🧪 Crappy Nutrient Formulas, the History of Fertilizers, and Chelation Science with Nik from...

3:11AM Jan 28, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

nutrient deep dive

cannabis nutrient lines

AC Infinity discount

420 sale

Rooted Leaf book

plant biochemistry

ancient fertilizers

nitrogen process

phosphorus recycling

calcium importance

chelating agents

anthocyanins

aronia berries

nutrient calculator

growcast membership

Greetings cultivators from around the world. Jordan River here back with more grow cast, perfectly balanced for your ears. Today we have good friend of the show, Nick back on the line. We've got all sorts of new episodes and new guests lined up, but I wanted to put this episode in here to continue our nutrient deep dive series, because it's a really good one that I have recorded for this episode and this installment of the nutrient deep dive series, we're focusing more on the cannabis nutrient lines themselves. We go all the way back to the history of fertilization and then the invention of modern fertilizer, all the way up to cannabis specific lines, like the ones we're all using. Now I know you're gonna love this episode with Nick before we jump into it, though. Shout out to AC infinity, the best grow gear in the game. Code, grow cast one five saves you 15% at AC infinity.com. They've got the thick, sturdy tents with the thick canvas and the thick tent poles. The best tents in the game. They've got the fans that you need, the inline fans, the cloud Ray oscillating fans. Now again, code grow cast one five for 15% off the best quality grow gear you can find. They've also got lights and scissors and pots and hangers and so much more. But when it comes to the fans and the tents, there's no one else out there that does it better. The inline fans, the cloud Line series are fantastic. The S series is the simple series still comes with a 10 speed fan controller, and the T series comes with a controller that lets you automatically dial in your temperature and humidity. AC infinity.com, code grow, cast one five for 15% off. They even have grow kits that come with everything you need to expand. Get that second veg tent. Get that second flower tent you've been thinking about save with the kit and use code grow, cast one five, which now works on those kits, saving you extra money with the best gear in the game. Acinity.com they've been our partners for years. We brought these guys along a long time ago. They've really, really expanded and done a great job. Acinity.com code grow, cast one five. All right, everyone, let's get into it. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. Hello, podcast listeners. You are now listening to grow cast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in again today before we get started as always, I urge you to share this show. Turn a grower onto growcast, turn them onto our huge library of content, or better yet, get a smoker growing for the first time. That's the best way you can help us on our mission of overgrow. Make sure you're subscribed. Hit follow, do all the things and check us out at growcast podcast.com/membership for the greatest membership in cannabis cultivation, huge. Thank you to the members. Today we've got friend of the show, Nick from rooted leaf back on the line. We're continuing the nutrient Deep Dive. I know you guys love this series. What's up? Nick, how are you doing? Man, Hey, Jordan, I'm doing pretty well. It's good to be back here. Yes, sir. We love having you on and listen, today we are continuing our nutrient deep dive series. We're talking about basically the history of fertilizer and nutrient formulations. But before we get into that Nick big sale, do we? Do we drop the big news? I mean, we're approaching 420 What do you have for us in terms of a sale this year?

I think we should. I think we should. Last year was a phenomenal success. Everybody at the order really came in and supported us quite a bit. So we want to thank everybody what we're thinking about doing for this year, for the order, is allowing people to place their orders a couple of days in advance of the rest of the coupon codes being activated. So we'll probably start on the 15th. You know, we can activate the Grow cast 420 coupon code so that people as early as the 15th can start placing their orders, and that coupon code will get you 42% off your order. It's the biggest sale that we do all year, and we want to give the orders kind of exclusive access to getting, you know, in the very front of the line, because we're typically pretty busy around, you know, the 420 sale. So it can take us a little bit of extra time to fulfill orders. But if you guys want to take advantage of the deal and get ahead of the rush, definitely use that coupon code. I think we're going to make it grow. Cast 420

so as you're hearing this, guys, it should be live grow. Cast 420 42% off your nutrients. This is the same thing you did last year, man. And people loved it. It's just good to have people be able to stock up. I'm sure it's good for you to refresh your inventory, move a bunch of product, and why not drop it on the best holiday of the year, the week of 420 so grow. Cast 420 that's grow. Cast 420 should be live right now for 42% off. Go and get it. Everybody, go and grab it. And thank you, Nick for putting that up early. Well, what's going on at rooted leaf? Are you guys just hunkering down, getting ready for this big sale and big rush orders.

Yeah, yeah. We've got a couple of really cool things that we're working on right now. Part of it is definitely, you know, revolving around the sales. We've also got a book that we're working on, and the book is going to basically contain some of the content that you may have heard me talk about on the episodes. Every once in a while, I may throw in the occasion. Original analogy between how plants operate and how car engine operates, or how a vehicle operates. And so I've been working on this for a couple of years, and it just seems like it's kind of a really, really strong metaphor. I think people who grow are naturally inclined to be a little bit more mechanically oriented, for whatever reason. So this is breaking down of complex knowledge of biochemistry. Plant biochemistry is made a lot easier when we can examine it from the context of like, hey, what does a car engine do? How does it operate? Versus what are some of the nuanced biochemistries that we're seeing in cannabis plants? So we've been working on that book, hopefully is going to get launched sometime in the beginning of May, and it'd be really we'll probably give the order a sneak peek preview. So if you guys are on the discord, I highly encourage you to check it out. If you're not on the discord, definitely make sure you get onto the order the cultivation discord. It will definitely be one of the best decisions you've made in your life.

Thank you, man. Yeah, that's right. People are really stoked about this. Nick already teased the table of contents in membership, like Nick saying, if you're a fan of his work and our work. You really should be in membership right now, because this is getting us very excited. Dude, you've talked about this before. You know this metaphor between plants and engines, but like, I'm just gonna really quick audience tease some of the chapter titles. I like this. Sulfur is the radiator. You relate calcium to the frame in the chassis. I like that. Potassium, the oil pump, fuel pump and transmission. Boron, the gaskets and seals. This is really cool stuff, dude. People are stoked about this book, and it's going to be free when you do release it, right? We'll get a sneak peek. We already got a sneak peek of the table of contents. We'll get a sneak peek of the actual content, but you're going to release it eventually as a free gift. I love that idea.

