🧪PH vs EH, Nutrient Uptake, and Hydrogen, with Nik from Rooted Leaf

12:09PM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

pH importance

nutrient uptake

redox cycle

hydrogen ions

proton concentration

organic acids

chelation chemistry

oxidative stress

antioxidants

electron transport

light intensity

plant metabolism

microbial interactions

soil chemistry

plant stress

Greetings listeners from around the world. Jordan River here back with more grow cast for your ears. PH, perfect. Every time today we have Nick from root relief back on the line. You love this nutrient deep dive series. We're taking a little bit of a left turn with it. We're talking about pH, that's right. We're talking about pH, eh, nutrient uptake. Lots of good stuff in this episode. I know you're gonna absolutely love it before we jump into it with Nick though, shout out to AC infinity. That's right. Acinity.com, code grow cast one five to get your savings on the best grow gear that you can get your hands on, my favorite grow tents. They've got lights, fans, pots, scissors, everything you need. It's at AC infinity.com. They've got grow kits. If you need to get started growing it's the best way to get started, in my opinion, go grab a three by three grow kit or a four by four grow kit. Use code grow cast one, five, and get that whole setup delivered to your door. Everything you need to get started, it's all there at AC infinity.com plus they've got lots of new and great items, like their new spray technology that they've released. They've got a new cloud forge humidifier. Now they have green lights that you can put in your tent, that you can use as work lights during your dark period. AC Infinity has it all. Code grow, cast one, five at AC infinity.com, that's what you need to do. That's how you get the savings and grab the best tents in the game, the best fans in the game, and so much more. Thank you to our partners, AC infinity. All right, let's get into it with Nick Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners who 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. Tell a grower about grow cast, or better yet, turn someone on to growing. It's the best way you can help us on our mission of overgrowing the nation and the world. Make sure you're subscribed. Hit that follow button on Spotify iTunes. Wherever you're listening, we're all over the place. And of course, grow cast podcast.com, for all the things, the seeds, the membership, everything you'll find there. Special thank you to the members. You do make the show possible. We are back with a nutrient deep dive series. This is one of the most requested, one of the most well received series that we've ever done, and that's largely thanks to our guest, Nick from rooted leaf is back on the line. What's up? Nick, Hey, Jordan, how's it going? Excellent. Man, excellent. We're continuing this series today. We're going a little bit different with it, a little bit of a curve ball, before we jump into all of the stuff we're going to discuss today. Quick update on rooted leaf. What's been going on that the lush green v2 was so cool. Man, people loving this new v2 you said it's physically heavier because it's got more carbon in it. I thought that was funny, of course, rootedleaf.com code, grow cast. But what's been happening at rooted leaf? Nick everything? Good.

Yeah. Things are great. We actually stayed busier in November and December of this year than we have ever been, actually. So it was the busiest, you know, holiday season for us in the company's existence. We definitely felt the love and the support of the Grow cast community. So thank you all. If you're listening out there and you bought products from us sometime, you know, between the Black Friday sale and the Christmas holiday sale that we had, want to thank you guys for all your support, continued support along the way. Yeah, we just been staying busy. I've been making a lot of product, and it's been sort of like this nice little back and forth. You know, when I'm in the plant making product, it's a nice quiet time. I guess you could say, I don't really get disturbed too much, and so I have an opportunity to kind of think critically and deeply about some of the concepts that then I get to turn around and talk about on a show like this. Yeah,

man, I love it. Been killing it over the holidays, people using the rooted leaf and the discord and all sorts of different applications, and loving it. So we like to get into the nitty gritty with Nick. I try to make it digestible for you listeners and dig into that big, beautiful brain Nick. Generally, in these episodes, we've been focusing on plant available, or I should, I should say, like soil minerals, right? We focus on nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, I think we started with calcium, right? But today, we're taking a little bit of a different approach. We're talking about different elements, not the soil, fertilizer elements, but rather things like hydrogen and oxygen. I'm excited to talk about this, where, today we're talking about the redox cycle. We're talking about pH. We're getting into the different ancillary elements here. And this is very exciting to me. So are you ready to dive into all things pH and Redux? Oh,

absolutely. Yeah, I definitely am. And it's one of those topics that I think is very complex. I think we've been trying to record an episode like this for actually quite a while now, and I haven't fully wrapped my mind around how exactly we're going to go through these concepts. And I was kind of thinking about it over the past few weeks, and I'm like, What's the best way that I could possibly describe what this conversation is going to be around? And interestingly enough, there was an animal that came to mind, octopus. You know how some octopuses can change not only the color of their skin, but also the texture? You ever seen that? So in this kind of way, it's like the topic of redox. Chemistry and pH is this thing that is constantly changing its color and its shape and its texture, and it's really difficult to actually get a good grasp on it in a short amount of time. I mean, you could spend decades and decades just focused on redox chemistry and what its implications are for plant metabolism, and you would never it's like the endless rabbit hole. I mean it literally Pandora's box. So this is going to be one of those topics or conversations where there's, you know, seemingly endless amounts of rabbit holes that we can go down. And we're going to try to kind of, you know, stay on track. We'll, we'll start off by looking at the broad picture, kind of overview. Hey, what exactly is this, and where are the sort of boundaries, and then we'll start to look more specifically at some of the nuances and how those nuances translate to real and effective information that growers can use in their garden.

