☀️The BIG DIFFERENCE Between the Sun and Your Grow Light, with Dr. Coco

11:43AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Dr. Coco

Keywords:

sun vs grow light

indoor vs outdoor

grow light metrics

tent heat factor

operating costs

photon efficacy

plant stressors

indoor pampering

outdoor resilience

spectral output

UV light

IR light

plant growth

cannabis cultivation

grow challenges

Greetings, growers worldwide. Jordan River here back with more grow cast having fun in the sun. Today we are talking about the sun. Dr Coco is back. This is a really great episode. The episodes with Dr Coco are always good, but this one takes a really unique look and approach. We're talking about the differences between indoors and outdoors. And for today's episode, we really are only able to get into the sun versus your grow light. Mostly, it's a huge Deep Dive. I know you're gonna love this episode before we jump into it, though. Shout out to AC infinity. Code grow cast one, five, getting you 15% off now across the board, at AC infinity.com, now there's been some changes to the code that I need to tell you about. First of all, like I said, it's now 15% across the board. For a while, it depended on what you were getting, or it was 10% off or the discount didn't apply. They're trying to send people to the website. So what do you get now? Grow cast one five is the code 15% off all items at AC infinity.com, plus free shipping on orders $99 or more. So they're sending people to their website. Code grow, cast one five saves you a chunk on the best fans in the game. Grow Tent kits, lights, scissors, pots, my favorite grow tents out there, whatever you need. Grab it from AC infinity.com and use code grow, cast one five for 15% off, plus you get free shipping $99 or more at the website, acinfinity.com plus on Amazon, if you're still gonna order on Amazon, growcast one five, saves you 5% so go ahead and grab what you need. A whole new tent, setup, some scissors, some sleeves, some sunglasses, whatever you need. Grow Tent, stuff. Grow gear. It's all there. Acinfinity.com code, grow cast one five. Thank you to AC infinity. All right, and just a reminder our grand final hunt starts February 15. Check it out at grow cast.com/hunt. That's grow cast.com/hunt. Wanted to let you know before we get into the show. Thank you for listening and enjoy that 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. Turn someone on to grow cast, or turn a smoker on to growing that's the best way you can help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed to grow cast. Podcast.com. Is the website there you'll find everything, the show, the seeds, the classes, the membership, it's all up there. Huge special. Thank you to all the members for making this thing possible. Today we've got a great friend of the show back on the line. You know him. You love him. It's been a minute. Dr Coco, from Coco for cannabis.com. Is back with us. What's up? Dr, Coco, how you been? Man, hey, hey,

Jordan River, I've been doing pretty well. I've been doing pretty well. It's nice to be back on with you as always.

You know, today we've got a really cool episode lined up, talking about indoor versus outdoor, talking about grow lights, talking about the sun, all this stuff. But before we get into it, what have you been up to? How's Coco for cannabis? Doing the challenges, the forums and everything over

there. It's going pretty well, man. We're getting geared up for the next new year's grow challenge. Let's get started on gonna start on January 1. So you know, if you guys are interested in growing along with us, come on over to Coco for cannabis. Check out the challenge page. Get signed up and Yeah, we're excited to roll that out again. And we've been doing the New Year's grow challenge since 2018 so what is this? The seventh annual. Geez, always a lot of fun. I've been working on some interesting projects. I'm doing a collaboration with lettistar, which is a diode manufacturer. I'm going to go through and do this video teaching growers about the different types of horticultural diodes, what you want to look for and grow lambs, what you don't necessarily need on grow lambs. You know, grow light manufacturers use different types of diodes, or different combinations of diodes, and kind of answer a lot of questions along those lines. So it's been an interesting project, and let us start been a great sort of collaborator with that, with hooking me up with all sorts of inside information. So I've been enjoying that, and I've been developing these new grow light metrics, and I'm starting to premiere those so looking at a calculation for operating costs. So I'm starting to report when I test lights how much this light will cost you to run for the course of a typical grow, wow, to better be able to sort of compare different lights in terms of operating costs, which is one of the factors in terms of getting a more efficient light is that you can have lower operating costs. But we often talk about this 2.3 micromoles per watt, or 2.4 micro moles per watt, and seeing how that actually translates into, well, this one's going to cost you $180 to run for grow, and this other one cost you $230 to run for grow, right?

And I can imagine that's pretty complex too, right? With like energy prices, do you factor in? Like replacements and damages and stuff, or just

operating cost of the light itself. So we're just looking at basically a power draw over the course of a typical grow, and then the cost of electricity. I'm putting them into the grow light calculator, where people will be able to put their own cost of electricity, you know, in terms of cost per kilowatt hour. Nice. That's huge, yeah. But for the the videos and sort of the standard metrics I'm I'm sort of publishing about the lights, it'll just be the USA average, which is 16 and a half cents per kilowatt hour. Is that? Right?

That's the that is the average cost of electricity going into my grow light. Yeah,

across the country, some places are cheaper. You live in Louisiana, it's cheaper. If you live in California, it's more expensive. But that's the average. So it you know, as long as that's held consistent, you can see at least some idea of how much more expensive one light is than the other. But the other metric that I'm doing that I'm even sort of more excited about, I call tent heat factor, and this is how much hotter a light will make a typical Grow Tent. So when you think about the lights on temperatures versus the lights off temperatures, everybody that's already grown in a Grow Tent knows that when lights go on, the temperature goes up, but by how much and the relevant variables there are, sort of the power of the light, the space that you're growing in. And then every Grow Tent is a little bit different in terms of how people have ventilation set up and all of that. So, you know, it's fairly easy to calculate Btu per hour from any electrical appliance, right? And if you're installing HVAC systems, like dedicated HVAC systems. That's the number you need to know. Is the BTU per hour. But if you're in a grow tent in your living room, you know me telling you it's going to be 2000 Btu per hour probably doesn't mean a whole lot to you. You're trying to use your living room as a long room, and you got an exhaust fan, and your relevant question is, you know, how much hotter is it going to make my tent than the light I'm currently using, or how much one light versus the other light is going to affect how hot my tent runs? So based on a lot of personal experience discussions with you know, lots of different growers came up with a formula to sort of estimate how hot a light will make a quote, unquote, typical roten Wow in terms of plus how many degrees Fahrenheit, so like the light I just tested Mars hydro, FC, 6500 that's 720 watts would make a five by five space about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer when it's on than when it's off in the typical ventilated Grow Tent. Sure, if you put that same light into a four by four space, it's going to make it about 15 degrees warmer in the typical ventilated Grow Tent. Wow,

just by the size of the space being different, that's interesting. Yeah, the lights all ran at 100% power probably, I'm guessing, yeah.

