🌱 How to Get the MOST Out of Your Soil Home Grow, with Ricky from Riverview

11:43PM Jan 27, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

living soil

home grow

soil pitfalls

Riverview soils

cannabis community

AC Infinity

grow tent

bar style lights

soil moisture

light intensity

PPFD measurement

tensiometer

foliar application

nutrient deficiencies

plant empowerment

Greetings cultivators worldwide. Jordan River here back with more growcast. Hot off the presses today, we have a brand new guest. I was recently down in the show me state, and I met up with a couple of great cannabis community members, a couple people coming on the show, including today's guest, Ricky from Riverview, living soils. It's a really good episode. He talks about growing at home with living soil pitfalls to avoid, tips and tricks to make your soil grow better. And of course, he talks about Riverview living soils and his journey. It's a really great episode. I know you're gonna love it before we jump into it with Ricky though shout out to AC infinity, that's right. Acinity.com, code grow, cast one five gets you 15% off across the board. Now that's right, for a while it was depending on which item you bought or this or that. No more grow cast one five now gets you 15% off across the board, plus free shipping on orders $99 or more from acinity.com I love AC infinity. They make the best gear in the Grow game. You really won't find better products out there. Grab their Grow Tent kits. It's got everything you need. I really like their pro kits. Their bar style lights are amazing. They are very, very powerful. In a lot of cases, they're more powerful than you need, which is a good thing, because if you run your bar style lights on 80% or 90% the life of your light is gonna last much, much longer. AC Infinity has amazing bar style lights. They've got the best tents in the game, the game, the best fans in the game, pots, scissors, sunglasses, everything you need is at AC infinity.com code growcast One five saves you 15% and free shipping on orders $99 or more. Plus, if you buy them on Amazon, use code growcast One five for I think it's 5% off for a smaller discount. So order from the site, but if you're ordering from Amazon, still use that code. The code is grow, cast one five. Thank you to AC infinity. Thank you to all you fans. Using the code helps us, helps keep the lights on here, and it helps out AC infinity. And best of all, it helps you out in your grow, best gear in the game. Go get it. It's AC infinity.com. Code, grow, cast one five for 15% off. All right, let's get into it with Ricky. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners, you are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today. Before we get started as always, I urge you to share this show. Turn a grower onto grow cast, or turn a smoker onto growing. That's how you can help us in our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed. Go to growcast podcast.com. For all the things, the episodes and the membership and the classes and the seeds, it's all there. Thank you so much to the members for making this all possible. Today, we have a brand new guest on the line, very excited to speak to this individual. I saw him teaching at the Midwest growers symposium in Missouri, an event that was actually put on by a grow cast member, which is pretty crazy. It was an awesome event. I love chatting with the growers down there, and one of the fellow educators did a really good job talking about soil and home growing. So I was very excited to have on today, Ricky from Riverview soils. He's with us now. What's up? Ricky? How you doing?

Hey, how's it going? Man, I appreciate you having me on. Hey,

my pleasure, man, you do a great job educating. I saw your presentation at the symposium, and you clearly just have a passion for living soil, for home growing. I like the way that you educate. It's a lot like the way that I educate, which is like, yes, you're a soil grower and you have your own soil blend, but you try to meet people where they're at, no matter how they're growing, whether they're in ground or any big container or a small container, or aquaponics or whatever, and you just try to kind of help them on their journey. So I appreciate that about you. And one more time, thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you again. I appreciate a lot. Why don't we start at the beginning, talk about yourself, what brought you into cannabis and what brought you to creating the Riverview living soil mix.

Yeah, well again, kind of the story starts with just in general, from years and years ago, kind of always being just into plants. There was never really any formal education regarding that. But it was just one of those things that kind of like bit and stuck. So it's one of those things that everybody has, that that just kind of seems to come natural to you, where information is retained pretty easily. You're passionate about it. It's fun. So when it comes to spending hours and hours in books to make up for the fact of lack of, like, a formal education in that arena. You don't mind it, you know, you really enjoy it. And that kind of all kind of came about to I had four or five some four or five some friends that when started a CBD company years ago, and they needed somebody to run their grow. So they reached out Sure, and I was stoked on the opportunity, because I had been messing around with it for a while, and at that point, you know, you're, you're pretty good at it before you jump into that. But it was a chance to kind of take it to that next level, to do that as something as like a profession. So I was, I was really, really excited about. Opportunity, and kind of where Riverview comes into this is when we were starting that we didn't have the infrastructure at that point to be mixing large volumes of these amended, heavily amended, like engineered soil mixes, like people are used to seeing with that, you know, living soils. So we ended up having to ship a lot of that in and it it kind of didn't sit with me, right? But there really wasn't any other option in the Midwest. You know, we had to ship that from a long ways off. And so not only is freight crazy, so if anybody's reached out to us, especially as home growers, and it's like, we can't deliver that ourselves. And people kind of get that freight quote that I send them, and it's kind of sticker shock, because, like, soil is heavy, right? It's, it's not easy to ship around the country. So absolutely, when we shipped that in, I was just, oh, like, it, it wasn't fun to look at how much we had to pay to do that. And I remember right at that moment, I was like, wow, there is a huge opportunity for somebody in the Midwest to create something like this. And at that point in time, I wasn't thinking, like, man, that's going to be me, but I was like, someone can do this. I'm like, there's a huge void from Missouri and the surrounding states and even out east a bit to kind of fill that gap. So fast forward a few years, and I end up leaving that role. And I was like, okay, kind of, you know, it's kind of, what's next thing? I was like, you know, there's still nothing there. I'm gonna take a crack at this, because at that point, you've been doing this for a while, you're pretty comfortable around organic cultivation and building soils, and then understanding kind of the soil testing process and amending and kind of how to go about creating that soil mix. So it's like, okay, I can help reduce carbon footprint by helping Midwest growers not have to ship soil from so far away. I can save them money again, because they're not going to be able to ship that soil so far away. And I know, at least here in Missouri, and I've felt this a lot from other states, is there's a lot of pride in being from this area and supporting companies from the Midwest and companies from Missouri, at least from what I've seen and talking with people. So I was like, so this is it's a really cool opportunity. I feel like my skill set matches this. The timing was right. And then, so I just started, at that point, experimenting with different soil mixes, throwing plants in them, killing some some, looking really good. And then just tinkering and tweaking from that point to see how far you can start to push things until we finally settled on a mix that has been working really well, and that's our high performance mix. And then at that point, kind of the rest is history. And then here, in the past year, we're able to get into a spot that we could expand our operation. We got, again, the best thing I could ever buy myself was a soil mixer. Because I can't tell you how much it sucked early in the process. And Missouri is hot, right? So when you're doing that in the summer, it's brutal. No way out there with a shop yards and yards on tarps, yeah? Like it's the whole, like half the yard was, like dead because it was just under a tarp. It's, I don't know how many different piles we had, you know, mixing in 55 gallon drums on big like, lubed up casters to spin easy, just because those concrete mixers, at least the ones that you could go get from Harvard freight, were only three and a half cubic feet, or something like that, or three cubic feet. So I was wanting something a bit bigger, so I was just kind of mixing that round and round. So anyways, it was a lot of hard work until we're kind of able to save up to get that mixer that's cool. Man, yeah. And then at that point, we're able to kind of scale up a bit more and try to get more stores and kind of make it more accessible to growers that are wanting to either someone who's been growing for a while that's wanting to kind of switch to organics for a host of reasons, not the only way to do things, but obviously, I'm slightly biased, but I think there's a lot of advantages doing this. We're getting a lot of growers that have been growing for a long time wanting to switch, and then even more so, we're getting a lot of first time growers that want to grow quality medicine home way cheaper than they're getting at dispensaries, but either don't have the knowledge or time to dive into this deeply and want kind of a set it and forget it system to cultivate their own cannabis.