Oh, that's perfect, man, yeah, let's see if we can't scratch the surface and not fall so far down one of those rabbit holes. We'll do a part two and maybe even a part three, I'm sure. Let's start with pH. Let's start with something that I can kind of already explain a little bit, which, again, I want to start like you said, from a 30,000 foot view. What is pH, as in, what does it stand for? And how would you describe it, and specifically the relation to what it actually is, and this idea of acidity? Yeah,

so pH is oftentimes used in the context of acid base chemistry, and what it actually stands for is something like potential of hydrogen, or parts hydrogen, power of hydrogen. I've, you know, seen all three of these various phrases used to describe it, but the important thing is that it's just a measurement of the concentration of hydrogen ions in solution. The hydrogen ions are different than hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms themselves, they are. They're comprised of one proton and one electron. So what happens is, when that electron gets lost, you're left with just a proton, and the concentration of those protons is what we measure pH as. So the greater the concentration of those protons, the lower the pH, meaning it's more acidic, quote, unquote. And then the decrease in that concentration of proton results. Eventually you get it to a pH of seven, which is fairly neutral. And then once you start going above seven, obviously there's different implications, because it's not, you know, you're dealing with hydroxyl rather than proton concentrations. It's a little bit different. But the point that I want to try to make is where we're talking about, you know, acids, and we're talking about pH even when we're looking at the nuances of, like, how does pH affect nutrient availability? These are going to be things that revolve around concentrations of protons. And in a larger sort of context, a lot of the compounds that we describe as acids, like organic acids, you know, I talk about them quite a bit, like the the citric acids, the fulvic acids, the acetic acids. They're considered acids because they have the ability to donate these protons in a solution. So you put them in water, they lower the pH. They're acids because they can donate that but they have other properties, other qualities to them, that allow them to then bind with minerals, or complex with cations like calcium, potassium, magnesium, so on and so forth, in a way that increases their availability. And so there's there's connective tissue, if you look under the hood a little bit. But the general idea is that, yes, the you know, the concentration of hydrogen or protons in the solution can actually dictate or inform the way that nutrient metabolism, nutrient transfer occurs. But is a complex topic.

I do want to dig right into that. But before that, talk to me about the pH scale you talk about. You know, six is neutral, and the low end is is acidic, and high towards the higher end is basic. But it's not like an even one to one, right? Like the distance between pH one and two is shorter than the distance between pH two and three, correct? Well, because it's

a logarithmic scale, the difference is 10x per unit. So if we're going from four to five, the difference is 10. If we're going from five to six, the difference is 10. But if we're going from four to six, the difference is 100 Oh, okay, so you have 100 times the concentration of protons present when we're talking about a pH of four. The way that the scale moves, more or less, is linear, in the sense that two to three is 10 x3 to four is 10x so on and so forth. But if you look at two to three versus two to four, or two to five, or two to six, that's where you get 10 100,000 10,000 so on and so forth. This increase in the concentration of proton is the, sort of the logarithmic side of it. So

that's why, next time you're driving yourself crazy trying to pH your solution, sometimes you'll there's that meme that goes around, right? Which is, like, add one drop, and it like, changes this amount, and then you and then it kind of stops, and you have to, like, add an F ton of drops. You know what? I mean? It's because it's not equal

distances. Yeah. And the other thing to consider, too, is, if you're adding a pH down after you've added in all of your elements, the way that that free proton, let's say you're adding a phosphoric acid based pH down, the way that the acidic molecule that. Phosphoric acid dissociates, and water releases those protons. Those protons start to interact with all of the ends, the PS, the K so on and so forth. You know, without knowing specifically the composition, it's hard to say what exactly is going on, but it's generally true that you have this buffer in the feed water, meaning that the change that occurs if you put one drop of pH down into your feed water. If that feed water is highly concentrated in nutrients, let's say you're at, you know, 1000 ppms of fertilizer in there. The there's going to be some time required for that proton to work its way across and all that energy to be dissipated. So the final measurement or reading should really be done a couple of minutes after it's added. But let's say on the flip side, you start with just plain water. It's got no ppms inside of it. The changes are going to happen relatively quickly, because there's no buffers inside of that feed water. So the change happens rapidly. That

makes perfect sense. So if you're putting it on top of your reservoir that's full of all these nutrients, that's why these growers are driving themselves crazy. If it was RO water, it would just swing

wildly. It would swing very quickly. Yes, it would definitely swing quickly. All right, cool. That's my first big takeaway. I didn't realize that when you're when you're dealing with our

products, for example, you know it does the feed water itself is very acidic, but the longer you let that feed water sip, the more the chemistry starts to change. The pH will start to rise, because the microbes will start to act on the reduced forms of carbon, they'll break them down, and they'll release the energy, you know, it's useful for powering their biological processes, but it also causes the pH to progressively drift up, and then you have this sort of disconnection between the organic acids that are chelating the minerals. You know, they'll start to lose their ratio, so to speak, because the microbes have a much greater appetite for the organic acids than they do the minerals. And so they'll just kind of oxidize the organic acids and break them down, and the minerals just kind of hang out outside of their biological membranes, and they start to contribute to a buildup of the alkalinity inside of the feed water. So

that makes perfect sense, that that is the first time I've realized that's why you don't need to pH with your product, right? Because I've heard other companies say you don't need to pH with our product, but I think they're trying a totally different approach, trying to make it like pH Perfect. You're saying no, no, start at a really low acidic pH and then let the microbes break down and dissipate the acids, meaning that that pH swings. And the best thing about a swinging pH is that there's kind of a time period where each nutrient is going to be extremely available during that swing. Did I get that right?