But you know, when I test it at a lower power setting, I'll publish the t hen or the tent heat factor sick lower power setting, which is really sort of the relevant variable. So all these things that we've been doing in the past, like measuring the surface temperature as a light that's almost meaningless, right? Talking to home growers about Btu per hour. Basically, I don't think any information is translated in those kinds of conversations. Now this, this one's going to make your 10 degrees hotter. This other one's going to make your tent 13 degrees hotter. And you're thinking, Well, shit, I'm already pushing, you know, 8384 degrees in my tent. I better not, you know, bump that amount of light up. Or maybe it's going to be better to go with the more efficient. Light that's going to produce less, less heat that's

extremely useful. Or if you're in a basement, maybe you're looking for that number to be a little bit higher. I know I battle with cold in my basement,

exactly, and you might be sort of questioning whether you know some of these more efficient lights or whatever would be enough heat for you. So I think that that's really the number growers need, like, when I turn this light off versus when I turn this light on in my setup, how much hotter is are things gonna get? And I think that they can kind of work with that and decide if they can manage with that. That's

really cool, man, that is a very useful piece of advice. Yeah, I was interested to see what you're working on. You know, like, you're always, you're always up to something,

yeah, no, I'm excited about these. I've been thinking these are going to be because, you know, we've been saying for years, and, like, my girls always said that, like, the the PPE number, the photon efficacy number, is, like, the most important number about a grow light. And it's like, Okay, but why? You know, these are the reasons why it directly affects operating costs and it directly affects the amount of heat that's in your tent. And I think that drawing attention to those two variables, as opposed to just this abstract like 2.3 micro moles per watt, talking about, you know, plus 10 degrees Fahrenheit and $160 a grow or something, I think those are numbers that growers can make better decisions. That's

great, dude. Very good job breaking down and communicating that type of stuff and pushing the boundaries about how we think about cultivation. I think that's really, I think that's really cool, man. And it ties in perfectly for today's episode.

Yeah, I thought, I thought it would thinking about the differences between indoor and outdoor grows. Yeah,

well, I mean, it started with, what I wanted to do is talk to you about an episode about the sun, yeah, that's where this started. Was like the sun. And then that kind of expanded into like the sun versus a grow light, obviously. And then expanded in this idea of like, just the difference, the difference between being outside, not within an indoor domicile, and out in nature. There's so many nuanced differences. And I think you and I could probably, you know, explore these and make some really good educational content. I'd like to start with this idea and kind of get your opinion on it, because it's something I see growers do a lot. When you read grower forums, when you're in my server, grower servers, something you see people say, and I'm sure you've seen this, is a grower will say, I'm doing this for this reason, and one of the reasons why I'm engaging in this strategy or this process is because I'm trying to mimic what happens in nature. Well, that's what happens in nature, right? So I'm trying to mimic what happens in nature, yep. And I think it's a really interesting concept, because sometimes that leads growers to do with good things. Sometimes that that is absolutely the right answer, and it is a positive impact in their indoor grow but other times it does not translate one to one at all, right, so, so I'd love to start there before we move on to light specifically, like, what about this idea of trying to mimic nature inside your indoor grow tent? Yeah,

so, like, at a very broad level, you know, the 30,000 foot perspective here, we need to mimic nature. Like plants. Need light, they need water. They need some place to put their roots down and grow them. They need minerals to be able to uptake, to perform basic biological functions. And you know, if we're going to grow them in exotic conditions, like inside a mylar grow tent or something. We do need to mimic all of those things, but in basic like, they need to exist, right? Wise? Yeah, in a lot of cases, we try to improve each and every one of those over kind of what the plants would experience in quote, unquote, nature, or outdoors in a farm or whatever, right? So, you know, thinking about the place to grow their roots, like we either use prepared peat medias or rock wall or cocoa or, you know, growing in DWC, in in sort of conditioned water we're trying to give the plants an ideal rooting media, not just some place to put their roots right, and that's an improvement over kind of the random soil that plants are going to find in nature, that they can set their roots down. And at least, we're trying to give them like improved and ideal media, right? In terms of climate, to a certain extent, plants are evolved to grow in specific environments, right? And we need to more or less mimic that environment where the plant is growing. But again, that's sort of the 30,000 foot perspective when it gets down to the nitty gritty outdoors in nature, plants experience a lot of swings in climate and in temperature and seasonalities that they basically have to survive. They're not necessarily things that are helping them to thrive, so sort of their ideal climactic parameters aren't always met outdoors or rarely met. Yeah, exactly rarely met. They're, they're, you know, oftentimes a little too cold, a little too warm, a little too wet, little too dry, a little too whatever. And over the long run of things, plants are able to survive and sort of adapt and become harder to kind of preview something you're going to get to. But that's part of it, right? Is that plants outdoors kind of have to struggle a little bit more. They're not getting all of their needs met perfectly all of the time, and that slows them down. It gets them to invest more energy in other aspects of the plant, that plants in an indoor, ideal climate don't end up having to sort of invest energy in because they're not being stressed. That makes sense. And so that energy is able to go to other things, right? The development of the