Yeah, and part of this is just like, you know, I see a lot of people trying to monitor, you know, this is maybe just like a personal belief of mine, but I feel like a lot of the knowledge that people are seeking out and they're striving to attain, it should be a lot easier to access than it currently is nowadays. I mean, with the advances that we see in technology and how easy it is to learn things nowadays, it's, it's kind of disheartening to me to see people out there trying to monetize and take advantage of what really should be, just like a global communal effort, like everybody should be trying to help everybody else to get to that next step in knowledge and to produce better results, as opposed to just trying to, like, make money on basic, you know, introductory level knowledge. And so, like a lot of times, you know the content that we discuss on the individual episodes, we're not trying to monetize those. We just want to put the knowledge out there so that people can get better results in the garden. Ultimately, what we hope to achieve is that people become inspired to go out there in the garden again, like really get involved with what your plants are doing. And if you understand the nuances of how the the compounds that you're applying to the plants, or the things that you're doing to the plants, to the plants might help them better express themselves. That's ultimately what we want to see, is people do better in the garden overall. So this is kind of, you know, an attempt for us to continue to share the knowledge, spread the love, and just get people super excited about how to garden and get the most out of whatever they're growing, potatoes or tomatoes. You know,

that is really cool. Man, I mean, listen, it's a really good analogy. And like you said, everyone should know this stuff. Everyone should know how a plant functions, and even to the more advanced you know, like what each mineral does. So I'm gonna sit down and read this thing. And again, we thank you given so much Sneak Peek access and spending so much time in the membership discord. It's a lot of fun in there. Man, cannot wait to see the new rooted leaf book. So let's see. Today we got a bunch on the menu, man. So I wanted to talk to you, Nick, since you are one of the people that I look up to most now creating nutrition for cannabis, specifically, I wanted to talk to you, you know, often, oftentimes we're talking about these new advancements. We're talking about what's next for rooted leaf and the future of fertilizer. But I also wanted to take a look back, right? Not that we need to do a whole 45 minute deep dive into the history of fertilizer, but like, can we talk about, you know, where we were as a species, before bottled fertilizers, and then after bottled fertilizers, all the way until now.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And, you know, it's one of these topics that we could do a really deep dive on, but I'll try to give you guys a couple of very high level points so that we can kind of get a good lay of the land. And we won't stitch together all the individual details that are associated with the larger picture, but what we want to do is just create an understanding, or establish the understanding that the way that humans participated in agricultural cycles for 10s of 1000s of years, if not longer, were much different than they are as of the past 150 maybe 200 years at the most, right? So we want to try to pick apart some of those nuances. And I guess where it makes sense to start is maybe in around the early 1800s to the mid 1800s this is when you have a lot of these scientists that are starting to become really intrigued by what elements are required for plants to grow. They wanted to try to formalize their knowledge and say that there's individual elements. And so the concept of what is an essential element versus a non essential element, partially is rooted in that pretty old body of knowledge, and it. Wasn't until about the 1860s that I believe it was in Germany that there was the process was invented for basically taking, like rock phosphates and bones as phosphorus sources and treating them with sulfuric acid. And this is the genesis of the very first type of phosphorus fertilizer. It was called Super phosphate calhofes, yeah. Yeah. Effectively, they would, well, not Cal phos, because they would, yeah, I mean, because they treated it with sufuric acid, right? You're gonna get, okay, yeah. The bones themselves are calcium phosphate in the form of Hydroxyapatite. It's a specific kind of, like a crystalline structure, if you will, for calcium phosphate. And there's maybe some other, trace components, trace elements, and there may be some strontium and some iron and so on and so forth. But yeah, the primary structure is a calcium phosphate structure, and then those would be mechanically refined, first ground down and then treated with sulfuric acid. And this was sort of like the very first phosphorus fertilizer that was made with a chemical process. I

will say that's earlier than I expected, early 1800s and then you said 1860 is when that breakthrough was that's earlier than I would have would have guessed, yeah,

and it's somewhere in there. It kind of depends on where you go. I know that here in North America, the potassium industry is actually after the 1900s it was like during World War One. And then in New Mexico in the early 1930s to the late 1930s there were some potassium sources that were found, and so they started making, there's a whole industry built around, you know, manufacturing of potassium for fertilizer. So, you know, but these are mostly, they're more like physical transformations than they are really like underlying chemistry changes, so to speak. You know, most of the time people associate nitrogen fertilizers with synthetic fertilizers because, you know the haber bosch process, which, you know, again, probably early 1900s or so, this process was invented to basically produce toluble, form of fertilizer that could be applied to crops. And you know, they basically take nitrogen gas out of the air. And using natural gas as a fuel source, they'll create ammonia out of the air, basically, jeez,

man. So there's these, like large advancements when it comes to the kind of chemical manufacturing of these things. So before that, obviously there's, there's the natural way that soil is kind of recycling itself and all of these things, but, but what you do is also very old, right? At rooted leaf, you take these plants and you ferment them and you alter them in different ways. That itself has a rich history, right? It

does, yeah, and the history for that goes back a little bit further. I mean, it kind of depends. There's like two distinct things that we should mention. The first is that over 15,000 years ago, there were belts of kelp forests that were growing in coastal waters. And it's been shown through archeological evidence that humans and human settlements were kind of following these belts of kelp as they grew, for a variety of good reasons, you know, particularly because these this kelp grows so fast and as it grows, kelp is really good keystone species. And so where you have kelp growing, you typically have small crustaceans, you've got small fish. And so it was kind of understood that if you just followed where the kelp grew, as long as the kelp was blooming and it was growing, that there would be other life forms there. And so people would fish out around the kelp forest. But it was also, what's really interesting is that, you know, there is evidence going back to about 15 plus 1000 years ago that humans were actually harvesting sea plants and removing them from the ocean, bringing them back on land, and then processing them in sort of rudimentary physical ways. There wasn't any like complex chemistry or advanced manufacturing happening, but they were transforming the kelp a little bit enough to have it remain in the archeological record, and there were tools that were developed specifically for various types of kelp. You could see evidence of this through what's called the buttermilk Creek complex in Texas, and it leads all the way down south to Mont Verde, Chile, where some of the oldest archeological evidence of humans using kelp was found. In fact, there was one site in Chile that researchers had discovered nine species of kelp and specific stone tools that had been used to cut and prepare the fronds in a variety of different ways. And when they tested those samples, they traced back to roughly think the range was like 14,000 to maybe 15,000 years ago. And so this is kind of this really interesting thought process here, before you know, modern agriculture was invented, here we have humans that are actually participating in agricultural cycles of sea plants before they participate in the cycles of terrestrial plants. And so it's almost like the body of knowledge that we have that led into what we now define as modern agriculture actually originated from the oceans, which is super fascinating. That is fascinating. Man,

holy crap, 15, yes, yeah, it is.

