💦 Rainwater Collection, Water Conservation, and Auto Watering, with Michael Box

9:18AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

rainwater collection

water conservation

automated watering

blue mats

moisture retention

irrigation systems

soil moisture

water efficiency

rainwater catchment

mulching

fabric pots

living soil

pressure reducer

cap dialing

vacation watering kit

Greetings, cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow. Cast fully saturated. Today we have Michael box back on the line. He's back code grow cast is active again at sustainable village.com, for 10% off your blue mats. You know it. You love it. It's time for more irrigation talk. But we get into so much more today, rain water and water conservation, administering water in all of the different ways and methods you're gonna love this episode on irrigation. But before that, shout out to AC infinity. That's right, they make the best grow gear on the market. Acinity.com, code grow cast one five saves you 10% that is the maximum discount we've had the code forever. We've been partners with AC infinity for years. And why? It's because they make the best tents you can get your hands on. They make the best inline fans, the best oscillating fans. They make really, really great quality accessories like scissors, pots, Ratchet hangers and things like that. And now they also have lights. They've got the ion board and now the ion frame bar style, really, really great stuff at AC infinity. Get the whole grow kit you've been after. You know you can get a three by three kit, a five by five kit. You know you want another one, just go ahead and pop over there. Use code grow cast one, five, always at checkout for the max discount. And thank you for supporting us and AC infinity. We love them so much. They make our favorite grow gear out there. I'm looking at two AC infinity tents in my bio dome, and you won't regret grabbing one. Use code grow, cast one, five at AC infinity.com. Thank you to AC infinity. All right, let's get into it with Michael box, 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 off to a friend, turn someone on to growing. It's how you can help us the most and make sure you're following us on Spotify or YouTube, whatever you like. Give us a follow and stay tuned to learn more about cannabis cultivation. Today, we have a friend of the show on That's right. People have been asking. People have been asking about this blue matte code, and it's back on. Everybody you know what that means. Michael box is back on the show. Code grow. Cast is back active. We're gonna do an episode on irrigation and much more. What's up? Michael, how you doing, buddy,

hey, Jordan, I'm doing good. Yeah. Good to be back. Good to be back, my

friend, your last episode was a hit. Go and go and check out all of Michael's episodes. Wonderful episodes on watering technique and irrigation and all sorts of stuff. But that last episode on moisture retention curve was a banger, man. People like that data. You're always testing. You're always in the lab. My audience loved that, so thank you for that, and thank you for coming back on today.

Yeah, yeah, you're welcome, yeah. I mean, you know, cliche, but like, life is a, you know, continuous process of learning, and that's what kind of floats my boat. And so we're always looking at new things here at the single village, but then just me personally, I always want to kind of be pushing the envelope and learning new things, keeping the world, keeping my world Interesting. Yeah, it's what it's all about. Yeah, that the emergency retention curve is, is a really interesting, you know, piece of data to look at, and a good concept for people to understand. So we're always fun talking about that. Yeah, I do encourage people to, yeah, go back and check that one out. A little bit good stuff.

Man, really good stuff. Now, now that you're back on the show, we know what this means as well. Code grow cast active for 10% off for the month of September at sustainable village.com grab your blue matte automated watering systems. You guys know that I love this system, and Michael is kind enough to activate this code just for us every so often, and I'm loving it, man. You know, we spoke at an event recently, but what have you been up to in the meantime, since the last time you were on the show, what have you been doing and what's new on the horizon for sustainable village.

Yeah, so, Boy, I've been a little bit since we were on here. I was just looking through my notes, and I think it was like the end of March that we that we did a show together last and I, and I'm also remembering we, we ran into each other since then, yes, in real life in Oklahoma. Funny how that works at the, yeah, can i con the OKC can icon? But, yeah, since then, you know, we've gone through springtime, which is always our traditional busy season. And it was another busy season. It's been a, you know, been an interesting year. I'll say that as far as what we're doing as a company, you know, like, what our kind of like, business flow is like, but also just the irrigation world in general, this year has been a really strange one. It's been a wet year across the country, right? You know, unless you're in a few different, few places. Some places, it was very, very dry. Most places. Was really wet, you know, particularly kind of like the northeast, but all like the mountains of Colorado, where we are, was very wet. And we work with a lot of farmers in this area on some of our bigger ag projects. And, you know, I'm in touch with people all over the country that are, they're doing agricultural projects. And as well as the manufacturers of various irrigation components all over the US and globally too, but particularly in the US this year it was, it was kind of a wet year, which, interestingly enough, means sales kind of come down sometimes for irrigation system.

Well, you tell me the rain is doing your job?

Yeah? Exactly, exactly, yeah, which is, you know, great for most people. I definitely had a few clients, a few, like, new weed projects up in Vermont this year, you know, like they never ended up buying an irrigation system. We had a design in place. They were ready to go, and then it rained and rained and rained and rained. And then their town flooded, and then it rained some more. And so we had that sort of thing happening. We just, we just saw the system to a project up in Vermont today. I think Izzy might have finished that up and it got scaled back, because this guy, you know, he put in, I don't know, it was several 100, like, 100 gallon pots out on the field, and the creek came up and ate away a third of his field and took the path away with it and everything. Yeah,

that is why. And he

didn't, they didn't need irrigation until, until now, you know, here they are in their last, like, whatever, six to eight weeks of growing and they

they needed it, so they're plugging in some blue mats. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think about those other automated watering systems. And, you know, it's got to be a challenge when it is naturally wet, right? When it's raining a lot, when there's a lot of moisture and things of this nature, if you're just running what drips on a timer, or something like that, or emitters on a timer, they don't know what's going on in the world around them. So I assume that these environmental changes are going to have to impact the way that you, that you irrigate. The blue mats, of course, like detecting the pressure in the soil, that's an amazing help. But probably just in general, yeah, it's going to change the way that you, that you irrigate. Well,

