Ⓜ️ Energy Banking Phosphorous, Chlorophyll's Relation to Magnesium, and Maximizing Biomass...

10:21AM Jan 29, 2025

Speakers:

Jordan River

Keywords:

phosphorus importance

magnesium role

energy storage

photosynthetic cycle

ATP biosynthesis

chlorophyll function

Rubisco activity

light intensity

CO2 metabolism

nutrient balance

foliar sprays

microbial role

biomass accumulation

visual cues

nutrient availability

magnesium importance

phosphorus storage

chlorophyll dynamics

flower formation

energy intensive

magnesium levels

phosphorus management

terpene biosynthesis

sulfur booster

cannabinoid production

home growers

carbon concentrations

community cup

education day

pest control

Greetings cultivators from around the world. Jordan River here back with more grow cast powered by ATP, we have Nick from the rooted leaf back on the line. I'm very excited for today's episode. You guys have asked for it. We are continuing the nutrient deep dive this time. We're focusing on phosphorus and magnesium. It's going to be a great episode as we explore these two minerals, make sure to check out the community cup to come and see Nick speak live along with a whole host of other speakers. I'll be there. Farmer John will be there. Brandon Russ will be there. Okay? Calcs will be their soil guru, Nick Kyle from the foop, touched by cannabis, so many more. It all goes down May 7 in Oklahoma City. Come on down and see us folks. Nick will talk about that in this episode. He's going to talk about the production of ATP. He's going to talk about the importance of phosphorus and magnesium during the photosynthetic cycle, and a lot of other goodies jam packed in there. They're going to help you optimize your plant's health in your garden. Before we get into it with Nick, 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. Acinity.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. Alright, let's get into it. Thank you for listening and enjoy the show. How Jordan, hello, podcast listeners, you are now listening to growcast. I'm your host, Jordan River, and I want to thank you for tuning in yet again today. Before we get started, as always, I urge you to share this show. It's how we grow. I do appreciate you, telling a friend, turning someone on to growing. It's the best way you can help out this community. If I do say so, find everything we are doing at growcast podcast.com/action there you will see all the action with the membership and the seeds and the classes and all the fun stuff. Today we are continuing our nutrient Deep Dive. You guys know I love a deep dive, and here we are. We've already covered nitrogen, deserving of its own episode, and certainly calcium, which was a huge hit, and now we are moving on to two other minerals, phosphorus and magnesium. As always, for this series, our guest is Nick from rooted leaf. What's up? Nick, how's it going? Hey, Jordan, I'm doing pretty well. How are you doing? I'm doing good, man. I'm excited about this. Phosphorus, magnesium. I mean, these are subjects that come up a lot on the show. And really, I feel like these minerals, the way that we look at them, has changed even during the time that I've been growing. So I imagine that there's, like, a lot of evolving kind of science on this. And I'm excited to dig into the best practices for home growers growing cannabis, and how they should be thinking about phosphorus and magnesium. You

ready to rock this one Absolutely. I'm definitely ready to go. Well, let's

just jump right in. Man, of course. Nick from rooted leaf, you can find them@rootedleaf.com as always. Code grow, cast active there. Thank you, Nick, for giving us discounts, and thank you for doing this episode series with us. Man, I just want to dive right in and start the same place that we started the other two episodes, which is, how do these minerals, phosphorus and magnesium, how do they function in nature? What are their cycles? Right? What do they do out in the natural world for plants, and how are they cycled? In general?

