Maybe they had some successful harvest under their belt, and now they want to grow some vegetables. Maybe they want to grow some herbs. What would you recommend? Maybe, like your top three plants to expand out into as a cannabis grower, maybe something close nutritionally, something that we wouldn't be too thrown off by growing

first step peppers. Pepper. Guys and girls out there are crazier than cannabis growing. You guys think you're fancy with your you know, mothball hurricane mixed with Oreo, banana, pop. No no, no, no, no. Pepper. Guys and girls out there. We're talking people that love hot peppers and have been cross breeding and breeding peppers for competitions for years. They have their own cannabis cups, but with peppers, you know, I met a guy back in the day. He used to come into the nursery I used to work at, and he would bring these peppers. Well, he would bring them in with rubber gloves on, in three zip lock bags, and be like, don't touch them, but just slice them up and put them in a burger or something. It'll be great, or a salsa. And I'm like, so I can't touch it with my hands, but you want me to put that inside. And he was like, some Scorpion Trinidad, like hybrid with a habanero. I mean, he would come in and he had a curly mustache and everything, the long curl mustache. And he was a, you know, missing an ear. I mean, he was a really eclectic guy. But, like, this is, like the pepper world, right? And these people love it. And there are so many varieties, and people out there cross breeding, if you're out there breeding and cross pollinating cannabis, you're literally doing the same thing for peppers, and it will almost feel like a rinse and repeat, not only in the process, but also in the nutrition, right? So like peppers are very heavy feeders. They need a lot of good iron. They're very nitrogen heavy because it's. Makes a lot to produce those peppers, sure. So a lot of times what I end up doing is like, if I'm growing peppers in my house, I have, for my whole life, have been using what I would grow any cannabis with, right, whatever that may be, right? So I do use heavier fertilizers. Or when I was growing production, I grew, you know, 6070, varieties. And I would always mix that pot that makes a fertilizer A few 100 PPM heavier than everybody else, right? So they were definitely heavy feeders, but it will feel very homey and comfortable to cannabis growers, because they're also small, and you could easily grow them in a tent, which is huge,

right? And so cannabis eats a lot, right? You talk about these heavier feeds, like, compared to these other plants, cannabis is a heavy feeder. And you're saying peppers can kind of keep up with that cannabis regimen,

yeah, yeah, in a lot of ways. I mean, you wouldn't necessarily ever have to flip to some like bloom fertilizer with heavier phosphorus. You know, really, what you'll find is the whole grow through. They're really just nitrogen drinkers. Sure, you know, for tomatoes, tomatoes is the next one. You know, everybody knows tomatoes. A lot of cannabis growers do grow tomatoes. And one of the things is, is that, you know, there's a lot of crazy varieties. There's a lot of hybrid going on. You know, there's tomatoes on websites like Baker Creek seeds, which are already out of stock for next spring. I'm not talking like two months. I'm talking like 2024, spring, right? Already sold out. I've noticed that that's crazy, dude, yeah, so you guys, you know, we think, like, all the next drop of a seed from a breeder is a big deal. Where, like, Yo garden ladies have been worrying and stressing over this since magazines were how you ordered them, right? Like, this has been a thing full of people, yeah, a lot of people don't realize it. So, like, you know, I mean, I have a seed catalog that's bigger than a phone book from one company. You know, there's a couple big, really massive companies out there. Seeds and genetics in the plant world is just a saw that, yeah, big deal, yeah. So you can get really in nerdy into varieties of tomatoes. You could bake that off of how you use them, or what flavor you're going for. And then you can also do peppers, which is basically like, How spicy Are you willing to torture

yourself? Hell yes, you know, now we're close. Now we're close to Taco dinner. Yeah. So, so I like both these ideas. I also like these plants because they're plants that'll keep producing, right? Like, if you grow I grew a cherry tomato Bush, right? And if the thing got out of control, it got huge, it just kept growing and growing. I was feeding it cannabis nutrients. But it's it lived for so long. It just kept producing and producing and producing. If we stuck these in our Grow Tent, would we just be able to continually harvest, kind of perpetually?

Well, it depends on the variety. So with tomatoes, there's indeterminate and determinants. So indeterminants are tomatoes that will keep producing a staggered amount of fruit actively they're in their ending is not determined, right? So it's an indeterminate so the other ones are, like some tomatoes that'll grow these big old honking beef steaks, yeah, and they'll be a determinant, which means that bad boy is going to do everything it can grow one crop of flower and fruit, and that's it. Okay, so when you're doing it, yes, you 100% cherry tomatoes tend to be more indeterminate, indeterminate than determining. But there is both things in both section, wow. So there are some, like, as long as you're like, hey, look, I want to repeat the fruiter, then you just make sure you're getting an indeterminate tomato and you're fine, wow. And with those in tomatoes, just like peppers eating nitrogen tomatoes, is a cow mag thing. So people get blossom Enron, and they have this in the ag industry, they don't give you cow mag there is no cow mag bottle in a garden center, right? So I always laugh. This is something I always laughed about. And I was like, I didn't know why, but it just never was. What they give you is there's a bottle that they would spray, and it's a cow mag spray. So you would spray this on your tomatoes, and they won't rot on the bottom. They get a thing called blossom end rot, which is actually just a calcium deficiency, right? Because the skin of a tomato and everything in tomato is super calcium based, so they're heavy, basically heavy flower feeder. So if you were feeding a veg bloom, set up, those would actually take your bloom, bottles over your veg, which your your peppers could use. So in theory, if you got like, an A B, vegging bloom set up, you could take your veg, a B, feed your pepper plants and your bloom, a B, and feed your tomato plants, killer that is so cool, and use them kind of in sync. Now, again, you could always, like, if the tomato plants, little and small, use your veg when it starts flowering. You're not changing that it's outside, or it doesn't automatically, or there's some time restraints on some plants, just there's photosensitivities, just like cannabis, but a lot of times, once it starts flowering, then you would just move it to your bloom, just like a cannabis plant. That is so cool, man. So it's very in sync, and there's a lot. Lot of things you'll end up doing. You're like, this is just like you could just do one on the side and have free tomatoes all year. Fuck