you're right, you're right about that, you know, just blue mats, just, you know, if people are just jumping in or whatever, that the crux of this. A lot of the systems we build use a blue mat sensor, the blue mat carrot, we call them sometimes, and they're basically a ceramic cone with a plastic top filled with water. There's a silicon tube that runs through the top that gets pinched on and off based on the soil moisture level. So effectively, it acts as a variable flow, variable speed valve, water valve, that opens and closes based on the soil moisture content in the container that it's in. So yeah, again, if it is, if you know the way it works is when the soil dries out, the valve opens, it waters, it brings it up to a set point and turns off. So if you're in a situation where you're getting a lot of rain, it's not going to turn on. And yeah, so that is a big difference than a like, a like a more of a traditional drip system on a timer. Now, having said that, there are controllers that can replicate some of the functionality of what the blue map is doing, sure, and I've actually been looking at those a little bit lately, some of the bigger projects we are, we tend to move away from actually using the blue map products once we get over a certain size. That makes sense. You know, say over half an acre to an acre of planted stuff. You know, if it was, if it's in containers, we can go bigger. We can go really big. If it's in containers, I don't really have a upper limit. But, you know, everything's got a scale, and everything's got an appropriate technology to fit that scale. And sometimes, when we're dealing with many acres and 1000s and 1000s of plants, sometimes we move past the blue map themselves and go into a more just highly sophisticated drip irrigation system. And when I say highly sophisticated, I don't mean overly complicated. In fact, the way we like to design our systems is as simple as possible, because, you know, I've worked on farms and and some people that are listening might also and, you know, having stuff that just works well, it's bomber, you know, it doesn't break easy. It's easy to turn on. It's easy to turn off. Doesn't have a lot of you know technology behind it that needs, like updating or power supplies and things like that, can be really, really is often usually preferred. So the trick there is, how do you take. Make a how you take those qualities on a large scale irrigation project, but give it the kind of sensitivity that we're in, responsiveness that we're getting with blue mat systems and containers. And I've really identified a few really nice controllers from this company. There's an Israeli company that's been operating out of the US for a while now that has got some really great ones where we can input a whole bunch of different solenoid valves. The soil valves can be remotely controlled. We can connect it to weather stations. We can put in analog inputs like arometers, so we can be collecting, you know, moisture data we can get, we can set trigger points based on that data,

real time. Moisture data, sure, yeah,

yeah, yeah,

that's right up your alley. This is the type of stuff you install if somebody comes to you with the design request for a very large outdoor Exactly,

right. Okay, wow, yeah. And a lot of the bigger, you know, like I said, more kind of, AG, quality projects that. So, you know, that's really like, the kind of Holy Grail of irrigation, is to have irrigation systems that open and turn on when the soil drops below a certain set point, and then turn off when they when they reach a certain moisture level, right, and then and kind of repeat that process, right? And a lot of the traditional drip world has been trying to do that for a long time, but has not really got there technology wise. Interestingly enough, we've been able to do that with blue mats in containers, particularly, you know, raised beds, pots, that sort of thing. We've been able to really accurately do that for quite a while, and we can do it really well now, but that technology piece where, where growers are able to get all those data points and then have like, automated irrigation events based on those data points, it's new. It's really pretty new. There's, there's different tech out there that's like trying to do it. And, you know, part of our job is to, kind of, like, analyze a lot of these new companies and their products, test them out. You know, we'll demo them. Maybe we'll get set up as a dealer, maybe we won't. And, you know, run them through their paces and see if they really do work. And so we're, you know, identifying different different products that can do that at all scales. Yeah, at all scales. That's correct. So when you think

about this, you know, you talk about opening the irrigation and closing the irrigation at the optimal times. And it strikes me, you know, what are the the main goals of automated irrigation? Well, one, obviously eliminating labor. You could argue that's the biggest thing right when you automate, is you eliminate repeated need for labor. Two, optimizing the soil moisture. You know, hand watering takes a lifetime to master, and if you can just have sensors doing it for you, you can a lot of the times do a better job by relying on the, you know, the sensors, and relying on the math. And then three, I would probably say another important one is water conservation, right? Using less water overall. That's, that's a huge deal at a large scale, but I think it's just a good life practice, no matter how small your garden is, is to conserve the the precious resource that is fresh, clean water. You know what?

I mean? Yeah, what? It's all really about water conservation from an environmental point of view, I guess. But the but as a resource conservation, you know, kind of point of view too, like, water is expensive and it's a resource that needs to be conserved. You know, the other things you brought up, as far as, like, labor savings, yes, that's like a massive one. You know, the the return on investment is incredibly quick on an automated irrigation system. When you start running the numbers, if you any kind of commercial operator, if they're paying somebody to, you know, hand water their plants. I mean, I can guarantee any of them that, you know, we can design a system with a price point that is going to pay for itself. The hand water

isn't here in the room. You don't have to lower your voice. I like how you got quiet there. We can, we can guarantee, yeah, it does make sense. You'd make that money back rather quickly on an automated watering system at scale. But even, even the home growers, man, primarily my audience, uh, home growers, yeah, I just think it frees you up. It frees you up. Man, it takes it to the

next point. Yeah, well, it takes it does it frees you up, unless you do other things and it takes the next point, which is the plants tend to like it better. Anyways. I mean, I know that there's a lot of advantages to home water, hand watering, in the sense that you're spending time with the plants and getting to, you know, like observe them. I do. I will say, with a small grow, with a blue mat system, they are going to be able to water your plants better than than the hand water can. And I know that's maybe sounds a little arrogant or something, but, you know, I. Time and time again. That's proven to me, I feel

like, well, I mean, listen, on average, I realized I was over watering myself when I got that moisture meter right. And here's the other thing that I'll say to the people that say, Oh, I love hand watering my plants. I still hand water all the time with blue man, that's how I have to add in my teas and things like that. I just doesn't rely on that for the water delivery. So I end up feeding a lot less and needing to mix things a lot less. And then I still will water in things like compost teas and living things that I don't really want sitting in a res blue mat. Just detects that it's a little wet, it stops running its thing until it dries out enough, and then it continues. So so for me, it's it's ideal for the for the home grower, set up, and I hand water in all the time, man, so I get in my probes. So,

yeah, water conservation. The third thing you brought up, you know, major, major factor in the irrigation world. It's a big piece of our company ethos, is to, you know, provide systems that promote water conservation, whether it's moving from flood irrigation to overhead, or from overhead to drip, or from drip to, you know, a kind of plant responsive system, like a blue mat system. So we're always looking to increase water conservation and water efficiency in any irrigation system we do. So

