🚨Blue vs Red Spectrums, Lenses on LEDs, and Big Plants, with Dr. Coco

9:59AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Dr. Coco

Keywords:

AC Infinity

grow tents

oscillating fans

cloud ray system

auto flowering

feminized auto flowers

seedling stage

dry room

uniformity

light spectrum

blue light

red light

full spectrum

quantum boards

lenses

Greetings growers from around the world. Jordan River here back at you with more. Grow cast full spectrum daily. Today we have Dr Coco back on the line. You know, we talk about lights, we talk about spectrum, we talk about the new Viper spectra and lenses and so much more, including auto flower growing and growing big plants. It's a really good episode, super informative. I know you're gonna love this exploration with Dr Coco, but before that, shout out to AC infinity, baby acinfinity.com, code growcast One five to get your savings and keep the lights on. Here at growcast, we appreciate your support, and we love AC infinity. They make the best grow tents around extra thick poles. They've got nice, durable, thick siding now. They have the new side ports people have been asking for those in AC infinity list. And plus, they've got everything else you need to grow. They've got lights and pots and fans and their oscillating fans, the cloud Ray system. Check out their humidifiers. The cloud Forge. How nice is your humidifier? Maybe it's time to replace that. The Cloud rays are my favorite oscillators on the market. And of course, their cloud Line series, what they got it all started with all those years ago when we were partners with AC infinity, all they made were those inline fans, and they're the best in the game. So shout out to the entire AC infinity suite. They've got everything you need to get growing from fans to tents to lights. Code growcast One five works at AC infinity.com. You support us, and you're getting some badass, durable grow gear while you're doing it. So thank you to all you listeners using code grow cast one five, and thank you to AC infinity. Alright, everyone, let's get into it with the great 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 again today. Before we get started, as always, I urge you please turn someone on to grow cast. Turn someone on to growing it's the best thing you can do and see everything that we're up to at grow cast. Podcast.com, forward slash action there you'll see all the action seeds, membership, the classes, everything is up there. Today, we have a classic friend of grow cast back on the show. You know him. You love him. We're gonna knock out some listener questions today. Dr, Coco is back on the line. What's up? Dr, Coco, how you been?

Hey, Jordan, I've been doing really great. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be back. I always look forward to doing grow cast, Hell

yeah, man. We got a list of listener questions right here that are going to be really dope to knock out. I know you got a lot of thoughts on these, but really quickly, what's been going on? How's Coco for cannabis? How's the Patreon going auto flowers and all that? Yeah,

indeed. Yeah. So I started a new Patreon. I'm doing the Ask Dr Coco show every week through my Patreon. You know, it's it kind of spun out of the consulting work that I do for commercial growers, and wanting to kind of be able to spend time one on one with home growers in the same way, but kind of make it make sense for everybody involved, and at a budget that kind of would work for people. So decided to do it through Patreon. On the show, I'm really having fun with it. I have like a guest come on every week, and, you know, do like a little consultation with them on the show for the audience, they get to ask all their kind of questions. People send in questions in advance, and you can ask questions during the show. Do it on a zoom webinar. So I know you used to that platform, and, yeah, it's just fun. So I've been really enjoying doing that. We've been doing it for about a couple of months.

So, man, you had some interesting auto flower talk come up with a commercial grower, right?

Yeah, yeah. Actually had him on some of the guests on the show a while ago. But yes, I'm working with a new commercial client now who's growing auto flowers and setting up just two big rooms to do auto flowers, sort of on an offset. Really interesting we thought about, you know, sort of the standard reasons why most growers grow clones, the trade offs and the pros and cons, and in his situation, we decided to go for auto flowers. Lot of interesting things that are different about planning a large scale grow like that with auto flowers than there are when you're planning a large scale, grow like that with clones. That's just been really interesting to think through a lot of those kind of differences, if that makes sense,

yeah, can you talk about those? Are you using feminized auto flowers for? These? Are you? We

are using feminized auto flowers from some fairly big and reputable breeders. So one of the issues there is, you know, seedling stage is kind of inconsistent. I mean, it's hard to get you know, we're growing 80 plants per room for the first run through. So getting 80 plants to be pretty well coordinated. I mean, how many seeds do you have to start in order to be sure that you've got. Got sort of 80 good plants ready to move and flower right, keeping them all coordinated with auto flowers. It's a little bit tougher than with photos, because the photo periods you're just coordinating the flowering period. You're doing it by flipping the lights, and you're doing it when the plants are already sort of, you know, healthy, vigorous, mature, responsive plants. Timing autos from seed is, wow. It's a little bit more challenging, basically, figuring out plants that are going to grow well together. And just to give everybody a little bit of an insight why that's so important is because dry space is limited, so we have one dry room. You can't be kind of harvesting 80 different plants as they come, right? You've got to harvest them all on one day and load your dry room. You can't be sort of loading your dry room over the course of a week, because that'll really screw up the drying of the earliest plants that you put in there. You that

consistency that farmers want. And this points to what you've talked about on the show before, which is, like, you know, true uniformity and breeding and doing bread lines and these outcrosses, before we get into the listener questions, do you think that that's where everything is headed? I mean, here you are doing your first commercial feminized auto flower grow. Yeah, I know we've talked about this a little bit before, but is that not the future? Do you think Paul you think planting feminized auto flower seeds that all come out the same? You know? Yeah, one of

the things that I'm talking to the client about is he keeps complaining about the the lack of consistency, and I'm like, the breeders are still focused on, you know, maximizing terpenes, maximizing cannabinoids. They're still focused on these other issues that haven't sort of focused on consistency issues plants grown from seed, and, you know, the market hasn't demanded it, because the growers that are really sensitive to consistency have been growing clones, and the growers that are sort of growing seeds generally are at small enough scale that they don't need to be as concerned about, you know, coordination of all of the different plants, right?