Correct me? If I'm wrong, yeah. I mean, there's, there's a couple of points you touched on there. They'd be worth elaborating on. The first is that other fertilizer companies that are manufacturing, you know, pH, perfect solutions. In most of the cases that I've seen, they're just putting buffers, and usually it's a potassium phosphate buffer. So what that does is they're basically saying, look, it doesn't matter what your starting water is, whether you're on tap water, well water or RO water, the amount of potassium phosphate is relatively high in concentration, so it always pulls those various input waters down into, you know, approximately the range that they need to be in. It's never perfect, but, you know, in some cases, or in most cases, I should say it works out pretty well so, but it always puts you at a predictable pH, and it's very difficult to adjust the pH, because there's so much buffer that they put inside of their products that it's very difficult to change the pH afterwards. The fundamental difference with ours is you don't need to adjust the pH, because those organic acids that we use, those can be taken up in massive concentrations by plants. In fact, the more the merrier. And you know, the beautiful thing about them is that they can be oxidized to release the energy, because they represent stored pools of energy. So they're not going to burn plants, necessarily. If you're talking about inorganic acids like phosphoric acid or sulfuric acid, nitric acid, you know, I've seen all of these be used agro operations. You can only introduce so much into the feed water before the concentration of that sulfuric acid or nitric acid or phosphoric acid, over, you know, overcomes the plant's ability to deal with it. In other words, there's not natural mechanisms at place that plants have for dealing with high concentrations of phosphoric acid, because it doesn't happen in nature. On the flip side, it's a byproduct of plant metabolism, of photosynthesis, I should say, of the electron transport chain, which, you know, we'll get into this. On the redox chemistry side, plants produce organic acids. They get pushed out of the roots. And you know, this happens through photosynthesis in the leaves. Organic acids are produced. They're secreted out of the roots. The function of those organic acids, and the reason they are specifically such a low pH, is because they acidify the surrounding medium, which typically, in most cases, is going to be rich in minerals, right? It's going to be rich in some kind of mineral compound, like, like a silicate rock, for example. Let's say we're doing, we're talking about the chemical weathering of rocks if you're just growing either outdoors or, like, in your case, in Hawaii, for example, it's rich in volcanic soil, you know, it's maybe a little bit lower organic matter than more established, you know, farmland in the continental United States. But the idea is that you've got the surrounding environment outside of the. Roots, that tends to be very low in organic matter, generally speaking. And plants are actively trying to pump out organic acids because it weathers chemically. Weathers the calcium silicates and the potassium silicates, you know, and all these natural minerals that make up the crust of the earth. I mean, feldspars are the most one of the most abundant mineral complexes on the crust of the earth, and those are frequently broken down by plants through this mechanism of photosynthesis, producing organic acids. Those acids being pushed out of the roots and then participating in chemical weathering to actually chelate and complex and break down those minerals and then reabsorb them. So the the pH of the rhizosphere is always, by default, by design, it's It's low. For plants, it's very low.

So it's all about those organic acids you can't have. They're swimming in it. You're saying organic acids, you're swimming in it. That's why they're not a problem.

Yes, yes. And the pH of the rhizosphere can be much lower than the pH of our feed water. In some cases, the pH of the rhizosphere can be like somewhere between three and four. And so if you mix up a batch of our products and you notice the pH is 4.5 that's actually in that sweet spot for what plants naturally do in their roots. This is why plants don't get burned when you when you feed such a low pH with our products, wow. You know, just as a sort of a mechanism of action, what's happening there. There's obviously things that can get in the way, you know, if you've got bad soil chemistry, or if you've got the wrong composition of nutrients in the soil, you know, there could be some adverse interactions. But just as far as, like, how our products work, you know, interfacing directly with the rhizosphere metabolism. I mean, they plug right in, right down to the pH, the ability for those protons to kind of move around and participate in chelation reactions and things like

that. Yeah, and that buffer on other products makes sense the way you described it, like they're just trying to get it to that pH and they're adding all these other acids that. I mean, that's one of the reasons why your product plays nicely with a living soil, for instance. I'm sure those other products, there's probably a lot of reasons why it's not great for a living soil, one being that excessive buffer. And I gotta tell you, man, I'm not gonna call out any companies, but I've worked with growers who have personally used those other, quote, pH, perfect products, and they had major issues, like they just, it just did not work very well. So, yeah, so props to you. Props to rooted leaf for for actually doing it right.

Thanks. Yeah, it's, you know, it's been a interesting few past few years has been, been trying to figure out exactly how these products work and on what level. There's not a whole lot of scientific literature available about, you know, carbon based fertilizers and these specific things that we're finding out to be true. So a lot of it is like we're figuring it out in real time. You know, we're doing a lot. We pay a lot of attention to the results that we're hearing feedback from customers and continually building out our understanding of what exactly is going on, because it is very complex. And I want to try to, you know, kind of reiterate that as we start to get into the more new, you know, nuanced aspects of this conversation, that redox chemistry and how it interfaces with pH is is very complex New Frontier.

Yeah, I feel like we've got to, I've got to grasp so far, man. And I gotta be honest, you know, I gotta turn on my brain when I do these interviews with you, so I can lock in these levels of understanding. So I think I'm with you so far. Now, here's where I want to go back to what we said we were going to focus on, which is, let's go back to that pH affecting other minerals uptake. So you take a look at the pH uptake chart, a lot of the micronutrients are down a little bit lower. A lot of the macronutrients are up a little bit higher on that chart. Why does the percentage of hydrogen affect whether or not a plant can take up a micronutrient versus a macronutrient?

This is one of those complex answers where it's not like there's an intermediary step here. I may have actually mentioned this earlier, but when we're talking about acids, we're looking at compounds that they can release protons in solution. And it's not the release of protons in a solution that guides the formation of those chelates. It's actually the loss of the proton to begin with, because that can be replenished. The nice thing about these organic acids is that they've got the ability to both lose a proton and also accept another positively charged element. In some cases, it could be cation. It could be something like a potassium or a calcium or magnesium ion. So the acids themselves, you know, it's not a function of the concentration of protons, which is what we're talking about when we're measuring pH. Okay, it's more about the effect that the molecule which donated that hydrogen and therefore lowered the pH of the solution. Once it donates that hydrogen, it has this open site available. And it's basically looking, you know, broke up with one relationship, so to speak, and now it's open for another relationship. And sometimes the relationship that comes along could be one that's made with potassium or calcium or magnesium. And in this kind of context, we have this chelation chemistry, this complex and chemistry that happens. The difference, I guess you could say, between chelation and complexing is how many different bonds are made with that one. A particular element. So potassium, being monovalent, only has one sort of charge site on it where it can occupy and be held in a relationship. And so this doesn't really make a true chelate in the sense of the word. It actually makes a complex. So the complex, the strength that bond, is actually a little bit weaker than you would find in a true chelate. I

think I understand what you're saying, though, which is, it's not about the concentration of the hydrogen itself. It's, like you said, it's about the effects of the donation of that hydrogen and then also the space that it creates for a new relationship. I think I've got

that, yes, yes. That's pretty accurate. Those organic acids once they release the proton into solution and therefore drive the pH down, which, you know, you put your pH program in, the more acidic it is, the greater the concentration of proton got it. There's some compound in there that releases that proton. And once it releases it, it has this active site that's open to be, you know, interacting with other compounds or other and that's the

chelation. That's where it can grab the mineral chelate it meaning it's now uptakeable.