Man, I love to see it. I think that you nailed it. Soil is not a very economic thing to ship around the country. So what you end up seeing is a bunch of craft producers, kind of laying claim to an area, right? I could name a bunch of different companies that are like this. You know, Purple Cow out of Wisconsin, kind of serves Illinois. There's a couple of Detroit blends, like Detroit nutrient company, or rather, Michigan. Blends on m3 there's, like, a bunch of these people that have to serve their their area, and Missouri had none, I feel like, has like so few craft producers that it's really good to see people stepping up and creating a small business, and like you said, cutting out that outrageous cost of shipping. So it's really cool that I see some members growing in Riverview, living soil and having good success. So when I ran into you, I was like, this is the guy that's gonna, you know, be the Missouri soil guy. I've seen this before. I've seen this pattern

before. You know, it's the hope, right? We're working hard to be that, and I know it's for us again, it's, it's a long way to go. We're still working on cultivating trust from members of the community, but what has been so helpful, again, is folks that are having good experience or sharing that, and it helps us greatly, because it's again, people's gardens are very important spaces to them, yes, so to kind of have somebody bring in something that they haven't used before into that space to cultivate a plant, that means a lot to them, right? It's not like that isn't appreciated. So we still have a long way to go. As we're working on gaining trust with growers in the community, we feel we try and make, again, a lot of testing available when it's nutrient content and nutrient analysis, as well as posting results on heavy metals. And it's just it's nice to see people in this community be so welcoming and really giving us a shot.

That's what I love to hear. Okay, so I want to jump around a little bit, just because on that topic, you know, you work with a lot of the people who use your soil. I know you answer DMS on Instagram at Riverview. Living soils is the Instagram handle, and I'd love to talk to you about home grower soil tips. This is kind of what you were presenting on at the symposium, but let's just talk about succeeding in soil. And I don't want to load up this question, other than just to say, what advice do you have for home growers who are soil growers? Maybe they're struggling, or maybe they're about to get started growing in soil. Talk to us about container size, watering habits, tips and tricks, things to avoid, things like that. Yeah,

it was a great question. Honestly, this is a really good topic to kind of touch, because I think this is these kind of things are, what kind of can make or break a grow and help people have a good or bad experience with it, no matter what soil they're using. Again, the number one thing I try and tell people is you need ways to quantify different variables in your grow room, right? I don't like guessing, because we don't interact with the environment the same way plants do. So like our intuitive senses for what's hot, what's humid, what's light, what's dim, anything like that, we don't understand the environment the way plants do. So we need ways to quantify things and we can relate it, right? To studies that have been done that show us exactly the set points that we need to be aiming for in our growth, right? So the things I like to quantify again, the first one, there's, there's two major ones and that that I see people struggle with the most, and it doesn't even have to be growing in soil, but it's obviously very important when you're using a living soil. But two things, one is way too much light. Is something I consistently see because people hear a cannabis is a highlight plant, and yes, it is, but it's crazy how easy it is to overdo it with LEDs today. So true, yeah, because in it, that's what also makes them really good. At the same time, is they're not putting off a bunch of heat right from that bulb, which would be torching a plant, if your PPFD right, which is what we use to measure that that light intensity was way too high. So it's kind of a little bit of a buffer, because you have to hang that light so far away from the canopy that it's hard to overdo light, but LEDs run much cooler, right? And produce a lot of energy that it's really easy to fry your plants. It stresses them out, especially, and I see it a lot in veg, because you have an 18 hour photo period, so you're accumulating all this excess light over 18 hours, rather than in flower, which is 12. So when people hear, well, in flower, I can run 11 to 1200 and that's even really high if you really know what you're doing. But that's over 12 hours, right? So if you add another six hours, right, that is a huge increase in the amount of light that that plant is taking in within a given photo period. So it's really important that we quantify what our light is, again, and we measure that in PPFD to understand, okay, I need to set this at here for veg. I need to set that at here for flower, right? And there are general recommendations, and again, on our Instagram, and I think it's one of our pin posts. It's on the if there, we have a simple grow along that's, like, a cartoon. That thing's great. I love it. It was really fun. We we worked with Box Brown. Oh, he does a lot of like, I love that cartoons. Yes, he's awesome. And like, we've, like, really enjoyed kind of reading his content. So reached out to see if we could have him do that to a support. Him and B. We love the artwork, and we think it was a fun way to kind of do a basic grow along, like very surface level,

like a how to grow. It's like a comic strip, yeah, Fox brown comic strip, but it's a how to grow. Does that mention PPFD levels on that comic? Yeah,

it's on the back. So there's two slides. So the first comic is just a little grow along. It's like, Hey, are you in a container? Hey, are you in a bed? Here's some tips and tricks, very surface level, not too much detail. But on the second slide is an entire environmental recommendation chart. Nice, right of things like, and it's not again, everybody's different. Like, can have being able to control your environment depends a lot on how much you invest in your garden, and I understand that is very different for everyone. And obviously, if you're outdoors, you have almost no control. So you don't have to be perfect. If you can, if you have the ability to hit those set points, I promise, if you do it, and you take care of your light and you take care of your soil moisture, and we'll get that to that in a second. You're gonna have really, really good results.