I want to go more in depth into like water conservation tips. But just to start from the automated watering perspective, over watering is going to be a less efficient use of the water, even if you're not watering to run off because the plant is going to be able to it's not going to be able to transpire as efficiently. It's not going to be able to drink up that water as easily now that it's over watered. It's really interesting. You say like efficient use of water. It's not just how much you're wasting. It's getting that air to water ratio, right? That 5050, air to water ratio that plants love so much to have maximum efficiency. Is that why you're saying that things like blue matter good for water conservation, because it's just the right balance. You're not dumping too much or too little.

Yeah, we're not using water that we don't need to use. You know? We're using just enough and we're not watering to run off, which is a kind of a major, again, environmental impact for a lot of traditional drip systems, where, you know, people are watering to a certain amount of runoff, and then they have to treat that runoff, and that's a whole process. It's a big, like, kind of selling point for the commercial systems that we see where, you know, we're not watering to run off. Yes, every time they irrigate. Because, you know, most places these days, when you get your license, if, if you have a license, grow, there's going to be some requirements to, you know, capture all that runoff water and, you know, clean it or dispose of it in a particular way.

Yeah, even a home grower, yeah. I mean, if you have other plants or can maybe gobble that up, or you have somewhere in your yard where you can, I mean, if you're near any waterways, and you're just dumping that in the same spot, and then it rains and it pushes that salt fertilizer that you might be using into the people don't like that. That's one of the reasons that home growers try to do a living soil system, because they say, Oh, I don't have to worry about that runoff. I think it's just about gardening responsibly. But I will say a lot of new growers get put off by this idea that this runoff probably shouldn't go into into, down the drain or into waterways. You know, yeah,

absolutely, absolutely. And that's why they put all those regulations in place, too, is because those kind of hyper concentrated levels of, you know, nitrogen in particular affect right watersheds negatively. Good call. What

other big water conservation tips do you? I have a couple that are in my mind, but I'd like to give you a chance to say, I know you see a lot of setups out there, especially in like the home growers Well, you

know, I mean, I love stuff to see just rain water, rain water catchment. You know, that's more of like on a backyard home grower scale kind of thing. Generally, there's other bigger projects that, you know, capture it in ponds and things like that too. But in Colorado, you're basically allowed to catch the water that comes off of your roof. Now, previously, you weren't allowed to collect any rain water in Colorado. You know, all the water in Colorado is owned at any given point. What? Even the stuff falling from the sky? Yeah, basically, I mean, yeah, as soon as it hits the ground, it is but so they've changed those rules a little bit here in Colorado over the last 10 years, and now you're able to do some rainwater collection. It is based on the amount of roof that you have. So you can only take you have to look at the square footage of your roof. What? How much water could you like? How much? What's the annual rainfall in your area, like, per foot? And then you take that number, and then times the amount of square feet of roof that you have, and that's like the volume that you're allowed to store on your property at any given time.

Does every state have these type of rainwater collection regulations? I haven't heard that before. Interesting nonetheless, though.

No, no, they don't. I mean, definitely not like East Coast states or anything like that, where there's just plenty of water. But again, you know, so Colorado, the state where there's no rivers that flow into Colorado, they just flow out of it. So I. All of our water is snow melt, for the most part, can't be collecting that precious rain, yeah, well, somebody owns it really, like, do, like, by, via water rights and water share somewhere downstream. And Colorado water law is, like, an old thing and has, like, its own history. And it's, it's, you know, it's complicated and crazy, but I remember that anyways, that's kind of besides the point. You can catch rainwater here, and you can do it in lots of other places too. And so the trick is to capture rainwater, have enough rainwater storage, you know, available to collect that water when it does rain, because it might not rain for a long time, but then it might, you know, rain a couple inches in an hour or a couple hours, and be able to fill up your 55 gallon drum. So you have to have that storage ability on site, and then have a way to move the water from there, from those those tanks, into your gardens, and preferably we're doing that through some sort of gravity process, right? We could put a pump in there and pump water out in into a drip system, or something like that. And that's done. But, you know, to kind of complete that, like elegant cycle of just catching water, storing it, and then, as the ground dries out after the rain, you know, reapplying it. That is the, that's the real trick. I think that's really cool. Yeah, we got some cool kind of kits we've been putting together that that sort of will plug into your rain water barrel, like your rain barrel, or, you know, if you want to get a rain barrel, you got those two. But basically just come off of the of the bulkhead from your rain barrel into some eight millimeter tubing, and then we can run that all over the garden. And what we've actually been doing is connecting the blue mat classics to that eight millimeter tubing so that we have this sort of slow release of water where we want it, and it's all gravity fed and that that's kind of a cool kind of newer thing that we've been messing around with here, as far as kind of backyard and like home grow, home style, rainwater oriented systems, I

would love to get on a rainwater system, or get my my family on them out out in Hawaii. That would be so cool. Rainwater has a lot of properties to it, right? That that other sources of water don't. Can you talk about that for a second?