Yes, chelate or complex, complex. And what happened with monovalent elements like calcium, which just has that one positive charge on it, and God, a little bit different than something like a true chelate, which is defined by multiple bonding sites. You can make a chelate with calcium because it's divalent. It has two sites where that connection can be made, so to speak. And the same thing with magnesium, it's also divalent, so it has two different sites where it can make that bond. If you have two bonds instead of just one, the strength of those bonds inherently goes up, and that makes the degree to which something is bound up can actually it's referred to as the stability constant. Stability constant is just a measurement of how stable is that, the strength of that bond, How stable is it, and how much energy actually has to go into breaking it apart? Wow. Because you got to consider too, if you're chelating something and you're protecting the charge and preventing it from interacting, suppose the plants want the calcium, and they want that positive charge to interact with that negative charge on the pectic acid residue, so they can make a cell wall. There's a certain amount of energy that might have to go into breaking the chelate down and breaking it apart. And this is where the stability constant kind of factors in and is relevant. Now, the nice thing about organic acids is, generally speaking, they're very you know, plants can readily oxidize them. They're very quick. They're very rapidly broken down, and they get kind of plugged into these various pathways that can be used for redox chemistry as well as acid base chemistry. So there's a little bit of a transition there. You know, pH and acid base chemistry is more a function of like a group of molecules is behaving. So when we're talking about a high concentration of protons, we're not looking at the individual properties of those protons. That's less relevant in the context of pH. What's more relevant is just their concentration, just the numbers that are there. It's it's a way of looking at dynamics that happen when you have lots and lots of these things just floating around, and how that affects systems at large, as opposed to looking at the specific individual properties of those protons. Does that kind of make sense?

I think I've got it. Man. I think I'm on on board with that. And this is what your whole line is based off. Of those complex amino acids as chelates, right? Like you're a unique source of them, and that's kind of how your whole system goes.

Yeah, yeah, we do chelate and complex all of our minerals. They're fully chelated, fully complex, depending on what they are, obviously, but yeah, it's very heavy on the organic acid side, on the reduced carbon side, and then on the fully chelated cation side, because that allows us to extend the pH range at which a lot of these minerals and elements are available. You know, like, if you look online and just look up charts for pH and nutrient availability, there's all kinds of charts that will pop up and show you that some elements are more available at lower PHS, others are more available at, you know, slightly higher PHS, and then all the micronutrients just fall right off a cliff above a pH of 7.0 or, you know, let's say 7.2 7.5 somewhere in there. But when you're talking about the individual elements themselves, that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to say, Well, if you have a chelating agent, or if there's something complexing that functionally, it extends the pH range of availability. So instead of just falling off a cliff at 7.0 if you've got your micronutrients in the proper, chelated form, they can still remain available for plants to take up even above a pH of 7.0 and this is one of those important things that I think oftentimes gets overlooked when we're talking about nutrient availability. I

wouldn't have assumed that, yeah, I was part of that misconception for sure,

yeah, because the behavior of those calciums and those magnesiums and those potassiums is going to be influenced by the concentration of other things around it, like those organic acids, which tend to lower the pH, they also tend to interact with those minerals, and sometimes that interaction leads to that mineral being soluble across a much broader pH range than if you didn't have that organic acid there, or if you had a different molecule there. You know that's why there's so many different even with synthetic cheating agents like EDTA, ed ha, DTPA, there's so many different flavors of these synthetic. Key leading agents because they have fundamentally different behaviors across these pH ranges that they're used in for. You know, whether it's like industrial application or agricultural application, you know, key leading agents can be used for a variety of things dependent on the pH requirements.

So you know that does make sense, though, because you've discussed it on earlier episodes. You've said before. What you're essentially saying is it's not just pH that determines nutrient uptake. There's interactions between specific minerals going on in there. There's solubility in general. It's not just this thing of here's the pH scale. Can it take it? It's multiple factors.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's it. Because if you're measuring pH, again, it's just the concentration of proton in solution, and that has little to no bearing whatsoever on any kind of chelation chemistry. But the thing that does got it is the compound that released the proton. So if you're measuring again, if you're measuring the pH, this is where that connective tissue kind of gets a little bit weird. And this octopus of our topic starts to, like, change its skin texture and color overall. So it's like, what do we it's more even talking about here, yeah. What are we talking about here? So what we're talking about is basically acids being defined by the release of protons. Those protons being measured by your pH probe, and then any kind of minerals interacting with not the protons, but with the organic acids that forms the chelation chemistry, or the complex in cannabis? Wow,

that makes sense. I got that dude. I you, you got me there. I want to throw a bit of a curve ball at you just briefly and talk about bacterial dominance versus fungal dominance, just for a second, because cannabis oftentimes gets cited as a lover of fungi. And people say, Oh, it's fungally dominant because of this pH argument. Well, it likes slightly it likes slightly acidic soil. It's a little Erica s, right? So therefore it must prefer fungi. Other people are like, no high bacterial concentration, because it's a shorter flowering plant. It's not a tree or something like that. It's a faster plant, and then bacteria prefers those things. Where do you fall on the fungal or bacterial dominant side? Or is it less important for growing