It's a good question. We've done episodes in the past where we've looked at individual nutritional elements, the nitrogen and the calcium. I'm glad those two were very well received by the audience. And so in preparation for this episode, I wanted to think about what the underlying features or functions of both magnesium and phosphorus are, because it makes a lot of sense to tie them together. I think people are going to be able to understand the connective tissue a little bit better if we treat them together rather than separate, because a lot of their functions, as we're about to get into they're really tightly coordinated with each other, and so we'll get into that in a little bit. But the main thing that I want to explain to people up front is that the basic way of thinking about magnesium and phosphorus is that they're utilized for the purpose of. Of energy energy storage, energy transduction. So when we're talking about photosynthesis, we'll kind of get into it a little bit. So it's really important to understand the specific roles, just in terms of energy production, energy transfer and energy storage, that both magnesium and phosphorus play a role in now, in terms of how it's naturally formed and where it comes from in nature, magnesium and phosphorus are both parts of a biogeochemical cycle, meaning that they're found in rocks. And these rocks are obviously abundant across the entire crust of planet Earth. When we're talking about things like volcanic eruptions and other tectonic types of activity, we're looking at major sources of where phosphorus is introduced back onto the surface layer of the planet. So yeah, in reality, it's a couple of different flavors of rocks. We're going to be looking at things like appetite and biotite, which are sources of phosphorus. There are common minerals found all over the world. And then for magnesium, we're looking at olivine and serpentine. These are groups of minerals. They contain magnesium. There's also some other elements. There's a couple of other rocks that are a lot more commonly used for agricultural purposes, like dolomite, for example, which is a carbonate mineral. It does contain a little bit of calcium and it also contains magnesium, so that is a little bit more of a common source. And then obviously, everybody knows rock phosphate is obviously a source of phosphorus in organic agriculture, and you can also use things like bone meals that are also good sources of phosphorus, and those also provide calcium. So in reality, there's a lot of different flavors of phosphorus and magnesium, and most of them are going to be tied up either in rock forms, mineral forms, like carbonates, for example, and then also in things like bone meal, we actually get our magnesium that we use to make solar rain. It's a pharmaceutical grade magnesium. It's actually derived from sea water. So yeah, it's kind of an abundant thing that is available pretty much anywhere on the planet, both of these elements.

Wow. And then that does make sense, like you said, The Rock forms for the phosphorus, and then also bones, rocks and bones everyone. It's where we get our phosphorus and the lava rock, the eruptive magma, right? Rich in these types of elements. That's really cool,

correct? Yeah, yeah. And volcanoes, whenever they blow up, they do introduce a large supply of minerals. That's why, you know, plants grown in volcanic soils tend to have more interesting, unique and robust flavor profiles. Obviously, if we're dealing with like a pineapple, for example, that's grown on the slopes of a Hawaiian active volcano, helioque, you know, it's going to carry with it a certain type of flavor profile. It's going to reflect, right, so to speak. And that is largely due to the presence of certain minerals. Obviously, Phosphorus is just one component of that larger deposition. But, yeah, the point is, ultimately, the phosphorus can be cycled. And I do want to touch on the concept that magnesium and phosphorus are infinitely renewable elements in terms of energy production, but they are not infinitely renewable in terms of the natural resources that we have to look at. So we'll kind of get into that a little bit more. But phosphorus, it's an element that you definitely want to make sure that you're utilizing appropriately, so that you get the most out of any amount that you put on. We want to strive for 100% bioavailability for a particular set of reasons.

Now, before we move on to home, cannabis growing and these specific nutrients, how do they mobilize? My understanding is that they mobilize differently, right? Magnesium is another one of those that runs off very easily, does it not? I'm talking about things like runoff in nature,

yeah. And I think it's, you know, depends on the form of magnesium. Most forms of magnesium are going to be pretty soluble in water, which means that they do move fairly quickly relative to other elements, like phosphorus, for example, it's not highly soluble, and most of the phosphorus that's present out there in nature, in the soils, is actually not available to plants. And there's a lot of large amount of energy that has to go into, you know, breaking the phosphates off from the clay particles that they are adsorbed onto. Magnesium is very, very small as well just as an element, it's fairly small, so it can actually fit pretty easily through all these nooks and crannies and microscopic crevices that are present inside of the actual soil. Like if you were to look under a microscope, you'd see, obviously, a bunch of pockets of empty space that are kind of separating soil particles from each other and preventing them from condensing too far. Condensing too far. And it's really in those little micro pores of the soil that magnesium can flow easily, whereas something a little bit larger, like calcium, for example, is probably it's a basic plumbing problem. If it's too big for the hole is trying to fit through, it's not really going to go anywhere. So yeah, magnesium can be mobilized. It can be leashed away from soils like that. So it is important also to make sure that the constant presence of magnesium was always there

for plants, right? And the phosphor is sticking around a little bit more interesting, interesting stuff. So why are these elements important for us as home growers? We're growing cannabis at home. We're trying to get the stickiest buds we can, the heavy. Harvests we can, how should we as home cannabis growers, be approaching these nutrients?