I've heard that, yeah, like, yeah, like, high dissolve oxygen rates, you know, I, I don't know a lot about that particularly, no,

no, you nailed it. It's full of oxygen. It's full of atmospheric nitrogen. And then there was even a study. I don't know if you saw this, but there was a study that said, yeah, actually, I have it right here. A study found that rain born bacteria falls from the sky and occupies the phyllosphere on plants. This is a study published in 2021 that says that there was a species of bacteria that was found to be in rainwater and colonize plants. Really crazy. Think there's something special about that rainwater. Yeah, that's what I think one of the reasons why outdoor plants, it has an organic quality, it does. It sure does. You know, I agree,

yeah, yeah. I've always preferred, uh, outdoor grown cannabis, just because it, you know, like it has that opportunity to interact with the wind and the rain and the sun and, you know, like maybe takes on some of those kind of wild qualities, even though it might not be the, you know, have the best bag appeal.

Anyone who's done both outdoor and indoor has at least, at least you can say this for sure. And I support grows of all types, but at least you can say this for sure, there's something about that outdoor if grown properly, that outdoor vigor. I don't know what. I don't know what it is about the native microbes or the sun and the rain and the wind, or all of the above. Most likely,

I just think it's the sun. I think, man, I see that out in Colorado. These plants get outdoors and once, once we get some good hot days, they just rip and I think it's that hot, Colorado sun,

nice. Yeah, the sun too, man, you call it that spectrum, wonderful, uh, single focal point in the sky that the plants can just perfectly interact with. And, yeah, especially when they grow together, they seem to be very vigorous outdoors together in the weather. You know what I

mean? Oh, they do compete with each other. I think they definitely do that. I think if you put two plants next to each other, you know, even if they have enough space, they'll, they'll, you plant a short one next to a tall one, that short one will catch up to the tall

something about it. And, yeah, someone told me a long time ago, I think that's like a anti competition thing, totally. And someone told me a long time ago, talking about vegetables, they said plants grow better together. They just do so if you have like plants, even if they're in separate pots, like you said, scoot them together. They like to be together. And I always remembered that a good stuff, though, amazing. So rainwater, I didn't even think you were going to bring up rainwater. Man, that's that is a killer. Uh, suggestion, yeah,

no, I think rainwater is a great one. I you know, again, we have a line of kind of products that are oriented towards that. I got to go. This is just kind of more on a personal note, got to go to, like, farm dinner a month or two ago at this place called elk run farm. They're like a really cool permaculture farm here in Boulder County, and they do a lot of kind of community oriented events. And there's a fellow there named Brad Lancaster. He was kind of the guest. And he's a, you know, more old school, you know, as far as permaculture, this goes pretty kind of famous in that world. And a lot of his work was done with rainwater catchment, rainwater diversion down in the southwest, in Arizona, and they had brought him up to Boulder County here to kind of do some like consulting and kind of policy advising with the City of Boulder on how that they could change their rainwater catchment and rainwater diversion laws in order to store more water in The in the landscape, and keep less of it from, you know, running down drains. And, yeah, we got to have some really, like, really cool night with him, talking about some of the projects he's worked with over the years. Man, if anybody is interested in rainwater catchment, check this guy out. Brad Lancaster. He's got some website stuff. He's written a few books, but he's sort of the godfather of that world. I'm

ready to speak to this guy. Man, yeah, that sounds really, really cool. It's cool that you're that you're hobnobbing the mayor, the mayor himself, hobnobbing with the king of rainwater and the boulder elites. I love it. Man, no. I mean, listen, in all seriousness, I think that's really cool. I think that's the type of stuff that these, like city officials, need to be thinking about. You know what I mean? That really flips my cookie.

Yeah, Boulder is, you know, which is where, where our company is located, as you know, has a long history of being fairly progressive in their kind of environmental policy. So

let's talk more about water conservation. You know, one thing that I see, that I know you probably see this a lot too, is a lack of mulch, a lack of mulching. Man, I think that's a huge source of water evaporation that a lot of people can change their garden with, just applying that mulch layer, making sure there's a sufficient mulch layer, and in the case of outdoors, making sure that you reapply that mulch layer, right? Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I do. I mean, I don't. I feel like there's different ways to go about the mulch thing. Outdoors, sure. Yeah, definitely. Mulch is a good thing indoors. I don't really want to take a stance on that. It can be kind of controversial, you know, it can be like a vector for pathogens and stuff like that too, for, you know, indoor controlled environments, but definitely anything outdoors. You know, mulch is a great it's a great product. It helps, you know, it's a lot of kind of biological activity and creating ecosystems to support a diversity of organisms. At home, I have some 65 gallon pots, and I have the blue soak, you know, this the soaker hose that goes along with the blue, the blue mats in those pots. And what I like to do is actually bury that a little bit. So I'll bury that a couple, like an inch or two under the the top layer of soil when I'm planting for the season, nice so that, you know, kind of it's releasing the water and the underneath the soil layer, the top of the soil, but it's within like an inch or two of the surface. So it kind of helps protect the blue soak for one thing. And I think the kind of back pressure that the soil provides, it helps kind of prolong the longevity of the tape as

well. Oh, no way. So it actually lasts because I was going to say it doesn't like clog or anything like that under the dirt.

Oh, just works great. It's actually designed to be buried. Wow, we're kind of using it off label in a way when we when we don't bury it. So, yeah, you'll always get longer life out of your blue soak if you bury it or heavily mulch it, that's for sure. And

that's what you like in like, a bed scenario, because you only have one carrot. But that blue soak tape is is able to, like, wrap around a big ass cot or a bed, yeah, exactly, or just run lengths of it down the beds. That is exactly what I want. That's what I'm after.

