🥥Harvest Climate, Maximizing Production, and Garden Consistency, with Dr. Coco

10:19AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Dr. Coco

Keywords:

420 sale

sustainable village

blue mats

automated watering

climate control

plant movement

short veg time

grams per square foot

high density

plant count

root zone

fertigation strategy

plant stress

consistent conditions

grow light videos

A huge sale at the foop.com starts 420 buy two, get one, free, everything site wide at the foop.com on 420 you'll hear about it later in this episode. Greetings cultivators from around the world. Jordan River here back with more. Grow cast. Consistency is key. Today we have Dr Coco on the line. So excited to have Dr Coco back on the show, and today we're going to be covering a couple of things that we've discussed on the show before, and then some more. We're digging in a little bit deeper on this recap. We're talking about keeping climate controlled, we're talking about moving your plants. We're talking about Dr Coco's grow and a lot more. I know you're gonna love today's episode before we jump into it, though, shout out to sustainable village. Blue mats are on sale. Code growcast for 10% off the best automated watering system you can find. Turn your living soil grow into an automated grow go to sustainable village.com. And use code growcast for 10% off your blue mat watering system. Only through April. This code is a limited time. You guys know I love the blue mass system. I'm gonna get my bed set up again. I'm so excited. This is the watering system that detects pressure automatically. No pumps required. You can gravity feed it, no funny drip emitters or anything like that. Just these brilliant little carrots that will turn your soil grow into an automated grow. Check it out. Sustainablevillage.com Give them a call if you need a quote or a setup designed for your growth specifically, they do amazing work. They won't sell you anything you don't need, and they will hook you up code growcast for 10% off. Get that automation going now, folks, you will not regret it. You'll thank me later. Sustainable village.com, code growcast, go grab those moisture meters and those matte watering systems while you can Okay, everyone, let's get into it with Dr Coco. 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 yet again today, before we get started as always, I urge you to share this show. Tell someone about growcast. Hit the little Send icon on your podcast player and share this episode. Everybody loves an episode of Dr Coco. Turn someone on to growing you know what to do. And of course, see everything we are doing at growcast podcast.com/action, there you can find the seeds and the membership and the classes and all the fun stuff we do today we have back on the line. As I mentioned, my good friend, Dr Coco, Final Table list at poker tournaments around the SoCal area and and fine maker of pizza. Oh yeah, he's also a wonderful cultivator. What's up? Dr, Coco, how's it going?

Man, how's it going. That's the best introduction so far. Man, I like that. My my poker skills and my pizza skills up there in front of the growing I

like, well, you know, you grow pretty good too. I'm just playing around the members. Know what we're talking about. We did take a trip down to SoCal, me and producer Jay, Dr CoCo was an awesome host. He does make his own dough and pizza, it was delicious. And then we play a poker tournament that all three of us final table, and producer J takes down. So I just want to one one more time. Thank you for that awesome trip. Dr, Coco, that was just

that was a lot of fun, surreal. I look forward to you guys coming back.

Totally bizarre that we were all sitting in the same final table. So, so

yeah, I mean, and Jay won. So to our man. J, they're taking down the grand prize and the poker turn. It wasn't just like the three of us playing either. There was like, you know, a bunch of other public people

there. So that's right, yeah, it was so fun, man. So Good times. Good times listeners. Indeed. I do appreciate Dr Coco coming on the show talking about cultivation. I got questions all the time about our episodes, man,

that's awesome. I love it. I love your audience. I love your community. You know of jumping in your little Wednesday show and chatting with your people there and everybody's always got great questions and sort of eager participants and all of this. Thank

you, man. I appreciate it absolutely. So we're kind of following up today on questions that I have received around stuff we've talked about, kind of just like drilling down deeper into subjects that we've touched on in previous episodes. But before we get into that list, I want to talk to you about what you've been doing. Man, you're working on some big projects down in the southeast. Right? You talked to us last time a little bit about this large scale production facility. How is that going? Where are you at with that?

They're they're finally growing now, like any new sort of cultivation facility that comes online, you know, you hit a lot of sort of hurdles and licensing issues and construction issues and plant based issues and climate issues and all of that. So, you know, they've been growing moms since June, with the expectation at some point that we would be, you know, cutting clones and flowering plants in like August or September got pushed to November. Finally, you know, I went out there and helped load the first room. So room number one, with plants with clones that right at the beginning of June. January. So those plants are now, you know, mid bloom, the other rooms are getting loaded, and it's just been, you know, interesting. This is a grow that I've been working on for over a year now, you know, in the planning and thinking about plant count and plant density, and you know, all of these issues, it's all coming to to life now, you know, able to actually see, you know, we ran, I designed this grow with a really high density of plants, really short veg time, because there's no plant count issues there in the first room. You know, things were getting settled and veg a little bit too long. Probably those plants now are denser than we would want, and so kind of making adjustments there, and thinking through about how to, how to sort of refine that for for the future rooms,

even shorter veg time, shorter

veg time. And potentially, also potentially lowering the plant count a little bit. We're only doing a 14 day veg from Cloner to flip, geez, you know, but the plants were were significantly too big. So reducing that veg stone, there's only so much you can. You can reduce their plants still are going to grow during the bowl. You know what I mean. Yeah, that that initial two weeks, but it gives us a little bit more flexibility to had some issues with the moms, and now maybe we could get away with, you know, taking a few fewer clones and and vegging still for two weeks, or taking, you know, the same number of clones and reducing the veg time, and just seeing how, because they're also growing eight different strains. So seeing how those eight different strains are sort of growing differently, it's been, it's been a very interesting process. I've been really relieved and sort of satisfied with how a lot of it has turned out and how well certain aspects of that have gone but of course, there's always things to sort of refine and to fine tune in that process so well,