And it's a very rich history. I'm just kind of bringing up one example, you know, like I mentioned with the buttermilk Creek complex in Texas, then Monte Verde down in Chile. There's a lot of different pieces of evidence that kind of stitch. Together this larger understanding that maybe humans were kind of poking and prodding around, and they they certainly had a strong understanding prior to when we think they had a strong understanding, right? And to kind of fast forward the clock a little bit, you know, we're now. We're in Roman times. In the first century there are Roman records. There was a guy named, I think his name was Lucius, Junius, moderate us colomela. Or Lucius colomela was the the short name, but so this guy was a scholar in Roman society. He was, if my memory serves correctly, he was kind of the dude that was responsible for agriculture, so to speak. So he was in a high level position, and and he made recommendations for how exactly to grow food crops. And what he did was he recorded that the coastal settlements had a practice of harvesting the sea plants from the ocean, and then they would bury them into the soil, along with a mixture of straw, peat, mulch and manure, which is really fascinating. So here we are. You know, like the Romans had this specific kind of industry built around harvesting sea plants directly out of the oceans. They would actually lay them down on the beach to have them sun dried. They would compress them into bricks, throw them on the back of the donkeys or the mules or the horses, you know, and then transport them back inland, because the kelp didn't grow and let it only grow on the coastal regions. But here we see this concerted effort that the Romans had to actually harvest the sea plants and then bring them back. And he made specific recommendations for people. One of them was to, you know, first wash the kelp, and then, for young plants in particular, they would actually take some of the fronds and they would wrap the roots in the seaweed itself and then transplant them, basically, and that would help them retain their greenness. That was a very specific thing that was recommended by this guy, Lucius colamell. He said that if you do this, and if you treat the soil with straw, peat, mulch, manure and kelp, that's a good way to increase the fertility and keep the fertility very high. So the Romans could afford to have a very advanced, you know, civilization where they could feed millions of people, and they didn't run out of fertility in the soils.

Wild Man, this guy is putting together the peat and the kelp into bricks that sounds like ancient Roman pro mix

that strikes to the grooming that home could hit two pounds of light. That's what he was trying to do. You know, 2000 years ago,

those aqueducts humming because we need the power to power up these grows Dude that is really wild. We do not give ancient people enough credit for how freaking intelligent they were. Yeah, they were working with a different set of tools and a different set of understanding than we were. But they were so smart. It's just cool to see that that was happening for 1000s of years, hundreds, hundreds of years. Yeah, yeah. And you

got to think about it like if modern fertilizer basically has its roots in, let's say, the late 1800s and there's a lot of people working on this, by the way. You know, I just mentioned, like the haber bosch process, for example. I mentioned, you know, what happened in Germany in the 1860s with the potassium industry. And those are kind of like individual examples that fit into a larger and more complex network of German, Russian, you know, American scientists, French, English, like the whole world basically has these really smart people that are all trying to pursue this at once. And so there's a lot of these ideas popping up here and there. You know, around that time there was a guy named justice von Liebig, who is oftentimes regarded as like the modern the father of modern organic chemistry. So he's the one that came up with the theory of the minimum, which is to say that a growth of any system, specifically a biological system, is is limited by the element that's least available, rather than the one that's most abundant. And that's why we understand nowadays. It's very common knowledge. Like, if you're deficient in nitrogen, it doesn't matter how much phosphorus you put on the plants. You're never going to correct a nitrogen deficiency by, you know, overdoing the phosphorus application or something like that. So he kind of, you know, broke this out. I mean, he himself borrowed the ideas that were kind of passed up to that point, but he's oftentimes credited with this idea. But the actual idea for the Law of the Minimum came maybe 20 or 30 years before him, but he's the one that gets all the credit. So dang,

that's crazy, yeah, or the guys to figure that out, or the ladies who then got taken credit from the guy to figure that out. That's just amazing, dude. What are you smoking on at that point when you when you have that revelation, and I can't believe they were so into the different element needs so early, that's really, really wild to think about. Now, what I learned in like, high school was kind of what came next after that, right? So we learned how to manufacture these fertilizers on mass. We started using them in heavy, heavy concentrations. We then found out the harmful effects of these at the time, modern fertilizers, right? We learned about the Dust Bowl in high school, how we harmed the soil so much that it created this dust layer in our farmland and kind of, you know, ruined part of the country for a really long time and and so now, you know, we're still stuck in that, in that factory farming mentality, largely, but at the same time, we've realized as harmful effects. There are lots and lots of people now working on the opposite people like you work. On fertilizers that don't harm the soil and, in fact, replenish the biology and things like that. So I'm just kind of thinking how we caught up to now and then the question, What's next, right? Like, what is the future advancements? Where are the bottlenecks to growth? When we take a look at fertilizer technology, what do you think about that?

Yeah, that's a good point to bring up there. And part of this is kind of like a double edged sword, because the estimates right now are that about 30 to 50% of the annual output, like all the biomass, all the crops, all the food, even the cotton that we grow to make clothes, out of 30 to 50% is attributed directly to the commercial fertilizer inputs, and a huge portion of that actually comes back to the haber bosch process, because nitrogen is oftentimes one of the rate limiting factors. We did a very extensive deep dive into nitrogen on one of the episodes earlier, and I would highly encourage people to go back and check that one out. But the idea that I'm just going to kind of recap here and briefly summarize is that nitrogen makes up about 80% of the composition of the air that you and I breathe right now. It's 800,000 parts per million of nitrogen gas, and only like 420 parts per million of CO two. So it's present in this huge concentration. It's very abundant. But the problem is the bond that holds that nitrogen gas together is extremely difficult to break apart. I mean, you need, like, colossal levels of energy. And so plants struggle with this. This is basic thermodynamics. It's the transfer of energy. In order to break that bond apart, you need a very, very powerful, high energy source. The industrial process, the haber bosch process, uses natural gas to basically burn compress. You know, it's done on a high pressure, high temperature, but it allows you to create a hydrogen containing form of nitrogen by combining, you know, nitrogen gas with like a fuel source. Basically, you just burn the gas, and that's where the hydrogen comes from, but it results in the emission of CO two, and it takes a huge amount of energy. So if you look at the haber bosch process, it ends up accounting for, like, two to 3% of the all the electricity that's used by, you know, humans across the planet is traced back to the haber bosch process. So

we could create big dent in sustainability if we could figure out a better way, specifically surrounding this element of nitrogen, right? And not to say like, like, every step of the process is critical. We had to learn these things first, right? And the ability to create that nitrogen completely changed the outlook of agriculture and hunger throughout the world. But then, like you said, Now we know the toll, and it's like, Can we do it even a better way? Can we can we find another way that's even more sustainable, even more efficient Yeah.