Yeah, we can have one carrot controlling, you know, a four by eight, four by 10, four by 12, maybe up to four by 20, kind of zone. Oh, wow. So, so that

saves on buying a bunch of carrots. Yeah, another advantage to getting into a larger bed. But I will tell you this, in the in the mulch, on the mulch side. And I don't know how big they make these, but one company, rain science, makes a pot cover. It's like the same material as their mesh. Have you seen these? And it sits in your in your plant still has room to go through, but you're basically have like, a screen, so things like fungus gnat eggs probably won't make it through there. It shades your medium. So stuff like that is really cool for, like, more sterile, yeah,

I've seen stuff like that. They're, like, discs that kind of go on, yeah,

yes, yeah. I like those. That was one thing that I saw that was really neat. So now you don't have to bring. In, you know, a bag of wood chips or whatever, if you don't want to necessarily bring that into your grow, right? Just something I thought about a lot of cool applications out there, right, right now. Man, oh, yeah. Do you enjoy listening to grow cast Well, if so, you'll love grow cast membership, hundreds of hours of bonus content, personal access to me in our members only, Discord, live streams, giveaways and so much more. Go to grow cast podcast.com/membership, and jump on in. Check out all of the bonus content. You can jump in free for seven days. Consume all that content. Tune to the live streams. I know you're gonna love it. We have resources and recipes for the members. We will personally guide you and solve all your garden problems in our members only discord. And most importantly, we are a positive community of uplifting growers who really want to just help you succeed in your garden. We're not going to jam our styles down your throat. We're going to help you garden the way you want to garden and succeed and achieve your goals. If you're a positive, like minded grower, come and join us at the order of cultivation. That's our fancy name at grow cast membership. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, and check out the Grow cast TV, live streams, best show in cannabis. I know you'll love it, and I hope to see you there. We do meet ups and events and classes all the time, so I hope to see you in membership and in person soon. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, try it free for seven days. Thank you to all you listeners and all of the members. I appreciate you. Speaking of those bags, though, another one that I like is having a lighter colored pot, like the the white mesh fabric bags. A lot of those dark, black ones that I have in my backyard, they really heat up in the sun, and I think that it cooks out, yeah, yeah. It cooks out that that water quicker, almost certainly it does. Oh, absolutely.

So, I mean, yeah, as far as pots, we don't talk about that for a second. I'm a huge fan of the grassroots fabric. Let me soil probably. Those are great, yeah, yeah. So they're usually tan, you know, which takes away that darkness, right? And heat absorption. So there's tan fabric. But the really, the important piece is the living soil liner. We call it. It's basically like a non permeable membrane that's sewn into the upper 12 inches of the of the pot, or the raised bed. And, you know, from an irrigation perspective, I think it's great. It keeps the soil moisture even all the way up to the edge of the pot. So, you know, fabric pots are great. They're like, lightweight, they're relatively cheap. You know, they're easy to set up and move around and whatever, but they do dry out around the edges, and that's a real problem for someone that's focused on soil moisture. So what I like I said, What's so great about those living soil liners is they keep that even moisture level right up to the edge of the pot, and that promotes, you know, kind of additional root growth in that area as well. So if you have like, two or three inches of soil all the way on the outside of your pot that is just continually dried out, it's not going to get the same amount of root growth that the consistently moist sections would get, yes, right? So, you know, that's like a waste of soil. And when you we've actually sat around the office here and done the math on this, and you know, if you take, like, the average cost of soil, like, of like, you know, a nice mix, like, something from whatever build a soil, or kiss organics, or one of those guys, whatever that stuff is, 1520 bucks a bag, the good shit. Yeah, yeah, the good shit. And if you take the cost of that per volume, and you look at, like, Okay, if you have a 65 gallon pot, and the outer three inches are not being used, and that means you're wasting, you know, three inches, like, how much of that extra three inches of of soil cost? You

guys are punching the numbers. You're, you're, you're going, what's the diameter three? Three inches off of each side? Yeah. The crazy

thing is, you'd be, you'd be better see what we found. I've always wanted to tell the guys at grassroots about this, but yeah, we sat there one night and just kind of nerding out about this stuff. What we found was the if you had a 65 gallon pot that was non living soil, right, that, you know, just had regular, standard fabric that was drying out around the edges, versus, like a 45 gallon pot with that living soil liner, you're basically, you're functionally getting about the same amount of available soil. And if you in the 45 gallon pot with the living soil liner, as you are in the 65 gallon pot without the living so, that much so that. So then, if you take the cost of that unused soil, that number is higher than, like, the difference in price between the living soil 45 gallon pot and the 65 gallon pot without that living soil ladder.

So you're paying for more soil overall cheap. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

because, yeah. Now. Can buy less soil for the same amount of volume. And basically, that's how it all worked out. Is like, oh, it turns out it's cheaper to go with a smaller pot where you use all the soil than it and that pot costs a little bit more than it is to go with a bigger, cheaper pot with more soil in it, but you're not using all that soil. So yeah, that's kind of the bottom line math on that this one. But we, well, we concluded on one of our, like, after work bullshit sessions here in the office, when we just sitting around. And

that makes sense, because those those big pots, are often much taller. So you're right, if it's the outer three inches that's all the way down to the to the bottom. So that's a lot of missing soil, as you put it, and yeah, and yeah, those are those wrapped pots are great, even if you don't like, let's say you already have some going or whatever. Even if you don't have the capability to, like, choose a new pot, another thing you can do is kind of shade or mulch the outside of your pot. Shout out to Mary Beth Sanchez. She was like, I'll just take a bunch of straw and kind of put it around the outside of my pot that protects it from the sun and it it insulates it, essentially. So I thought that was a really neat trick to mulch the outside of your pot. I thought that was neat. Yeah, good stuff, man. I love all those, all those breathable bags, the ones that are that have the lining like you said, are amazing, as long as you get that air pruning. You know, that's that is key. Although I know some great growers who still grow in plastic, to be fair, I'll give them their due, but I like the ones that the roots grow through and do the air pruning