And even they enjoy that, that little surprise, that little hunt. So there's actually a benefit in that, but I think that is going to shift the more and more commercial spaces that come online, the further we get these strains dialed in, like you're saying, especially on the auto flower side, I think the attention will turn towards uniformity.

Yeah. Well, one of the reasons that we decided to run this, this grow with auto flowers, is because we wouldn't have to have a separate space where we kept moms all of the time. We could turn that sort of space with only running two big flower rooms much more efficiently with growing plants from seed every time. So it's interesting that thinking through the different kinds of pros and cons, we got to be able to nail down some of these consistency issues, or figure that the other sort of strategy we've taken is, you know, we may be able to load the room with plants that are going to be at least two weeks later, like, if we have any issues and we can't fully load the room, then, you know, we could start plants that are at least two weeks behind, because by that point, the dry room will be empty. But nobody wants to run a room like that. You want to have, you know, your whole room be sort of maximally full the whole time. It's just presenting interesting challenges. But to get back to your original question, yes, I think this is showing sort of how significant the need is for consistency in cannabis seeds, if we expect larger scale growers to grow from seeds. And that's one of the interesting sort of idiosyncrasies of the cannabis market. I

think I agree, and I think it's coming. I think the change is coming. Man, yeah,

we're moving in that direction that they represent. And, you know, I'll be able to say more as this grow starts having harvests, right? But we're anticipating larger yields than we would be able to receive off of photo period, plants in the same timeline, right? And we would have to keep a separate space for moms. So if those sort of sides of our calculations bear fruit, right, if your calculations are correct, yes, yeah. And that's I said, like, I'll be able to say more about this. But there are other advantages in terms of, you know, maximizing your your capital utilization, like keeping your lights running for a longer period of the day, as opposed to having them off for 12 hours,

all those nuances, the space and all of that. It's going to be interesting to see the data that you have at this Yeah,

really cool. And then, and then think about how that works in different areas where this client is he has very cheap electricity, so running the lights longer doesn't represent a huge sort of additional cost where, you know, if we were able to get any kind of additional harvest out of that, it'd probably be worth it. Some other growers may be in a different situation with their costs. So that's what

per watt? Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah, that goes nicely into the four. First question that we have here from listeners that segue is really nice. Do you want to get into some light talk?

Yeah, let's get into some light talk. You're asking a question about a light I'm reviewing right now. But I think the other question is about like spectrum, right?

Okay, yeah. Let's start with spectrum, and then, yeah, I gotta hear about this Viper spectral light and all these new phrases that come out, man. But let's start from the top here. I did have a listener just write in and ask, can you have Dr Coco give a quick overview of, like, different parts of the light spectrum and what they mean? Like, we hear these kind of general overviews, like, oh, red light for flowering, you know, blue spectrum for veg, green doesn't affect the plants. Like, these are all just kind of, I know a lot of these are myths as well. Yeah, it's just kind of how we get, we get presented this information. So could you talk about light spectrum, blue versus red versus green, and why we use full spectrum light

Absolutely. So, you know, in a general sense, for photosynthesis, plants can harness, and we used to think it was just really the range from 400 to 700 nanometers. It goes a little bit higher, and really a little bit lower, as it sort of tapers off than that. But that 400 to say, 750 nanometers runs pretty much the same as the visible spectrum. So the shorter the 400 nanometer wavelength light is blue, and the longer 700 750 nanometer wavelength light is like red and far red infrared. And basically it's the rainbow in the middle, right? The rainbow actually is the prism that sort of reveals that spectrum, where you go from really violet and blue, there's greens and yellows in the 500 to 600 nanometers and then reds, basically above 600 plants use all of that light for photosynthesis, and we want to give them a mix, because we want to be activating both photo systems. So we don't want to just give them one wavelength of light that's not efficient. That's why the the original sort of LED lights would use red diodes and blue diodes and create this LARP light because they were basically trying to use the most efficient diodes at the time, the 450 nanometer blue diodes are very efficient, and The 660 nanometer red diodes are very efficient. So they would combine those two sets of diodes, they'd be triggering ball photo systems. There wouldn't be any green light in those those lamps plants drew pretty well under them, despite that, because, you know, photosynthesis was being sort of fully triggered, one of the biggest drawbacks of the Blurple lights for horticulture was that they made visual identification of plant issues very difficult. So

true, it's hard to see what the fuck is going on under that Blurple light. 100%

I mean, and you've been around this game long enough to remember when everybody was growing with Blurple lights. Somebody would send you a picture of their plants, and you'd be like, Okay, can you turn off the grow light and put a regular light on the plant? Because I can't see shit, right? Like, it's just like it looks it looks like dark almost, because like,

looks like, really, it looks like you sent me a shot from the club in the plant exactly,