great cannabis? I mean, I think that that it's probably less important. The way that I look at it is, you know, plants, as they grow, will kind of, they're going to figure out their own biochemical needs, and you know, the microbes or the fungi that support them in whatever they're trying to do are going to be the ones that are preferentially fed. So there's environments and circumstances in which your cannabis plants may end up forming the relationships with mycorrhizal fungi or with mycelia and actually have a notable benefit associated with it. That's why there's so many studies out there that point to beneficial fungi and the effects that they have on plant metabolism. But then on the flip side too, there's lots of instances or circumstances where those beneficial fungi don't really have the same effect, right? You know, just as one example, fungi like mycorrhizal fungi, they're known to help plants with phosphorus starvation. So when you have low levels of phosphorus available to the plants, mycorrhizal fungi can actually help alleviate that in cannabis plants. But what happens if you don't have any kind of low phosphorus environment for the plants, if you're feeding them soluble phosphorus fertilizers, if you're doing foliar sprays, sure of fertilizers that contain phosphorus, then the context shifts a little bit, and the benefits that are typically associated with that fungal species aren't there anymore because there's no phosphorus limitation. This isn't to say that the relationship is, you know, one dimensional and it's useless to have beneficial fungi or beneficial microbes. It's just that they end up doing so many different things that it's hard to just say it does this specifically, where it does that. I have seen in certain cases. You know, aerobic microbes work fantastic for cannabis plants. I've seen other cases where mycorrhizal fungi work fantastic cannabis. I think it just comes down to the environment that they're being grown in, and what kind of equilibrium they need to establish in the rhizosphere to maintain that optimum chemistry. That's a

great answer. So they play well with everything. That's what we've observed as well. You know, you take a look at all all the different soil that people are growing with across the country, and cannabis seems to do well in a variety of different ratios. When it comes to microbes,

it's remarkably adaptive. This plant, it exhibits so much plasticity that you can pretty much grow it anywhere on earth. You can grow high altitude, low altitude, northern latitudes, southern latitudes, you can grow on the, you know, near the equator, near the polar regions, like there's very few places on earth that you know, you couldn't figure out a way to grow cannabis, and progressively acclimated for being grown in that region. It's very hearty, very resilient plant, and it's very it demonstrates huge amount of plasticity, in the sense that it's got all these tools available to it that are produced through photosynthesis, like the, you know, organic acids, the flavonoids, the other secondary metabolites that might serve as a food source for beneficial fungi or beneficial microbes. And then once it's got that food source produced through photosynthesis, it starts to select for the various species of whatever's growing in the soil. And. Hey, if you can support me in this, I'll feed you, and you start to get these synergistic relationships happening. Now, there are cases outside of cannabis where these synergistic relationships happen over very long periods of time, like with rhizobia and legumes. For example, legumes tend to exist synergistically with rhizobia because the rhizobia participate in nitrogen fixation, on behalf of the legumes. Legumes, they're not very good at it. They just kind of suck. So they're inherently limited by the availability of nitrogen. They're always looking for more nitrogen. They always want more of it. So what they've figured out over the course of 100 or so million years is how to generate organic acids, which are easy for it because it photosynthesizes, you know, uses the power of the sun to create reduced carbon, and then it specifically feeds certain flavors of that carbon down to rhizobia, which participate in fixing nitrogen out of the air, breaking it apart, and then delivering soluble nitrogen to the legumes that's available for them to take up, whether it's a nitrate form or an amino acid or some other ammonia form, or, you know, half built molecule, if you will. Could even be a part of a larger protein residue or something like that. You know, it's very complex stuff. It's a beautiful relationship. Yeah, yeah. The point is, some of these relationships have been evolved over very long periods of time, because it's easier to get along and to cooperate with the microorganisms in the soil than it is to just be on your own and say, No, I'm going to figure this out alone. Yeah, that's

exactly right. And like you said, cannabis is adaptable. Grow cast membership, that's right. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, brings you right there. If you love grow cast, you will absolutely love our membership program. Not only do you get hundreds of hours of bonus content and live content every single week, our live video, web show, grow cast TV every single Wednesday, amas, Q and A streams. We've also got members only discounts in there, so you can save on your grow gear. And these are members only codes. Okay? They're secret codes that you get a deeper discount than anywhere else on all your favorite products, from Bucha, earthworks to rain science grow bags, even microbes from Okay, call x. We got special member only discounts coming in all the time, members only giveaways. Access to our Discord where you can get personalized garden advice. If you got a problem, Mary Beth will solve it for you. Wolf Man will jump in there and tell you about your product. We're hanging out in the discord every single day, and you can get it all at growcast podcast.com/membership I also do a weekly members only video, if that's not enough for you for some quick educational hits that are sure to deepen your understanding of your garden and your cannabis plant. We got monthly resources. We got Friday night Hangouts. So much is going on in Grow cast membership. It makes growing fun again. If you used to be a member, come check out all the new benefits. If you haven't joined yet, what are you waiting for? Grow cast podcast.com/membership, if you like this program, you will love grow cast membership, our little club. We call it the order of cultivation, and I hope to see you in soon. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, huge. Thank you to all the members who support this show and make this whole community possible. Grow cast membership, everybody. I'll see you there. This has been a solid episode. We got to get into the second half here. We're going to carve into, I guess, what you referred to as, kind of the other side of the coin of pH, which you called, eh, this redox cycle, this oxygenation and deoxygenation cycle. I could use some further understanding. So let's start from the top. What is eh? What does this have to do with oxygen and redox? Yeah, yeah. So this is

an interesting concept, because I think a lot of people have heard of pH, but they haven't heard of eh. And I just wanted to try to build out some connective tissue, because there is this sort of phase shift that happens when we're talking about the flow of electrons and the flow of protons, when we're talking about protons, again, the concentration of those protons is measured as h plus. It's obviously oxidized hydrogen, but it's not really referred to in the context of oxidized hydrogen. We refer to it as protons or acids, just kind of with a blanket statement. But the important thing is, there's something that happens. And, you know, I also thought about the best way to kind of lay this concept out to people, as far as, how do you introduce redox chemistry as a sort of a very large level topic? And I think the answer to that is, everybody knows plants have an electron transport chain. So maybe we start there. Maybe we start with, what is photosynthesis? There's this light energy that comes in and initiates an electron transport chain that ultimately produces ATP and NADPH. Now along the way, plants will take up molecules of water, and they use the power of the sun. You know that power generated, obviously and funneled and concentrated through the electron transport chain, starts to get funneled towards these water molecules, and the water molecules get split apart. Now everybody knows, or perhaps learned in kindergarten or high school that plants will breathe out oxygen, you know, they take in CO two and they breathe out oxygen. They release the oxygen. Humans, on the flip side, we take in oxygen and we breathe back out CO two. So this is kind of like, you know, two halves of a heartbeat, if you will, the way that. Plants metabolize in the way that humans metabolize fits in perfectly with each other. The thing about the you know, when plants use the power of the sun to split water molecules apart, what they do is they generate oxygen that we're very familiar with. They also generate protons and they generate electrons. Those electrons get, you know, reinserted back into the electron transport chain, so it actually becomes a chain, where it becomes a cycle that can continue to feed itself and power itself based on its own activities. The protons start to accumulate, and they form what's called a proton gradient. And people may have been introduced to this concept at large in high school and some advanced chemistry class or biology class, but this concentration of protons, as it builds up, will eventually power the ATP synthase mechanism. You have this buildup of proton on one side, it contributes to, you know, an acidification overall, and then that drives the high concentration of protons, actually drives a mechanism that synthesizes ATP so it takes a ADP molecule, which is adenosine diphosphate, and using the power of that proton gradient, it will actually attach a third phosphate group onto that diphosphate group. So you get this ATP, or adenosine tripod,