yes. That's exactly what I'm encouraging people to do who are listening to this episode. Before we continue on with with the third plant, I gotta take a little bit of a left turn and dive into something you said, which is this idea of pest pressure being a symptom of calcium deficiency, this idea that calcium builds up that cellular wall and strengthens the resistance zone between between the plant and its its rhizosphere, and it's, it's, it's microbiome, and then things like molds, mildews, pathogens, water molds. I am really starting to realize that, you know, that's what we were talking to another guest, and they were saying, the easiest sign of calcium deficiency is a fungal pathogen. It's disease pressure, because the plant isn't showing a deficiency necessarily, but the cell wall isn't as thick as it could be if you had loaded that calcium. Is that kind of what you're saying with the tomatoes. That's why they add the calcium to strengthen that cell wall and prevent a pathogen, a fungal pathogen,

yeah. I mean, that's why the tomato in general, that's what it uses for that step, whole wall, that whole skin on the outside, basically all calcium, right? So, yeah, like, in a lot of ways, plants use things, but it wouldn't even just be like, saying it's just calcium would kind of close a lot of doors, whereas like silica, like silica, right? 100% based for cell wall strengthening. So if you use silica on foliage or on a plant or in the roots or whatever, you're actually building cell walls, which is protecting against wilt, against heat stress, temperature stress, bug pressure, you know, any sort of disease pressure. When you look at mold growing on foliage, what it is is a little Spore, and that spore sticks this little tentacle out and kind of finds, like a cell wall gap and tries to work its way in. So if those cells are really, you know, tight together, and they're really thick and they're strong. You won't have that, like that breakdown, where there's a moment where that mold can find penetration the brain. Yeah, exactly the armor is what they're looking for,

exactly. And we were, we were just talking with dyslexic Stoner. He's the he's the microbe guy. You guys, why can't I think of his name? You listeners know who I'm talking about, the pathogen specialist. And he showed this exact thing, a drawing of the cell wall, and how the fungal tentacle, like you said, slips in between those cells and through those cells. So just crazy that we're thinking about, again, calcium, loading calcium, even if you don't see a deficiency, providing ample, ample calcium to your plants, as long as as well as silica and others. Yeah, very, very cool, man. Super, super. It's

about keeping a plant healthy, right? It's just like everybody knows, like, if you're taking vitamins to supplement your lack of diet, if you don't eat a lot of greens, and you know, you're lacking an iron and all like, you take a supplement like that keeps you healthy, right? So just as we are, the more you keep the plant balanced with what it really wants available, the healthier that plants going to be, the healthier that plants going to be, the less it's going to trigger for other insects and other pathogens to come up, right?

That makes perfect sense. Yeah. So back to this idea of veggie cannabis growers love the tomatoes and peppers. Those both make a lot of sense. I've had some good success with jalapenos, with cherry tomatoes, but I'm looking to go even bigger. What is your third top three veggies to grow?

So a lot of people, if you're going like, and I can't say it's necessarily at this point, it wouldn't be as easy to do same tent because of temperatures and all, you know, if you but if you were gonna say, Hey, I've got this old veg tent, I don't use it anymore. You know, what can I use it for? I got this extra light, you can put a very easy lettuce room together, which, in a cool basement, basically won't need any heat or any cooling, as long as you're just using, like, an LED or T fives. I mean, with t5 light bulbs, if you did LED T fives, like a fourth bulb, one of those four bulb, four foots, or something like that, in a tent, you could grow enough lettuce to feed a small family, and it would be rotating, like every couple to every three weeks, or three four weeks. Oh, okay, you know. And you could, you can get some colorful lettuce. This

is planting lettuce and harvesting, like you said, and then replanting, yeah. And you

could do soil. Everybody immediately jumps to like, what they see on the internet. Now, with all those, like, Styrofoam tables and Hydros, you could do an ebb and flow table, you could do a hydro table, whatever your tech and you want. But if you're like, Hey, I got an extra tent and a t5 life gonna cost me only 100 and something dollars. I'm gonna go ahead and grow some lettuce. You could do that in soil, in some pots, right in the tent, with minimal effort. Oh, tell us an airflow. Tell

us what you would do. What size pots would you do there? How hot of a mix do you go grab some like some like water only. Soil, you grab Purple Cow and use that, or what?