that's important to me. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of folks these days, you know, scaling back from some of the larger containers you and you know they're doing, they're producing, okay, so, like, we say living soil, style, production. Like, what does that really mean? Right? Like, I bet if we ask 10 people, we get 10 different definitions, yes. And the whole point is, there isn't really a official definition. It's, it's not like it's saying it has an organic certification or something where it has, like, it has to meet these criteria. Well, this is just like a slogan. It's a colloquial but, you know, a lot of folks might say, hey, it just means you're using, like, a heavily amended potting mix soil that has most of the organic ingredients and lots of micronutrients. And you know, the product that you're getting is, like, super rich and broad terpene spectrums and so on and so forth. And a lot of people go on to add that's grown in a large container, and that there's biological activity that continually, kind of like, cycles through and solubilizes nutrients and makes them plant available and like, that's the function. It's like, basically your your soil bed is a is a living system in itself. But not everybody thinks that way, too. And, you know, some people want to just have a pre mixed soil, whether they add a lot of microbes to in a smaller container, like a five or 10 gallon pot. Yep, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there that would would jump up and say, you know, growing in a five gallon pot is not living soil, but it is possible to produce in that way with it and get a product that has is very similar in that really rich terpene profile and produce a product that, you know has lots of available micronutrients and things like that.

People scaling back down to that more, is what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. So

we're kind of seeing that more, and that's like a new new or we've have a lot of new kind of designs to match up with that style. And again, it actually doesn't even have to be just that living soil person, anybody that's in any kind of smaller container, in that, like, kind of three to 10 gallon container. So even if they're growing cocoa, you know, in cocoa with salt and stuff like that too, this does it also work, but we're kind of seeing that as as a process, you know, I think you know this, but we do a lot of design work here at the at the office, and so

guys do that for free. A lot of my members have been grateful, man, they said I called up and you guys just gave them a system. Said, here's the design for free. If you want to grab it, use code, grow cast. And yeah, we appreciate

that. You bet we do. We do. Most of our systems are for free. Occasionally, we do, you know, a couple of months I've got bigger systems that require an engineered CAD drawing and everything, and there's, we'll charge a little bit of money for that, but it's actually really reasonable if you need engineered drawings. But most of our stuff, definitely, I think involving blue mass is all a free design. And those designs, they come with, like, a really nice computer design, a drawing, you know, that's like Amazon, your parts and pieces labeled and diagrams and how it all fits together, and it's customized to your space. And then it also comes along with, like, a itemized parts list for everything that goes into that system. And we're able to do a pretty quick turnaround on those kind of projects. So many of these designs, you know, that we do are for all kinds of systems, home grows, you know, big farms, a lot of commercial cannabis. You know, used to do just tons and tons of like greenhouses and raised beds. And I. Say, used to, because we're in an interesting position in the industry, and that we're talking to people from every state in the country, pretty much, and kind of hearing what folks are up to and what they're doing. And really over time, you know, like, I think I said it was, I've been sitting in this role here at this company for about five years in that, that last five years has been a real roller coaster in the cannabis world, watching, you know, the preferred styles of growers evolve and adapt, you know, to lots of different things. You know, finding more efficient technologies. You know, some styles that produce better products, or, you know, maybe just market demands for wanting different things in different places for different people. So, yeah, we're seeing a lot of that. And one of the things that we've been doing a lot of here lately, when this is just sort of an interesting, you know, kind of commentary on on the market is, is those grows that are doing, you know, five to 10 gallon pots of like, quote, unquote, living soil. And again, I think it's great. I think it's a cool way to grow. And what we're doing is putting one blue mat in every pot, and we have these drip rings now, oh, yeah, those little halos. Yeah, those are great, exactly, yeah. So we have these like, and we've been working with this one company to get them manufactured so that they fit seamlessly with our just a little plug right onto the end of a blue mat. You know, we're not doing with the distribution drippers. We just have these, like, nice plastic rings. They're really affordable. And we can do like, one carrot and one drip ring per container. So we have, like, a five inch one and we have a 10 inch one. So, you know, the five inch is really good for, like, up to a five gallon pot. We'll put those 10 inch ones up to a 30 gallon pot, and get that kind of functionality there. So the other thing that we've been really working on with that system is the cap dialing. So what we've been doing with that, with the cap dialing, is, and I know we covered this a little bit last time as well is that we have a method for dialing all of our carrots at once, just in one place. We can actually do it before we even get to the grow room. In fact, what we've been doing is cap dialing here at the at the warehouse. We built a little setup here where we can just quickly do a lot of them, and then we snap a plastic cap on them so we're able to, like, dial in the carrots ahead of time.

So if I order now, am I going to get one of those? You could, yeah,

we, actually, we haven't put on the website yet, and, you know, I'll just throw it out there. I don't, I don't think anybody's I've talked about this anywhere else yet, I just built the item number in our system. Oh, we have a service we're doing. You can pay to have them dialed ahead of time. And you know what, Jordan, if you want them, I'll dial them up for you myself, free of charge. You know, we have been doing over the last six months we've been we wanted to make sure this works really well. So we we've picked probably about a dozen different commercial facilities and some smaller ones. And we cap dialed all their carrots. Maybe it was 10, maybe it was 40, maybe it was 600 and we dialed all the carrots here, put the caps on them, shipped them to them. They just plugged them in. Didn't do any adjustments, you know. All they did was soak the bottoms, fill them with water and put them in the soil, turn the pressure on, and boom, they're hitting every pot, pot to pot, the pot, the pot is hitting the exact target millibar level that we want them to hit. That is killer. Hey, combine that with the drip ring, you know, the pre dial carrots with the drip ring, and all of a sudden, for, for not very much per container, you know, dollar figure, we have, like, a, you know, a moisture sensing valve and water distribution system in every individual pot. And it's plug and play, and it's, yeah, it's getting to be plug and play, you know, I mean, everything has to get built, you know, the supply line to be laid out and water systems to be hooked up to. But yeah, it's, it's getting very close to, like, a plug and play, much more so than it was beforehand. Well, that's the plug part. So that's, like, the really easy way to do it. You know, have it, teach it to, like, pay to have them pre dialed ahead of time and consent to you. But the instructions for pre dialing were very easy, too, and we produced a whole series of videos since we were on here last. They kind of demonstrate how to do that online. So on our YouTube channel, folks go out there, they'll be able to see all those new videos. Nice,

sustainable village. Nice, okay, sustainable village. YouTube channel. Go subscribe. Everybody. Go get them a subscription. Okay, so I love that, and I love that for the style that you just described. That makes a lot of sense, you know?