I want to, I want to jump around because this, this question is lower on the list. But here we are. I want to talk about this short vegging time, man, because that was a subject that I got a lot of feedback on. Okay, one of the, one of the biggest beginner questions that I hear out there is, how much is this plant going to yield? How much is this tent going to yield? And I always say the same thing, right? Which is, the more plants you have, the less veg time you need to fill out that canopy. And you should be thinking of it in terms of grams per square foot. Really is how you can kind of approach that. And that makes sense. Grams

per square foot is absolutely how we calculate harvest potential grams per square foot, assuming you have adequate lighting, you can also, do, you know, grams per light, so grams per micro mole. So when we calculate based on lighting, we do it that way. When we calculate based on area, basically assumes that you have full lighting, and you can do it that way, but, yeah, we never when we're running numbers like that in terms of sort of consulting for commercial cannabis farms, you never think really about return for plant. Now, some growers still think that way, but like, you can't really project because different plants, I mean, different sizes, really makes a big difference.

Depends on how long you vet, like, if they only have one plant in the room, I'll have to say no. Depends on how long you veg this thing. It's about that canopy size. And then it makes sense. It clicks in their head, right? And when you can shave off two weeks out of the veg time. I mean, again, emphasizing this point, time is money. I don't care if you're a home grower or especially if you're a commercial cultivator, you know, 14 days that you shave off that adds up to a whole extra run. Think

about it in terms of percentages, like just ours, we're on a 10 week run in the flower rooms, so we don't have a separate veg space. Plants go from Cloner in the flower room, and they stay there. If they veg for two weeks, then it's a total of a 10 week time period in that room, right? Eight weeks of 1212, and then the two weeks of veg leading up to that. If we take a week off of that veg, that's 10% right? I mean, that's 10% of the time reduction. That's a significant saving. Exactly, okay, you've cut your production costs by 10% because your production costs don't really relate to the number of plants. They relate to the amount of time those plants are in that room. So true, you increase the turnover time, or you create sort of more flexibility in your schedule. And there's, there's tremendous sort of advantages there. So that reduction in the veg time is huge. You can't really reduce the flower time. I mean, you can grow different strains or whatever. But most, most commercial operators, to be honest, grow eight week strains. They don't. Grow nine or 10 weeks trans or if they do, they only grow them for eight weeks in flower. But you know, you don't, generally aren't able to shave time off of that much more, yeah,

just by adding more plants. That'd be really nice if they went faster, if they had more buddies around them. Right

to a certain extent, if you're under lit, and you then go to fully lit, you can sort of speed that up, but only to a point, right? Mean, to eight weeks, basically. And most drains need that eight weeks to fully mature their flowers. So where you can save time is, you know, I talked to growers that veg for two months. I talked to growers that veg for longer than two months, and they think that they're, they're sort of growing efficiently, but you're not. I mean, if you're vegging for two months in an indoor grow, you're not growing efficiently, just straight up period. You could be, you know, improving your efficiency by reducing your veg time to harvest.

Yeah, they like the bigger plants, and they like the bigger yields. And I will say the one wrench that gets thrown in here is plant count, right? Well,

yeah, plant count, definitely. So I consult with a big commercial farm in Michigan, and they veg for four weeks, and they need to grow plants that will occupy a little over three square feet, because their plant count limited, yeah. And it makes them grown on an inefficient way. That's weird that

someone would say you have to grow this way, and it results in you growing three square foot plants just to follow the regulate for no other reason than to follow the regulations. That's bizarre, right?

And in the state where we don't have a plant count minimum, our plants aren't even one square foot okay, well, that's what I want to talk and that's the debate now, should we go to up to giving them one square foot at this point, they're getting about two thirds of a square foot. That's exactly what

I want to talk about. Coco. Is there a point of diminishing returns here? So let's put plant counts aside for a second. And the idea is that the more plants you have, the less time you need a veg and fill that canopy. Well, I know you said, if I remember correctly, you were in one gallon pots at a certain point. Is there a point of diminishing returns? Why aren't we planting in four inch pots? You know what I'm saying?

Well, because the plant, like a healthy cannabis plant, no matter how small it is, say you just got a healthy rooted clone, or like a healthy seedling with three nodes on it. Basically, you flip either of those plants to flower and keep them healthy, especially in cocoa under high frequency fertigation, and they're going to be 24 to 36 inches tall if you don't top them. Sure. And they just are. There's it's not, it's not easy. You have to, you have to grow is sort of in an inferior way. You have to do something like starve the plants, or like torture the plants, or something to grow smaller plants than that, in sort of following my style of, it's

gonna get a certain size.