No, it's even easier. So you would literally, you don't even need to feed. So the thing about lettuces and all is they're kind of like Insta groves. So what I was testing when I was testing food back in the day, we were running it on all sorts of herbs and veggies, and what I found is that my lettuce is, like, honestly, anything more than, like, 100 ppms, it just kind of made it weird. So I was barely feeding, if at all, a little bit of organics in there. If you made my personal way of doing it, you would probably be able to reutilize your soil. I know your guys here are all, like, living soil people, and you have a lot of, like, diverse soil people. You were doing a healthy soil. You should be able to plant lettuce in it multiple times. Wow. And as long as you gotta keep your temperature, that's the difference. You gotta keep your cool temps. It cannot get hot in there.

When do they not like it? Do they not like the high 70s even, not

even like it's lower. It's like 55 for some brocco from shrimps, lettuces and, yeah, so there's, it's a little cooler. I mean, some of them can go up to 80. There is definitely some little bit of difference between the varieties. You've got purple, green, all that stuff. But they really like about 55 to 65 degree. Wow, that is literally, yeah. So, a lot of basements, a lot of cellars. If people are doing stuff in colder climates, like you guys up north, have a lot shorter, you know, we're kind of right below the short season, but like the North people, everybody up there, they've got a lot, lot of time indoors and a lot of cold temps, yeah, so even so, you know, putting a little, like, there's a lot of ways to do it, but little bit of lettuce is a really good crop. You could fill your time with and produce a good amount. You know, I fucking love that micro greens. Micro greens is a whole, that's a whole day of a talk. Oh,

we should do, I would do an episode on micro greens, man, because I love growing micro greens. And they're easy. That's so easy, you're right, you know, in an inert medium, they just bam, you're ready to go. And

in a four by 410 you could make enough micro greens to literally not know what to do with them. Start a business. Think about Yeah, yeah. That's what everybody else does. I actually set up. I helped a lady look at her property and set some racks up, and did a whole thing and she she was running for chefs, local

chefs that is so cool and fresh harvested baby, join the order of cultivation today our membership community at growcast podcast.com/membership our tight knit family is waiting to help you elevate your garden game beyond your wildest dreams. We've got hundreds of hours of bonus content just for members. We've got weekly live streams the members only discord, where people are meeting up in our different regional chapters. They're trading they're helping each other out in their garden. The community is amazing. Plus, you get member discounts on things like rain science grow bags and Rimrock analytical testing and a bunch of our partners, members only discounts deeper than anything else you can find out there, even for products like Dino Myco. Come on in, get at all the live streams, all the amas, all the giveaways. It's all going down in the order of cultivation. Like I said, it's our little family of cultivators. We are very tight knit, and we work hard every day to deliver value to you growers. You get discounts on the seeds at grow cast seed CO, our Oreo feminization just dropped, and members get a huge discount on all their seeds. You also get discounts on the classes and events. We got community cups coming up. We got cultivators cups coming up, all sorts of classes. The members get in on it first, and they always save go to growcast podcast.com/membership to see all the bonus content and all the bonus goodies. I'll see you there. Our membership is open right now, so I cannot wait to have you in our order of cultivation. Family. Shout out to the order of cultivation. Shout out to all the members, all the mods who helped get it done. I appreciate each and every one of you, and I will continue to work tirelessly for the order, see you there. Man, that's an awesome exploration of veggies, because I know, like I said, this is a really hot topic, and maybe we'll have to have you on for the members. We were going to do a veggie cast, and we were going to have Farmer John up there and Mary Beth Sanchez Kyle, I'd love to invite you to do a grow cast TV sometime and talk more vegetables. Anytime you're free, it's open invitation.

Yeah? I would love to do that. I will talk growing plants of any types of anybody,

anything, trees. Time to talk about shrubs. Yeah, let me tell you about the shrubs. Anything that's killer. Man, absolutely killer. But let's get into the cannabis side. You know, you work with food certified organic nutrients, a big supporter of this show. But I want to talk to you about this idea. You know, you said, I grow all plants the same. I want to know what that means. I want to talk about your cultivation style, because I saw your garden. It looks fucking beautiful. You do it in kind like a pretty unique way. So what can you tell us about? You know. How you grow all these plants with different nutrient profiles and how you use the food? Yeah.