And so a lot of like, to that point, a lot of the technologies that are coming out, they still kind of use the the essential blueprint, I guess you could say, of the haber bosch process. But they're looking at doing things like, maybe, instead of deriving hydrogen from the burning of fossil fuels, what if we apply electrolysis to water and split water molecules apart. Because, you know, that's H, 2o so if we can figure out a way to steal the hydrogen and release the oxygen, then what we have is a system whereby we can create nitrogen fertilizer using the power of the sun and water. And this kind of leads into the examples that we've been talking about with plants, plant biochemistry and how plants do it, because this is obviously what plants do. They use the power of the sun to split molecules of water apart. They keep the protons to generate ATP. They keep the electrons and store them in redox pairs in both the chloroplasts and the mitochondria. So effectively, what the more sustainable and more advanced technologies are doing now is bringing us back more in alignment with with nature. I guess you could say the way that this, these types of things happen in the natural world. The problem overall is that, you know, in order for us to sustain the number of people that we have on the planet today, we need to have conventional fertilizer production. It doesn't matter if it's a sustainable process like the latest and greatest and non thermal plasma creating, you know, a nitrogen, soluble nitrate fertilizer, or if it's the very, very old haber bosch process that emits a lot of CO two, takes a lot of power. Either way, we need the fertilizer to be produced if we want to feed approximately 3 billion people on the planet, if we're okay with not feeding about half of the world. You know, theoretically, we could cut out the production of all fertilizers and probably still be okay, but it would be a terrible thing to happen, because nobody, you know wants to see that happen. I mean, you're talking about, you know, global population reduction of about 50% if we knock out modern fertilizers. So it's almost like we're we have to try to find a way to keep producing fertilizers, but do so in a way that has little impact or no impact at all on the environment. And that's what I think is going to be the future, waves of technology. You know, people are already producing what's called Green ammonia. In fact, just over the past five years, in particular, there's been a major push for green ammonia plants using things like I mentioned, the electrolysis of water to generate the hydrogen that the nitrogen is recombined with to make the ammonia. That's called a green ammonia. It's not the haber bosch process, but it kind of blueprinted on the haber bosch process. There's also non thermal plasma, which is just exciting electrons rather than heating up a gas. So the energy inputs are much lower, but the yield is much lower as well. You don't get as concentrated. So, you know, there's people that out there that are trying to solve for these problems, and they're doing so at pretty rapid rates. The global fertilizer industry is worth, I want to say over two, $50 billion so it's the second most valuable endeavor of human activity. The first is obviously energy. Energy is the number one thing. That's the most valuable thing. Agriculture is number two, and medicine, obviously, is pretty close. You know, it's number three. It's not tied for number two. So you have this big vested interest in companies dumping millions and millions, if not billions, of dollars, into R and D for the latest and greatest technologies. A lot of them do revolve around nitrogen, because it's such an energy intensive process to figure out how to convert nitrogen gas in the air into plant available form of nitrogen. I don't know if we did the math on this on our previous episode, maybe we did off air, but I remember doing some just basic math and figuring out that for every acre of farmland here in the US, there's over 9000 pounds of nitrogen gas that's sitting on, literally sitting on top of the soil, pushing down, and it's just not accessible to the plants. And in order to get that poundage equivalent of, you know, somewhere around nine or 10,000 pounds of nitrogen gas, we ended up estimating there would be about, like, 65,000 bags of calcium nitrate per acre. Equivalent, roughly, we'd have to look at the numbers again to double check everything. But it ended up being some, you know, crazy amount, some insane amount. So, you know, the amount of nitrogen that is accessible in the air is vastly like, it's so much more nitrogen that's available in the air, rather than in just like a 50 pound bag of calcium nitrate or potassium nitrate, those are very dilute sources nitrogen fertilizer. But because it's so hard to access naturally out of the air. We need to supply it in a form that's already it's already been broken down. It's already made available for the plants to take up because they otherwise would not really have any sophisticated mechanisms to do that themselves.

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Let's bring it to let's bring it to cannabis specific, yeah, unless there's anything else you wanted to add, as far as the future fertilizer, you know,

besides nitrogen, you know, you're seeing other types of technologies come out for other elements. There's like recycling and reusing phosphorus. That's been a big one, because there's so much phosphorus applied to soils everywhere in the world, it just ends up getting wasted. But the the phosphor, the global phosphorus cycle is very slow, and so what we're doing effectively is taking concentrated phosphate mines that take very, very long time to form and then creating rock phosphates, basically in granular forms of fertilizer that we're sprinkling out into soils, and those end up becoming unavailable for plants to take up. So as the global phosphorus supplies kind of dwindle and get closer and closer to being depleted, we got to start looking at ways to maybe recapture. And re utilize some of the phosphorus. And so there's some of these technologies coming out for how exactly to do that, and as well as some of the other minerals,

that's a big issue, that phosphorus, like you said, is, like, largely unavailable. Anyways, yeah,

just because of the reactivity, you know, between phosphates and some cations like calcium and magnesium, to some extent potassium although most potassium phosphate species are pretty soluble, depending on the pH range, but they exhibit much greater solubility and bioavailability than the calcium phosphate magnesium phosphate forms do. That's why a lot of PK boosters out there, a lot of the salt based PK boosters, those are potassium phosphates. Now they're mono potassium phosphate, di potassium phosphate trip potassium phosphate. There's also Tetra potassium pyrophosphate. You have these various flavors, if you will, of these potassium phosphate fertilizers, but they have better solubility and better bioavailability in plants than the corresponding calcium phosphates and magnesium phosphates do. So

that's why we see that so much in the classic fertilizers, I want to tell you, from my perspective, you know, starting growing in 2010 and looking at the products that were on the market at the time, and then starting grow cast five years later, after growing for about five years. You know, these older lines, not the newer stuff, not like when you take a look at your product line or a lot of the competing product lines, but like the older lines that have been around for a while, first of all, what do you see as their as their numbers for their bloom booster? We've talked about this before, the zero, 5030 right? The 0% nitrogen, 50% phosphorus, 30% potassium. And this was cooking people's plants, like I said when I started podcasting in 2015 one of the things we would tell people, Nick, because people would write in and say, Hey, I have bottled nutrient line x, and I'm going to start growing. One of the things we would literally tell people is, start at 50% and work your way up. Have you heard this advice? We used to give this advice because all the nutrient lines out there were way overpowered. They were way too hot, dude. And people frying their plants was way more of an epidemic than it is now, with all these modern blends that I feel like, I mean, you tell me I feel like they're they're gentler, they're less overloaded.