It's gonna get a certain size, yeah, and that's, that's the lower limit, and I think we're pretty close to it, at two thirds of a square foot per plant.

So precise, in a one gallon, was I right about that you're in one

gallon in a one gallon pot, yeah, wow, in a nominal one gallon pot. Be aware that you know most pots aren't truly their their weight, right? And those are actually air pots, or air pot equivalents. So nice. They're a little bit smaller than a true gallon, but they're, they're considered the one gallon sort of size for that. You know, you're only giving the plant, like, a little over eight, eight to nine inches, like on a side, right? Like in an area, if you're thinking about this is square. It's a square that's like eight to nine inches on a side. We're gonna go basically from Cloner to flip in a week. I think now is what you know, it looks like. Two weeks was too long. Two weeks the plants were growing too big. So the and at that point, plants are pretty small, they're gonna have like, one big Cola, maybe one secondary branch that has, you know, is notably a secondary branch, maybe two. But most plants, you know, basically just one COLA that, wow.

So you just have these self supporting kind of chunky field of one gallon colas, yeah, that's been one of the interesting

things about watching our actual strains grow out. Strains grow out. Some of them grow pretty lanky and taller and whatever. And you know, you may need to have a SCROG net, or rather, a trellis net set up on them, but, yeah, you know, you go from the Cloner to flipping really fast if you just have enough plants. Basically what I was saying. I'm like, okay, as soon as these plants start growing, we need to flip, because when you transplant them from the Cloner into the cocoa, you know, be a little grumpy, and have to kind of get their feet about get their wits about them, and that takes a few days, but then they'll start, you know, noticeably growing again. And it's like, okay. If you're growing that many plants, then, then you're gonna have to flip. People have tried to go denser than that. I mean, I don't think that this is sort of the actual limit on density, but I think that there are diminishing returns past that. You're not giving your plants enough space to become plants,

and at that point, you're also, at a certain point, you're gonna have a lot of labor intensive like, if you get down to the four gallon you gotta now, seed planting is like a whole fucking thing, you know, getting those clones transplanted, like the labor shifts too. It's interesting to think about, man so very, very

cool. No, well, there's that's definitely side of it. And if you were hand watering or doing anything like that, we'd never said this, that was something early on, I kind of thought through about this is, you want to reduce the labor cost plant training is a lot of labor, so growing little plants that don't need to be topped and trained and tied up and tied down and bent over and all of that, so that that that side of it's supposed to be sort of less labor. The the more labor side of it is, get to grow more moms have more cloning capacity. True. Have, you know, a bigger Cloner, and that, they call it transplant day, where the plants go from the Cloner into the pots. So a lot of work to do that day. Man, I had the privilege of sort of being there doing it the first time with with that grow. And, yeah, it was, it was fun, but there's a lot of work to do. It's plant based work, though. I mean, it's, you know, it's what we all do for fun.

I'm excited to see how this thing goes, Man, and it sounds like that one gallon is the sweet spot with that high frequency cocoa fertigation, cutting down the veg times to a week. I love it, man, yeah,

and loading that up. So the equivalent there, you know, in like, your four by four tent would be putting like 25 plants, yeah, that is quite in a four by 410 Well,

wait, I guess not really. I mean, you think about three gallons, they're a square foot, so you could pack in 16. It's not that unreasonable. No,

I mean, there's space between the pots. If that's what you're curious about, the pots aren't touching each other

by Yeah, I'm just thinking about how many you could pack in of like, you know, a three gallon

be touching each other, yeah, you know, after not too long. But yeah, Now compare that to the girl I was talking about that I can sell for in Michigan, where they have to veg for four weeks. They have a dedicated veg room. And it's actually a two zone veg room, because you have plants in the first two weeks of veg, and you have plants in the second two weeks in veg in that room, because they're also on a two week rotation. So that is supporting four flower rooms that are on eight week flowering cycles. So and there they have a veg space that's as big as the flowering spaces because it's got two zones in it, basically, right? And you know, if they didn't have a plant count that veg room, I would have designed that room as an as a fifth flower room,

right? And that changes the production entirely. It

would have changed. They'd have five flower rooms running in a rotation instead of four. And, you know, be producing sort of better, especially for the amount of energy that they were running in that in that grow facility. So yeah, that is not as efficient if you have to sort of dedicate space time, energy to just vegetative growth clocks, just taking on that. And if you're looking to improve the efficiency, if you're looking to reduce your environmental impact as an indoor grower, the number one thing you can do is shorten your veg time. I love it. Get as much harvest out of a shorter grow. Because, man, it's the amount of time we're running these tents. It's the amount of time we're running our lights and our exhaust, and if you're getting you know, D Hughes or ACS or any of that other stuff. It's the amount of time all that equipment that's got to go on. So if you're trying to make like the environmentally responsible choice, don't choose a style of growing that leads to longer veg periods. This is indoor horticulture, and our impact comes from the fact that we're doing all these things indoors, right? So anyone