Oh, yeah. And let me just take this one step further, because this is, like, I wanted to kind of give you a little update on this, because I think I touched on the cap dialing last time, because we were really, just No, really, just getting the SOP of it down and just starting to send out those test kits. And, yeah, it's worked really well. People are getting, you know, they're ordering cases. The time of pre dialed carrots, or they're showing up at their facility, and they're able to stick, you know, soak the bottoms, fill them with water, and then be able to stick them in and have them operate, and have that consistency from pot to pot to pot, without any kind of screwing around. So what's cool is to take that and then couple that with the adjustable pressure reducer, which is another product we we touched on, I think last time again, it was pretty new, then we were just starting to send them out, and they are a different pressure reducer. They're not like the blue map brand ones we've previously sent out. They're they're from a different manufacturer in Germany. We found these are really cool though. There's the Adjust David, like a dial on them where you can adjust the pressure setting, and they'll go anywhere from like one to 19 psi, I think somewhere around there, but it's one to 14 is what it is. So we can adjust the pressure on the back end of the system. And what we've found is that if you have every carrot in your facility, they're all putting out, say, 80 millibars, or even a little wetter. Let's say they're putting out 60 millibars, which is pretty wet, but that's like acceptable range for a living soil mix or even a cocoa mix. For sure, cocoa can go even wetter. As a matter of fact, that we learned all that stuff based on that moisture retention curve data we talked about last time. But so say we're sitting at 60 millibars, that's on the wetter side of things, and the back end of the system is at, say, 15 psi, which is sort of the upper limit for blue mass. If we turn the valve on that adjustable pressure reducer and drop the back end pressure down to, say, seven psi, so we'd lower the pressure on the back end of the system. What that's going to do is in a very concerned consistent and even way, is going to dry out every pot in that room. That kind of drop would probably dry it back to around 90 to 100 millibars.

So you can determine, adjusting the pressure on the back end, how that's going to lower the moisture to a tea in the medium. So this is useful, like before harvest, for instance, if you wanted to dry them out, or you wanted to do an intentional dry back,

that's exactly right. So yeah, either doing it, yeah, like at transition, people will do it often. Some people will do it towards the end of the groceries. You know, anytime you want to, based on your your technique, that is so cool. You know, you could, you could do full on crop steering with this,

because that's the problem. Being able to turn it on and off like that would be so useful, because then you don't have to redial ever, and you can just, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Man,

oh yeah, yeah. Once those plastic caps snap on the top of the blue map, these little clear plastic ones that go over the brown dial, they're never meant to be touched again. Really, that's cool. And again, I think we did talk about some of this stuff last time. Stuff last time, but I just, you know, want to put it out there that we then sent these to a number of commercial systems. Some of them we set up ourselves. Some of them we just mailed them and they sent it up, and they've had tremendous results. It's just an awesome way to irrigate right now, very cool. You know, I'd love to design for anybody that's listening right now. We, you know, if you got something where you're using, even if it's, you know, 10 pots, 20 pots, 100 pots, 1000 pots, you know, give us a call. And we'll, we'll, you know, put together the system. We'll do the design. You can look at the price. You can talk to us. You can haggle with us if you need to. And we'll, we'll figure exactly how to make it work and get this thing. And been there for you, because I want to see these, you know, people using these, because the results are tremendous. That's really and if you want to do a traditional drip system, we can do that too, you know, that's based off of control, or a timer, or something like that, or a manual control,

nice. That's easy too. Just remember to bring up code grow cast during the haggling process, and you'll receive 10% off. Tell them you heard it here. And thank you, man for all you do. Sustainable village.com. It's the best. Before we wrap it up, I did want to say I used your blue mat classics. That's another one you touched on last episode. The blue mat classics not having the adjustable dial. It's just a carrot that weeps. And sure I used it with its literally like it shows on the on the house plant instructional, which is, I had to go out of town. You gave me a handful of these blue matte classics. I had them sitting around. I put them in a bowl of water, and I plugged them into the few plants that I had sitting in in a few three gallon pots, and lo and behold, I came back, and it was way longer than I usually water, and the bowl had been mostly drained, and the plants were thirsty, but they had survived like it was literally did exactly what it needed to do, and I let it go an extra like, I don't even, know, four days, maybe three days. Like, it definitely saved, it definitely saved my plants. And I don't have to do anything except

for plug them in. Yeah, well, I mean, you're right, the the blue Mac, we call it the blue mat classic. It's mostly used for house plants. It's, you know, as an individual product. It's our most popular product that we sell. And you know, we have a few different sales channels where you push those through, but the blue mat Classic is a really cool house plant product, and it looks very similar to the trope blue mat, which we mostly talk about in weed culture, which is the valve. This one's a little different in that it's just. A ceramic cone with a plastic top and a little tube coming out of that. And you put one end of the tube and a pitcher of water, and the water is siphoned up through that tube and then into the ceramic cone. And it's it actually bleeds through the ceramic cone into the pot. So it's actually a different mixture of of clays in the tip. So the tip, the clay tip on a trope lumat versus the clay tip on a blue mat. Classic is a different composite of material. And the classic is made to actually wick water out of the tube, out of the out of the tip, whereas the whereas the the trope lumat is not

it's more porous. I'd imagine the classic is more porous. I would imagine that makes sense.