flowers, trichome production, that answers a large portion of my question, because we talk about, like, what's better, what's optimal, right? And it's like, well, from our perspective, we're, you know, if we're just trichome farmers, like a lot of people say, Yeah, that's one thing. But like, there's that meme, right? There's that. Theme that you see online, Indoor Plants versus outdoor plants. And the indoor plants is like the weak, little Shiba dog sitting there. And it's like, I'm sorry, the left side is actually outdoor plants. And it's like the beefy Shiba dog, and says, concrete, cozy, right? Yeah, the indoor one's like, is this tap water dechlorinated? I've observed that for sure. Dr, Coco, like, yeah. That is a phenomenon I have observed, and you're saying it's because they're exposed to different stressors, and they utilize that energy in different areas than if they were just catered for hand and foot. Well, let's

think about this just again, in really broad strokes. How long do most outdoor plants veg? Much longer than months. Yeah, right. How long do most indoor plants veg weeks like? I mean, there's a real quantitative difference there, sure, in terms of the amount of time that we're investing in the plants, in terms of letting them grow up and again, sort of the broad strokes in terms of comparing indoor and outdoor. Indoor, we can speed things up. Outdoor is way cheaper, yeah, so you have kind of the juxtaposition there. When you're growing outdoors, you can invest months in veg because you're not investing anything in climate control. You're not investing anything in lighting. So true, you know what I mean? So you can, you can invest time in growing, get a huge yield too, yeah, but you wait all summer, you get one harvest per year. You move indoors, you invest a hell of a lot more energy, right? And the whole goal at that point is, let's grow these plants fast and get them to invest all of their energy in the parts of the plant that we want them to harvest, basically. So we don't need these plants to be super strong in terms of weathering different climate shifts, or in terms of weathering different temperature shifts, we're going to keep them really close to their ideal temperature range the hallway, so they don't have to invest energy in that, and they can just invest energy in their flowers. But yeah, if you take one of these plants and suddenly bring it outdoors, it's gonna struggle mightily, right? Because it's not prepared for that, and it is going to wilt or die, or any number of other things depending on kind of what, what climate you move it out indoors into, you're so right?

Since we bred them in that environment and put them this environment, we don't need those things. So it's good that they don't, you know what I mean, like, they are not meant to survive outdoors. They're meant to produce trichomes.

This is more an individual development issue, rather than sort of an evolution thing. What happens, kind of, in the genetics between generations. We can take the same seeds from the same seed pack, you know, grow five of them indoors, five of them outdoors. You're going to end up with plants that are different in terms of, like, everything we're talking about, right? So it's not that one has kind of been evolved to grow in indoor situations, and the other is going to evolve to grow in outdoors. But if you took those indoor plants, the five of them from the same seed pack, and you know, sometime in the middle of flower, moved it out outdoors, I see what you're saying. It's gonna struggle a lot more than the five that had been growing outdoors 100% long.

That's so true. And I've also seen, after a while, they kind of like the ones that survive, like you said, if they can make it past that tough point, they kind of acclimate. They get stronger. They do grow up, like you said. They start talking with the microbes outside. And there's, there's an adjustment period. It's so fast. It's like someone going through SEAL training. It like makes or breaks you, you know, it's

actually called hardening off. There you go where we kind of the plant has to get toughened up before it can survive well outdoors. So oftentimes in cold environments, where growers do their starts in greenhouses or indoors, and then move their starts outdoors. They'll go through a hardening off process where they'll move them out or expose them to those conditions for a couple hours one day, and then, like four hours the next, and then six and then finally, put them out there, so that it's not sort of too much for them all at once. And plants do adjust to that and become heartier hardened in that process. That's crazy. And yeah, so in indoor plants, we're almost trying to grow soft plants. I keep thinking, and I've never really, I haven't thought through this metaphor deeply. It's never occurred to me before, but I'm kind of thinking about veal. You know,

you of all people are thinking about veal, yeah,

it's like, we're, we're trying to keep them soft and kind of give them the perfect food, the perfect conditions to grow, kind of the tastiest product, without them having to worry about, you know, getting out there and walking around and actually, you know, defending them. Selves, so we pamper the hell out of indoor plants. That's

fascinating. We don't want the Hardy bison species with the shaggy coat to survive the wind. We don't need it. We want that succulent just about the flavor. Yeah, this

is kind of what's happened in modern varieties of agriculture outdoors, too. If you look at, you know, I'm famous for bringing up corn, but if you look at the difference between the corn that the farmers that I work with in Mexico grow, which once it's planted, a lot of that corn will grow and produce an ear of corn, even if the farmer completely neglects it after that point. Well, if you plant a field of corn in Iowa and then completely neglect it. You ain't getting any corn. I mean, the plants will not have enough nitrogen to grow. They won't be able to do it. They absolutely depend on prodigious use of fertilizers in order to sort of grow and produce that. They can't weather pest attacks the same way that the crops that I grow, when the farmers in Oaxaca do, they can't deal with those things because they're used to getting sprayed with pesticides. They're used to getting lots of nitrogen fertilizer, and they're used to their bread to grow very fast, and if they're not getting that nitrogen fertilizer that doesn't allow them to grow fast, and they just, you know, grow scrawny, whether they never grow big enough to produce ears, and they'll just die, right? So we grow these plants in a lot of conditions when we can take control of certain aspects of them, then we can grow them bigger and faster, and it's done to grow a better harvest. And we can have all sorts of arguments about quality now, and I think that there's interesting arguments to be made there. But in terms of quantity, you know that breeding efforts and doing these things increasing the intensification of farming. There's all sorts of of similar processes, but growing indoors is a pretty extreme example of increasing the intensification of farming.