can benefit from that, right? I encourage any ways anyone wants to garden. I do agree that that is, this is how you become more efficient and get a better yield. People think of it backwards. How do I get bigger buds at the end? But you're saying, get the same amount of buds. Get. It in less time. It's a really, really important mind stage Exactly,

exactly because, like, you started this saying, you know, it's about the canopy size, right, right? So if I got just that, my little two by 410 here, and I'm thinking about how to fill my little two by four tank, typically, because I, like, you know, spending time with my plants. I like training out the plants. I like splitting the applicable dominance and all of that. And it's a little bit easier to only have, like, say, two plants in the two by 410 that means each plant needs to be four square feet, right by the time it fully occupies that. And I end up vegging, you know, four or five, sometimes a little over five weeks, which still may sound fast to people. Remember, I've got this style of growing that's all about sort of growing really fast to reduce the veg time. If I went to four plants, if I went to six plants, if I went to eight plants in there, and I'm thinking about doing this, I'm thinking about shit, why don't I just grow eight plants? And, like, you know, if I did eight plants, it's eight square feet, I'd be able to flip them in two weeks, from seed gets wet to 1212, in two weeks, have a full canopy in there that shaves three, you know, maybe three plus weeks off of my grow. And even if I've got to buy more pots, or, you know, get more drippers, or sort of set up something on the technical side, on that side of it, saving those three weeks is a huge, huge savings.

Well, is there any other than adding more plants and having, like, an optimal fertigation strategy, is there anything else we can do to shave that veg time. I mean, that's basically it, right.

Dial, good question, everything and yeah, make sure your light's appropriate, make sure your climate's appropriate. Make sure that your fertilization, your watering, and all those things are on point. But yeah, there's definitely faster and slower ways to grow plants. And frankly, this is why I love cocoa so much. Is cocoa is really good at holding the root zone conditions optimally. So the the plants don't ever sort of slow down. If you're staying on top of your fertigation. Plants never slow down because of sort of sub optimal root zone conditions. Don't let them skip a beat. They don't skip a beat. Man, I mean, growers, if you really like the first time you go to a high frequency fertigation through the bolt, through that quote, unquote flowering stretch, if you got your game dialed in, the plants grow so fast it freaks you out.

That's what I like to see. Man, yeah,

no, once you once you've done it once, and you're like, looking forward to it the next time you're the next time you're ready for it. But I mean, the first time people like, they literally freak out, sort of do that. So yeah, there's keeping your plants healthy, happy, light, dialed in, climate, dialed in, fertilization, watering all of that, dialed in, and then leave them alone, right? Yeah, leaving, leaving your plants alone. This is one of the other questions, right? About talking about not, not moving the plants. Well,

that's, that's the second side of that equation, right? So you get the you get the tent humidity and temperature, perfect, and the automated watering system is taking care of your fertigation, or what have you. Now, your job is to and again, like I am guilty of this. I'm never gonna stop fucking with my plants and enjoying time next to my plants, and I know that I'll probably lose a little bit of growth rate, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice. But if I wanted maximum growth rate, your job is to not open that tent, right? Yeah,

you know, it does kind of depend. I mean, there are trade offs. So to certain extent, opening the tent and being with the plants, you're breathing on them, you're giving them good carbon Diox, sorry, you're making sure nothing's going awry. You know, I really do believe that the old saying about, you know, the best fertilizer is the footsteps of the farmer. So, you know, being present with your plants is important. I don't really advocate, although I do even remote sensing days, I have a camera in my tent right where I can, like, look at my plants

without the difference. Yeah, that's the difference. Is being with the plants, scouting things like that. That's always good, but when you just need to look, I mean, listen, they make these window ports for a reason. Now, for some reason that's not good enough for me. I have to get in there and root around or something. I don't know. It's just, it's just, you know what I do? But no, but I noticed that when I leave town and Mrs. River takes care of the plants, and she only opens that tent to water it, and then she closes it. And when I when I come back from town, I noticed that that's the fastest growth rate that I have in that veg cycle. I notice it every time, a few

things like, yeah, if you leave the tent door open for for too long, it's harder to keep the climate they're not getting as much light because the light is spilling out into the room. It warms me and like a lizard, the climate swings are really the most dramatic thing, though. So it's. The opening and closing of the tent that you gotta realize inside the tent, usually the climate is different than outside the tent, in both humidity and temperature, and so when you open that door, it changes rapidly inside the tent, oftentimes the temperature drops. If it's like cooler in your room and it's hotter in the tent, the temperature drops and the relative humidity drops. And the plant's going to have to adjust to that, and it's not going to kill the plant. You're not going to notice a bunch of sort of plant suffering symptoms, but the plant is going to spend some time and energy over the course of the next hour or two making adjustments that change in climate that happen, and those adjustments mean that it's not going to be growing as efficiently using