Yeah, the ceramic, yeah. So the the classics are great. And we have a couple of kits we've put together, and they've been real popular. One of them is called the vacation watering kit. That's a good place to start. I don't really might change the name. It's literally what I used it for. Man, yeah, it's vacation watering kit, and it's a five gallon bucket with a bulkhead in it, and it's got about 25 feet of eight millimeter super flex tubing, couple eight millimeter valves, and then 12 of these classics. In addition, it comes with the 12 of these eight millimeter by three millimeter reducing T's. So these are the T's you would use with the tropes. And the kit itself, I'm looking at one right now. I'm in my office, and I have it watering all my, you know, my like house plants here. I've got some fake trees and banana trees and bunch of geraniums and hibiscus and stuff. And I got this one five gallon bucket. It's got a piece of eight millimeter tubing coming out of it. And where, anywhere there's a plant. I cut that tubing, I put in one of these teas, and then I connect that to the blue mat classic tube. So basically, we have 12 of these, the blue mat classics, connected to one line of eight millimeter tubing that's under just a slight amount of pressure, you know, like less than half a PSI. I have the bucket just elevated a little bit. There's a little bit. There's a little bit of back end pressure, and it allows me, what it allows me to do is have one five gallon bucket and then, you know, 12 plants that are being watered by it. And, you know, we were sick, we were looking at this. I mean, these work really good. These work really good on our house plan. This would work on a on a simple tent Grove, you know, with a few, like, whatever, you know, one to 12 plants in it. Yep, that was me. This would actually be like a really useful system. You could have the five gallon bucket sitting outside of the tent, and then you just run that tubing inside the tent. It would snake around the base of your plants, and you would just run one classic up. Now, you don't get the sensitivity that the tropes do, where it turns on and off and water is just the amount that's needed. You're just going to get a kind of steady, continuous flow. If you want it a little wetter, put two carrots in there, you know, or raise the bucket up higher so there's a little bit more pressure on the back end. But, you know, you're just going to get a consistent flow. But for, for veg particularly, or, you know, for a smaller home grow where you're not going for, like, absolute maximum performance, and you just want something that's really easy, this

is the way to go. Yes, I should have used a five gallon bucket. Yeah. Well, that's what

this is, yeah, just a five gallon bucket. You could connect the bulkhead to, like a tote, or something like that too. Like a, you know, 20 gallon, you know, black and yellow coat or something like that. And, you know, if you want a larger reservoir or something, you could, you could put, you know, basic water soluble nutrients through the line. And, yeah, it's a really easy one. It's on the website. It says, vacation, water and kit. There's another one. It's on there. It's called, like, again, these names are all up for up for debate right

now. It's called, my listeners are going to write in gravity irrigation

Excel kit or something like that. But we have one that uses the Excel classics, which are just the larger. They put out more water and and those are the kind of kits that we would connect to rain barrels outside too. Yeah, we want to kind of distribute our rain water out around our, you know, potted plants outdoors or directly in the ground or in a raised

bed. Well, I loved it, man. Like I said, I should have thrown it in a five gallon, because mine drank it right up. It really, worked really well. It's perfect for going out of town, because you're not, you know, if you don't want the whole system installed in there, definitely have some blue mat classics on hand. Grab the vacation package. I had a great, a great time using those classics. Man, very, very cool stuff. Michael, yeah, anything else? What's on the What's on the menu before we wrap it up? Anything coming down the pipe? Any new products, any new projects? Are you just cruising along?

Yeah, I got a big regenerative Farm project happening up in northern Colorado right now that actually I'm going to be on the phone with an engineer and a designer, another permaculture designer, as soon as we get off this call. That's an interesting one, you know, I usually end up dealing with, like the like me personally, like the larger kind of engineered projects that that take, you know, six months to a year. Or more sometimes to come to fruition. So yeah, it's they're not always. There's not that same kind of immediate gratification working on those but, but they are satisfying, and also just learning constantly, like we've learned so much, you know, over the over the years, about about water and and how to administer it. So love to be able to share that, share that with everybody.

That's what it's all about at the end of the day, administering water, and the many ways of administering water, yeah, well, keep keep it up. Man. We love sustainable village. So guys, go show your support. Grab that automated watering system today, or grab a vacation kit for the next time you got to go out of town. Sustainable village.com. Code, grow. Cast now active and thank you, Michael, we'll see you soon. We'll see you at bizcon, maybe, yeah,

yeah, we'll probably see you there. Thank you, buddy. Thanks, Jordan, that's great. Catching up with you as always. All right, take care. Bye. All

right, everyone. That's all and we'll see you next time. Hope you enjoyed this episode. I know you did. Stay tuned. Don't touch that dial. This is Michael box and Jordan River, signing off saying, be safe and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. Thank you for being subscribed to grow cast. Give us a follow. Make sure you stay up to date on all of our classes and events. Go to grow cast podcast.com/classes, we are in. That's right, Tampa for the Florida terpene class, September 9. It's this Saturday. I'll see you there in Tampa. This is a class unlike anyone we've done before. You're not going to want to miss it. It's a terpene class. It's a tasting and so much more. Grab your tickets now. Don't miss this one, everyone. It's amazing. And then after that, we're in Virginia for the breeder class. Find it at growcast podcast.com/classes and use code grow cast to save some bucks. Members get 25% off, of course. So check that out. Thank you so much for tuning in. We've got Oklahoma fungi coming up on the show. We've got new guests, old guests, lots of good stuff for you. Don't touch that dial. Hope you're doing amazing things in your garden. Be safe out there everyone. See you next time.

Just learning constantly, like we've learned so much, you know over the over the years about about water and how to administer it, i.