exactly. So that's one of the issues, that's one of the benefits. And part of this question is sort of like, why do we use the full spectrum light? One of the reasons, and really one of the main reasons, is because it allows us to see the plants better and to be sort of better gardeners in that regard, because a lot of plant based issues with nutrition and with pests, you know, you observe them because of the way the coloration of the leaves, which is very difficult to observe under blurbable light. So that's part of it. Now, beyond sort of just powering photosynthesis, different wavelengths of light have different effects on how the plant is going to grow during vegetative growth. So when the plant is, you know, adding cells basically and growing vegetatively with cannabis plants, this is, you know, the first month or so with autos and until you flip to 1212, with photo period plants during that vegetative growth, if the plant is exposed to primarily blue light, then it will grow much sort of shorter cells, much stockier cells, basically, if it's exposed to A lot of red light, then it will grow longer cells, elongated cells, right? Assuming the same number of cells are added to the plant, then under red light, the plant is going to grow much, quote, unquote, stretchier than it would under blue

light, okay, that's something I've heard. So that's a real. Phenomenon with plants in general. Yes, that's

a real phenomenon. And that's why we used to veg under metal halide, right? Because HPS lights have too much red. And if you veg under HPS lights, you get these plants that are sort of tall and lanky, and growers preferred to have, you know, tighter node spacing. If you want tighter node spacing and sort of a stronger plant, then you want these compact cells. You don't want these elongated cells. So we would want to have a higher density, or a more richer mix of blue and a lesser mix of red. So growers would grow under the metal halide to avoid having too much red. Basically,

that makes perfect sense. I didn't know it literally affected the cell structure. That is really cool. And of course, that's what would make it stretchier. But just to have, yeah, my mind is pretty cool,

and that's why it leads to, you know, sort of a weaker kind of growth too, because it's, it's not like growing stretch here, because it's growing more. It's just, you know, the cells are basically longer than they would be otherwise lanky

cells, yeah, makes a lot of sense. And that's why those HPs buds come out a little bit different than when people switch over to LED, they just say, hey, my bud shape is a little bit different. Is it similar because of the cells. So bud

shape, Bugbee has been looking into this, and, you know, to be perfectly honest with you, a little bit surprised at the, you know, the degree of sort of certainty he comes down on some of these answers. Because, like, I still understand how there could be some mechanisms. But in the test that bugs bees run, changing spectrum during flowering has no impact on the plant. Oh, it's not doing the same sort of vegetative growth anymore. And cannabis growers know this because, you know, at the end of the bolt or the flowering stretch, the plant essentially stops growing vegetatively and just kind of pats on flowers, right? Just grows those flower structures that does not appear to be influenced by the spectrum of light. And I know growers have a hard time sort of rationalizing that, and they think like there's some magical spectrum to add during flowering. And I've been hit a lot of times with growers saying like, No, you need more red during flowering. And that's why growers used to use HPs during flowering. Why they use metal halide during veg? And my answer to that is, HPs is better than metal halide. HPs is more efficient, right? So if you have 1000 watt setup, you're going to get a lot more light out of an HPS bulb than you're going to get out of metal halide bulb. So you would want to use the HPS bulb because you're getting more photons, you're going to grow more cannabis. But it's not because they're more red. They just happen to be more red. The reason you couldn't grow with those HPs bulbs in veg was because the plants would grow too lanky, and by the time they get to flowering, the red isn't going to affect them anymore, so it's just more light, and adding more light allows us to grow, you know, more more cannabis. That makes

a lot of sense, and that probably lends to correct me if I'm wrong, where that theory of the green light comes from, right? Because aside from what these spectrums do to your plants, it depends on how efficient they are at delivering the photons and isn't green one of the less efficient ones is that where that myth of green light doesn't affect plants came from, you think,

yeah, exactly. If you look at the McCree curve, which is sort of the photosynthetic and it's not perfect. I mean, McCree did that research back in the 70s, and there's been some people that have sort of updated that, and bug bees teams and other researchers that they're affiliated with are trying to extend that range. But that McCree curve is basically plotting the plants responsiveness to different wavelengths of light, right? And anybody can just google this if you want to see what the Cree curve looks like. But there's, it rises quickly from 400 and it has an initial peak around 450 nanometers. There's a trough through the 500 to 600 range, and then another peak that's even a higher peak at Red. Okay, that like 650, to 700 nanometers, really tall peak. And so that's sort of the how the plants respond. The difference between the two peaks and the trough is not much like you know, if the tallest peak is 100% efficiency, the trough in the green and yellow is at like 85%

efficient, interesting. So this is a chasm that I thought, but the green and the yellow lives in that trough.

The green and the yellow lives in that trough. The grow light manufacturers, I really believe the green light thing. There's two factors that lead to this. One is there's the easily observable fact. The plants appear to us to be green, and that leads growers to me that the easy deduction that the green light is bouncing off of the plant, it's not being used by the plant, and all the other wavelengths of light are being used by the plant. So green light shouldn't affect the plant because it's not being absorbed. And that's just really, I mean, true. It's based on kind of a grain of truth that you just build off of in a way that you can't basically it mean, the plants are reflecting some green light, but they're also using it. Green Light actually penetrates deeper into the cells, into the leaves, than the blue light does, right? I've

heard that as well. So thus this full spectrum it's not just about this peak of Yeah, yeah.