a currency that it could have spent other places, whether that's, you know, growth in Veg or terpene production, For instance. And that's what I want to kind of lead into, which is I got a really interesting comment. Somebody was given pushback. We just did an episode on things to avoid in your grow, and one of the things was messing with your plants too much. And this person said, you know, I don't think that moving your seedlings around is going to make much of a difference. And I thought to myself, first of all, I said, we're going to do a deep dive into exactly why you shouldn't reposition. Shouldn't reposition your plants. But does the stage matter? Right? Like, when would be the worst time to interrupt that interrupt that cycle a seedling, I feel like surface area. Okay? So, so you think that, basically, the younger it is, the more resilient it is to these types of changes. Hey, everybody, the foop is running a massive 420 sale. Buy two, get one free. For everything they sell, commercial growers, home growers. Does not matter. It all starts 420 and you can get it at the foop.com you can get yourself your foop notes, your food starter, pack your veg, pack your bloom, pack mist gel, sweetener, whatever you like. Buy two, get one free. Now, of course, everything is organic certified by the Organic Materials Research Institute fruit organic bio sciences are loaded with microbiology, all of the macro and micro nutrients you need. Plus, they've got the clone gel, they've got the mist, they've got the sweetener. Free shipping on all orders over $70 and starting 420 buy two, get one free for everything they sell. Now always try Code, grow, cast, you know to use that code at the foop.com this is where it's at everybody the big 420 sale, buy two, get one free. Newt starter packs, mist gel, sweetener, whatever you like, whatever you're looking to try the foop.com 420 sale, use code, grow cast and enjoy that. Buy two, get one, free, everybody. Thank you to the food and enjoy those sweet organic nutrients. Be healthy, go organic. Use food. So you think that basically, the younger it is, the more resilient it is to these types of changes. Absolutely

try to do everything, basically to your plants before the end of the bowl, while they're still vegetatively growing, right? Yeah, it's much easier to recover from injury. It's much easier to sort of shift around and reallocate energy for the plant, and generally, the consequences of it are not going to be as severe, wow, after the bowl like when the plants are putting most of their energy into developing and growing their flowers, if you cost them energy doing something else, then they're not going to grow their flowers as much, right?

So that's when it's really detrimental. It's not just slowing you down and your veg rate, you're literally getting less terpene production because it's expending some sort of energy currency, like ATP or something, where it could have spent any shit that you want it to do the cannabinoid production. And the factory, there's the Trichome head,

100% correct. There's a limited amount of energy that the plants able to harness from the light. And, like, I'm also sort of really sensitive that side, like, how much light can we give the plants, how much energy can we give the plants? And we're limited in time, right? We got, like, the aforementioned eight weeks, and we got 12 hours a day, and then we got a PPFD limit, right? And so we really and in the last few years, it's been interesting to see how the technology has allowed us to push those limits right to the edge. Now you can get the PPFD limit like, all the way across your tent, you know, from corner to corner, basically, and run the lights right at that level, but that's the limit, right? You got eight weeks at 12 hours at that PPFD limit, that's the energy you can deliver to the plant. And now, what's it going to do with that energy? If you keep the plants happy and stable, they'll put as much energy as they can into growing big, beautiful flowers and producing cannabinoids if you're stressing the plant. Ow. So then some portion of that limited amount of energy is going to be devoted to other things, and you can never get it back to

zero sum game and a limited time. Yeah, you're stressing me out. Stressing me out, man, there's limited

you know, it's interesting to I think that's an important thing to know, yes, that yeah at that point. And prior to that, your plant is putting most of its energy into vegetative growth. And a lot of vegetative growth is redundant even, you know, we talked about that the beginning of the show. Like, how much can we cut this down? But you know, to be perfectly honest, in almost every grow unless you're getting down to the point where you're vegging for like, four days, that's like, perfect or something like that. You know, you might not be able to shave another day off of that. But a day's worth of growth during veg isn't going to be translated into your harvest quality or quantity, but a day's worth of growth post bolt is gonna reflect in your numbers, in the harvest or in the quality of your cannabis. That's a really

good point, man. I fucking love it. So that was a really comprehensive answer. Again, why we shouldn't be messing with these plants too much, or changing the climate too much, especially in flowers, you

know, if you're gonna do other things that, like a lot of people do things right at the end of the bolt. And I don't want to go into a whole nother thing about don't strip your plants or all this. I'm not a big fan of that. But you know, if you are going to do something super stressful to the plants despite sort of like, the warnings against that, step it up a few days. Do it like not day 21 I can do so much stuff on day 21 days, which is really sort of designed to be the last day of the bolt, right? The way the bolt basically happens is you got about seven days of transition, and then you got about 14 days of bolt, right? Once you flip them into 1212, and day 21 I see all these like, leaf strip at day 21 BS and stuff like that, right? That? Like, do it on day that's like in your thing, because give them a couple of days of good vegetative growth after that to recover. Okay, okay, don't, don't I gotcha push it too close to that borderline where they basically stopped reproductive growth, and now they'd like to be devoting their energy to flowers, but you just injured them, and they're going to be devoting some portion of that energy to repairing the injuries, and I'm referring to leaf stripping or pruning at that point. Well,