Now, yeah, and part of this just comes down to our collective understanding of how fertilizer elements are required by plants is actually still in its infancy. I mean, on the episode we did about silicon, I pointed out that modern research into silicon as an essential nutrient only became a thing, I want to say, probably early 90s. So we're, like, 30 years we're one generation of scientists, or maybe two generations of scientists, into piecing together this understanding that silicon is important for plants and like that seems so basic that's, you know, from our vantage point. So you can also apply the same logic to other elements and say that, well, maybe 1020, maybe 30 years ago, people just didn't know the way that salt based fertilizers would interact with organic matter in the soil. Nobody could have predicted that excessive application of nitrates would strip organic matter and kind of decrease the fertility of soil, which then gives rise to things like the great dust bowl. You diminish and deplete the organic matter in the soil by directly attacking it with these synthetic acids that have very little carbon, if any carbon at all. In fact, the whole point of salt based fertilizer is that is purified elemental form, and a lot of them do not contain any carbon at all. So the way that they interact with soils oftentimes leads to very diminished performance of the soil, but it takes a couple of years to manifest. The first year that you apply a salt based fertilizer may work really well for your farm. Two Three years later, you may find yourself needing to apply more and more of that fertilizer in order to keep the results up with what you're expecting. And then about five or 10 years into, you know, the same program, you start to realize that the soil is behaving in funny ways. It used to be that soils could hold moisture for like two weeks at a time, so even if you're in really dry, really hot region, the soil fertility was so high that you didn't have to water your plants, and your plants could go for two weeks without rain. But nowadays, in most farms that apply on most farms that apply conventional fertilizers and have been doing that for a very long time, their soil quality is so low that the soil itself can't even hold water for more than three or four days. And this makes it very challenging and very difficult when we're talking about things like, you know, climates naturally changing, as they do from year to year, very slow, incremental changes. Sometimes those changes are bigger than others, but there's always this pressure that's placed on the plants, and if they can't rely on the soil, because the soil chemistry is constantly diminishing in its quality, eventually you'll hit that point where that soil is no longer sustainable and it's no longer possible to support very complex life. That's where things like monoculture is takes the biggest toll. I think that's a really good point. That's what we saw on the coffee farms in Colombia. The ones that were doing it organically and regeneratively, said when the drought hit, that's when all my neighbors were suffering. And the land that had the organic matter built up, like you said, and the fungal life still thriving survived the drought. So it can be the difference between life and death of your garden that's. For sure, yeah, with some of the other with fertilizers, you know, with, I guess the PK Booster concept is something that was really common. And it was initially thought that phosphorus was required in such high concentrations, because in order to produce the metabolites, phosphorus was required. And so they saw this kind of trend come out in tobacco plants, probably in the 60s and 70s, maybe even as far as the 80s and the 90s. But the general trend was that if you applied phosphorus based fertilizers to tobacco plants, that they increase the concentration of nicotine and some of the other metabolites that they produce. And so this, this logic of the PK Booster kind of unfolded into a variety of other crops and ended up not actually being the case. As it turns out, plants need way less phosphorus than is typically called for, particularly with like that zero, 5030, that you were talking about. I mean, you know, if you look at the application rates for those, I mean, they're delivering so much phosphorus that not even half of it could be fully taken up by plants, even if it didn't lock out immediately in the soil, if it didn't tie up, those plants would not be able to take up that quantity of phosphorus overall. So there was this app over application of phosphorus based fertilizers, which kind of, unfortunately came from

tobacco although it wasn't true. You said that originally, kind of came from tobacco farming. That is fascinating. I had not heard that before,

yeah, and I think that's one of the earliest sort of documented hypotheses about like, hey, if we apply more phosphorus, can we get a better result in the biosynthesis of nicotine in the crops? And as it turns out, the answer is yes, but only to a limited extent. It's not like you can apply more and more, and the more you apply, the more nicotine you get. At a certain point, you're kind of working against the equilibrium that plants are trying to establish, and you're going to end up damaging the plants more than you are benefiting them. And it doesn't help that phosphorus ties up readily with a lot of these other elements. So in the context of like rock phosphates, those tend to break down really slowly over time. But in the more modern application of like salt based PK boosters, because they don't really need to break down at all. They just need to solubilize and then get delivered to the plants. You need way less of those than you do of the rock phosphate equivalent. This was one of the benefits that was associated with like when, when the first PK boosters, if you will, started to come out, like the actual potassium phosphate salts, rather than the parent rock phosphate material. The advantage was that you would apply a fraction of that versus the rock phosphate, because, you know, the PK Booster itself, that salt would have the phosphorus in a readily available form, they called orthophosphate. Potassium phosphates are known sources of ortho phosphate, so that when the plants metabolize it, they get that bioavailable form of phosphorus, which is orthophosphate. But that's not true in the in the parent material, in the rock phosphate. You know, you may have calcium phosphate, which is a different structure than orthophosphate. So to get that orthophosphate is, I think, what the initial premise, or the purpose of the salt based fertilizers was, but that quickly resulted in people overusing it, and unfortunately, it's caused a lot of problems. Like you were saying, plants get burned. They get scorched. It's so bad that you can't even reuse soils. In some cases, if they're overloaded with PK boosters and, you know, synthetic salts and don't have enough organic matter, that's not something that you would want to put a young transplant into. You're gonna, you're gonna fry it pretty quickly, you

know, light it up exactly. So, you know, this begs the question, then, what are the appropriate targets that we are looking for? And this is a good time to talk about the nutrient calculator that you dropped for members. Really good job on this. One man. This is a PDF that is has all the formulas pre punched in that shows you it started with what Nick basically, you putting your your concentrations up there, like, here's what rooted leaf contains, right? Here's our levels of calcium, here's our levels of nitrogen, yada yada yada. But then you can easily stack it up against all these other brands, and that got released for members at growcast podcast.com/membership Thank you, Nick, that's a lot of fun punching in the different dosages, seeing what, which lines are high in what, which lines are low in what? It's a real wild west out there. Man, we went over it for the members, and it was like, geez, all these companies say we've got what your plants need. We've got what plants crave, right? Like the movie Idiocracy, but they're all so different. So it's like, where do you begin? Now, of course, I've been wowed by your product, so of course, that's what we're comparing it to, for the nutrient count. Nutrient calculator all the time, but, uh, but talk about that man. Talk about the ideal concentration of calcium. Talk about the ideal concentration of these minerals, and what separates your concentrations from the rest.