the universal energy currency that we discussed in the phosphorus episode. Yeah.

And so, you know, again, the origin point of all this is you have this flow of energy coming in from the sun. Photon energy is initially deposited as charge separation. You have this electron transport activity happening. Water molecules are split. You start generating a proton gradient. This is the kind of connective tissue I want people to understand, is you have this charge separation between protons and electrons that gets ultimately recombined in sort of the grand context of plant metabolism. So redox chemistry ultimately underpins all of biology, and redox chemistry actually informs acid base chemistry. I think pH is maybe 49% of the equation. And redox, or the transfer of electrons, and the movement of electrons through redox reactions, is actually about 51% of the, you know, importance of it. So redox basically reduction in oxidation, you know, maybe an easy way for people to remember this is use the acronym oil rig, oxidation is losing electrons and reduction is gaining electrons. Oil Rig, it should be an easy one to kind of remember, but this transfer of electrons is very important because it's the basis of photosynthesis. But the flow of electrons also starts to build up things like this proton gradient, and that proton gradient eventually creates ATP, and the ATP is like the universal currency here. So, you know, they're not fundamentally disjointed. They're actually kind of recombined downstream, you know, in plant metabolism,

and then is the expulsion of that oxygen, the losing of the electron. Is that, in the case of plants, is that the oxygen is losing part.

No, no. So oxidation technically means that you're losing electron. So when, yeah, when things are oxidized in a chemical sense, it means that they've lost electrons, whereas, if they're reduced, they've gained electrons. So that's occurring inside that transport chain, yes, yes. And again, to kind of take it back to the conversation of pH when you're when we're looking at what a proton is. Proton could be defined as oxidized hydrogen, because it doesn't have an electron anymore. We start off with a hydrogen atom, which has one electron and it's got one proton. We remove the electron, we're left with the proton. The concentration of that proton is ultimately what we refer to as pH. So the higher the concentration of those protons, the lower the pH, basically the more acidic something is got it. But we don't really refer to it as oxidized hydrogen, because it doesn't make sense in that context. We're not really looking at like the fact that it's missing an electron. We're looking at the behavior of that high concentration of protons, and what it does. It's behavior as a sort of a larger group, as opposed to, like, the individual nuanced properties. But the transfer of electrons ultimately, is very, very important, because it allows for certain things to happen, like, if you have electrons flowing towards biosynthetic machinery, you can get enzymatic activity. You can get antioxidant activity as a result of that as well. And plants produce a lot of antioxidants because they are subject to oxidative stress. There's so much oxygen in this environment that the natural default state is for things to be oxidized. Plants have to deal with something like 200,000 parts per million of oxygen in the air, and they have to deal with about 420 parts per million of CO two in the air. So these are vastly different concentration

so they're saturated in oxygen. And that's Is that why they produce things like flavonoids, which are technically antioxidants, or does that not play into it?

It does. It does so you have in plants, you've got enzymatic and non enzymatic defense systems, I guess you could say antioxidant systems. A lot of the enzyme based antioxidant systems, those will actually draw reduction power directly away from photosynthesis. So when you have that flow of electron energy going through the plant, the gaining of electrons. So you know, you capture the electron, and that electron will be used to reduce something, right? Because, if you. In an electron, it means you're reduced. So you want your antioxidants to be in a reduced state. You want them to always have electrons available, because then when an oxidizer comes along, like if you've got some oxidative stress, and oxidative stress, you know, by the way, it can happen outside the context of just biological systems. In other words, you don't have to have the electron transport chain to have oxidative stress, all you have to have is sunlight in this atmosphere along with oxygen. That's it. Even before biology gets factored in to this, we have to understand we're living on a planet that is very rich in oxygen, and that oxygen likes to react with things. It loves to react with things, especially in the presence of excess light energy, because that light energy when it's used to capture electrons, oxygen wants to take those electrons, which is a phenomena called oxidizing, right? Oxidizing is losing electrons. So if the electron transport chain gains electrons from the sun, which it does, sometimes those electrons are robbed out of the electron transport chain. This is where you start to get reactive oxygen species formation. You start to get oxidative stress that builds up. And the reason that you want your antioxidants to be fully reduced is because reduction is a gaining of electrons. And if you have oxidizers that are trying to steal electrons, you have these compounds that come in, and they quench that oxidative stress by donating the electrons and neutralizing the stress. It's no longer a threat because it was neutralized.

Oh, my goodness. So this ties back into other episodes we've done as well. And it's funny because it's like, you know, you talk about anthocyanin in this pigment, flavonoid, and it's like, yeah, like, it comes when you make your plant cold. And that was my understanding of it for so long. And it seems like these compounds have so many different effects, just not just as an anti freeze and as part of the body of desire, but actually affecting this redox cycle. That's really wild, man. I think I've got a pretty clear picture of this. I've got a clearer picture of this now than I have before. Let me ask you this, is there anything specific that we need to know when we're growing cannabis? Is this like a very universal cycle that all sorts of plants are utilizing? How does it differ with cannabis, when we're like creating trichomes and things like that, anything we need to think of differently?