on that note, of those solar panels and receiving that light, I do want to stress this, you know, messing with plants one more time, because you mentioned it on a previous episode. This idea of shifting plants, the idea that in nature, when you're outside, in the sun, the plant can really control how much PPFD it's receiving by either facing away from or towards the sun, right? That makes a lot of sense. But here in the Grow Tent, especially under an LED, which is literally just dropping light in a square right down on your whole tent, essentially, light's coming

from everywhere in a grow time, because not only are there, like, you know, 1000 different points of light in your LED, get ready, but there's also the reflective walls, which are bouncing light back so

well, wouldn't they mind being shifted less? Or do you still not want to? For instance, take your pot and spin it in a 180 degree, because you've said before, you know, the plants position themselves very specifically, and it takes, you know, a readjustment. What do you think about in a tent scenario? Is it less impactful? More impactful?

What do you think in terms of how bad it is to do that. It's, you know, there's going to be situations where it's really bad, and then there's going to be situations where it's only kind of bad. I'll definitely give you that, but I don't ever think that there's a benefit. And all of the reasons that growers talk about why they're doing it are really striking to be like the wrong reasons. One of the most common reasons, I think, is because they're like, Well, you know, the plants developing unevenly. So, like, there's more growth on this side facing the light than there is on this other side that's not facing light. So every few days I'm going to rotate the plant. Even every day I'm going to rotate the plant. So, you know, 180 degrees, both sides to develop at the same rate, which basically means both sides are going to be underdeveloped, and the plants going to be sort of shifting back and forth a little bit, but it neither one of those sides of the plant is going to be in the good light for the full flowering period. So

a plant in a corner, you don't want to spin that around to Sun the other side, you would, you know,

you don't want to spin that around to Sun the other side, because the leaves that are in the light and the leaves that are in the shade are not ready for light. So the first day that they get switched, the plants just sort of reallocating its photosynthetic material. You also those like those leaves that are now suddenly Sun leaves are prepared to sort of handle the bulk of the photosynthesis, and the leaves that are now in the shade, they don't need to have all that photosynthe, or all the chlorophyll and everything, sort of in an active state. And so you're just getting the plant to reallocate its resources and reallocate its energy in ways that are counterproductive to rapid growth, which

is exactly what we're looking to avoid. So it's an interesting thought. I've heard that same thing. Another reason why someone might spin their plant is to get better access to another side for training purposes.

I get that, like, if you got, you know, four plants and a tent or whatever, and you can't, like, get into the middle of the tent, like, look back at that side and you're doing some some pruning, or some training or something. I get that it's, yeah, trans can tolerate a lot of these things. Gonna say it's not, like, it's gonna outright kill them. And that's, I guess, my other message to growers is, even if your plant looks healthy, looks happy, it doesn't mean that, you know, it's not struggling with something. It's just they're really good at sort of hiding all of their struggles until the struggles become very intense, so you can still dial things in and make the plant happier and increase the rate of growth or increase, the amount of the limited energy that the plants able to harvest, how much of that gets put into the kind of growth that we really want? Yeah,

that is a really good point. And yeah, this isn't like a huge detriment or anything like that. I don't want this to come off now. I'm saying, Oh, we've got to avoid this. But it's something that you need to consider. You need to have it in the back of your mind. If you're moving

your plants for the sake of moving your plants, because plants, because you think moving your plants is sort of, like, beneficial to them, or you think it's really important to have your plant, like, be perfectly symmetrical, or something like that. Like, I would encourage you to give up on those practices. But like, if there's legitimate reasons to move your plants, I don't want you to be like, Oh crap. Dr Coco said document, the plants are tough. Man, exactly right. Yeah, my wife a bunch of our house plants over the sink to water them. And I've always talked to her. I used to, I don't do it anymore, because I've gotten to use this. I'm like, Oh, they don't like that. Like, they're not gonna like that. They'd be happier if you just let them be in water them where they were. And like, she's like, I mean, she's got her reasons. And it's like, I mean, it's certainly not going to kill the plant.

Yeah, it's well, said, it's nit picky, but I found it to be really interesting, because, like you said, there's this constant reaction that the plant is going through based on all these parameters, right? Whether it's how open or closed the stomata is, or how much nutrient is uptaking, all these things. When you shift the position, or shift the position of the light, or crack open that tent and there's a rush of room temperature or cool air into the tent, those instant reaction processes start to change on the fly in real time all the time. So it's just, it's a very interesting point. I agree. I don't know doing