I like that phrasing. That is exactly what we're doing, yeah, intensifying it. Speaking of intensifying, you know, you talk about the differences between indoor and outdoor, you talk about the climate, air flow differences, but then immediately you bring up the sun, yeah. And the sun, like I said, is kind of what inspired this whole episode. And to so much talk around the Sun versus this grow light. Nothing beats the sun. Our glow grow light is closest to the sun. Our grow light mimics the sun. Yeah, I know it's free. I know that it's nice and powerful to grow big organic buds outside for free. Yeah, so that's a big benefit. But just talk to me about how we should be thinking about the sun while growing outdoors. Talk to me about how plants interact with the sun and like that, you know, eons old relationship, and how that differs from grow lights.

Yeah. So, you know, the sun is an amazing, wonderful like gift of energy and warmth and light, and it allows everything on this planet to live and survive, largely through plants ability to harness the energy and photons and create sugars and create, you know, everything that all the rest of life is basically built upon, right? So plants have a long sort of evolutionary history of being exposed to the sun and of sort of, you know, maximizing that energy transfer, the reality of sunlight in like, really sunny locations, they get a lot of sun. So lower latitudes, bright sunny day, towards the middle of the day, you're gonna get ppfds at or above 2000 micromoles per square meter. Oh, really, yeah, it's like double what we need inside a tent, like a little over double, yeah, it's double, basically what plants can efficiently use at the carbon dioxide levels that they're experiencing outdoors. So plants basically have to protect themselves from that additional light. And one of the things that I never hear indoor growers who are talking about mimicking nature, right, is like, I'm gonna start my plants at like, 100 PPFD, and gradually ramp that up to 2000 and then leave it there for a few hours, and then ramp it back down. You know, there's the sunset and sunrise modes that a lot of girl lights, or girl light controllers have that sort of play off of this idea that plants need to be kind of woken up with gradually increasing light and put back to sleep with gradually decreasing light. And that it's it's not really mimicking sort of the PPFD experience that that plants have outdoors, though. Yeah, but it's

part of it that's really interesting. What you said, I don't mean to interrupt, but one of the things you said on a previous episode that has always stuck with me is that that two, 2000 PPFD coming from the sun is coming from a single focal point. You can lift up your thumb and block it out. Yeah. And you talked about how plants have the ability to angle their leaves so that they don't saturate it. That blew my mind, because I see, I see so many over lit plants indoors and veg, and they can't turn their leaves away. The LED takes up the entire ceiling. The whole ceiling is lights,

yep, and the reflective walls are surprisingly like effective lights too, right? Like you go in there and look at the reflective wall. It's bright underneath the light. So yeah, lights coming at them from everywhere, exactly. Yeah, the plants have ways to sort of survive that. Changing their leaf angle is a big one outdoors, and it's only a few hours that they kind of have to get through that. So they're not kind of dealing with the whole time the lights are on. And if they were, plants would be evolved differently. Basically, plants can't be evolved to be sort of super efficient at 2000 PPFD, because that's not the condition that they're sort of most likely to experience most of the time, right? And so if they were optimized for 2000 PPFD, you know, they're going to have a lot of receptors that are often not being used. And that's just biologically expensive to build that infrastructure, if it's only rarely used. So it's evolved for a lower level of light. And when there's excessive light, they sort of avoid it. And when there's not enough light, they go kind of hunting for it, right? And really open their leaves and try to find it. So they have to be evolved sort of for that midpoint which is going to be the optimal, the evolutionary optimum at

this distance from the Sun. So maybe if we were growing plants on Venus, that PPFD would spike

higher, yeah, if, if we experienced, you know, noon time, ppfds of 4000 right? Then the plants would probably be efficient closer to, like, 2000 right? Because that would be kind of the the mid point where you can't, you can't optimize for the maximum, because you're just not going to often achieve that maximum. So what happens outdoors is in the morning and in the evening, the plants are getting less light than they could actually use, and in the middle of the day, they're getting more light than they can actually use, and so, you know, there's not much they can do during the morning and the night, they get what they can. And then, you know, in the tropics or whatever, and the lower latitudes, on sunny days, they start avoiding light during the middle parts of the day, or they have, you know, desert plants and other things are evolved to not absorb too much light. So in an indoor setting, we just sort of understand where are plants, what's the plant's optimal point of photosynthesis whenever the receptors sort of set up, and you just dig that to them all the time. So they don't ever have to kind of be under lit, and they don't ever have to be avoiding light. You don't want to give your plant so much light that it has to go into those photo protection measures, but we can do that, and that's why we measure PPFD, and that's why, you know, eventually grow light. Designers started designing lights to distribute that density of light across the canopy, and what the plants can sort of be optimized for. That's one of the ways that we grow plants faster indoors is we're able to give them better light over the whole sort of lights on period. The other thing that the sun does, the sun doesn't really do this, but the planet is spinning, so the sun has the appearance of moving across the sky. And plants can't, necessarily. They're not fully phototropic, where they kind of move to follow the sun. So they do that somewhat. Cannabis plants do that somewhat, but basically, having a steady, fixed overhead lighting source delivering the perfect PPFD all of the time is just far more efficient, right? Than having a mobile, single point light source that you know delivers not enough light for half of the time and too much light for the other portion of the time. Those are two totally different

things. It's a really good way to look at it. Dr Coco, we explained that very well, and there is no light manufacturer who ever could or who would ever want to mimic that. Honestly, it should be on random mode if you're going to mimic it. Maybe a storm passes today and half the light goes out. Maybe it's, maybe it's way too sunny. It's, it's the consistency and the evenness that actually is better.