That's also true. That's also true full spectrum light, the actual measured plant responsiveness to it is not significant compared between Blurple, right and full spectrum light. But you're right. It is a sort of more well rounded photosynthesis. And you are all the light is basically interacting with the plants a little bit differently. The other thing about the green light is that, you know, the early generation LEDs only use red and blue light. And I think that also encouraged a lot of growers to think that plants didn't use green light, because otherwise they would have added it. The dirty secret there is blue diodes and red diodes were the most efficient diodes. They also sort of mapped onto the McCree curve, but led manufacturers tried to sell it as being, you know, the best spectrum for plants and being the most efficacious spectrum for plants. And that's why they were doing Blurple and it this was the light that plants actually used for photosynthesis. There was a lot of marketing around that, and sort of misapplying the me Creek curve, or exaggerating those peaks in the McCree curve. And I think that the real reason they were using the red and blue diodes, I mean, it works, and they were really efficient, but they kind of that marketing push, I think led a lot of growers to think that green light doesn't matter. That is

super, super fascinating. And I am also surprised that Bugbee comes down so hard on that argument, because it's a phenomenon that I've observed in other people's gardens, where they switch from HID to LED, and their flower shape comes out a little bit different. Now it could be any number of things, right? The temperature changes the leaf, yeah, so flower

shape isn't one of the things bugs be specifically looking at. Bugbee is looking at harvest, yield and cannabinoid contents has found no significant differences in yield or cannabinoids based on altering the spectrum during the flowering period. Now, some of that research entails using, you know, actual HPs bulbs. A lot of it, they're just altering the wavelengths of light that they're being exposed to all of it's using LEDs, right? So they're able to dial in very specific spectrums that they want to test using LEDs. So I guess there's some grain of salt there, but it is interesting that, yeah, in those tests, where they alter, so they changed like the the proportion of blue, from 20% to 50% of the the light mix, no effect on yield or cannabinoids. This doesn't super

surprise me. With all all the good flower I've seen grown under all types of different lights, I guess super surprised me,

yeah. So I guess my message about about this to growers is you can play with spectrum during veg to alter the way your plants grow. And if you give them more blue light, they'll stay shorter. If you give them more red light, they'll grow taller. You don't necessarily want to use red light to grow tall plants, though, but you can play with it like that. But the time you get to the flowering period. It really doesn't matter. We're just trying to give plants all the light they can handle, so that, you know, they can maximize their production during that limited period of time, that we can give them light during the flowering period. So at that point, quantity of light matters much more than spectrum. And frankly, that's why growers used to switch to HPs because they could get more quantity from the same hardware, not because the Spectrum was sort of better suited or led to better results. Then

that is really cool. That's a great way to think about it, and a great overview, which is like, there's the photon saturation that we're concerned about, right? There's the spectrums effect on the way plants vegetate that we're also thinking about, but also how efficient they are each at delivering those photons. All of those things separate in your head, very important to understand. And I think you're right. I think a lot of people get, like, hung up on very specific parts of their grow when they may be better. Are focusing on the fucking fundamentals, man, you know, instead of, like, really concerning yourself with spectrum and VPD and things like that. I mean, I speak to gardeners who have been gardening for decades, and they're like, I'm still teaching people how to water, you know, and they're five years in, like, get your watering game on point, get your nutrition on point, your plant training on point. And then once you're, you know, really, really capable in those things. I feel like this is like the icing on the cake, getting into things like that. But that's just my opinion. Yeah,

absolutely. I think that that's a good way to think about it, a good way to think about light in general, for your grow, you know, one final thought, I guess, about sort of these different types of diodes would be red light is still the most efficient light to create in LEDs by far, where we create a lot more photons for the same amount of power with the 660 nanometer diodes and with the 730 nanometer diodes than we do with any other diodes. And so it's a reason that grow light manufacturers always add a bunch of 660 nanometers, and sometimes add the 730 nanometer diodes, because you can get sort of more light per watt from them. One of the drawbacks there that manufacturers think about is we can't add too many, because that'll make it not very suitable for vegetative growth and some light manufacturers, and this is the one sort of changeable spectrum thing that I can understand and kind of get behind. Have a, basically a way to dim the 660, nanometer diodes during the veg period. And that's usually what the bloom buttons did, or the bloom switches did, they turn on and off, or they dim the red diet, so you weren't giving too much red during vegetative right?

That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. And, yeah, I'm excited to see how these lights evolve. We talked about, like the onboard interfaces. I think that's huge. Instead of having separate timers and separate controllers for people who buy one light, I think the onboards are really cool future development that we'll probably see more and more of. Yeah,

I've been working with medicrow on theirs, because they came out with the onboard timer the first one, and it had some glitches in terms of how growers would actually want to use it. I'm like, No, if we're gonna, if you're gonna do this, we gotta, we gotta have this respond to the way, you know, growers would actually want it to be used. I've been, I've been sort of helping them refine that, and I agree, if we can get good systems that work the way we want to use the equipment, you know? And some of these manufacturers know a lot about horticulture in general, but they don't know much about the specifics of growing cannabis plants, right?

That's where Dr Coco comes in. So they want you there to to bridge that gap and make it intuitive and all of those things. The order of cultivation. Our membership program here at growcast podcast, you can check us out at growcast podcast.com/membership, you will find hundreds of hours of bonus content. Grow cast TV, the best show on cannabis, if I do say so myself, live weekly broadcast every Wednesday from the bio dome my studio slash grow. Come and check it out. You also get access to our members only discord. You get discounts on grow cast genetics, along with products that you love, like Dino, Myco and rain science grow bags and more. Check it out. Discounts, community, extra content. The Ask Me Anything live streams will solve all your garden problems. We got giveaways and games going on. There's a lot happening in the order of cultivation. Check it out right now at grow cast podcast.com forward slash membership. It helps support the show, and you get a whole bunch of goodies along with it. I appreciate all of you members, and I hope to see you on the inside. Grow cast podcast.com/membership, try it out today. I do want to talk about this new life, because there's some buzzwords around this Viper spectrum model, and you review all sorts of different brands and stuff like that. But I kept hearing the word lenses with Viper lenses. What is this? Okay, so we went from Cobbs and what was, what was the other big buzzword, quantum boards, yeah, bar style. And now, lenses. What are lenses?