Yeah, yeah. And like you said this, this r a comparison, this nutrient calculator. It's an Excel spreadsheet that lives on the order in the discord. I am making some updates to it right now. We've got about 35 different lines from A to Z. Some of them are really big, very popular, very famous. Others are maybe a little bit more, small companies, boutique companies. But the idea, basically is that we've got a full list of products, and they're guaranteed analyzes. So you can see according to. The labels, how much NPK, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, etc, is a component of all of these products. And then you can go through and basically build out a feed program. So if you wanted to use five mils of primer A and B versus 10 mills of primer A and B, you would simply punch that into the calculator, and the calculator would return the exact concentrations of each individual element, and it's broken down in a really easy to understand way, like you can actually look at the tables and see for yourself. You know, if I'm using five mils of primer B, I'm getting about 17 ppms of elemental phosphorus. If I convert that to P 205 which is what the labels guarantee, then it bumps up to about 40 ppms of P 205 that's the other thing I want to mention real quick for the next version, the next update that I'm going to have for this nutrient comparison, I'm going to build out a couple of additional fertilizer lines, and I'm also going to toggle so that people can have the ability to switch between p and p 205, and also between k and k2 Oh. And k 2o and the reason this is specific I mentioned real quick is because when you look at the label for any fertilizer product, the registration requirements force the manufacturer to express that potassium in the form of k 2o but when you're looking at the literature, and you're looking at the scientific studies, they're studying how much elemental potassium, so how much K, not how much k 2o And if you want to convert between the two, it's just a simple conversion factor, but it makes sense to bake that into the calculator so that people have the option to switch between the two. And having said that, like you were saying, when you compare, you know, our products versus some of the other products that are out there, one of the things that you'll find is that, generally speaking, we're lower in phosphorus and we're higher in calcium and definitely higher in potassium. There's a couple of good reasons for this. The first is that when we decided to formulate our products, there was a very clear understanding about the total amount of phosphorus that was actually required for high intensity cultivation, for high quality, high biomass, high concentration of active metabolites. There's a certain amount of phosphorus that you can feed to kind of hit the mark for, you know, 99.9% of cases. So we wanted to keep the phosphorus at a very reasonable level. And the way to do that was to make the phosphorus as close to being 100% available as possible. So all the phosphorus that's inside of our products, it's not going to tie up if you use just primer A and B, the the pH range that the phosphorus is available at extends from as low as 3.5 up to about 8.4 and anywhere in between, that the phosphorus remains 100% available for plants to take up. So this allows us to deliver less phosphorus than some of our competitors, but achieve a higher throughput because none of it gets tied up. Anyways, your plants are taking all of it in. So why do we need to overfeed them? We don't have to overfeed them, and because we don't have to overfeed the phosphorus, now we can start doing things like playing around with calcium concentrations, which is ultimately what cannabis plants want. Cannabis plants will accumulate more calcium from start to finish, than even nitrogen, just to kind of give you guys some perspective. So we should consider calcium as a macronutrient. And for those of you who are curious, definitely go and check out the episode on grow cast where we talked about calcium, we should be considering it as a macronutrient, which is one of the reasons why our product line is so heavy in calcium. We have in our primary A and b4, and a half percent calcium, and then we have a standalone Cal mag supplement, the Cal mag fuel, that has 6% calcium. So if you're using both of those in conjunction with each other, you know you can get anywhere from 50% to 100% more calcium than some of our competitors. This makes sense in the context of really dense, chunky flowers that are resistant to diseases, don't experience any stress pressures. And then when you harvest the flowers, it's really calcium as a constituent of the cell walls that allows for a good cure. So if you have product, if you have flour that's grown really well and dried out properly, and it has enough calcium that's accumulated in the actual structure of the plant, then you can it'll hold a cure for a very long time. You can cure it in a jar for 3060, 90 days, and it doesn't lose any of its terpenes. It doesn't degrade at all. So this is one of the major differences between our products and some of the other ones out there. We don't supply, yeah, we don't supply as much phosphorus because we don't need to. And by the way, I've never seen a phosphorus deficiency with our products. It's helpful that we deliver what the plants need through the roots, but it's also a nice little boost. If you guys are doing foliar sprays of peak bloom, it's a really, really good way to deliver 100% available phosphorus to the plants without having to worry about going through the soil chemistry. You can immediately supply something that's taken up very rapidly by plants. So what does

that work out to and you have the primer A and B and the Cal mag fuel at full dose. What is the PPM of calcium that that results in, give or take,

I think, if you're so, if you're using 12 mils of A and B and eight mils of Cal mag fuel, it ends up being about so it's 140 plus. We'll say 130 so about 270 ppms of calcium. Which is, is huge.

You see other nutrient lines with like a third of that? Yeah, definitely.

And in some cases, I've seen even less than that. I've seen in some of these lines. And you guys can go through the Excel spreadsheet as well, just take a look at the columns for calcium and just kind of play around with the feed rates. I mean, you'll see, in some cases, they're really not delivering much at all. They may be delivering maybe 100 to 100 to 150 ppms of calcium. You know, we're close to 300 and the form factor of that calcium is significantly different. It's not a calcium nitrate, so it's not going to behave like a nitrate. It's going to behave fundamentally different. So the plants will actually be able to take up that calcium and incorporate it into their cell walls rapidly. There's no turnaround time that's necessary for it. So I've

been sold for a while on that Cal mag fuel and and the other reason why I like the new train calculator is if somebody wants to make a switch and they have like one part, right, or they win a part in a giveaway. Now you can go and take a look at all the parts individually and see what you're getting and see how to how to work it in there. So it's a really cool tool to use in the growers toolbox. So I will say, if you listeners want it free, just go ahead and email me contact at growcast podcast.com that's contact at growcast podcast.com tell me what the nutrient calculator. I'll give you a refund so you get 30 days free in membership and one more time. Nick, really, great job on that one. Man, really. Thanks.

I appreciate it. Yeah, it's awesome to get everyone's feedback too. I have incorporated a couple of new lines that people have requested. So, you know, it'll be good for people that want to go through and just find the products they're currently using, even if you're just hodgepodging a system like you're using a couple products from one company, couple products from a different company, it's set up in a way, this calculator set up in a way where may take a little bit of manual effort, but it's just simple copy and paste, you know, you can sort of build together your own custom feed program and see what exactly you're getting. This is also really useful for people that want to try to figure out if they've got any deficiencies. What I can't guarantee, though, is because the calculator is based on the label guarantees that a lot of the manufacturers have. So if they're not accurate on the labels, or if they're doing something that they're not disclosing on the labels, it's difficult, without getting a lab report to properly flesh that out. So part of this is just assuming, like, hey, if they're saying, You know what they're saying on the labels is accurate, then we can go ahead with this understanding of like, this is how many ppms you're getting?