Now, plants are able to deal with temporary issues like that, right? So like if, if you're growing in a room or. A tent, and say you have a big four by eight tent, you got two lights, like one on either side and one light goes out for whatever reason, right? The plants aren't going to really bat an eye at that. If that light's just out for a day, yeah, the other light comes on and it's just going to be a cloudy day for that plants on that side of the tent, like they're evolved to handle changing light conditions on a day by day basis, and it's not going to upset them. Yeah, that is an important note, yeah, but we don't want to do that on purpose Exactly. Plants aren't looking to have a rainy day every once in a while and they're like, oh my god, it's never rained. And now unhappy plants or I'm not going to produce as much cannabinoids. It really helps to think about plants like they're sort of biological pumps, and they really just respond to the conditions that they're found. And I think it's easy to anthropomorphize them, or get them kind of feelings and thoughts personify them desires and right what they want or whatever, but they're really just biological pumps, pumping water from the soil up into the air and like, that's how most of the movement of everything happens within the plant. And they're responding to the different conditions that they're given. That's

exactly right. I think you can personify and they're they're unique, and you can love them. But when we come to how, when it comes to how they behave, right, you're absolutely right, we tend to like, give all these like nuances to processes that are that maybe not the way we look at them. SD, microbes, baby. SD, microbe works.com. Code, grow cast to get your savings on the greatest compost and soil mix in the world, if I do say so myself. SD microbes is powered by their amazing biovast vermicompost. It is the most powerful and diverse compost that I have personally found out there on the market. And this thing will supercharge your soil no matter how you grow or just grab their water only soil mix. Not only does it have the bio vast loaded into it, but it's actually a cocoa based mix. I'm using this cocoa living soil in my earth box, Sub irrigated planter, and I could not be happier with the results. It's absolutely amazing. It's got great water holding capacity. It's absolutely perfect for a Sub irrigated planter and whatever style you're running, SD Micro works.com they've got a bunch of great stuff up there again, use code, grow cast for savings. Andrew is absolutely amazing. If you're in the SoCal area, hit him up. He'll deliver he'll work with you. He'll get the soil in your hands. Or just hit up that website. It is absolutely worth it. And of course, members getting 35% off in membership. That's right, a bunch of members gearing up for the grand Pheno hunt starting 215 That's right, February 15, and a lot of people are using SD microbes in SIP systems. Is what we've been recommending for a while. Hunt those strains and see how they come out. Absolutely fire out of this grow style. So check it out. SD microworks.com. Make sure that you're following us. Make sure you're in membership. Go to grow cast.com our brand new website, and make sure to stay tuned for that grand final hunt as well. Grow cast.com/hunt thank you to SD microbes. Thank you to Andrew. Go check them out. You will not regret plugging that bio, vast compost into your system. SD microworks.com code grow cast members get 35% off back to

the light thing. This is, this is really important. So you talk about the distribution of light, essentially, the quantity of light, the timing of light. What about the quality? Because this is something that, again, I hear a lot. Nothing beats the sun. Our grow light is the same as the sun. Talk to me about, like, spectrum and then just overall quality of light, Sun versus grow light,

yeah. So this is, it's an interesting one. There's, there's no question that the sun light is different in terms of, you know, spectral output, then grow lights are. It produces a lot more for our red light, richer full spectrum light in the greens and yellows. The reality is, most LED grow lights have a bimodal distribution, so there's two spikes in their spectral output, one at about 450 nanometers, and that's because there are 450 nanometer semiconductors driving the full spectrum diodes. So almost all full spectrum white diodes have 450 nanometer semiconductors. And even though a lot of their light is kind of pushed to longer wavelengths, and that's why it appears white, they all have a spike at 450 because of that, semiconductors generating all the photons at that range. And then grow lights use a lot of 660 nanometer LEDs, which produce light. Exactly at 660 nanometers, and so you get a spike at 450 and a spike at 660 now that that's not entirely by accident. I mean, it's a little bit of a lucky circumstance, but that the plants actually sort of respond the McCree response curve, which was mapped out in the 70s, sort of like how plants use different wavelengths of light, suggested that they used blue light a little bit more efficiently than green and yellow lights, and red light more efficiently than than green and yellow light, so that they're also sort of those two spikes. And that corresponds to kind of how the different photo systems within the plants harvest different wavelengths of light. Wow. So, yeah, there's two photo systems, photo systems one and two, and they're sort of geared towards different wavelengths. If you, if you provide monochromatic light, you won't activate both of them. And that's why, like the old blurbable lights, had blue light and red light, they'd activate both photo systems and make the plant sort of work. That's fascinating. So

if you just grow under like straight green light or one one, yeah, or

straight red light or straight blue light, wow, will not get as efficient photosynthesis. But if you grow with blue light and red light, you'll activate both photo systems instead of just one or the other. Never understood that. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah, and the ratio between them is important too. If the ratio shifts towards blue, then the plants tend to be shorter stock here, it actually affects the how the cells develop. So the cells themselves become sort of squatter cells, shorter cells. And if you're exposed to more red light, or the ratio of red is higher than the cells elongate. So when you're thinking about internodal distances, the same number of cells, if they're shorter squatter translates into shorter internodal spacing. But if you get these elongated cells, then you get sort of longer internodal spacing, and oftentimes that's less desirous during veg. So the ratio of red to blue matters. The other sort of complicating factor in that is that red light is cheaper than blue light, so grow light manufacturers would generally prefer to use red light because you get more of it for each watt of electricity that you invest but if you put too much red light, then that causes vegetating plants to stretch. Can

we just pause and appreciate how crazy that is and how, how fascinating The phenomenon is that you saturate a living being with a different frequency of Photon energy, and it changes the cell structure to be more or less squat. Yeah, that's some crazy shit. Score one for the hippie the frequency hippie dippie people, because that's like mad. That's like magic to me. Man, that's crazy,