Well, you know, in order to get the biggest possible yields that we can and the highest quality that we can, it really just comes down to energy at large. And I just mean the concept of being able to capture energy efficiently and then store that energy efficiently and then also burn that energy efficiently, because all of the cannabinoids and all the terpenes that we want to see and grow, those are very high energy molecules. You know, you can't shade grow your cannabis and expect to have very high concentrations of either cannabinoids or terpenes, because those molecules, in order to make them they require a large amount of energy going in, and so how magnesium and phosphorus interface with this process at large is very important to understand. You want to as a home grower, understand that magnesium and phosphorus are going to revolve, at large, around how energy is both transferred from your lights, for example, and how it's efficiently utilized in Rubisco cycle, for example, to actually fix the CO two out of there, and then how it's burned once it's been captured and stored, how it's burned as a fuel source for certain kinds of enzymes whose job it is to create these terpenes and create these cannabinoids. And that's really the umbrella that both magnesium and phosphorus fall under. So if you can kind of think to yourself that there's this relationship, there's this interface between light intensity, obviously, air flow and CO two saturation and CO two concentrations with the activity of the enzymes to produce those terpenes and cannabinoids, you'll have a lot easier time understanding exactly what's going on under the hood.

So when you talk about this energy accumulation and then expenditure. How would you relate this to your, like, factory analogy? I know that these tie into things like ATP and how this is a limited energy currency, but like, I would hear this kind of like to, you know, stretched out in an analogy.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know, one thing that comes to mind is we had, during our episode on nitrogen, I kind of mentioned, like, hey, about 90% of the nitrogen that you put on your plants is going to get sunk into chlorophyll, which is the green pigment, or it's going to get sunk into Rubisco, which is like this giant vacuum cleaner that sucks CO two out of the air, right? So, you know, there's a lot of different proteins and enzymes and things like that, which use small amounts of nitrogen, but in reality, the bulk of it goes towards these two enzymes. One's a, you know, part of a protein complex, and that is also obviously used for energy production. Now, it's interesting to note, the reason that I bring that up is because at the active site of chlorophyll, sits inside of the porphyrin ring, which is kind of like the you know, think about your hand gripping a baseball. There's a similar effect that's happening where the chlorophyll, there's this ring in the dead center, and it's actually gripping a magnesium ion. And then same thing is true for Rubisco. The active site of Rubisco contains a magnesium ion. So here we are kind of going back and dipping our toes into the conversation we had about nitrogen and talking about how energy production and energy transfer are going to be very, very important. So when the energy of the sun comes in and it hits that chlorophyll pigment, it's the magnesium ion in the center of chlorophyll that's actually responsible for that first and dedicated step of photosynthesis, which is to absorb that energy. It get those electrons excited, and then start passing those excited electrons down a series, a very complex series, very elaborate series of other enzymes whose job it is ultimately to funnel that energy into the process of creating chemical energy out of the photon energy that comes in from the sun. So magnesium, being at the center of chlorophyll, plays a very important role in capturing the energy of the sun. And as we move downstream, and we follow that energy and trace it to where it goes, we realize that also Rubisco at its active site sits a magnesium ion, and the particular kind of configuration and the specific properties of magnesium allow it to be a very effective tool in converting CO two out of the air into a soluble sugar. And it's kind of like this rotor that turns, and as it turns, it has these catalytic sites, these pockets, this physical attraction, this tendency to pull CO two in and then cleave the oxygen off and then release the carbon into a sugar. And the oxygen is obviously a byproduct of this whole process. So here again, we have an example of how magnesium, even though it's considered a micronutrient, it's disproportionately important when it comes to the production of energy through chlorophyll and then the utilization of that energy through Rubisco, because Rubisco fits into a larger cycle, the Calvin Benson cycle, which requires the ATP and NADPH that are produced as a result of photosynthesis, Jesus