that. Plants are totally used to doing that outside. The climate shifts, the light shifts, all of that stuff is shifting around. The plants are making adjustments to it. Some days it's wet, some days it's dry, some days they have plenty of water in their roots. Other days they don't. They're constantly making adjustments to that, and they're growing slow. And when we put them in an indoor setting, right where we're able to control all these variables, the idea is absolutely not to recreate sort of the conditions they face outdoors, which is like a constant struggle. The idea is to give them ideal conditions and grow them as fast as we can, grow them as healthily and quickly as we can, and sort of turn that in so, you know, a lot of growers, you know the little rivets or the edges on the side of the road, you know that, like the rumble strips or whatever, that are designed to tell you, like you're driving off of the road. Well, you don't want to just like, close your eyes and, like, drive by, you know, hitting the rumble strips, and be like, Oh, I gotta go back to the left. Okay. Oh, I gotta feel it over on the right. I gotta go back right. I mean, that would be, but a lot of growers are sort of driving their grows that way, where they're actually doing things until they see bad feedback in the plants, right, and then they sort of step off, or they push a little bit in the other direction. They'll like, for example, keep ramping up the light until they start to see their plants suffering under too much light, or, like all these other things. And the message I just want to say is, you know, your plants might look perfectly healthy. They're not going to show you any signs of of suffering until you're way past, sort of the point where optimal growth would have happened. So don't kind of like drive by by feeling out the rumble strips basically try to keep your your grow more into the middle of your lane. And a lot of these things really have better success. They're poor community.

Caters. They bottle up their emotions, you know, they could use more calcium, but they don't start saying it until they really need more calcium. You know, it's like, it's like, somebody who's too polite doesn't want to ask for a drink of water. It's like, no, just let me know exactly. Until now, communicating

out, and then you're like, what's wrong with that guy? Oh, shit, nobody gave him water in five days.

He's been at this party for 72 hours, and nobody gave him water, and he didn't ask, and now he's wilting over to terminal wilt. Now he has terminal wilt,

right, right? But, yeah, it would really just be, it would be like, feeding your children based on when they're, like, in their faces or whatever, you know, you could tell that they were malnourished.

You look gaunt. Now it's time to feed you.

Oh, I think Sally's looking a little mountainous. We'll give her some rice today, or something like, no. I mean,

oh my goodness, you're totally right. So you got to dial it in a little further than that. You got to get really, get to know them, even though they're not very good communication.

And you agree with me, right? You hear that kind of stuff where you're like, Oh, my plants look healthy. Or like, yeah, I keep pushing them until I see the plants wilt, or something like that. Ece is another thing that conventional growers are getting more and more and more fertilizer into their plants until they see the leaf tips curling up on themselves, or get a little tip burn or something. It's like you are so far past optimal fertilization and sort of water management at that point that like the plant is no longer able to manage it. I've certainly

seen that sentiment before that. Hey, if I got just a little bit of tip burn, it means that I'm maximizing it. You don't push back against that heavily.

I push back against that. You rebuke that. Yeah. I mean, this is like, Sally looks a little bit, you know, like she's suffering from dehydration or from malnutrition or something. I mean, no, you don't want to ever get anywhere near that point where the plants are physically suffering. Keep in mind, right? Plants are designed devolved to grow outdoors, where the climate and the light, everything's constantly shifting so they can handle a big range of things before they actually start to look like they're suffering. But they're not. You know, the range that actually empowers like the best growth is much smaller than the range that allows plants to survive. So I think those are, those are two really kind of important ideals too, that the consistency thing is sort of the other one that we're kind of talking around. But I often come out that topic of consistency, they just don't be changing things more than you have to on the plans. I mean, there are some things that that require changing, and when they require changing, try to change them gradually. And other than that, the general rule that I follow is consistency. Keep things consistent. Even if you know the EC, for example, in the root zone isn't perfectly optimal, the plant will adjust to that. And if as long as it stays consistent, the plant will thrive there,

I love that. Yeah, that's a really good point. Keep things consistent. Change maybe one thing at a time. A lot of growers I talked to, you know, I did the same thing as last run. Well, you know, did you change anything? Let me Well, I did this different, and I did that different, and I did this different, that different. It's like, well, you know, maybe change one thing at a time there. And there's almost

always, like, 20 differences, even if it's just the time of year that you're growing. So like, your last grow was was in the winter, and now it's in the spring, and your climate is different, and you don't realize sort of that, and now you're growing different plants, and you change other things. And I love it. Growers always have, like, Oh, but I know it's this new additive that I'm using that created this difference. I'm like, I'm like, 57 things have changed, and you're convinced it's this one additive or the lack of an additive or something else. So be cautious of that kind of, you know, logical fallacy, wherein we recognize patterns but attribute them to the wrong causes.

That is a good point. And maybe to wrap that note, you know, every run is so unique, the phenotype does include your environment. I don't care if you are in a tent. Like you said, my indoor run from summer to winter was totally different, and even though I'm indoors, it still changed the temperature of the room just a little bit, and you're going to see higher feeding and higher temperatures. I saw a nicer dry and cure because I was drying in my closet, not a completely climate, sealed space? So in the colder months, I had a nice, longer, just slightly different, slightly better, dry and cure. It's just little differences.