Yeah. I mean, the important consideration is cannabis, the molecules that we're trying to get cannabis plants to produce require a large amount of energy. This is why you need high intensity and direct light. You need good air flow. You need to maintain type parameters. It's very difficult to grow. You know, award winning cannabis off to the side, away from direct light, watering only once a week, and keeping the neutral program relatively minimal. Generally speaking, the parameters have to be such that the plane is going to be subject to stress, and very intense levels of stress too. In some cases, the amount of stress that we expose cannabis plants to could end up killing a lot of different crops because they're just not capable of handling that high level of stress. So it's an inherently stressful environment, and that's why I think it's so important to keep in mind that anytime that you increase the potential for oxidative stress, you want to increase the reductive power available to the plants, because if you have more organic acids, if you've got more you know, this is why some of the foliar sprays that we make work so well on plants that are yellow and not looking good, is because they're off that equilibrium. They're in a state where they're more oxidized. And by giving them organic acids which have that reduction power baked into their bonds, plants will access that and use that to neutralize and quench that stress immediately. I mean, it happens pretty freaking fast. In some cases, the enzymes that regulate this, they're called diffusion limited enzymes, and so they operate literally as fast as the laws of physics will allow the changes to occur. Wow. It's not a matter of, like, days or even minutes. I mean, it's like, literally the moment that the plant is exposed to these compounds, these organic acids, it can start to utilize them immediately, whether it's daytime or nighttime or whatever. That is really cool. In the context of growing cannabis, it's important to remember that highlight intensity increases reactive oxygen species formation, because if you're shining more light on your plants, you're exciting that electron transport chain more and more. And at a certain point, if you excite it too much, and there's some overflow that starts to occur, sometimes that excess energy can actually be accepted by oxygen, and it starts to cause some pretty serious damage. If you start to form reactive oxygen species, you might notice that your plants can actually get burned from the light itself. And this is, this is the mechanism by which the actual burn that you see when the lights are up too high and you notice that your leaves are starting to scorch. This is the mechanism that's occurring there's too much light energy coming in, there's so much oxygen that's absorbing all of it, and it's creating oxidative stress. The plants don't have enough reductive power to deal with that oxidative stress, and they end up just the leaves end up burning to a crisp, because everything's oxidized, right? Everything turns brown. You know, it's like if you cut open an apple and watch it brown. That's an oxidation phenomena that's occurring you're exposing. You know, in this case, it's enzymatically driven, because there's an enzyme called Polyphenol oxidase that is acting on that oxygen. But point being, ultimately, it's kind of the same thing happening. There's so much oxygen present at. All times inside of the plant, outside of the plant, everywhere surrounding the plant that the oxygen is always hungry for electrons, it always is. That makes sense, yeah. If you excite that electron, transport pain too much, you're going to get some stress. Coronavis are an example of a defensive compound that all plants produce. You may have seen this. It's the orange pigment. It gives carrots the orange color, but it's also present in all plants. And Coronavirus are really interesting because they're specifically engineered by plants to be able to soak up Exudative excess oxidative stress when you have chlorophyll becoming too excited and that energy isn't flowing properly, instead of, instead of just the chlorophyll apparatus bursting because it's been oxidized by some oxygen. What ends up happening is the Coronavirus is capable of accepting all that oxidative stress that's generated, and it dissipates that across it's very long, you'll see like this conjugated carbon skeleton of all carotenoids, and that's where the energy actually physically gets dispersed callous,

like it's been stressed, and now it's got this other thing there that can handle the stress. Yeah.

So you know, Coronavirus are specifically engineered by plants. They've got these molecular structures where they can accept excess oxidative stress and quench it by dissipating all that energy down their molecular skeletons. Sometimes, when that energy becomes a little bit excessive, even for the Coronavirus to deal with, they can actually break. There's certain spots along their frames, if you will, where they can actually snap apart. And, you know, keep in mind, Coronavirus are Tetra terpene molecules. They're C 40 molecules. You know, we've talked a lot about mono terpenes. We've talked about sesquiterpenes. You know, diterpenes would be things like cannabinoids, to some extent. And then also the TETRA turpens Are the C 40. And then there's, you know, various configurations of these carotenoids, depending on what they exist and but the point is, ultimately that they're there to help plants deal with excess oxidative stress. And what ends up happening is, when there's too much oxidative stress, Coronavirus can break apart and they release certain compounds that are like the oxidative byproduct, right? So you have this oxidative stress that's flowing through a molecule produced by a plant, a Coronavirus. In this case, that Coronavirus will break apart and form a hormone called abscisic acid. Abscisic acid down regulates plant growth. It will actually slow down photosynthesis. Because the idea, again, is in environments or conditions where the light intensity is very high and the oxidative stress is very high on the plants. That's a feedback loop for the plant. There's a signal that comes through, and the way that signal comes through again is this flow of excess stress physically breaking a molecule apart, and then the remnants of that molecule become a hormone that down regulate photosynthesis. When the plant notices that the concentrations of abscisic acid increase, everything else gets down regulated, because that mech, that feedback loop, is a mechanism for plants to be able to determine if there's too much hot sauce coming into the system or not.