God, that's such a good point because they're over driving the the photosynthetic pump, right? They can't keep up with maybe a fresh batch of soil that isn't mulched, maybe it's over watered. So now these microbes can keep up with that production. Really good point, man, if I could just piggyback on that. I do see that a lot. I think that you're right. People will buy a really nice light, you know, the the AC infinity Pro Kit comes with, like, a 500 watt light in like, what is it? A four by four? Or it's a lot. It's a light that you can run on 80 or 90% probably at its peak, which will extend the life, by the way, and that is a lot of photon power, but people don't know that. The other thing is, like you said in especially in veg, one thing I'll see is, when the canopy isn't filled out, the plants suffer so much more. So you have, like one pot, or like three pots in a big tent, and the tent is just flooded with light.

Yeah, it's a lot, because that's all bouncing everywhere, off too, right? It's not like it disappears, yes,

and just accumulating on that tiny little amount of mass, and then magically, when the plants grow and the canopy is filled out, and now there's this nice, like green shield of leaves, things kind of even themselves out. But in that early period, especially, like you said In veg, the lights are on 18 hours, and they're just getting blasted because there is no kind of group canopy formed yet. So, really, really good stuff, light toxicity, and then, and then you were saying your second point,

yeah. And this, I want to plug one thing real quick, because, like, not everybody, because those Apogee meters, right, which is it's, uh, they make a lot of good, like, uh, lab grade equipment. Very, very expensive, but so that's definitely not something I expect everyone to have in their grow to be able to measure that light intensity. But what I did find, and I did test this myself, there is an app called photone, right, P, H, O, T, O, N, E, they've been

plugged on this show before. Did you find that those pretty close to pretty,

really close enough. Yeah, so you make sure, though, you have a diffuser of some sort. And literally, all I did, it's just a piece of printer paper right over the sensor, and it was within range of being like appropriate to use where I would actually recommend it. Wow, that you were not the first person to say that the faux Dude, it was like maybe $7 for the LED one. And if you have HBS, it's another six or seven. You could go outside it's another six or seven. But for the most part, people growing intense, they have LED lights. So it's like a free app with the $7 purchase for the LED functionality. Use it with a piece of printer paper over the top. Make sure it's tight and you can get pretty accurate readings, and honestly, accurate enough for any home grower to be close enough for good results. So measure it. It makes a difference. I love it, yeah. So the other thing right, number two, that I see issues with a lot, is irrigation and soil moisture. Now you can kind of broadly recommend, hey, keep soil moist, not soaking. But if you're going to miss anything, miss it a little dry. But that's so ambiguous, right? What does that mean? You know? So it's you have to have ways to measure things, again, quantify. So what you can get are these meters. They're called tensiometers, that you insert in the soil, and you leave it there, and you push a button, and it gives you a number that tells you how wet or dry the soil is, right, how much pressure is pulling up. Basically, it's measuring pressure, but again, it helps you train your own eye right? Because now you can play in the soil a little bit. You can squeeze it, you can fold it in a ball. Does water come out? And you can press a button and see, right, okay, soil moisture right where I'm squeezing it, and the drop comes out is right? X all right. And now it says, Hey, this is pretty dry. Okay? Can press this button. What is, what does this mean, right? Okay, it's now, it's figure y, right? But it's starting to put numbers to things that you can interact with and see. So you are training yourself to kind of understand soil moisture, right, giving yourself a baseline, yeah. And if you really don't care, dude, it doesn't matter. Don't touch the soil. You don't have to press a button and you have that number right? And it basically, it's, there's no more guessing. You know exactly what your soil moisture is at, right? And I know, like, again, like blue mats, probably the number one that people use, arrometer is another really good one. Both are available on sustainable village.

So yeah, we've had that guy on and I do love those. Like you said, they measure in M bars, which is, which is a unit of pressure. What numbers do you like to see? Because they give you a pretty general range. You know, for a while they were saying, like, between 80 and 120 lower, being wetter. And then, you know, at one point someone was saying, like, oh, you could, you could make it a little bit more moist than that, like, 60 to 100 Yeah. What's your personal

opinion? So 80 to 120 works great in veg. I do like just slightly wetter. Again, because when you talk about, like how nutrients are taken up to the plant right, mass flow, again, nutrients in solution, and also keeping the soil wetter is going to dilute things a bit, so it keeps your EC lower right, especially if you're in a pretty heavily emitted soil, and you're putting the young plants in there. Now you have to be careful not to go too far, right? And then, like water, log your soil. But again, if we have a tensiometer, it helps you avoid that, because you know exactly where it's at. But again, I think the 60 to 100 and veg is great. And then, like 100 to 140 in flower. And then you can even push your dry backs a little bit later in flower, pretty hard, even to, like, over 200 but one thing I would just be careful of, and now I like doing that again. There's a million ways to grow cannabis, but sure, the only thing you have to be careful of when you're pushing these pretty intense dry backs and flower, like, I don't do it too much. One you don't want to stress the plan out. It's just kind of controlled stress at certain times. But if you do it too much and too hard, you can end up with hydrophobic pockets in your soil, because once peat dries and like, if anybody's bought a bag that's kind of been on a shelf for a while, any brand like you might notice that. Man, why is this thing not wanting to take up water? Well, Pete is really good at holding water, but when it's dry, it doesn't like to take it in. So if you dry your soil out too much, you can get channeling that you don't really see in your pot or your bed. But basically, water is going to take the path of least resistance all the way down, right?

Why is there so much runoff so quickly? It's because there's like, chunks in there that have gone hydrophobic, exactly.