it is, and any growers can can sort of play around with this. You know, if you want to get your plants to get stretch here, people often ask like, and let me just say, to get back to your original question about, sort of how spectrum and outdoor and all this affect plants. We have this photo system thing. We need to activate both photo systems, right and to sort of fully saturate photosynthesis. But as far as photosynthesis is concerned, there doesn't appear to be much more that you know, if we're providing adequate red and blue light, providing yellow and green photons, aren't going to do much more in terms of photosynthesis at that point, we're sure of this. The science has settled on this. Yeah. Well, this is some of the stuff that bug B and his students are sort of actively probing and researching and doing different tests at different spectrums and changing spectrums at different times during the Grow period. And that's cool, and that's, yeah, they keep kind of coming back with, especially during the flowering period, that changing the spectrum during the flowering period doesn't have appreciable, quantitative, measurable impacts on harvest quality, so on cannabinoids or terpenes or other things like that, or in harvest size, or really in anything that they're able to measure Changing spectrum. So increasing the ratio of red light, increasing the ratio of blue light using only certain wavelengths of light, as long as you're still activating both photo systems. Wow, during vegetative growth, it affects cell structure, as we discussed, but plants don't sort of grow the same way during flowering. You know, that's why we used to switch. I've said this a lot because growers always think that this is different. Growers often think that we switch when we used to grow under metal halide and HPs that we did that because, you know, I think that the idea is metal halide was cheaper, but HPs was better for flowering. Is that? Right? That's what people think. Ink, I think, but it's exactly wrong. Metal Halide isn't cheaper, it's more expensive. HPs is better, but HPs is too much red, so you can't use HPs during veg, because

it stretches your plants out. That's what I was always told, is the metal halide builds the structure, and then HPs is for flower. That's what I was told. Yeah,

HPs is a red, much more red. And it's metal halide lights have more blue signature, more blue, sort of a spectral output, less red, so plants grow shorter stalker. But metal halides bulbs don't last as long. They aren't as efficient, so you don't get as much light per watt of electricity. And they were sort of used to prevent plants from stretching, but growers think that, like, oh, HBs had some sort of better spectrum for flowering. It really just had more light per watt, right? So you'd get more light, and that's why you'd get a better harvest. Now, there's more to it. There's other non photosynthetic plants signaling, you know, other wavelengths of light can do other things potentially, and there's room for this. So we can't ever say that. You know that argument about sunlight being qualitatively better for whatever reason, it's hard to systematically show every single whatever reason isn't true.

Hey, listen, I hear, hear an answer that Dr Coco, that does sound like what you're saying is there is something very special about the sun that is very hard to mimic.

Yes, but whether or not it's important to mimic, it just like whether or not it's important to mimic, you know, rocky soil. Is it important to have like rocks in your pot. Rocks exist in the ground, in nature, right? Like or is this, you know, is it important to have your light move across the sky? Or these other issues? How important is that? Or what does that do? I'm of the opinion, based on the the research that's been sort of return so far, is that there's nothing really super magical in the spectrum itself. You know, they've tested a lot of different, you know, treatments with infrared exposures, with ultraviolet exposures, almost all of that either leads to known, you know, measurable improvement or measurable decline. Oh, sure. Okay, so it seems unlikely, and our ability to manipulate spectrum is radically improving. You know, as recently as the 90s and the early 2000s we were really limited in terms of even being able to generate specific spectrums of light, but with improvements in semiconductor technologies now, we can generate a lot of really specific wavelengths of light that we've never been able to do, and have More control and test different things, so we will learn more about spectrum and potentially be able to improve bro lights. In that regard, I think that there. I'm not, I don't know. I guess I'm a bit of a non optimist in that regard, in terms of sort of uncovering something that's super transformational.

Well, I mean, like you said, we still, we already grow outside, like, right? I think that people laser focus in on certain things and are like, this is the thing that's going to make my weed, like you said, magically Danker, right? Whether it's adding UV lights, whether it's like boosting their CO two or some secret high stress training method. Like, I don't think it really works like that. I think it's much more multifaceted and it's a lot more boring. Yeah, so it's about consistency and being in your garden every day. And we tend to look for these like magical solutions. But that being said, I'm sure, like you said, there's so much more science and work to be done. I just don't think it's going to take your mids and turn it into dink.

It's not, let me, let me comment on a couple of wavelengths, stuff that I'm going to get into on that diode city that I was talking about, ultraviolet light. There's really okay. So even if you're trying to mimic the sun, there's no UV C, and there's really no UV B that reached the planet, and there's really small quantities of UVA that reach the surface of the planet, is that? Right? Yeah, it's all filtered out in the atmosphere. So if you think there's some sort of mimicking nature thing about dosing your plants with UVB light, that's just that doesn't happen in nature. UVB light is really damaging cell structures, and so to the extent that it's doing anything, the route through which it's doing it is by damaging cell structures and maybe plant response. But there's no evidence that that helps cannabis plants.

Oh, I was just going to ask you this, because I see, I see people. You. Posting science about it and trying it in their grow. And to me, it seems like one of those things that we just discussed where, if it's having a positive change, I don't think it's a I think it's a marginal lunch is, what? Is what? Yeah, a lot of

the studies that have dose of plants and done it in a controlled environment and measured cannabinoids showed that there's a decrease, and trying to do it at different timings, or whatever. And there's this idea in the community that, well, you do it for two hours at different times of the day or something. You don't do it all the time. I just, I don't see any good science that's supporting those ideas. These are just growers, sort of and grow light companies, to be perfectly honest with you, trying to sell something to growers that are trying to buy something to solve, you know, problems that they think they may have.

Well, that comes pretty honest from you, man, because you could, you have an affiliate code for those lights, and you could have your own Dr, UV. So when you come out and say something like that, you know whether or not someone agrees with you, at least you can't argue. You're being intellectually honest here.