Man, absolutely, almost everybody. I think, if you're honest, when you harvest plants between, say, November and April, you have a better dry cure for most growers, like in the United States, right, than you do on your plants that you harvest, you know, the rest of the year. Why? So in this summer, yeah, you harvest plants in July, and then you're running your air conditioner then probably, but you're probably still in the in the low 70s. Even if you're running it that cool, you know, I mean, you're probably not, but man, in January, you know, the room is probably getting into the low 60s overnight, or whatever it's just like. So that and that temperature difference makes a big difference during the cure, during the dry so I really agree with you. There's so many things that change, and it's so hard to set up really good, controlled experiments, but every grower thinks that, you know, they can really easily identify what variable change that led to the different outcome in their specific case. Hey, it happens,

man, just like that poker hand that I tried to bluff you on, you know what I'm saying. I thought, I thought I knew what was going on. I thought, I thought I had a read. But then next thing, you know, you thought

you read me. You thought I was bluffing, see, now, but I had cards.

You had a pair. I know you had a pair. Okay, we're going off the rails here. Man, this was an awesome podcast. Though. I like this. I like this, and Coco really quickly. What's going on at Coco for cannabis. What's the next challenge before we wrap this episode? What's happening?

Well, I've got, I'm back trying to get some grow light videos going and doing videos. I'm talking about doing a new show and thinking about maybe doing something, you know, like you do with Patreon. I don't know, but I'm thinking about, I want, I want to open up, sort of more access to people. So I've been thinking about doing like an ask Dr Coco show, where people could, you know, spend more time sort of discussing their questions. And a lot of it's because I have fun doing these kinds of shows with you. So I'm poking around and thinking about developing something there we got the new the spring auto flower challenge is going to come up in April. So if you guys want to grow along with us, we're doing the spring auto flower challenge is our next community grow. And you know, come check out Coco for cannabis.com. We always do our grower love giveaways going on all the time. Now, every month we're giving away a big light. So go check out our deals and discounts page and register for the grower love giveaway.

Oh yeah, loving the giveaways. Man, yeah, you got some those big light giveaways. People love What do you got? Which light Do you have up there? Do you have it listed

yet? Yes. So this month, we're giving away one of the metagro lights. We got the metagro fold eight is the prize this month.

Nice. Go enter everybody. I want to see a growcaster take that down. Yeah,

yeah. No. Metagross. Are cool lights. It's a big, you know, 720 watt light, I believe. So more than enough power for for all of our sort of tent based growers, sweet and, yeah, that's what we usually, we usually try to do, get a pretty big price up there runs for a good month. February is a short month. So it's, you know, that prize will be coming up pretty soon, and it's super easy to register. We just, you know, and we've often put grow cast and Jordan River up there, as you know, we follow friends or follow different people or subscribe to YouTube channels and stuff like that to get additional chances to win those prizes. So that's why we call it the grower love giveaway, because it's a way that we're able to sort of spread the love back to a lot of members of the community. Give a great prize out to somebody. And yeah, everybody just feels good about it.

That's wonderful. Coco for cannabis.com. Everybody do all the things. Sign up for the giveaways. If this airs after that giveaway, there's another one up there. Go ahead and grab it.

There's another one. Yeah, there'll be another prize for for March, and we've already negotiating a big prize for the April

gotta be for 420 I like it. I like

it, it's gonna be big. And it's, yeah, it's, it's gonna be big, is really the optimal word there for the April prize. But every month we do, we do a pretty big light like this. So yeah, come check it out. And yeah, participate in the grow. Your love

I love it. Love it. Everybody. Coco for cannabis.com. Of course, you can find us at growcast podcast.com. Forward slash action. To see all the action, get on the green list. It's free. Stay up to date on the emails, and we'll see you next time. Everybody, this is Dr Coco and Jordan River, signing off, wishing you all a wonderful day. Be safe out there. Everybody. Grow smarter, grow with love, everyone. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Come and see us, everybody. We've got events that's right, the cultivators cup is sold out, but we've got community cup Oklahoma. You can come on down to Oklahoma for a wonderful day of education and a Cannabis Cup grow cast podcast.com/community, cup. And, of course, pesto Palooza, a long awaited IPM class with the great Matthew gates, the world's leading expert on cannabis IPM. Now come on down to Pesta palooza. We have two dates right now, Long Island in San Diego, we're adding some more dates. Go and grab those tickets. Everybody. It's an in depth pest course that's going to come with a completion certificate along with a huge bag of goodies. You're going to get your hands on IPM. This gift bag you'll have bio controls. You get yourself a badass pair of goggles to help you scout insects in your garden, plus. Plus coupon codes for viroid testing green stuff included in their seeds. You know, we do it, right? It's a whole day of pest education plus a fully catered after party and a massive gift gift bag. It is Pesta palooza. Do not miss it. Come on down. Hang out with me and Matthew gates, and if the information in this class just saves you one infestation and crop loss, it is well worth it. My friends come and learn from the best. Get yourself a badass one of a kind, Pesta Palooza gift bag, and enjoy the party at Pesta Palooza, baby. Check us out. Grow cast podcast.com/classes, we're adding more dates, and I will see you there with Matthew gates. All right, everybody, that's our show. I hope you are doing amazing things in your garden. Stay tuned. We'll talk to you soon. Everybody, bye, bye.

So growing little plants that don't need to be topped and trained and tied up and tied down and bent over and all of that. I.