So that's the only thing I caution about with really intense dry backs. But if you kind of know what you're doing, and you're not pushing it too hard, they're really good in flower right again, pumping these like kind of driving EC up and starting to do a lot of those kind of signaling cues to the plant, hey, it's time to set flowers right. Or a little bit of controlled stress, which helps secondary metabolite production, which is all of like, our terpenes, the CBD, THC, CBN, right? CB, all that stuff, right? So you can use that strategically, but again, quantifying it will make you much better at it, because you're not guessing. But that's a big one, the tensiometer, that's great, yeah, the other easy ones that I think come with most controllers your relative humidity and your air temperature, because using that, you can get a pretty good gage of where your vapor pressure deficit is. And again, when we're talking about these figures, like the relationship between the plant and its environmental conditions, right, what we are trying to do is keep stomata open, and it's on that chart that I have on the Instagram is temperature, set points and humidity, set points. And for the most part, like in a really specific, right, accurate calculation, you definitely want to take into account leaf temperature, because that also plays a role. But for the most part, you're close enough you don't if you want to get it, like an infrared gun that you can shoot on your leaf and get leaf temperature. There are calculators online where you literally just type in leaf temp, relative humidity, air temp, and it'll shoot out your VPD, right? They're all over. They're really cool to use, but you don't really have to get it again if you're looking to save money. But if you want to be super specific, an IR gun helps with that, along with your hygrometer, which measure, measures Rh and temp, which help you determine your VPD, to understand, hey, am I doing everything in my power to keep stomata open? Because plants are big transpiration machines, right? Because, again, when we talk about how nutrients are taken up for the most part, right? It's not everything, but for the most part mass flow taken up through water, right? And how is water moved through the plant? Okay? It's through transpiration out the leaves, right? So the more we can encourage that plant to transpire, the more is taken up, the more again, nutrients it has to go through different plant processes, like building plant tissue. So that's super important. And then. And again, the last one that comes to mind is like CO two. And I know a lot of those controllers do offer a way to measure CO two. I know those units tend to be a little bit more expensive, so if you're not measuring that, it's not the end of the world. But what I would recommend if you aren't is make sure you have an adequately sized exhaust fan to make sure you have air exchange to keep your CO two ppms at least ambient, right? I know a lot of people, yeah, it's just because, if you right, that drives everything. When you talk about, like, what plants, and I know we talked about plants eating nutrients, right? But it's not really that, like plant food is, it's photosynthesis, right, right? And how much CO two is related in that process, right, along with light and whatnot. So one of the biggest things you could do in your grow, if you have the ability to do this, is start pushing CO two up. It's like nos in your car, right? You're super charging that plan. But at the very least it has to be ambient, because if you start having a closed room with not supplementing CO two, and you actually have a way to measure it, you're going to see that drop. And when you do, you're going to see light stress too, because now your plant is struggling to manage all this light without CO two to support all these processes. So you need to keep your CO two levels ambient. If you can, you need to elevate them. People do them through those mushroom bags. It's just gonna ask about through burners. Burners, if you're using them, make sure you're getting complete combustion, or you're gonna end up with some nasty stuff. And then my favorite, but they are a little pricier, are tanks, tanked, like bottled CO two. Yeah, it's really accurate. I know a lot of those burners can produce. I think, with when they do that, a lot of humidity as well. So if you don't have a way to manage all that, your humidity can get out of control a little bit. And when you're really wanting to push CO two is in flower, and you're really wanting to make sure you're being careful that humidity is in flower, it can be kind of a weird thing to balance. So again, CO two is a big one.

How do you think about dispersion with that tank? What's your favorite way to disperse it to the plants? So I

know, like some people, like, we use rain systems, where you run that line over your plant, because CO two is heavy, it drops down onto the canopy. But even, like in my grows, like, as long as you had adequate air moving all around the room. When I would take a meter to different parts of the room, normally, it was pretty well dispersed. But you just want again, I think the actual measurement was like one meter per second, right? Three feet per second. You gain the anemometer, and there's so it's kind of funny as we talk about quantifying things, because as we get deeper and deeper into talking about different variables, it's like, there, it's funny, there's just a little tool for measuring every little thing. And in a perfect world, we have them,

yeah, it's only like, 12 grand if you want to get all the measurements, it's get your HPLC on point. Yeah, finally get that accurate test. I

know it's like, so it's one of these things where it's like, as you dive deeper and deeper, it's like, oh my god, what? It's like a money pit. But again, the big thing that I like to just tell is like, make sure your plants are dancing a little bit, right? You don't want hard wind on these where it just looks like they're struggling to stand up. Just make sure you can see your leaves dance. That's a good way to put it, gentle swaying, right? Nothing intense, right? And like you can check the under canopy too, how's that moving? Because you don't want stagnant air there. If you can get kind of this circular air pattern in your room, if you have a room or a tent, just try and keep that air moving. Because when you look at get big grows and you have this horizontal airflow, and you start reading into that a bit, it's just a really nice way to adequately move air through the room to where you limit micro climates, right, where you might have dead spots. And then you can also get CO two equally dispersed in there as well. And if you're paying for it, you might as well do that. Yes,

good point. So, and I know that was a lot, really, no, that was great. That was, that was absolutely fantastic, man. Really, really good and cohesive points. I have a couple of follow up questions that I that I'd like to do. Yeah, absolutely. Come and join grow cast membership. You can find it at growcast podcast.com/membership growing this plant should be easy and fun, and it should bring you closer to the people around you and to nature. There's so much divisiveness going on in our community, but not a grow cast membership. Come and find us. We are your new go to destination. As a cannabis cultivator, you'll get 24/7, accurate garden advice. There's so much bad information out there on the internet, and I'd hate to see growers taking bad advice that they find on Google. Plus, you'll be able to join in on our community challenges like our Grow alongs and our grand fino hunt. Our grand fino Hunt is about to start round two shortly, and somebody's gonna win $1,000 just for hunting through some seeds. Stay tuned for more info on that, and shout out to high grazian for sponsoring the Grow cast grand fino hunt. But there's so much going on in membership. You got discounts that nobody else can get. You've got a ton of member. Is only bonus content. Grow cast TV is live every single week. We're answering questions in the quick help channel, the fastest way to get accurate garden advice. We've added a bunch of new features. So if you're an old member and you want to come check it out, you're going to find a lot more stuff. You're going to find it better organized. As we're making huge improvements to grow cast membership. It's the best community in cultivation. Don't miss out on it. Come gift your membership today. Go to grow cast. Podcast.com/membership, and sign up. You will not regret it. I can't wait to see on the inside. Go and grab a seven day free trial, and like I said, get in there before the grand final hunt starts, because we've got a great set of prizes lined up, including $1,000 cash to the grand prize winner. Grow cast. Podcast.com/membership, come and join us. It's grow cast. Membership. It's the greatest community in cannabis cultivation. I'll see you there. Totally, totally agree on, on quantifying, especially when it comes to water. Watering is like the issue that I see a lot of the time, because if you have a good soil mix, by the way, same thing goes for bottle nutrients. If you have a good cannabis specific nutrient formula, and you're watering your plant, and you have a good light and you have good airflow and decent environment like that, you should be doing okay. If it's if there's still something wrong, 90% of the time it's watering, 90% of the time it's watering, and 80% of the time of the 90% it's over, watering is what I see. So what I wanted to ask you, as the soil guy, is, there's a lot of different grow containers out there. It's a lot of different grow containers. Back in the day, it was just black plastic pots. Now we have everything from sips to beds and everything. But what are your thoughts on plastic versus fabric versus mesh? Grow pots,