And the supplemental, like bars that that put both UV and IR chips on the same board make absolutely no sense to me. Why is that? Because just turning on UV and IR, you would, you wouldn't use them the same way, like I just said, like the leading idea about how to use UV would just be short durations during the day, got it and you would use IR either consistently during the day or alone right after the lights go out, but you wouldn't want the UV to come on kind of in either of those situations. So I don't understand why you would put UV chips and IR chips on the same channel of the same light bar. Sure. I didn't

mean to laugh. I just that was a really funny statement. You were like, don't get me started on putting UV chips on the same floor. That's a very like

interesting things you can do with these supplemental light bars. And you know, I've been playing around with a couple recently. I got a 730 nanometer bar that I've been thinking about using to sundown my plants and see if I can reduce the dark period. I got a 660 nanometer bar that you can add during flowering to have sort of a cheaper source of light, things like that. But yeah, you know, and I'm playing around with this also because I'm really trying to gain that experience, to have a better platform to speak about these different individual spectrums of light. But so far, if you're looking at grow lights, in particular, I don't like grow lights that include UV chips and run them while the rest of the chips are just on. I didn't even know that was a thing. Isn't that bad for you? It's bad for you. It depends. Man, a lot of them are just 395 nanometer chips. So they're technically UV, but they're open off to the sort of 400 is the visible light you can sort of cut off point, or violet, ultraviolet cutoff point. So they're basically violent diodes. But those violet does the 390 fives are so much less efficient than the 450s Sure, the 450s are some of the most efficient semiconductors that we know how to make in terms of energy transfer. They are the most efficient in terms of energy transfer. Wow, but the 390 fives are just not very efficient in terms of energy transfer. So they are doing some photosynthesis. They're within the photosynthetic range, even though they're technically outside of par 395, nanometers is doing photosynthesis. So you are getting benefit, but I think you'd be a lot better off just using, you know, 450 nanometer diode, or just another white diode, for that matter, getting it more light, as opposed to get, yeah, you'd get a lot more light, bigger bang for your buck. And I don't think that there's some super secret thing that 395 nanometer light is doing. At least none of the science shows that. It's true that if you go to the 450 nanometer semiconductors, you don't get any 395 nanometer light. When they put the 450 semiconductors into a white diode, basically they're using phosphor in the glue, usually, to redirect some of those blue towards longer wavelengths. They basically knock some of the energy off of them so they become a longer wavelength photon, but they can't make them shorter wavelength photons. So as it travels through, sort of, the phosphor in the the glue, a lot of the 450s becomes 600 somethings, but they can't become 300 somethings. Energy just doesn't, sort of, you can take energy away from something, but you can't give it in that way. Interesting, interesting, yeah, so you're not getting it. And I understand the idea that, hey, there could be something in the plant that's only sensitive to, like, 403 nanometer light and, you know, or whatever, and it's just, we don't, I mean, it could be, and that's what I'm saying. It's really hard to show that. Not true, right? But we don't have any evidence to suggest that it is true. Because if we tested, like, the 403 then be like, Oh, it's actually, we were wrong. It's 402 and then you have to test 402 and then, like, he can't show that it's not any of these things that each individually. I mean, it would just, it would be hard to do that, and it's

the magic bullet approach, right? Like, I think the truth often lies in like, the interactions between these systems. Like outdoor is a perfect example of that. Like nature, we tend to break it down in our heads as best we can as humans to try to make sense of things. Like, right? But there is so much going on and so much evolution behind these things that have been on this planet way before us. Yeah, right,

yeah. So that's what I think we're really trying to do as indoor horticulturalists, is we're trying to understand how these plants evolved in nature, understand how they work, and then be able to provide to them the optimal conditions to sort of allow them to work best, allow them to grow and put most of their energy into the parts of the plant that we're most interested in harvesting. And the idea there is, we'll take care of the rest, right? We'll defend you from pest infestation. You don't need to defend yourself. We'll make sure that you have enough phosphorus. You don't have to go looking for it, right? We'll make sure that you have everything you know the right climate. You don't have to become heartier and thicker bark or thicker cell walls to defend yourself from bigger swings in temperatures, because you're not going to have to experience that. We're going to take care of that for you,

that veal life. I hear you loud and clear. Dr COVID, going to get steak after this. I know after this? I know exactly your lifestyle. He's a vegetarian, folks. Or he doesn't, doesn't eat red meat. Yeah, I don't eat red meat, dude. This was a great exploration. I want to give you time to, like, wrap up any thoughts here at the end, like, this episode was fan fucking tastic. All your episodes are great, but this is a subject I wanted to dive into for a while, and you did a phenomenal job before we get into plugs and updates. Do you have any like final thoughts on growing outside inside? The Sun lights? Anything?

Yeah, I think it comes back to the speed versus cheap thing, right? It's a lot cheaper to grow outdoors. It takes a lot more time, and you're sort of thinking about your investment and your returns differently. In outdoor growing, you're investing land and you're investing time, primarily, right in an indoor growing, you're investing labor and you're investing energy. And since we're growing, you know more energy and more labor into the same sort of amount of space, we can grow a much bigger crop a lot faster, but it's way more expensive. And I think that those are sort of the biggest decision makers or thoughts between this. One other interesting thought is, I kind of wish cannabis was grown outdoors. No kidding. Yeah, from a strictly sustainability standpoint, yes, I think it's a disaster to grow cannabis indoors. It's a plant. It grows really well outdoors, and the main reason we grow it indoors is legal. At one point it was to hide from, you know, the man the police. Yeah, yeah. It's often regulated to do it that way, or it's state by state markets where you're growing this crop in a state that's not really suitable to grow cannabis, or certainly not suitable to grow cannabis year round.