Lenses? Lenses? Well, lenses are lenses, right? We're all, we all use lenses in other things. Yeah,

lenses, honestly, yeah,

anything. Yeah, exactly. Those are lenses. But, you know, early generation LEDs used lenses oftentimes to kind of redirect light and to, you know, create a more even distribution of light, so the lens basically covers the diode, and the light has to go through that lens, and you can kind of direct the light to specific areas of the canopy during that process. However, when light passes through a lens, some of the light is converted to heat, is lost as heat, not a lot, but some so lenses. Were the photon efficacy of a fixture. There's really no way around that. You know. If you go back 10 years ago, lenses were pretty common across the LED grow light industry. But then LEDs started to sort of increase in efficiency and the main marketing push for LEDs, especially in the commercial side, but also in the home grower side. And I think a lot of this leaked over to the home grower side. Was all about efficacy and getting that PPE number up and so, you know, being twice as efficient as HPS lights, or getting up to there. So the whole market became really hyper focused on efficacy. On the one hand, grow light manufacturers had to convince commercial facilities that were running HPs that it was worth switching over and that, you know, these were so much better than the HPS. And in order to do that, they needed the best efficacy numbers that coupled with, you know, utility rebates in a lot of places that were based on how efficacious your your fixture was, just like you get, like rebates on your hot water heater. So the manufacturing of grow lights, you know, over most of the last 10 years has been really hyper focused on increasing the efficacy numbers. And, you know, we get grow light companies trying to juice the numbers. And we always talk about, you know, the manufacturers, and are they able to come up with better LEDs, and, you know, using more of them to get, you know, better PPE numbers and all of that. So during that push to sort of maximize efficacy, almost all manufacturers abandoned lenses, because lenses would lower the efficacy and they that's really how led bars were made, because we're not going to redirect the light out to the edges with lenses. We're going to have to move the diodes out to the edges, right, spread that

bitch out and make it come. Yeah. Okay, so that's the benefit of the lenses, is that you can move the light from a central focal point, right?

So you can, with a relatively small fixture, you can, you can hang it pretty low and not have a hot spot right under the fixture. You can actually, you know, spread that light that would normally just rain down right underneath that fixture, out to the corners.

Look more like an h, i, d, floating above the canopy, which is very small, as opposed to the huge surface, right? Bar Style interesting, and that's

always been the challenge with quantum boards, right? So that's why quantum boards fell out of favor in larger size spaces, because they were always smaller form factors than the LED bars. And so if both fixtures aren't using lenses, then the only way that they're distributing the light is, you know, just launching it into the air and letting it spread out as it travels. And in it with a smaller fixture, you would need it to travel a longer distance to spread out more evenly. So the quantum boards would have to be hung higher above the canopy than an LED bar fixture because it spreads the light out, it avoids the hot spot and lets you get up close to the fixtures, right? So one of the real reasons that quantum boards are no longer used in larger spaces is because they're small relative to the space they're intended to cover, and that means you're going to have to hang them really high, and in a four by 410, there's really not enough room for that. So some manufacturers have tried spreading the quantum boards out, just like they did with LED bars. Yeah, you end

up with this big fucking UF Yeah, to hang in your tent, this heavy shit,

yep. So I still think it works for I still think quantum boards have the preferred for two by 210, certainly, and maybe for three by three. It's still a small enough space that you don't need to hang it so high. And basically what Vivar spectra is doing is coming at this and saying, we're gonna put lenses back on. They're probably taking a hit in their PPE numbers, but the diodes are better now than they were 10 years ago, so we're getting better efficacies. And I don't know, I try to focus more on distribution than raw efficacy. I think both are important, right? But when I'm reviewing a light, I'm drawing attention to the par map and to the distribution of light and the efficacy number can't be awful, but it's not like the most important thing about the light, it's just, I don't, I don't think it

is gained. In the past so many years, we've gotten so much ground on that efficiency to lose back just a tiny percentage of it for a better power math is going to be a okay with a bunch of people, yep,

and they've definitely done that. I mean, it's interesting. So I took this little excess 1500 Pro from five bar spectra hanging it's not that big. It's only, I think, like 14 inches on a side, or whatever, and it's covering a 24 inch space, right? So it's covering an area much bigger than its physical footprint hung only 12 and a half inches above the sensor, which is. Really low hanging height and getting even distribution all the way into the corners. It was sort of such a remarkable distribution when I first started testing it that I decided I really needed to do like a deeper test. Because, you know, for example, in the first test, I was getting numbers like 867, in one of the squares in the middle of the test. And I was getting 928,

out on the edge. Oh, wow. So even more than under this, even more those lenses, right?