yeah, so the ones I'm most familiar with are fabric, but I also love plastic, so I like using both, and then they also now have these beds that are kind of a hybrid between the two, which I really like to flower, and they also, I think they have pots the same way. So I hate fabric pots until I'm in my final pot, because they are a pain in the ass to get a plant out. It's really hard. The roots grow into that fabric you're trying to get it out. It's just, it's a mess. It's not clean. I don't really like that a lot. So for younger plants, I really do enjoy using plastic, just for the ease of just being able to just pop them out, obviously, with plastic pots, where there's kind of less air exchange, if you are a chronic over water, there's less of a buffer for that, right? That's what's kind of nice about fabric pots. And these mesh pots and these even, like these cloth like the cloth type pots are these bio bags. Oh, yeah, almost I've seen those because there was, at one point, it's just kind of a side note, when I was kind of running living soils in the same room, like next to, like, one gallon cocoa pots hooked up to a controller, measuring, p1, p2, p3, irrigation timing, stuff, trying to get them as close as possible in terms of how they perform. But it's just those tiny little pots would dry out so fast, yeah, which isn't a bad thing. But again, I think a lot of this kind of comes down to a lot. And that's, I think it's, it's a common theme growing plants and everything is related and in some way or another, right? So if you're going to have large plants, small pot, right? That's going to have you watering a lot more. And if it's a fabric pot, even more so, right? Because you're also getting air exchange, drying out the sides of the pot, not just roots, pulling water out of the pot, and it kind of going through transpiration. So if you're wanting to water less, plastic pots will probably help you out a bit. But again, if you have these giant plants and smaller pots, and you're feeding, it's you're going to be in there all day anyways. But again, because I kind of get going on all these tangents anyways, but we're going to loop it back plastic fabric. So again, fabric pots are really nice because you do get root pruning, you don't get circling. So again, it hits the edge of that pot, and then the roots, like, okay, air, I don't need to go there anymore, and it starts to branch out from there, so you get a little bit better colonization of all the available soil. Sure, right, that that plant has access to through the that root pruning, rather than it's like, you see a lot of pictures, and they look pretty, but someone will send you some picture, and it looks like ramen noodles right around the pot. And I'm just, it's, it's not like it's a bad thing, necessarily, but if you let that go too far, you're going to have issues with those roots constricting themselves. And right? It's just you need to break it up a little bit when you transplant. But what's nice about fabric pots is you don't really have that issue as well. Much, and what's really, really nice is they have these hybrid pots that are pretty cool to wear, almost like a tarp type wrap around the sides, but it leaves a gap at the bottom that's fabric. So you still do get a bit of the root pruning as the roots hit the sides and work their way down or around. Eventually it hits that and you get that same root pruning, but also now that you've wrapped it in this tarp, like material on the inside, you're not drying back as fast. So when you're trying to keep a soil moist to again, help plants take up nutrients, help keep that soil biology thriving, because hydrology is important to that. It helps things not dry out quite so quickly. So there's kind of advantages and disadvantages to each the way I love to do it is young plants and a plastic one, because they're easy to transplant if they're going to be in the pot a long time, or it's their final pot. I really like those hybrid ones, because you do get root pruning, and those dry backs don't happen quite so fast, yeah. So it gives you just a little bit more control, and

depending on your climate too, right? One of the tough things about the Midwest is that, you know, in the summers, especially in Missouri, oh my god, you get this insanely high humidity. And yeah, if you're outside this, I don't know if it's if it's like some of the Hawaiian grows that I was doing, but if you're outside, you might not even want not even want to mulch, because it is so humid that standing water will start forming, like in your soil. It's it's like a swamp, basically. Yeah, winter hits and the snow falls and your RH drops to 12% and that's certainly how it is here in Illinois, is it gets bone dry in the winters. So even if you're indoors, and even if you're in a controlled climate, you'll still see these little changes from from season to season. Yeah, and certain containers seem to do better in certain environments. If your dryback is really, really fast, those rain science type mesh bags can dry out quite quickly, which even in some grows, like a cocoa growers, might be super beneficial. But if you're trying to keep your stuff nice and even more even moist, you want to use those mesh bags in a more humid environment. Or, like you said, wrap them, have them wrapped, or use their style. That's a great it's a great way to do it. And I'll take my rain signs and just wrap them myself if I feel the need. So it's a good tip. You

hit a great point. Honestly, it's like so much, is it this, this scale and this, this, it slides one way or the other. So much about like, okay, plant size, pot size. How much do you want to be in your garden, irrigating? Do you want to automate it? And then, like, what's your environment like,

yeah, what's your cultivar? Like, yeah, right, right. So in

it, and that's tricky, but that's the one part to where it's kind of fun when you get to start to take a little bit of ownership of ownership of your grow, and you start to learn that a bit, and you build confidence, not just through the things that you do well, but the things that you kind of mess up, and if you're good at just and they don't need to be specific notes or just like a deeply detailed journal. But I think one thing that really helps cultivators is keep a journal right write things down, because at least I know for me, sometimes it's like my brain is always 1000 different places rather than the thing that I'm on. You're kind of always running in autopilot while you're daydreaming. And so it really helps me to be able to actually see what's going on and look back at it. So I'm like, Hey, this is weird. What was happening at this time last time, you can pull a little journal and you'd be like, Oh, the same problem is having twice in a row for the same reasons. Let me make adjustments. So true, man. But if you don't have that information right, data, right, quantifying things, writing them down, it's just you save yourself having to guess, and you save yourself from making them the same, the same mistake multiple times, because it's like, as you and I are talking, I'm like, damn, like, I didn't even it's like, I didn't think about that at first too. And I'm like, that's a really good point. Like, environment absolutely plays a role in that. But I wouldn't have thought of that, and I wouldn't have wrote it down, but if I would have been recording all these other things, you have all these little puzzle pieces that, when you start kind of looking at your growing it's like, Okay, what's going on here? And I have all this individual data, and I start to see patterns, and I'm like, Ah, if I can tweak this a little bit, or maybe I need irrigation modifications, and I can tweak that. And then you that's when you really start to dial stuff in, because you can have these kind of set it and forget it grows. And you'll honestly be really pleased with the results you have if you keep things close. But where you start talking about gaining that last five or 10% when you start getting really good at this, is when you start writing things down and getting specific with the environment, when how that impacted your plan, so how and like, what it did to them and why you think it did. But it's like you need to write this stuff down, or it's hard to remember. Some people have memory like that. So maybe they don't, but I do not.