So originally, I started working with foop about five, six years ago as a tester. The owner, CEO, came to our growing facility and said, Hey, we're interested in having some testing done. But since cannabis wasn't fully legal in a lot of the areas, especially around Maryland and Virginia at all. At that time, there was really no official testing he could get done, other than, like, some guy on Instagram who said, Send me some free stuff, right? We all know how that usually ends up. So he was like, you know, he's having hard time getting real results, real like, factual, like, here's a real test done by someone who took the time to do it right, because we, you know, he was trying to figure it out. So he found us, and then he was introduced to me, and I started testing our food garden, which was a product he had started working on early. And then he and I started working together, and I was using soup on everything from herbs and veggies. I was using it on perennials, but a lot of times we would use end up using salts, because it was just cheaper for that end of the growing than organics. But for all of my herb and veggies, all of my tomatoes, all of my basil, it was all grown with the food garden, which is a one bottle and that is what we kind of ran. And I would just kind of go off ppms and just schedule it out, you know, like we were saying earlier, tomatoes, peppers, heavier heating, so they would go heavier. Basils, herbs and stuff like that, more of a 200 to 300 lettuces, about 100 you know. So, yeah, very low. Oh, well, when you talk to, like, I would when my owner there was getting, like, kind of interested in the cannabis growing, and like, wanted to know more, because it was becoming more and more legal, he wanted to see he always asked. He goes, Well, what are they feeding? And I would tell them, you know, the ppms and the EC that we, you know, use in this inside of growing. And they, they are blown away, because almost everything you've ever purchased has been grown with less than 500 ppm, wow, of fertilizer. So there's a huge difference there. So that's something that was looking at when we first started. Well, then I started working with Larry Moore, and he was like, hey, look like since I know you can do the cannabis testing, why don't you go ahead and do that? So I started working with cannabis testing on it, and that was a while ago. And so the reason, the way I kind of, I do something a lot different, and not much of a nerdy, you know, grower, where I'm in there every day and really working on it and always trying to find new additives to add in. I grow a plant like a plant guy who doesn't have time to grow plants. So, you know, like, I've been watering plants. I mean, you talk to me about watering, people are like, Oh, I'm in there. You know, I was in my garden 15 hours this week. I used to water for 60 to 80 hours a week alone. So with two hoses, you know, you put headphones in, you'd cycle your headphones wireless three and four times through a day, and it was just like all day you'd just be watering. So that's kind of, you know, I do things a lot simpler. I've done complicated grows. I've done I do mostly experimental grows. Now I'm always testing food against new products with new additives that hit the market get popular. I want to make sure they don't do anything weird with soup. So a lot of my gardens nowadays are more experimental. Wow, yeah. So I'm always testing. I'm always running new ideas. What about your

medium? I want to know. I want to know exactly how you grow, what size pot, what medium, how are you watering? How often are you watering? What's your pH schedule or strategy looking like

so I go two ways, right? So real soil mix. I'm a huge proponent of down to earth. A lot of you guys and girls will know it, right? It is, like one of the best products. It has been around for me for 20 years, or whatever. I've been using it my entire life. Like before, people thought, oh, you know, I was the best thing like this is it was a product forever. So I will go two ways, back in the day, and still to this day, I will use pro mix. If I'm making my own blend, I'll start with a pro mix case, because it's clean, it's easy. I know what I'm dealing with. I know its porosity, rate. I know what it does, right? So I work with pro mix, usually bx. I know people use HP now it's just, you know, I would add perlite to my bx. And with hp, you don't have to, so a little bit of a half a step the BX

is, like a is like a medium porosity with extra Michael riser. Do I have that, right?

Yeah, Bacillus and all, sillius and all, and, yeah, and, I mean, if you get a fresh, if you get, like, a good fresh, like, store of it. You'll get a really good, healthy bag problem with bag soils anywhere, you always have to worry about where it's been and how long it's been sitting, yeah, but I get a good pro mix base, I use down to earth. I mean, yeah, down to earth. And I use bio, live and azmite. Sometimes I'll do a small. Little bit of the langmanite in there along with or there's a product in the ag industry that we use for a long time called Biotone. It's not as like fancy, but I'll tell you, what, for like, a quarter of the price, you're getting a ton of bacteria. Yeah,

that's right, that bio tone that's up on the on the nursery show, what's that brand that? Yeah, all that spoma, Espoma, that's exactly right.

I call it the rainbow wall because they have Holly tone, plant tone, tree tone, all tone. They got all the tone, and

then the Biotone. Good call. Yeah.

So bio tones one of those oddballs on that lineup that actually is a one off, really good product. The rest of them are, like, very, very barely changed between the bats, right, right? But like their bio tone, that's a phenomenal product. I suggest it for anybody growing anything outside. It's a really cool product, but that's my base for my soils.

Do you use those down to earth products at recommended dosages? Yes,

I do. I use bio live and everything and recommended. Have I gone up and down? Sure. Have I done anything that's made a life changing difference? No, it's I pretty much just stick with it so that, you know, you don't mess it up. The other key about what I put in is a charged biochar. I am a huge proponent of biochar. Back in the day, I used to have to mix my soils, and then I my mom and I would just, like, leave them in like, wheelbarrows or whatever, and we'd have to deal with it later, and you'd have to charge that biochar. But now that there's products like biochar is out there that are blended, like organic mechanics has a phenomenal biochar blend, I suggest anyone that has the extra couple bucks go check it out. It is not cheap, but it's really good product. And even we are working on a charged biochar right now where out of the bag, you will be able to add it to a mix and not wait for the delay. Hell. We're just kind of doing we're doing some finalized testing. I'm actually doing soil tests right now on that, I'm

looking at a bucket of the food biochar right now that is an experimental batch that y'all sent me. So thank you for that, and it sure feels nice. It's gonna be an interesting crop. No biochar expert, but it looks fucking exciting to me. I'm very excited.

Yeah, well, it's 100% cedar. It's exclusive from a cedar farm that does only biochar from the cedar trees growing on that farm because we're very organic based, so it has to be omre listable. So her farm happens to be omre listable. So she's one of the only om realistable farms that we met. Wow. So that is one of those products even down to our simple biotar, it's quality as it makes a huge difference.

That is very cool. So you run this, what I would say is like a moderately mineralized potting mix type solution, right?