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And I wonder, is anybody checking that? I mean, does anybody really, like, go around and make sure that? Does anybody randomly test your stuff? Like a, like a random UFC fighter getting drug tested? You know what I'm saying to stop him from just saying I got a million ppm of fucking

you know what I mean, yeah, and it depends on the individual states, like here in Washington and down in Oregon and even in California, there are people that are at the Department of Agriculture. They kind of go around to the retail shops, all the hydro stores, and they'll randomly sample products, send them off for analysis, just to see if they meet the guaranteed requirements. But they're not really trying to, like, screen them for, I mean, unless something egregious pops up, like there's a synthetic hormone that's prohibited, or there's some compound that's a known carcinogen that gets flagged, or something like that, right? Um, usually what they're doing is just trying to figure out, like, here you guys actually being honest on the labels. If you're claiming that your product is guaranteed at 5% nitrogen, but you only have 1% nitrogen, they tend to, you know, put you on a stop sale list so the product becomes illegal to sell. It doesn't happen very often. We've had our products tested. Our products don't fail. Analysis, what you see on the labels for our products is actually pretty accurate. It's very close representation of what's actually in the products. So, you know, you guys can be confident that we're being honest and we're trying to be as transparent as we can, you know, hence, we're building out these calculators for people to use for free, so they can figure out, like, exactly how many ppms and it's it's estimated, it's calculated down to the nearest 100th of a PPM. So it's very accurate, but it also depends on the accuracy of the label guarantees. So very cool dude, game

changer. But one thing that I do want to ask about, you know, we talk about the mineral content and how that's changed, and it seems like it's still a constant balancing act, like you're still talking about, you know, perfecting lush green 2.0 and dialing it in to the nth degree. But there's another side to that, which is it's not just about the elements themselves, kind of, like you said with phosphorus, it's about their availability, right? It's about their efficiency. It's about it's about the chelating agents that you use, these compounds that will help nutrient uptake. And I'm sure those have a whole rich history themselves. I'm sure of that. But what do you want to tell us about, like, the evolution of these chelating agents and and a little bit of a reveal from the rooted leaf secret formula.

Yeah, we can definitely do a little bit of reveal there. And this kind of goes back to your earlier point about how fertilizer technology is evolving and what's in the future. I had mentioned that, you know, nitrogen fertilizers definitely a big focus. Phosphorus fertilizer is also a big focus, I think, in general, not specific to any. One element in general, one of the biggest focuses is, how do we deliver these nutrients more effectively? How do we deliver them in a way that the plants will recognize them, to say, aha, this is a form that, you know, form of phosphorus or a form of calcium that I would have otherwise made. This becomes, is a kind of opens up a new definition I refer to as biological relevancy. You know, if a compound is biologically relevant or bio relevant, really, what that means is the compound plugs directly into a primary or secondary metabolic pathway, burns clean, and there's nothing that gets accumulated inside of the plants. Synthetic chelates like EDTA, DTPA, Edd, ha and some of the other ones, those, they're not biologically relevant, because plants have no use for EDTA. They don't break down EDTA. They don't convert it. They don't take the calcium out of the EDTA and then convert the EDTA into something else that EDTA is persistent in their biological systems. And because it's persistent, and it has this active site that is has a ability to hold a charged mineral or a charged element, plants will need to compensate that. So in order to access the calcium, they have to put in a different element inside of the active site to prevent the EDTA from stripping ions out of cell walls and things like that, as it kind of cruises by. These are not natural. They're not recognized by plants, and a lot of times they may actually represent energy expenditure in dealing with them, because plants have to detoxify themselves. They have to spend energy on breaking these things down into less harmful forms that don't accumulate as much. Geez. What we're doing with our products is making them biologically relevant, so that when plants absorb the chelates, they burn 100% clean the actual chelating agent in the case of an organic acid like acetic acid or citric acid or the pectic acid residues that were fermenting out of orange peels, those are things that plants would naturally produce themselves. And so what they're capable of doing is taking the calcium and this pectic acid form that it's attached in and basically inserting it directly into the cell wall. There is no waste that's associated with that the plants can insert it directly into a primary metabolic pathway or a secondary metabolic pathway, so they are 100% biologically relevant. And this is one of the things that sets us apart, I think, from any of the other brands that are out there, regardless of if they're salt based, if they're organic based, or if they're also carbon based fertilizer, I think this is something that's very unique to us, and partially it has to do with the types of organic acids that we're making through the fermentation chemistry. You know, we're using these plants, and really it's the complex chelates that we're creating. One of the things that we've been working on, you know, we've been doing this for a number of years now, but we just recently decided that we wanted to shed some light on it, which is that in solar rain now you'll see in the powered by plant stamp, for those of you who end up buying the products here soon, the power by plant stamp is now going to say that solar rain has aronia berry inside of it. And aronia berry very interesting plant. We've been using it for quite a few years now, but we just haven't drawn too much attention to it. And the reason for that is because aronia berries are very rich in anthocyanins. And anthocyanins are the purple pigments that everybody's fascinated with nowadays. Well, as it turns out, anthocyanins also have the ability to interact with certain elements, like magnesium, for example, in a way that effectively turns them into chelating agents. And this is kind of like we're trying to expand our definition of what a chelating agent is, not by virtue of its structure, because oftentimes we would talk about organic acids, even EDTA and some of these synthetic chelating agents, those are technically organic acids, right? And so there's a very distinct mechanism there by which organic acids can, you know, interact with minerals to make them more available. But as it turns out, anthocyanins also have this quality. It's probably under a slightly different mechanism, but they form what are called Metallo anthocyanin complexes, where you have magnesium in some cases, magnesium ions are actually effectively chelated by anthocyanins and made bioavailable for plants to take up. We've been doing this for a very long time. And solar rain, in fact, it was kind of like the at the core layer of the chelation chemistry of it. But I think a lot of people don't really like, you know, solar rain is applied as a foliar spray, and it's interesting, you know, the idea that you could deliver an anthocyanin, which is effectively a sunscreen, right? Anthocyanins can help decrease stressors associated with light intensity and with temperature, obviously, as well. But the idea that you could deliver a mineral chelate, like magnesium in a form factor that could also serve as a Osmo protectant or a sunscreen is really fascinating, and we've certainly seen that to be true. This is one of the reasons why you can spray solar rain with the lights on, and there's no phytotoxicity, because it has the built in sunscreen inside of it.