No, you're right. I think, I think the vast majority of the people out there, yeah, like you and me, where grow diaries, type app, even a calendar,

yeah, I just use these composition books like you should see. My house be in. It's, it's never messy, but there's just, like, notes everywhere. Do Lists scattered everywhere, like, Do this, do that, this happened today, fix that. And it's just scattered on dining tables, like a kitchen island in an office, and it's not as organized as it should be. But somehow it works. But I just, like, even just a notebook, like, even just physically writing this stuff down, yeah, anything you can do to get thoughts, ideas and data onto paper. So when things go well, you can recreate them, and when you make mistakes, you can fix them. Yeah,

I'm more analog to my audience. Knows I love a good whiteboard and a grow that's always great.

Yeah, I just like everything I do. I even, I remember, at one point I went and I got just an iPad within little keyboard. Like, I'm going to be more organized with my notes, and I'm going to write this stuff down even a pencil. I'm like, maybe it'll be better if I physically write on dude. It lasted like a week. So it's just I went right back to paper. I'm the same way. That's great. It's just it's so much easier for me. I did

see some members saying, though they use chat GPT to, I think they said they used happy GPT to log their their things, and then also they said, to create your own awesome you can create your own Discord server for free, and it's just your personal Discord server. You're the only one in it, but you can create a channel for each grow year, and you'll have all of your pictures and all your notes right there. So I'm not a digital guy. Love chat for that, yeah, but, but that's those are good ways to document your growth. I'm writing

that down. I haven't remembered that maybe. Oh,

good stuff, man. This is a great interview. I only want to make a few more points, yeah, because we were going to go to them, which I love you mentioned this idea of how plants take up nutrients. I'd love to hear more about your kind of thoughts and analogies on how plants grow, specifically in these organic systems, because it's so much different than bottled, chelated nutrients, for a lot of reasons, but there's also similarities, and I think people might not quite understand so can you talk about like, microbes feeding plants, like top dressing nutrition, versus a lot of people using like, Liquid organics and soluble nutrients. Just talk to us about about all of that synergizing.

So the way that I kind of see is just like that, soil biology is kind of the interface where plants meet geology, right? Not just geology, but also like organic matter. So whether that's in the natural world, different like rocks getting slowly broken down and animals decomposing, because it's not like a plant can go up to granite and say, help me out with some of these micronutrients, or whatever, basalt or can't go up to this carcass that's decomposing, right? But there's an interface of that biology that takes things that aren't available to the plant and make it available to the plant. And plants aren't. Plants are highly intelligent, right? It's really cool, and they recognize this, and they have the ability to influence the rhizophere with different compounds that they put out into the soil there, which help them make things available that they need, and they devote energy, like precious energy, to this process. And it's really, really neat, and that's why in organic cultivation, everybody puts such an emphasis on, again, feed your soil, feed the biology, and let that help make that available to your plant, and the plant and the plant is also doing that with you, right? You're not the only one doing that, which is, it's kind of fun. It's it's partnership, right, between the microbes, the plant, and yourself, and you're basically with these soil mixes, trying to create a stage that makes this process as smooth as possible. Because, yes, the plant can do all this, but I want the plant using its energy for other things, right? So it's a fun little balance to play with, but again, a good way to that I always remember is your biology is the interface between the plant and things that aren't quite plant available so the plant can again cultivate microbes, and the different things that the microbes break down, and then they're in this entire world of their own of predation and decomposition and then death, and then all those microbes excrete, right, their own waste, which then is now available to the plant. I think Jeff Lowen fell, if I'm saying that name, right. It's been a while since I've read that book. Kind of talked about the microbes as fertilizer bags, yes, right? Little bags of fertilizer, okay? And that's honestly, that was one of the things that has kind of stuck with me from that book. I think it was one of his teaming books, if I'm remembering right again, it's been a while. Yeah, teaming with nutrients. Yeah, microbes, nutrients and fungi. Yeah, yeah. Really good ones. So if you want to read those, ooh, at some point, remind me. I'll forget. There's a few texts that it would be cool to mention. I will absolutely to try and get to okay, because, yeah, a couple of my favorite ones. But anyways, I just would have forgotten if I didn't say it there. But yeah, those microbes are basically helping make a. Insoluble nutrients, or just like organic matter, into something that the plant can actually use, right? And it's a big partnership,

yeah, absolutely. That's a good that's a good way to put it. And now I see a lot of times home growers, kind of sometimes they might shoot themselves in the foot a little bit where they need a quick fix, and instead of using something a little more soluble, they're applying a top dress, right? Or maybe they're applying a top dress and going, Hey, this didn't really work too well. I'm gonna apply more. But they just didn't give enough time for those microbes to break down. Or maybe they didn't mulch their soil, so there wasn't enough microbiology near the surface. Can you talk about the differences there between like, delivering soluble nutrients and top dress? Absolutely,