Yeah. I mean, I will definitely, like, I will add some sort of compost to leaf grow, or we use leaf grow in Maryland. That's why I don't bring compost up a lot. I always forget, because, like, to me, leaf grow is just like automatic, but it's a leaf compost manure that we use here that's a local product for us. But like, lobster compost, earthworm castings, both little bit of that in there as well, and then after that, yeah, I think a lot of people tend to over amend their initial soil, because you with dry amendments. And even, like when you're using liquid lines, right, like so, I use dry amendments as a starting point. You know, a lot of people want to run dry amendments all through, but it's definitely tougher for you to work with Sure. You know, it's a it's a different rate that it goes in, you know, with a nice liquid feed. And a lot of people did drives because they want to be organic. Well, now with food, again, is one of the, it's one of the only products that are based here in Maryland and in the US that is a full organic right? That is a liquid line you could use. And you could say, because that's what I do. I use a dry amendments to start my soil. If I'm going to be lazy, I get a full, full speed soil, like ocean forest or something like, we all do it once in a while, sure, but if I make my nice soil amendment, I will then just use food liquid and I add no cow, add no nothing. It is just that I do have a couple little secrets that I add in. There's one of them, I will tell you, is a B vitamin supplement. Sure, I love B vitamins, couple weeks in veg, couple weeks in flower. But in a five or seven gallon pot, I run large veggies because I like to grow the plant. So I run long veggies for 10, somewhere between six and eight weeks usually, and then I flip and run a full flower. And it runs beautiful, big plants, I run five or seven gallons. The plants get about four by four and with a liquid feed with no extra amendments to the grow. My base soil mix and then liquid feeding at this point. Foop is my, my base for my, my standard control. Control, if I call it my control for my testing, no calmag, no nothing. So you can scroll through in some of my old posts. I don't post a lot, but some of my couple grows ago, a lot of those are 100% poop only testing runs, whereas I was literally not allowed to use additives, wow, because that would ruin the testing, and there's an honor to it. So I try, morally, I love to know that that product and that test was unscathed, like no one touched it. No one could have screwed it up if I put it in there. It's the only way it got in

there. Nice man. That is really fucking cool. Now, before we go on, what was your dosage with the food, and how were you watering? Do you water to run off? I know we had a conversation about this that I found pretty enlightening.

So watering, so watering is very tricky, right? So it depends on your media. However, a lot of people I find, and I talk to, like, dozens of people a week, you know, customers of food that are buying $10 bottles to $30,000 to big, large commercials we work with, and I can't tell you, like that, people the the general consensus out there about how much the water is, I really feel is a little drier than people should water. I mean, I think they need to really start having heavying their hand down on watering a little bit Sure, and adding a little bit more, because I have a lot of people say, hey, with organics, I don't want to do run off at all. And I get that like, I'm not trying to tell people out there to flood their pots and fill buckets of runoff. We don't want that. A, it's wasteful. But B, you know, you don't want to wash out good microbes, right? So, but even with an organic like having a little bit of runoff is really important, because it's the only way to know you're fully saturating your soil, true. And the saturation in your soil, you know, there's, there's grass, I mean, and this is something you could look at, and once you figure out your porosity and start doing some soil science and like mathematics on it, you know, there's a lot of rates out there that have been, you know, studied by scientists for years that say X amount of soil takes this much water to be fully saturated right right now, that depends on how much roots are in it. How big is the plant? You know, there's a lot of like, other variables, but, you know, a lot of people are putting a quarter gallon to a half gallon, into five gallon pots, you know, and three gallons, and that's just not what you're creating is these dry pockets. And even though you're thinking you're watering fully, you're really not, you're missing pockets that are like dry sponges. I call it the dry sponge effect, because when you put a dry sponge in water, it kind of floats dry for a few right? Hydrophobic, right? It does. It's hydrophobic. And a lot of soils. What people don't realize, especially when you're making your own soils, compared to when you're buying a soil mix, they add wetting agents and a wedding agent, people stay away from that term, but a Wedding, wedding agent can be a simple product that literally is just letting that soil re obtain water at a better rate. Yeah. So it's something that we forget about when we make soils that some of them don't you're not adding wetting agents. So if you let your soil dry really down hard one time for on purpose or accidental, then when you go to water again, you're like, Oh, well, I only water X amount. Well, that first, that whole part of that goes away,

washes right off. The top washes right off because of Pete's ability to become hydrophobic. I forget the guests that said it, but Pete is so hydrophobic when you let it dry out that in South America, they use it as roof thatching to let the rain run off the top. That's how hydrophobic it becomes. I think it was Joshua Steenson who said that. But I was like, oh my god, it's, it really is an important point. And like you said, yeah, people adding wetting agents to the mix, yeah. I think it's interesting, because you're running, what you're describing is you're running, like a, like a quasi mineralized soil, or like, moderately mineralized soil, and then adding liquid, organic nutrients. So the runoff question is, like, well, in a traditional living soil, you don't want a bunch of runoff, like you said, but in a traditional bottled nutrient line, you do want that runoff. It seems like you're saying kind of shoot for the middle, like a little bit of runoff using the food, yeah. Like

I run, I run with a little run off. I mean, runoff is important. Because not only is run off important for a lot of reasons, even with organics, you're not worried about salt build up, but what about just PPM build up? Yeah, mineral buildup times? Yeah. When you water a house plant, right? And you feed it really good, and then it just kind of sits, and it doesn't get really, doesn't dry out for a long time. And then you go and, like, water it really well, it'll actually come out and look kind of like Coca Cola. And like, a lot of times you'll see that in all sorts of pop, no matter what products you're using, and what that is, is, there's a lot of build up of just excess things, right? And a lot of times that needs to be, that needs to come out every once in a while. So watering is literally, you know, I know we spoke beforehand about, like, you know, things people do that. They might screw up or but, yeah, it is. Watering is like the toughest job of growing plants. And I, and I can't say that enough,