Well, I mean, ours isn't year round, but it's illegal for these. These legal. What am I trying to say? The large scale licensed cultivators here, they cannot grow outdoors, like the good months they're not allowed to

right? So it forces us indoors, which that's where I try to really carve my niche in the market. Is like, Okay, if we're going to be growing indoors, let's try to do this as efficiently as possible, damn, right. Let's really try to do this in it's not sustainable. Growing indoor horticulture is never going to be sustainable, but, you know, in terms of the hardcore definition of that, but let's try and make it as sustainable as possible. Let's try to speed up the time to harvest, lower the amount of inputs that we're using, and maximize our returns to the energy that we're investing in the grow. Rather than, you know, maximize our returns to the land, or whatever you're going to think about in terms of outdoor growing. This is why I think that, you know, rather than plant count limits in states, they should do electrical caps. You have a 400 you know, megawatt cap, or whatever, and you grow as much as you freaking can, but that's your limit. You can't. And that would force growers to economize to power use that would force them to grow more efficiently. And more and more of them would bring me business, because more of them would come looking, sort of provide advice about how to do that. That would be fascinating man, or let them grow outside, like you said, Yeah, about that. That's great. And I say a lot of good things about indoor horticulture, because I figure, you know. If we're going to be doing this thing, we got to figure out how to do it as good as we possibly can. And, you know, minimize our negative impacts and maximize the size and the speed to harvest. That's so true. Yeah, really, I would really think my heart's with you. I love you guys. You're doing the God's work out there being farmers under the sun, and I kind of wish that cannabis came that way. It's slower, but it's much cheaper, much less fun,

too. I mean, listen, I love growing indoors. Growing indoors is fucking fun. There's nothing like being able to step away from my computer into my garden, right? But growing after is a special kind of fun, yeah? And,

you know, that's, that's the way we should go. You know, I don't know with a lot of things. I think that it's a little bit silly how much cannabis needs to be grown indoors, like the legal regime, like you're talking about, yeah, not letting licensed facility. It doesn't make a lot of sense here in San Diego County, where I live, you know, home growers are allowed to have six plants in a tent inside, but not even in a fenced yard or whatever outside. It's totally lame, and it kind of forces us where we have the ideal climate to be able to do this outdoors, we're not legally allowed to do it. We're sort of legally forced to, quote, unquote, recreate the sun right inside our tents. So yeah, I think that there's arguments on both sides. There's a lot of advantages to growing outdoors, but if we are going to grow indoors, I think we need to figure out how to optimize it, not just how to sort of somewhat mimic outdoors. That's

great, and that's where the work is to be done. Like you said, that's, that's where there's, there's work to be done there. Really quickly. Before we wrap it up, I got to tell you about my current run. Just take two minutes. Dr, Coco, you talk about the indoor and the labor part. I'm a really big fan of these SIP systems, these Sub irrigated planters, yep. Okay. And what do I have on the inside for my living soil medium, a living cocoa, nice. SD, microbes, makes a living cocoa. And this thing works so fucking good in a SIP because it wicks so well. Coco, yeah, you talk about the many powers of cocoa. And one of the things that does really well is wicks super well. And dude, the plants look great. The thing drinks faster than a regular sip, a Pete sip. And I just had to shout you out for a run. A living Coco run. Man, it's fucking living cocoa. It's just everything. Like you said, there's work to be done. There's so much innovation. People like combining styles and stuff. Yeah, and I had to tell you, I'm grown in Coco, growing in cocoa for the first time in a long time. So that's

cool. I'm glad. I'm glad to hear that. I'd love to hear more about your your living Coco adventure. How far are you from harvesting that crop? I'm

about to flip and I put them in looking so sick because they've been Solo cups for like, 10 weeks, and they just look so low.

Comes for 10 weeks. Is that your s, p, oh

yeah. That's actually I got a resource coming out of how to keep Solo cups pissed off. Yeah. Wow. Oh no. It was just laziness, a little cup for 10 weeks, but totally pure laziness, dude neglected them. It gets to that point where you're like, is this thing gonna even bounce back? But sure enough, they did. It's the magic of Coco, baby, okay? Dr Coco, tell us where to find you, where to go. Give us plugs before we wrap it

up. All right, so check me out on YouTube, of course, Dr MJ Coco on YouTube. I dropped a new video just a few or a week ago. I'm gonna be doing this new diodes video Negro light test, doing the new heat or tent heat factor and the operating cost metrics, and talking all about that. So check out those videos. Check me out on Coco for cannabis.com. Of course, my website, where we have a huge community of growers active 24 hour chat room, where you can drop in and ask questions about your plants, and where we're gearing up for the new New Year's grow challenge. It's going to start on January 1, 2025 we'd love to invite you to to grow your plants with us. So come on over and check us out at Coco for cannabis.

Awesome. Thank you. Dr, Coco, you rock band. Let's stay in touch. Yeah,

absolutely. Let's stay in touch. Jordan, love coming on. Grow cast, it's the best cannabis growing podcast out there, and always a privilege and an awe. Thank you.

Thank you, bro. Be well out there. Go enjoy your your veal steak, and we'll see you next time. Thank you all you listeners for tuning in. Coco for cannabis.com, growcast podcast.com. You know where to find us. We're all over the place. Stay tuned and special. Thank you to the members. We'll see you next time, everybody. This is Dr Coco and Jordan River, signing off, saying, Be safe out there and grow smarter. Bye, bye.

Grower. Love

that's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you to Dr Coco one more time. Shout out to the grand fino hunt. It's the best contest we've ever put on, and you need to be a part of it. Grow cast.com/hunt has the details. Go and check it out. You can grow any genetics in this hunt. We're hunting through the entire memberships gene pool and. Someone is gonna win $1,000 cash grand prize. Grow, cast.com/hunt, all the information is up there. Go and check it out. Go check out the new website, and we are so excited to host you in the grand fino hunt. Rooted leaf nutrients. Shout out to rooted leaf for sponsoring the show. Rooted leaf.com code, grow cast for 20% off. The 42% code might still be boosted. Go check it out. Maybe it's still live, but I'm pretty sure it's 20% off right now at the time. You're hearing this@rootedleaf.com thank you to rooted leaf for supporting the show, and thank you, dear listener. I appreciate all of you. I appreciate the members so so much. I'll see you guys in membership, and we go hop in voice chat right now and be well out there. Everybody be safe. We'll see you next time bye, bye.

You know, I'm famous for bringing up corn. You.