it's a really good point, because, again, in organic cultivation, there are different ways that we can deliver nutrients to our plants. So if you're taking the approach as a top dress, right, we're applying a lot of minerals through alfalfa meal or fish bone meal, right? Different protein meals cow Foss, which takes a long time to break down calcium phosphate, right? There's some that are a little bit more soluble, but again, for the most part, it takes time to break down. So the way that makes sense to me, again, what that's like is, you're applying a bunch at once, and it's just like a little drip coming out all the time, right? Of nutrients, as those nutrients mineralize, but it takes time. Let's say we have a nitrogen deficiency, right? You're starting to notice that yellowing from the bottom of the plant all the way up, and you're like, Hey, I am not late enough in flower to see this, right? I need to address it. So a top dress isn't a bad idea, because it will. It can supply greater amounts of nutrients at once, and you only have to do it once every couple weeks, depending on how much you apply, but it's not going to address an immediate problem, and that's where more soluble nutrients come in, again, like micronized soybean meal. Again, the surface area is so great, it's nearly an immediately available source of nitrogen that you can supply organically, because it can get broken down so quickly. Gypsum, calcium sulfate, it's not like its solubility is super high, but it you can get in quite high ppms before you run into that issue. Again, if you're if you're applying that just kind of keep stuff mixed up. I think it's like solubility is like nine grams per gallon is, like, the max? Well, it

depends too. The gypsum comes in different solubilities. Like, there's just like, yeah, the micronized, yeah, exactly micronized. There we go. Good point, because that stuff is really soluble. And then when you say the soy protein, these are the products that you see on the grocery store shelves that are, like, aminos, right? Like green aminos and all that you look at the back, It all says soy. Aminos. That's great.

And it's a bio stimulant. They're key later. Aminos are really good. We include those in our both our veggie and flowers soluble products as well. They're awesome because it's not only is it feeding your plant, it's a bio stimulant, which, anytime we can kind of stack on those kind of benefits. Those are products we love to include in our formulations, that's great, but those soluble things apply immediately available nutrients to help you address that deficiency, and then if you really want to take it one step further, right? So let's say we see a deficiency. Okay, top dress that's not available. Now, that's okay, right? Okay, here we mix up a soluble feed. We can feed that in, that's going to be much more available. But to hit it from all three angles, you can also apply a foliar depending on where you are in the crop cycle, because obviously you got to be careful doing it once you're in flower, just again. You don't want mold and rot and getting flowers soaked when you don't have to. It's just best to keep those dry, in my opinion. But if you're in veg and you're seeing that you can top dress, which is a lot of nutrients that will slowly mineralize, and then you have your soluble which, I mean, you could technically load that up, but really, you should never really go above three, oh, EC, when you're doing that. But then you can water that in so it addresses an immediate issue, but it's not enough to fix it long term. That's where the top dress comes from. And then you can also apply it directly to the foliage. Again, those foliars, they won't fix problems, but they can help jump start that process of correcting deficiencies quickly. So again, you can hit it with the foliar. You can salt, use a soluble feed, and then top dress, and that will help address that issue completely, catch

you back up and then give it food for the future. Yeah, exactly. People don't realize how much more nutrient application you have to do to catch up from a deficiency. When it's to the point where the plant tissues are now low on this nutrient, it's pretty far gone. And I feel we just did a video on this for members recently, is you really got to play catch up at that point and make sure that you're feeding as basically as heavy as you possibly can to catch up from that deficiency. And sometimes your plant never really does make it all the way back to full health, you know, by harvest, yeah, depending on the deficiency

Exactly. And so it's something you kind of got to be careful with and as and again, the best part is. Like making mistakes, it's just a step to kind of not letting that happen again and learning why that happened. So again, taking notes on how long this pot went before we saw deficiencies feeding this or feeding just water. So I know next round to not make that same mistake. Because on the other end of that, and I've done this before, playing catch up, is I would over fertilize social which is sometimes tricky. It's easy to do. Yes, it is. So that's one thing I warned. Like I wouldn't if you're looking at deficiencies, sometimes you can kind of safely double application rates for top dress. I know we don't have one available yet. We're just kind of finalizing packaging for that, but I know there are companies that offer top dress blends that, again, it's all made from the same products, probably just slightly different ratios of those based on their nutrition targets and their own belief for what works well. For ours, for example, it's like it's one cup per 10 gallons. So when that's available, if you notice efficiencies, again, it's usually pretty safe for you to be able to double that, or even triple that, depending on kind of what your plants telling you to help kind of address that for weeks on end. And a really good tip that when you're top dressing, mix that with castings or compost, because for those things to break down, they need to stay moist. And if you want to take it a step further, like when you're watering over that you can add a biological inoculant. You can add a bit of molasses. You can add an enzymatic product for with malted like ground malted barley. I love one from Tania called Petz. I'm clear the applications like one mil per gallon, it lasts forever. It's good, like em. One is another one. But basically, you can make, like, kind of a quick, easy tea, without having to brew for 24 to 36 hours and water that in. And that is going to really jump start in a hurry, that mineralization process, of those organic amendments,

as opposed to just dumping some out of the dry bag on top of the soil. It's such a great point. Yeah, and the mechanic is present in there. And yes, all that, yes, that's such

a Yeah, humic and fulvic are awesome. We add fulvic to ours, and then as you get natural breakdown of that organic matter, you get those humic acids anyways, which is really nice. And that's why those mature soils are really nice. But that's why also we add that in at the front to kind of help simulate a more mature soil, right off the bat. That's great stuff. Yeah, it's cool. It's, it's funny. Again, it's, we've had a lot of fun, kind of getting this mix to where we like it, like, right, like how it is now. But again, that's, that's a good way you can attack deficiencies using top dress solubles and foliars and kind of the differences between, again, a little bit of nutrient or kind of a lot of nutrients available over time, or more nutrients that are immediately available, foliars are really, really good adding, it's just a quick address. You can do biological stimulants. You can do things that stimulate plants, natural defense mechanisms. When you're stimulating those defense mechanisms, right? The ISR and SAR pathways, those are the same pathways that get activated when plants are creating those secondary metabolites. So when you're talking about why like tobacco is a really good example, because there's a lot of studies on tobacco. It's been around for a long time when there is like, mechanic, like, physical wounding of the tobacco plant, right? Whether that's come from like, herbivores, right? Something eating that tobacco plant. What does the tobacco plant do? It produces more nicotine, basically their defense mechanisms, yeah, and that's basically the same compounds that we want for our final product, right when we're talking about terpenes, THC, CBD, all the whole list of all the minor cannabinoids. On top of that, we can stimulate the production of more with controlled stress. Don't overdo it. That's great, because you're stimulating these pathways which go and create these compounds that we that are medically important for the first reason we're creating or we're cultivating this plant regalia is a really, really good foliar. It will stain everything you use with it, so be careful. But it's, it's made out of a natural plant extract. It's a really good natural foliar that stimulates that plant immune response. What's another good one here? Albion, metallic. It's an amino chelated foliar. And they have all kinds of formulations, every individual nutrient You can want, honestly, just a good general one is their multi mineral calcium. Just they have a straight calcium, they have a calcium boron combination, which is really, really good, because both those two, yeah. And then if you use that alongside in MSA, like it's basically the plant available form of silica, yeah, right, where it's a lot of uses. So if you use all those three, you're addressing three. Huge players in creating strong, thick cell walls. And again, the reason that's important because a lot of those pests we have to deal with are piercing, sucking insects, and if you and like even, PM, right? So if you're creating a thick, strong cell wall, they can't actually get to what they're trying to get to