I know I got complacent, you know, growing for like, seven years or whatever, and then I got a moisture meter, and I was like, Holy shit, I can't water. People really say that, like watering is, this is one of the simplest acts of gardening, but one of the hardest to master as, like a lifelong horticulturalist. Do you? Do you agree with that statement? Oh,

I have yet to approve anyone to trust in the weekend watering without me going in to check behind them. Even people have been there for years. I work seven days a week for years and years and years. I mean, I can't tell you I went. I've gone my whole life and never really had a vacation, like a real one. And so like they, I will tell you, I wish one of those people on the ways could have watered right. But the reality is, is that, you know, I got one person that almost got there right, and she liked to go have do some schooling, and had a kid, and, you know, whatever, of course, my luck. But I literally had, like, I always had, like, this idea of a degree that I would like print out and hand them and be like, you know, teary eyed because someone finally graduated my my watering class of 14 years of experience, you know, actually, it's like, Finally, you've been here for 12 years, you have now watered enough, right? Like a true, but it's really that hard. And it's not like, it's not that it's like, confusing. It's just that it's a lot of details. And when you see me watering and walking through, you can kind of see, like, um, you can always see me, like, picking pots up along the way, right? Because I'm a weight pick of water. Oh, you're lifting water. You're lifting this guy, yeah, because when you're walking greenhouses with 1000s and 1000s of plants, and every 10 feet a different variety that needs a different watering type. You walk around, and honestly, you don't even see me lift them. I'll pick them. I know exactly how much of a I know exactly how much of a bounce a one gallon pot that is has a perennial in it has if I kick it while walking by, and I could tell by that bounce how much water and how long it almost took a few hours to a day, or about how long until I need to make sure to water those plants. Oh, my God. So that's fine. That's one of those things after 25 plus years of watering like, and it was the one thing I was always really obsessive about. That's why my grows looks so good, and it's, it's because everybody is so worried about all these nutrient deficiencies and all when I'm I'll be honest, 80% of the people I talk to, it didn't water enough. They were feeding fine. They went into a deficiency. Well, they saw a deficiency because the roots had food, but it had no drink. And people forget that roots have to be hydrated to take in nutrients. That

water delivery split that molecule has

to have it. So people really need to start looking at how they water and really think, Am I really saturating this pot? Because I'll be honest, in my five and seven gallon pots, up until the last few days, like the last couple weeks, when they're really rooted, I go in there every couple few days? I don't walk in that room for two three days. I will water a five gallon pot and walk away for almost three days. I'll go in there the second night, just to make sure. But the reality is, is that's how long you should be able to you know that soil is holding water, and it slowly shrinks. That time roots fill in and the soil breaks down. That is

a really interesting style. Man, I would love to, like, put together a PDF of this or something. It's just

kind of, yeah, it's just kind of a very casual like, I I know what the plant wants. I know when it needs it, and I know how to give it to it. So with all of those things, I never walk in that room and expect a problem, you know? And if I go in that room and I see a problem, you know, what's going on? And if you don't, it should, you know, just take a moment of breaking it down. But like, if there really is a problem, it's probably because I'm doing an experiment. But the reality is, is, like, you should know, okay, I have a lot of people go, okay, Kyle, hey, look, I got food, and I'm feeding it, and now my plant's sufficient, so I need to feed more. Well, I can promise you, you don't, because if you're using the schedule and you're everything's in line, then your feet, your plan, is getting enough food. So now we have to figure out why it's not getting enough food, and then it turns into a P. It always ends up being a pH spike. They didn't pay attention to sure or honestly, under watering, I had a guy who answered every question I asked properly. And the last thing I he told me was, I give it a half a gallon every time I water. And I said, Well, when do you up? Increase that watering. He goes, never. Well. He was. Problem was every grow. In week four, he was starting to have deficiencies, and he couldn't figure out why. Well, that plant was so big and rooted, he just never increased his watering. It was the simplest mistake. He just never thought about it. So under, over watering is crazy. It's

so true. I see it all the time. Man, oh, so just really quickly. Exactly you using foop at full strength. It gets pretty high that 60 milliliter per gallon. Is that what you use in your mix at the height?

So yes, but what I do is, I'm I've played a lot of ways, so I've gone a lot of ways with foop, and in the testing, that's been my job. At one point, Larry said this run, I want you to burn your plants. So I was speeding three and four and 5000 ppm, trying to literally burn the plants. And he was like, if I was like, the loss was recoverable kind of thing, like, he was like, try to burn the plant. Wow. And what I found is that the only thing that really ends up happening is you push yourself into a lockout because it's too heavy in the soil, which is just general knowledge, like anything, you could just overdo the soil, but more so it did nothing, and it was just wasteful, sure. So what I've kind of gotten people to and when you talk to me like, and people call me all the time because I actually tuned a lot of grows in, and a lot of the growers that will talk to me over the months, will hear me tell them, like, hey, look, if you're doing this type of grow, I've gotten a lot of growers doing that with a lot less usage. So like hydro people, I'm dropping their usage somewhere between 20 and 30% and sometimes more, depending on how they're growing. I got guys, every person in the world doing some type of hydro and every type of media, right, right? Like, so it's the same water system, but every one of them have a different media. One's rock wool, one's cocoa, one's cocoa peat mix, one's a soil blend. Because they were crazy, you know, there's been all sorts of stuff. One guy was like, I make my own custom soil, right? So there's why he was having problems. So there's a lot of things that like people, you know, it just, it happens. But there's a lot of things like that, yeah, that just kind of, you know, it puts a lot of media changes into it. So I have run foop at half strengths. I've had strains love it. I've run through butcher strain and I've had strains not love it, right? So with any fertilizer and any product, it's about tuning it into you, your environment, your plants and your grow you and that strain and your soil are three people that need to know each other better than anything I can tell you over man,