I was getting 867 again in the middle of their area, and I got 876 in one of the corners. Wow. So it wasn't, it wasn't just sort of even it was also kind of oddly distributed, like almost every light basically has a definable hot spot, or hot spots that then the light sort of distributes away from fairly linearly, right? And that wasn't the case with this, this light at all. So normally, in a two by two area, my test grid is only going to be four by four, so it's just a 16 sample grid, right? So I'm like, this isn't enough. I need a finer grain detail about how this light is being distributed across the this map. So instead of just taking one measurement right in the middle of each of my squares, I decided I was going to take nine measurements in each square, so like, three across the top, three across the middle, and three across the bottom. So it ended up being, yeah, it ended up being 144 measurements in total across the two by two area, right? So I'm taking a measurement every two inches, instead of, like, every six inches. Got a really fine grained sort of data about the light, even with the sensor, like, all the way into the corner, so that the little base of the sensor is literally touching both walls in the corner, right? I'm getting above 750 all the way around in the park. Test at 12 and a half inches. Wow. It's getting late, like, all the way deep into the corners. And so then I was interested. I'm like, okay, they're aiming this light basically out of the corners. And you can see that little hot spots sort of aimed out at the corners in this fine grain test, right with 144 samples. So you can sort of see where some of the the lights being pointed at by the fixture. So I decided I was going to change the hanging height, right? So I raised it up and ran another 144 sample test, which was really interesting to sort of see, and those hot spots that they had been aiming sort of towards the corners moved further into the corners than at that higher height. And in fact, the highest value that I recorded in one of those tests was in the absolute corner. Wow. So it really does spread it out. It really does move the light around. And in the middle, the values were like, were like lower. So then I lowered the fixture down to 10 inches to see how, sort of that would affect how the light was being kind of aimed, right? Because if you're going to do this, you got to sort of assume, if you're going to be aiming light like that, you got to have an idea of how high above the target and how big the target is and all that, and so you could definitely see interesting things in those tests. I have a lot. I mean, I really know how, how that light at least distributes. I've been working on this video now for like, over a month, because I got way too complicated, clearly,

man, getting into the hundreds and hundreds of samples, but that's why we love it. That's very interesting. And I'm reminded of, like the old magnifying glass trick, right? Like people who light their bowl with the magnifying glass, it's that lens is probably scattering it out in a similar manner. So you get these huge readings on the corners. It's fascinating. It's very fascinating. I wonder if more lenses are going to come out, or I wonder if there's going to be all these different types and nuances to these lights, and you're going to there's not going to be any uniformity. You're going to have to hang the light as directed, because it's going to be very, very different than the next guys. I don't know. I'm not sure what that's

going to look with this one. There's interesting pros and cons. I think I wanted to do the fine grain test because I wanted to see if there were holes right. I wanted to see if there were weak points that like they weren't getting adequate light to because they were they were hitting right. They were hitting sort of the corners with a lot of light. Maybe they were taking that away or robbing it from other areas, but I was kind of impressed with there's not really holes, per se. But it does strike me that hanging height is probably a little bit more important with this fixture than it would be with a lot of other fixtures, because it's really well tuned to be hung at the right height above the canopy. And, you know, it got me thinking. Out other things, like angle attack of the light, because those corners are getting a lot of light, but they're not underneath the fixture.

I was gonna ask that you've talked about light kind of ricocheting before. Where's the diminishing return when you're shooting the light across the tent at an angle? Are we losing light there, or does it bounce right. It's not what

we're measuring that we're still getting the right density of it, but a lot of it's going to be coming in at a low angle, and so I don't think that that's probably as good as having it come straight down from above, having it come in at that angle. We'd have to run actual grow tests, I think, to show that. But plants would be more susceptible to, you know, being blocked out by other plants that were sort of between them and the light, or plants that were or tops of the plants that were sort of closer to the middle of the tent, since that light's coming in at a lower angle, like potentially block light from getting out to the edge,

or, you know, probably not the light you want if you're not going to grow inside that enclosed, reflective Grow Tent. Absolutely

true. And now, you know, damn it, Jordan, now I'm gonna have to run a knife. I'm gonna have to add another part. No, I was gonna do that. I was gonna take the walls away and run the the test without the walls to show, to see how much of that light is just being reflected back, or how much is stored directly aimed at specific places in the canopy, or how much of it's aimed out at the walls, essentially, and then reflects back, and that's why the corners are higher. So I guess there's always more to learn about this, but I definitely agree with you all lights, you know, in order to hit the numbers that I report in my test or whatever, you need to put them in a fully enclosed tent. If you're in an open space without reflective walls, you lose a lot of light. You lose, like 40% of the light that you're creating just over spills that space and drifts away with a fixture like the excess 1500 pro that's got the the lenses, it might be more than 40% that drifts away.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I had never thought about about that before, because some people do grow in kind of an open room, and your life is going to matter, that nothing's going to compete with that bar style light, driving light straight down, and something like yes, would would even exacerbate a situation like that. But let's be honest, most people are growing intense. Most people

are growing intense. And if you want to grow plants to full harvest in a two by 210 I like this little excess 1500 Pro, I'd certainly be interested in doing a two by two tent grow with it to harvest. So, yeah, check out my video. My I'm almost done with the video. It's coming soon, and I'll kind of work my way through all these high sample density tests that I ran. It's really interesting to then go back. I compared those tests to the original test that just did one sample per square. You know, when I was first creating the grill light testing protocol, I did a bunch of tests like that make sure that we had adequate sampling density, to make sure that one sample per square was going to generate an accurate average PPFD. And with this fixture, it didn't, and I sort of saw that only with a higher sample density tests. I got a lot sets. It's going to be an interesting sort of hairstylist.