Jeez, that that clicks for me. That is wild. And I love this idea that you're talking about when you're growing, when you're trying to grow, like you said, top quality flour. You need to apply these stressors while simultaneously applying the things that ease these stressors. It's just like getting strong as a human, right? You need to stress your muscles. But it's not just all about stress. You don't not drink water and take your supplements and eat a well balanced diet, right? It's not just like, hey, plants will produce more trichomes when you stress them. It's about very selective stressors and then also providing the things that ease those stressors. You know what I mean? Yeah, and

understanding that stress is ultimately, it has to be a balanced system. If you're going to stress your plants, you better give them some stress relief or some stress support. You know, like we were talking about earlier, you mentioned flavonoids. I also want to mention certain types of organic acids, like ascorbic acid, vitamin C. Vitamin C is fundamental for plants. I mean, they always have a pool of vitamin C available to them, because if you give them these organic acids that have the ability to donate electrons, then what they do is they deal with oxidative compounds. So plants, generally speaking, some secondary metabolites can be accumulated as a way for the plants to simply populate their surrounding. Let's say it's the cytoplasm, or it's the vacuole, or whatever cellular compartment we have here, if there's molecules floating around, just have the ability to say, Here you go. Here's an electron. Now get the heck out of here. That's what plants want to be rich in because if you continue to expose them to higher and higher light intensities, while they have a higher and higher potential to quench oxidative stress, you're going to get better results that way. And you're also going to get better expression of secondary metabolites, which is what we're at just real quick. I do want to mention as well that there are, you know, there's compounds that are produced, like the flavonoids, like certain organic acids. These are not necessarily enzyme systems to deal with stress. There are very fundamental systems that are enzyme based that deal with oxidative stress, things like superoxide dismutase, catalase, peroxidase. There's all these enzymes that end in ASE, those enzymes, they participate in a. System that allows plants to funnel reduction power generated through photosynthesis into quenching oxidative stress. So a lot of times that light energy that's being absorbed by the plants, instead of going all the way to making a sugar, for example, or even producing ATP, well, they produce NADPH. That's kind of the redox equivalent. But the point is, ultimately, here, sometimes that that electron energy flowing through photosynthesis actually goes to these enzymes that are antioxidant related, you know, part of the antioxidant stress, exactly. They need that reduction power, because they, if they're rich in electrons, they can quench all of the oxidative stressors that want to take all of the electrons away. So they complex, and they they they manage out this. They kind of create their own buffer, if you will. And that's why I mentioned earlier that redox networks underpin all of biology. They even go so far as to inform acid base chemistry. In other words, the flow of electrons is the thing that guides the formation of a proton gradient. And therefore, in my opinion, eh as redox potential is actually a more important consideration than pH as a concentration of protons and solution. The two are fundamentally linked together. But there's that octopus thing happening again, where it's like when we're talking about redox, we're talking about the flow of electrons, the gaining of electrons, the losing of electrons. And what are the sort of things that happen when you gain and lose electrons, right? But then, on the flip side, when we're talking about pH, it's a concentration of protons. It's not about the individual behavior of an oxidized hydrogen. It's more about just the concentration of a proton, regardless of the fact that it was, you know, it could also be considered as an oxidized form of hydrogen. That's not really a relevant discussion in the context of acid base chemistry, more so for redox chemistry, but the two, again, they're they're hardwired. There's just that really weird spot in the middle. Yeah, that that link, it's so hard to describe. That's why I'm like, this is an octopus that's changing its texture and color and shape. When you're looking at it from the perspective of redox chemistry versus acid base chemistry or pH, you know,

that's amazing, man, that's just, you just locked that in. For me, I feel like I have a better understanding now than ever. Before, we're gonna need to do a part two, because we're up against it here. So we've got a hard out. But what an episode. Listeners write me what you thought? I've had a lot of breakthroughs just from listening here, like all the way to you know the basics of pH, the fact that it's a measure of just percent hydrogen, right? But it's less about that hydrogen itself, and more about the interactions between the minerals and the donation of that hydrogen, freeing up organic acids to make complex and chelates. And on top of that, it's not just about either of those. Uptake is also about solubility and complex reactions going on. I loved the redox explanation, the trend, the electron transport chain. I feel like I got a better understanding of the reduction versus oxidization, right? Oil Rig is a great acronym to remember. And then finally, all this talk about oxidative stress and antioxidants, we got to do a part two. Nick but, but this was absolutely amazing, man. Shout out your stuff. You deserve it after a badass episode like this. Ruder leaf.com, code grow cast, yep. Rooterleaf.com

code grow cast, hit me up on Instagram. I'm always the person that responds to the messages if you guys have questions, and I definitely appreciate everybody tuning in. So I appreciate the the positive feedback, definitely. And if anybody else has any questions, if you guys want further clarity, or if you want greater detail about anything that I talked about, please feel free to reach out. I'm always very nice, and everybody, I love talking about this stuff. And you know where I sometimes feel like I fumble and kind of skip around, you know, there's an opportunity to maybe elaborate on some of the stuff. So yes, please on a on a round two of this exact same topic, because it really does warn a further discussion. Let's

revisit it. Man, and then, of course, thank you for all your work in the discord, helping out the members, uh, grow cast podcast.com/membership, Nick is in there just crushing it in people's gardens. Man, people using the rooted leaf, loving it, asking you other product questions. We got a nutrient calculator that we're going to be dropping in there as a resource. You guys are going to want to play around with this thing. So one more. Thank you, Nick, for being so involved in our Member community. Really awesome of you to do that. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right, buddy. We'll see you soon. Keep doing God's work and you listener the same. Hope you have an amazing time in your garden. Hope your yields are heavy and sticky. Stay tuned for more information, more badass episodes. I don't know why I'm using that word so much of this badass at growcast, so check it out. Grow cast podcast.com, membership, seeds. It's all there. Thank you so much listeners. Thank you so much members. This is Nick from rooted leaf and Jordan River, signing off saying, Be safe out there and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to Nick Of course, relief.com. Code growcast saves 20% on the best nutrients around and then growcastpodcast.com. For all our stuff, the membership, the seeds, everything we got a cultivators cup coming up. That's right. April 13 in loves Park, Illinois, that's just on the edge of Rockford. You. Go ahead and email me contact at growcast podcast.com it's invite only. You can go ahead and email request an invite. We'll tell you about the competition, and I can't wait to get back to Illinois, back to the growcast cultivators cup 20, 24/3 annual baby. Congratulations to our first winners for the first two years. Crazy Legs, of course, taking down year one, and then our friend Pukas taking down year two. Shout out to those guys. Lovely, lovely job. Can you take down the reigning champions? We will see April 13. Bubble hive loves Park, Illinois. Email contact at growcast podcast.com and ask about the cult cup. 24 going down April 13. I'll see you there. Everybody? All right, that's it for now. Love you guys, take care, be safe. Bye, bye. The

important thing is, there's something that happens you.