that is a really good point. The different feeders, the cultivar dependency, and then, like you said, environmental factors like heat and light saturation, right?

I mean, some plants like a little warmer, some plants don't. So it's all about learning. But food is so versatile that it does. I have tuned it into so many types of grows that I know at some level, and maybe I don't have the answer right off the bat. But like, if you kind of take my thinking and you're willing to try it, and you tune it in and, like, shoot me a text, and we work it, usually, I've yet to have something where we've just been like, you know what? Man, just switch somewhere else. Like, try something else gonna work for you? You can

figure it out. Man, I think a lot of people want that, though, a lot of people are really attracted to that organic certification, man. And let me break it down for you, Kyle, because like on this show, I have no masters, we pull no punches. Like one of the reasons I like working with Larry and you guys is I tell my sponsors I'm allowed to say anything I want about your product. I'm allowed to say anything I want about competitors products. Competitors products. A lot of people don't like that shit. Yeah, well, Larry was like, go, let's do this. And that shows confidence in the product. Now. Now that being said, let me break it down for you. I will tell you exactly what I think of this product, and having been using it and for the audience, give you a little bit of advice, which is the organic certification a lot of people are attracted to. There's something about the aquatic microbes and the fish waste that brings out excellent flavors. I love what it does to my plants. The fact that it's a two part bottle line makes it very, very quick and easy. However, it's probably its biggest weakness is also its greatest strength, which is it doesn't have that chelation agent, right? We talk about EDTA, this acid, this chelator that allows your plants to take up all sorts of different minerals. Well, it is a forever chemical. It's in a bunch of the food we eat gets into the water supplies. It's not a great, not great. It's not great. And so when you have a product like yours, like I said, the biggest weakness probably being that's greatest strength, you have to get that pH on point stabilizing. That pH is critical to the nutrient uptake because it doesn't have this synthetic chelator to help buffer that. Is that an accurate statement? What do you have to say about that? Oh,

yeah. I mean, 100% and, and, you know, with edtas, what I actually, you know, grew up learning was poison, right? EDTA meant poison, like, it's terrible. Well, I've learned a lot about it in the years, and it's not, it's not just poison, right? It has a lot of normal usage. It does, like you said, it's in literally everything at this point. But you know, as an organic certified even we're even CDFA, so we're organic in California, which is not easy, yeah, so you're right. I stress, and I stress, and people really push their lines on pH, in my opinion, my personal opinion, where they're like, Oh, well, because we're in cocoa and we're doing this and that we're running this, and, you know, there's these things, but at some point, like plants and pH, you know, the percentage of nutrients that it can take up is very all entwined. So I stress that people have to keep it pH and one of the biggest thing is, is when you do mix poop or an organic or something, that's a living, I mean, once you mix food together, it's a living brew at that point, right? So you literally are like, if you walk, or if you mix it, and you're like, all right, I'm gonna go get pizza. It just came. And you go down, and you forget. And then you end up, like, playing a couple rounds of Call of Duty and watching a movie. And like, you know, you go back up there you if you don't go, pH it again. It's changed, right? It's probably spiked way down. Because what happens is, the more microbes usage, and the more microbial life, your pH drops with that, so, you know, it'll move in that couple hours. So I tell people, you know, if you're doing organics, and you guys know this, you know, organics can be finicky, but once you get a groove, it's like, less work, right? Like, that's kind of the idea So, and that's what's poop is, once you get down and you're used to it and you're pH in it regularly. I mean, I can't tell you, I can mix group in 30 seconds in a five gallon bucket without even thinking, right, and just be done. Whereas, you know, I've run it, I've run every brand. I mean, I don't have to name drop them, but I've run them all. I mean, I've run the big ones that have eight and 10 bottles I've bought. I've run other four bottle mixes. But one of those things is like, we've all done it where you're starting to put teaspoons or ounces in, and you forget. And then somebody calls you, and you look away, and you look back, and you're like, was that serious? You're on Part Seven of 16, and you've got one full one in your hand. You're like, is this two or three? I don't even know at this point. So one of those things that I have found with food is just like, you just assume you need it and you pour it in, you overdo it a little bit. But what's nice is that versatility won't kill whereas, if you do that with some other products that are micro fed companies like brand, where it's like each bottle is very specific. If you over feed one of those, you could literally scratch a plant, fry your plant, yeah, yeah. And there's a lot of sensitivity issues so, and that's kind of where food runs into this, like versatility, and even though it is specific, it does need to be, you know, it cannot be kept in a system for long. You know, I have a lot of people running dwcs. And I talked to two DWC guys today, and a lot of them, I'm just, you know, the one thing is, is, I'll be honest, it's organics, and you have to be up on your cleaning better. Yeah, you cannot just mix it and forget it like it's not just you gotta check it if you're gonna leave that in there, you gotta go pH check it daily, just to keep up on it. This is what real growers do anyway. But when you're coming from the salt world, you just kind of see it as a difficult or on it's a waste of time. Oh, why should I hassle? But you're getting, like you said, a whole different world of terpenes out of organics that you will just not get with salts. I