Geez, that's wild. That all comes from the aronia berry. Yeah, aronia

Melano karpa, and it's native here to the North America. It grows primarily on the East Coast, and it's got a pretty long standing history. Being used by Native Americans for a variety of different things. They would make, you know, different kinds of jams and jellies using the fruit. They would make preservatives with it. Or, I'm sorry, they would make preserves, like fruit preserves with it. But aronia berries are insanely concentrated in anthocyanins. They have some of the highest concentrations out of any berries. It's not just the total concentration of those anthocyanins. More specifically, it's the particular kind of anthocyanin. Not all anthocyanins are the same. There's, you know, similarities between all of them. They have structural similarities, but there's also some differences between them, and the differences could be on a per species basis. So you have like, delphinium, for example, is the type of anthocyanin found in delphinia flowers. And you have turnitins, which are another kind of anthocyanin found inside of butterfly pea flowers. And then you've got, you know, the ones in blueberries, the ones in grapes, so on and so forth. And a lot of times, they can be further modified. The core structure that makes up an anthocyanin can be further modified by the presence of certain types of elements. When we did our discussion on heavy metals and aluminum, I forgot to mention, hydrangea flowers are capable of taking up aluminum and sequestering it in anthocyanin complex and sinking it into the actual petals of the flowers. So when you look out at a hydrangea flower and see that it's blue, it's, you know, it's got all these beautiful pigments and the coloration, yes, part of the coloration and pigmentation is driven by the pH and the acidity versus the alkalinity. But it's also true that mineral, I'm sorry, metal ions, like aluminum, can also influence the expression of them. So yeah, yeah, they have multiple functions inside of plants. We had talked a little bit about aluminum toxicity and how plants have evolved mechanisms to deal with soluble forms of aluminum. Just because the plants take up the aluminum doesn't necessarily mean that these heavy metals have to damage them. They can neutralize the ionization potential, like, for example, through an anthocyanin. Then they can safely sequester them and store them, like in the petals, for instance. And they can accumulate and they don't necessarily don't necessarily do damage to the plants. So we've been doing this type of chemistry specifically to deliver the mineral forms of nutrition of plants in a way that I think clearly works out very well. I mean, solar rain is a phenomenal product. It gives very, very quick turnaround time on the results. So

well now we know it's the secret is in the aronia berry, here we here we are, you know, all these years later, doing the same thing, harvesting plants for their natural compounds to use in growing more plants. So,

yeah, and aronia berries, interestingly enough, they're called choke berries as well. So if you, if you eat aronia berries, you might choke because they're so gassy, they're so funky, they're so pungent, they're not bad. It's not like putrid or anything. It's not going to be like durian, but it's not a sweet kind of flavor. It's not like you're going to bite into it be like, Oh, wow. This is so triggery Sweet. It has a little tiny little bit of bitterness, but it's more like gassy asphalt, tarmac, all of the you know, nexus of flavors that the average stoner might appreciate. But you know, your your culinary, gastronomic, you know, type of person may just not want to eat something like that, because it doesn't really but I personally enjoy eating the aronia berries. In fact, every time that we get a batch of aronia berries in, I always take a handful, and I always eat them. They're nice. They're super tasty.

Save the rest for the formulas. Man, well, listen, if you've been listening to this episode, then you know it's time go ahead and try it. Rootedleaf.com, code grow, cast 420 for 42% off if you're already using it, stock up. Biggest sale of the year. You guys know it. You guys love it. You get extra early access because you listen to this show. Code grow cast 420 Thank you, Nick. This was an awesome episode. I mean, I learned so much, not just about the past and the history of fertilizers, all the way up until now. Loved learning about the different chelating agents. Every time you talk about EDTA, I love hearing about all the crazy stuff that that compound does. You guys using anthocyanins and berries and plant ferments to replace that sort of nasty thing. It's just, it's been an awesome episode, man. And of course, the nutrient calculator talk has been epic. So thank you, Nick, you let us know if there's anything we can do for you. And great episode today. Man, really, really, great job.

Thanks. I appreciate it. And thank you to everyone for listening. If you guys have questions, feel free to hit me up in the discord, I'm usually pretty active there, and I love interacting with the community at large. So definitely keep me posted. Let me know if you have any questions. If you guys want to talk more about the aronium berries or the nutrient calculator, whatever it is, feel free to get in touch with me. I love it. Rooted

leaf.com, code, grow, cast 420 on Instagram at the rooted leaf, and then, of course, in the member discord, fastest way to get at them. We're all kicking it. Everybody come and talk coffee and tea with Nick in the member discord. So that's it for today, though. Hope you are all doing amazing in your garden. We're gonna wrap it up here. This has been Nick from rooted leaf and me Jordan River. We're now saying. Be safe out there, everybody, and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in, everybody. Thank you to Nick from rootedleaf, of course. Rootedleaf.com code grow cast 420 to get in on the 420 sale. Now, one more quick shout out before we go rain science grow bags. That's right, our partners at rain science grow bags make the best grow containers that you can get your hands on. No more plastic pots that are gonna get you those roots just spinning. You need them air pruned. So instead of going for a fabric pot that gets all dirty over time, get a high quality mesh. Rain science grow bag. It'll be the last container you ever buy. Doesn't matter if you're just getting propagation cones or three gallon pots or a huge living soil bed, use code growcast for 10% off, and then members of growcast membership get 20% off with their secret code at rainscience, grow bags.com Once again, it's the best company for containers that made in the USA to last a lifetime. I love these bags. They let your root zone breathe. They have grommets that you can attach an order attached to the rim so you can do your LST and all of your bending and training. They're the best. 10% off with code grow cast right now, or just join grow cast podcast.com/membership, and save 20% with your secret code. Thank you to rain science grow bags. We appreciate their support. All right, everybody, that's it. We just got through the cultivators cup. It was incredible. And we've got some more events headed your way next I am in Oklahoma City for the barbecue, smoke out and guac off. That's Saturday, April 27 the week after 420 the weekend after 420 and that's at the Great Barrier reefer dispensary, 3pm to 7pm I believe we'll be down there with ATG acres and some friends of the show. And of course, great barrier reefer, the guac off is part of that event. Now what that is, just like it sounds guacamole championship, bring a small container of your best guacamole. The winner is gonna take home a trophy, and the winner is gonna win $100 cash. So spend it a great barrier reefer, though they they support us well. So we appreciate them. We appreciate you, and I hope to see you at the guac off. It's a free community event. Come and see us everybody. April 27 always hit me up. If you've got any questions, contact a grow cast podcast.com, there. You can find us at growcast on Instagram. I'm gonna get on. I'm gonna get on linking all my accounts, so I'm on Facebook and Twitter and stuff. I see people posting and responding there to my automated messages, and sometimes I don't get in there to respond back. So I apologize if that was you, and I'm gonna do better about that, but hit me up if you need anything. Be well out there, everybody, hope you're doing awesome in your garden. Bye. Bye. You