One man. People love it. People love getting into the nitty gritty. I hope

so. So you don't have to encourage me very much to like, go deeper. I do kind of worry. Sometimes I'm like, Man, our actual growers can be interested in all this stuff, or am I just, like, going up on, you know, physics tangents at this point, but

you get closer to the guy with the marbles and Jumanji, like, the deeper you go, the closer you get to insanity. So, but, yeah, man, people are gonna love it. People are gonna do tune in. Subscribe Coco for cannabis.com. The cocoa for cannabis YouTube channel. Yeah, that's the DR MJ Coco YouTube channel. Dr, MJ Coco, apologies, yo. MJ Coco. Give a follow everybody. Before we wrap it up, I want to talk about I want you to plug the spring auto flower challenge. But even quickly before that, let's just do a quick rapid fire. Man, what are your recommendations for growing big ass autos? People are growing large autos in your challenge? Yeah, an auto grower, and I want to grow one big what are your top

recommendations? So yeah, we're doing the Size Matters challenge in the spring auto flower challenge this year, which is just great, right? Size matters challenge. And then the strain that we're working with homegrown cannabis company, and they suggested some strains that we could grow. Among them was sticky Dicky. So now we're doing the Size Matters auto flower challenge with sticky Dicky and we're all trying to grow the biggest sticky Dickies, right? It's like fun. Oh yeah, it's a lot of fun. So trying to grow the biggest auto first things is make sure you start in a small pot and have a transplant strategy to work that plant up and. If you put small plants in big pots, they slow down because for a lot of reasons. One, they got to work on growing roots out to the bottom of this gigantic pot. Two, they're going to be sort of a little bit waterlogged. The water is going to be a little bit hypoxic and lack oxygen, and the roots aren't going to fully colonize that media anyway. So I see a lot of growers falling for this myth that auto flowers should not be transplanted, that you should put them in final containers, you know, from seed or whatever, and that's just a guaranteed way to grow a small plant. If you put a seed into a giant container, it's going to be a small plant. You don't have second chances with autos. You can't just like, wait for them to become bigger plants, because they're going to start flowering when they're going to start flowering. So my biggest advice, you know, with my autos, I've already potted them up twice. So I started in fabric seedling bags. I potted them up to one gallon air pots, and I just potted them up a few days ago to their number three air pods. So three gallon air pods, which is where they'll finish under high frequency fertigation. You could go higher than that for, you know, depending on how you're growing. But they definitely like working them up as you go. So transplant your autos. The other thing is, you know, you recognize that you got about 30 days from the time the seed gets wet. And you know, different strains are somewhat different, but a general rule for most autos is you got about 30 days that you can train your plants before they're getting close enough to the transition that you know you should let them transition and start flowering to grow big auto flowers, I do two topics. So I talked my plants the first time, when they were 19 days old, I topped my plants. I topped them back to the third left two branches, and I top those two branches on like day 27 about a week later, back to the third again, and I'll grow eight mains down from that initial structure. So don't be afraid to top your plants and get a good structure going at the base. If you want to grow a big bushy plant, you're going to have to top it. You're not going to get a big sort of bushy plant. If you leave it as Christmas tree, it's you're always going to be dealing with those apical dominance things. And LST, I just don't, I mean, I think it's slower than topping. I think it's also more dangerous than topping. So dangerous, oh, because you might split something. Yeah, topping is not risky. It's like, anybody can top, yeah, maybe they can, like, you know, use scissors. Can top a plant. LST is an art man, and knowing how much pressure you can put on the plant and what you're even trying to do while you're bending that plant over is much more harrowing than taking scissors and cutting the plant in half or cutting the top off.

I agree it is an art I've seen some amazing LS, tears, but when I'm getting people starting growing for the first time. I teach them how to top first thing I know, some people like the film and stuff like that. I'm down with all of it, but I liked what you said, which is low stress training is an art, yeah?

And those just training, I say that, like low stress training is it can be high risk. Just saying low stress does not mean it's low risk. That's

true. That's true. I've split a few plants. I tape them back together. Yeah? Well, you know, with autos, that's a big fucking deal. With a photo, it's like, I, you know, tape this back together. Give it some extra time

and give it another week, yeah, with autos, you don't get to give it another week to recover from that. It's true. So I agree, keeping your plants healthy, keeping them humming along. You know, I grow in cocoa. I do high frequency fertigation from the beginning. So when they were back in those little seedling pots, I was watering them three times a day to get them to grow fast.

When do you start giving them nutrients and and how low do you start? You start

giving them nutrients. Nutrients support photosynthesis. So, you know, I often hear this, this rumor that plants are born or seeds have enough nutrients for the first two weeks, and that's totally false. Seeds have carbohydrates and proteins. They don't have nutrients. They have zero nutrients. Seeds don't come with any nutrients. So plants require nutrients in order to do photosynthesis. So when those leaves open and start looking for light your plant wants to do photosynthesis. And if you're growing in a fully neutral Now, if you're in any kind of peat based media, there's going to be enough trace nutrients to keep that little seedling happy for a while. Yeah,

that's true. That's true, right? Scorch it though, early. So how

you do not want to scorch it early? So I start, when I do start fertigating, which is when I pot, I start in little Jiffy pellets. And you know, usually on day four, from seed gets wet, I put that Jiffy pellet with a little seedling in it into a little pot with cocoa. And you know, the cotyledons, and often, like the first true leaves, are just coming in at that point. And. And I start fertigating at a very low concentration, about 400 EC. So point four EC, 200 ppm, if you're using ppm for that,

so you're, you're like, at what would that be, compared to your, like, peak feed, like, 15% strength? Is that right? Oh,