think the Aquatics is a big part of it. And then something about the waste, something about that, like rotting material in the con, like the compost world, you know what I mean. It brings so much flavor, but, um, but before we close this subject, 6.2 is what you shoot for. Correct. What are we pH into if we're in, if we're in, your style, I

do 6.2 I do six to 6.2 is my boundary. I will never hold someone and say if it's 6.1 to kill two plants. So I'm a realistic human, so six to 6.2 is a hard cut off for veg, perfect 6.2 to six four for flowers. Okay, okay. Now, with that being said, if you're running at six four, and what that does is it over it lets more availability of phosphorus and pasture the macro. What that does, it will cut down on your nitrogen uptake. So sometimes, when people do this, and I suggest it, they start seeing a lighter green plant. Well, that just means maybe you run one feed or so at a 6.3 or a 6.2 and you can adjust if you can crop steer with your pH, because if you're feeding the same thing every week, but you're feeding it different PHS. You're actually letting your plant be more available as long as you're having you know, if your soil is not holding wet and never changing, but in the general idea of you can tune your growing to where you're pH in. That does help your availability

100% I see this with the other direction with micronutrient deficiencies, like, you can correct this deficiency simply by swinging down that pH. So really, really good point. Man,

yeah, it's a really good thing to think about, and those pH uptake charts are very important to know.

Man, like I said, I would love to put together some sort of how to or like a PDF sheet. I like your style of growing. I like that it's certified organic, and you can just get this. Stuff from around you, like, super accessible. That's what I'm focusing on with the course that I'm creating right now is like this ease, right? So I don't know. Man, this has been an awesome episode. You fucking you killed it. It's been super informative. I love the veggie talk, your super simple mix, along with the food organic growing style, talking about over and under watering, we barely got to mistakes. Growers makes cultivars. We're gonna have to have you back on Kyle,

yeah. I mean, it's, it's crazy, like, you know, I tell people all the time, I watch these newbies walk in and go crazy about stuff. It's so simple to grow a plant, but I tell everyone, learn how to grow a plant first. Don't worry about growing cannabis. Great. Just grow a plant. Just grow one just, just grow it and figure it out. Feel the soil. You might try to soil. Your friend swears by it might just not be how you like to grow. You may not have no life and want to be in there every day. You need Coco, right? If you don't, if you want to walk in there once in a blue moon, because you got four kids running around and two jobs, and you want soil, right? So it's a world of difference. I love that. I'd love to be, I'd love to be back out and just kind of, you know, help people get into it. And anything I can do

that's awesome. Shout out everybody. Kyle at the foop at Green Ninja growers. Give them a follow. Shoot them a DM, uh, let me know if you want to see Kyle back on the show. I know you do. This was a wonderful episode. Thank you again. Kyle, appreciate you, buddy. Yeah,

not a problem here. Reach out to me on any profile. I've also joined your guys discord. I'm rude in there. I might be hanging around, yeah, just hit me up. DM me. If you have any questions, I'm happy just to chat and just help any way I can, hell

yes, shout out. Appreciate you guys, all that support. It's been incredible for this show. So thank you for tuning in and stay tuned. We've got some awesome episodes. As you know, find everything we're doing at growcast podcast.com/action, join our green list. Email there. It's free. Stay up to date on everything, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. We appreciate you here at grow cast, and we hope you're doing amazing things in your garden. This is Kyle from the footman Jordan River, signing off, saying to you out there, be safe everybody and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much everybody for tuning in. Thank you to Kyle for his first time appearance. And before we wrap it up, shout out to photon tech lighting, everybody you can go to grow cast, podcast.com/photon, it'll bring you right to the photon tech website, code, grow cast saves you 10% on your high performance LED lights. Now photon tech is dropping the x1 1000 watt Pro. This is the strongest light that photon tech made. This thing is way overpowered. You need CO two just to keep up with this thing, delivering 2929 you moles per second with this magnetic bars that easily disassemble and reassemble. It is high efficiency, high power, and you are gonna love the sexy red that photon tech comes in Grow cast, podcast.com/photon, grab yourself the huge new x1 1000 Pro, or check out the rest of their products, the 465 which is perfect for a four by four. They've got the 600 watt, which is perfect for a five by five. They've got smaller ones. Whatever you need, find it at grow cast podcast.com/photon, use code, grow cast. Always at photon tech lighting. Thank you, photon tech for your amazing support. Okay, everyone, that's all for this week. I hope you're doing incredible things in your garden. Growcast is moving along. We're bigger than ever, and we got some amazing events coming up, really dialing in this community aspect. So you stay tuned. We got some updates coming at you. We got some good episodes coming at you, so don't touch that dial. All right, everyone, we'll see you next time. Have a good day. Bye, bye.

You guys think you're fancy with your you know, mothball hurricane mixed with Oreo, banana, pop, no, no, no, no, no.