much more disease resistant. Absolutely. Yeah,

absolutely. So it's, like, all that stuff, and like, the foliars are really good, but it's not where a plant's getting most of it, but a lot of those bio stimulants, and even, like kelp stuff, where you're getting a lot of those phyto hormones and whatnot, it does a lot of stuff. So it makes happy, it makes you pray. It's really, it's really, really good. So if you can kind of use a lot of that stuff, it's not all of it. It's not all necessary, but it gets you that last five to 10% and once you kind of have things pretty dialed in, that's where that stuff starts to make a huge difference, or when you're addressing deficiencies, or what you should be doing anyways, is working that into an IPM program, because you can mix a lot of those stuff. I mean, you got to be careful, make sure things are competitive. Tank, tank compatible. But you can mix that with like a horticultural soap. So not only is it your IPM, but your surfactant is also horticultural soap that helps it stick on the plant and the plant to use it. And you can alternate that with a spray, like stuff oil, which is really, really good, but you want to apply that one on its own, so it just becomes part of your entire routine. When you start with a clean garden, you keep a clean garden, and because once you get into flower, unless you're running beneficial insects, you really aren't spraying much on your plants. So your ability to keep things clean through flower, you need to start clean. So that's why, through veg and through the first like, two weeks of flower, those foliars and IPM schedules you need to keep.

And mixing the beneficials with the best applications is a really good

Oh, it's amazing. The beneficials are crazy good. Listen, we could probably

go for another hour easy, but we're all the way at the top here. I want to make sure we leave time. We'll get to plugs and promos. But first you mentioned you wanted to give some resources for people who are interested in, oh, biology or living soil. What do you like to recommend for reading and things like that? Okay,

one of my favorite texts again, and it's more so helping you understand how the plant interacts with its environment. Because I think when I got through that book, you start to look at the plant differently, and you start to understand environmental control differently, and light, how it goes from light, irrigation, Rh, temp, and you understand how these things are all connected, it helps you kind of think like a plant, if that makes sense. It's called plant empowerment. It focuses mostly on greenhouse cultivation, but a lot of those concepts are the same, but it's a really, really, really good book, ideal soil. I think it's like volume 2.0 is another really good one. That's where they have a lot of those nutrition targets that a lot of like leading agronomists and cannabis consultants will use and kind of teach based off of. And then there's, a few people that I recommend reading what they write and following the things they post. Number one, I think some people might know him, Is this, like soil doctor. His name's Bryant Mason. Post a lot of really good educational material as it relates to organic cannabis cultivation, honestly, just cultivation in general, a host of plants. Matla plant is another really good one. I think there's, I forget, which someone does a big round table with those two. I mean, it's like a three hour long conversation, and there's a lot of really good stuff to kind of pull away from those guys. Another guy is like Bill McKibben. He's the one is kind of behind a lot of the soil wrecks at Logan labs, where we do our testing, but has a lot of really good resources out there. Any talks you can hear those three do if you can get your hands on plant empowerment, ideal soil is another good one. But again, it's just the more you kind of take ownership over your garden and dive into this stuff without overloading based on just time, because everybody has lives, but it helps. Plant empowerment would be the number one, though. If I could recommend any of those, it's a really, really good book. If you can get your hands on it,

that's great. Speaking of plant empowerment, you can find Riverview living soils at r v L s m o.com, that's r, v, L, S, M, O, Riverview living soil, missouri.com, go and check it out and at Riverview living soils, that's plural on Instagram, give them a follow, tell them that you listened to the show and how much you liked it. It's a great episode today. Ricky, anything else before we wrap it up? Any final words before we, uh, close out the show, man,

I just again, the biggest thing is, I just want to kind of express appreciation again, to be on the show for the support from the cannabis community in general here. It's been a lot as we're trying to turn this into something bigger, right, and make this more available to people in the Midwest. It means a lot to us. Send us your feedback, the good, the. Add, we love chatting with you guys. Then again, just thank you for giving us a chance in your garden.

You got it. Man, thank you for coming on the show. This was a great episode, and Godspeed, we look forward to speaking with you on grow cast TV and in the future, and until then. Man, best of luck with the Riverview living soil. We appreciate you. Ricky, awesome. Thank you, likewise. All right, everybody, thank you for tuning in. Stay tuned. We got plenty more coming at you. You know where to find it. Here. Tune in growcast podcast.com. Share that show and thank you to all the members that's all for now. This is Ricky from Riverview in Jordan. River from growcast, signing off saying, be safe and grow smarter. Bye, bye, everyone. That's our show. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to Ricky for coming on the show. Lovely first time guest before we go, of course, shout out to rooted leaf nutrients. That's right. The nutrient line you don't need to pH rootedleaf.com code growcast for 20% off your rooted leaf nutrients, loaded with carbon, no pH required. Their foliar schedule is amazing. If you want to try out one thing first without switching anything up. Then go ahead and get their foliar suite and start that foliar package. You will not regret it. You'll see amazing results. But if you're not completely satisfied with your nutrient line that you're using right now in your grow, make sure to grab their starter kit and try it out. You'll never go back. It's rootedleaf.com code grow cast for 20% off, stop pH in and get those big, big results with the carbon based rooted leaf nutrients. And shout out to us, grow cast membership. Shout out to all the members. I love you all. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, of course, come and join us. I'd love to see you there. We've got a few events scheduled for next year. Of course, cultivators cup is April 12. That page is going to be coming sooner rather than later. So keep an eye out. You. Keep an eye out and stay tuned. Taking it easy for the holidays. Then we got big things planned for 2025 so don't touch that dial. Best of luck in your grow out there. I love each and every one of you. Bye, bye. You.

You don't have to be perfect. You.