no, no. It's my peak. Strength isn't that high. So the highest I ever give plants is about 1500

so we're starting 400 I was thinking more than 10% less than 10% okay, I got it. Yeah. No,

it's about a third, right? Or about almost a third. So, and in cocoa in particular, we need to get the calcium up pretty quickly, or the plants will suffer. So we try to ramp that up quickly and sort of train the little seedlings to tolerate higher and higher doses. So I'll go 400-470-5556 25 like in successive waterings, I'm kind of rapidly ramping that up

get them going, especially when you're on that limited timer. So that's great, man for growing a big auto love. Overview, and a lot of like you said, you're pushing back on a lot of myths, like, don't be scared to top your autos. Don't be scared to your autos. I

think that's gonna be one of the greatest things about this spring auto power. Challenge is we got a bunch of good growers, not just me, by any stretch of the imagination, that are trying to grow the biggest auto flower. And if you want to see, because then there's going to be, you know, growers with all sorts of different strategies that are going for this. I think it'll be really interesting to see what separates the bigger plants from the plants that didn't get as big as they could have, maybe, or whatever. Right? Like, is there consistencies in how that group did their transplanting, or did their training, or did their fertilization, or their, you know, container sizes, or what is the secret sauce about the growers that end up growing the biggest autos out of this, because we're all trying for it, right? So I think that's gonna be fascinating. I invite everybody to come check out my journal. We have a whole sort of forum for this in the CoCo for cannabis growers forum, but for the spring auto flower challenge, and my journal is my electric blue sticky Dicky, because I'm growing electric blue and sticky Dicky, that'll stand

right out in the forums. Everybody, Coco for cannabis.com you can just scroll through till you see electric blue, sticky Dicky. My electric blue, sticky Dicky. There you'll find Dr Coco's grow journal. That's great, man. I love to hear it. Listen. I'll be back out soon. It was great hanging with you last time. Yeah, heads up poker and you, you cheated me. Clearly. I was like, destroying Coco, like teaching him strategy. I was like, Okay, here's why I bluffed you off that pot. He's like, he's like, okay, fine, let's, let's just raise the stakes and finish this off. Let's, like, raise the blinds, and then you proceed to, like,

all your pennies away from you, Man, if only it had been real money, though, I will say I still have in my cap. I'm glad you bring this up publicly. But yeah, I did take all of your loose change. Well, you

waited to raise the stakes before you got your full house and your straight flush. So, yes, got

a straight flush,

dude, you did, and I knew it. Got a straight

flush playing against you for pennies and nickels. Like, why can't that happen in Vegas, right? Oh,

see, that's the part about poker. Like, I wish that was at a real fucking table. Just wasted my luck Exactly,

exactly. When the hell is that going to happen again? Man, I just, I totally blew

it. Let's do a vlog. We'll do some content. People want to see that. So thank you, Coco. Thank you for being a friend of the show. Thank you for out when we're out in SoCal and and, yeah, we love you here, man. Coco for cannabis.com. Everybody. Go and support. Go and follow Dr MJ Coco on YouTube.

Yeah, and check out my new Patreon. Come to the Ask Dr Coco's show. It's really fun to, you know, have more kind of one on one conversations. So if you have questions for me, that's definitely the best place to come and URL there. Patreon is Dr MJ Coco slash.

Dr MJ Coco, awesome. Everybody. Go and check it out. Go and support and we'll see you around with more. Dr Coco coming back soon. Absolutely for now, any final words, Coco, we're gonna wrap it on up here and sign off. Just grow her love for everybody out there. Love it. Take care. Everybody. Stay tuned. Be safe, grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much to Dr Coco, and thank you for tuning in now, we have some events coming up here, Pesta Palooza with Matthew gates, our all day pest fest. We are in New York, Long Island. That is June 3. And we are also in San Diego, July 29 you can go to Pesta palooza.com that'll bring you right to the New York page. Or go to grow cast podcast.com/classes to see all of our classes and events and meetups, we got some breeder classes on the way, hash class that's in the works, some free how to grow classes. I'm working hard behind the scenes. You guys. I have really loved doing these live meetups and meeting you folks in person and learning about your grows and smoking with you. And while I'm gonna slow down. My schedule, I am not stopping the live events and classes, so stay tuned and come and see us again. Code, grow cast saves you $20 on Pesta palooza. We are in New York. June 3. Go to Pesta palooza.com. Brings you right there. And we're also in San Diego. July 29 grow cast podcast.com/classes, to see all of our classes. Thank you to all of the students, all of the members and all of you listeners. That's all for today. I hope you're doing swimmingly out there. Take care of yourself. Be well. We'll see you next time bye, bye.

Do you like grow cast podcast? Of course, you do well, if you love this show, you're going to love a slice of cannabis, a show all about food and cannabis, hosted by our good friends and members, port and the rugged gent, what's up? Rugged?

Hey everyone. Rugged gent here, if you're all about cooking, great cuisine and cannabis, like I am, then you've gotta come subscribe to a slice of cannabis we're free to listen to on Spotify or any podcast app, so come and subscribe today. Tune in to hear from world renowned members of the cannabis industry as we explore the beautiful relationship between the food we enjoy and the cannabis we love to consume. Season Two has just kicked off, so come check it out and catch up on old episodes with Jordan, friends of grow cast, professional chefs and much more, a slice of cannabis. Find us on Spotify or your favorite podcast app, and I'll see you there

a slice of cannabis. Everyone go and subscribe now. You