Christ. So it starts all the way to the beginning with magnesium, just from that Rubisco reaction, before that energy can be transported and moved. And all the way up to the Trichome factory sits, like you said, magnesium at the center of that is fucking crazy, man. It's like a Yeah, it's like a tempest. Impact of, you know, like magical energy. Yeah, and

think about it like all vibrational frequencies are energy. Some energies are a little bit more intense than others. You know, even if it comes down to something as simple as being in a room with your friends, you can kind of feel the vibe. You can feel the energy out. And similarly, when you look out there in the world around you, your external world is just energy, and your your eyes themselves. They they accept that energy, and you can create this picture of what's going out there, on out there, in in the rest of the world. So we have this visible light spectrum whose energy we can actually physically see. Certain types of energy are a little bit more intense than others, like infrared, for example, is just heat. We can't really see it, but we can feel it. And certainly in some cases, you can actually see like infrared energy lifting off a heater, for example, kind of looks like there's some waves and some ribbons that are dancing right off the surface. So it is visible to some extent. Now, on the opposite end, once we get closer to UV energy, that's the kind of energy that's a little bit too intense for us. We don't want to accept that energy into our eyeballs, because it could cause permanent damage. So plants are also kind of in a similar position. They have these receptors, so to speak. They have these antennas, just like we have eyeballs that receive the visible light spectrum and help us create our visual understanding of what's going on in the external world. Well, plants also accept light energy, except instead of using it to power their eyeballs. They actually accept that energy and use it to power biological processes, like the process of growth, for example. So magnesium is quite literally the thing that accepts the energy from the sun. It is right there at the very first layer of energy production in the plants. I mean, it starts with magnesium is a good way of looking at it. That is wild. And the amount of energy that I'm talking about is not a small amount of energy. You know, I was thinking about this the other day, and the funny joke, do you even lift grow? Kind of came to mind because I was thinking about how plants it's really remarkable to think about how much energy plants are actually capable of producing. I mean, imagine you stand out in the sun, and over the course of six months, you end up growing to be able to lift 10 times your own body weight. I mean, that's effectively what happens with these plants. As they grow, they eat the energy of the sun, they produce their own sugars, and they accumulate a large amount of biomass, and they're so good at it that they can, quite literally, lift over 10 times their own body weight. You know, let's just say, hypothetically, when you, when you just for the sake of keeping the math simple here, when you harvest your flowers and you dry them out, we're talking about, let's say, about a 90% reduction overall weight, because that's mostly water weight. We want to pull that out. If we have a 20 pound plant in terms of biomass and flower, we can reasonably for the purpose of this hypothetical example. You know, suppose that we're going to end up with about two pounds of actual flower. And in most cases, that's true, you're going to lose about 75% of the weight, up to 90% of the weight as water weight overall. But think about that. How much did the plant actually weigh? We're talking about a plant that weighed, you know, two, two and a half pounds. Because the stocks and stems, they really don't weigh that much. They're very, very light compared to the flowers. So really, a bulk of the biomass is the flowers themselves. So now think about this. We have a plant that weighs about two to two and a half pounds, and it's capable of holding, at any one given time 10 times its own body weight. Now that's insane. I mean, imagine if you as a body builder, yeah, imagine if you as a body builder. You know, you're a ripped guy, right? You weigh 200 pounds. You've been working out your entire life. Nobody out there is bench pressing 2000 pounds on a daily basis, just powered by the sun. But that's exactly what plants are doing. So this is not a small amount of energy that these plants are capable of producing. It's huge. It's significant. It's very remarkable to think that plants go through their day to day existence and they just constantly pump 10 times their own body weight and water, up from the roots, from the soil, out through the leaves. And the important thing to remember there is that magnesium is the thing that's driving all of that. Magnesium as an ion, allows plants to actually be able to first capture the energy and then utilize the energy, store the energy and even burn the energy. Yeah,

man, just sitting out there in the sun and making gains, you know, powered by magnesium, just like us. You got to get that magnesium man, just like humans. That's right. It's too true. But back to the garden and back to like, Nutrient Application. How should we apply magnesium and phosphorus? How do we need to? How do we need to think about the application of these and how do plants consume these

minerals? It's a good question. I think the easiest way for people to keep their magnesium and phosphorus levels in check is to understand that it interfaces very heavily with the light intensity and the CO two saturation in the air. You know, Phosphorus is actually on the receiving end of magnesium energy giving processes. You know, magnesium, sitting in the center of chlorophyll, is going to get excited by the photons coming in, and it needs to shove that energy downstream somewhere. And it just so happens that phosphorus participates in cycles that actually allow the energy coming from that magnesium ion to be accepted into a biological system. So we have on. One hand is giving ion, something that gives the energy, and then the other one receives the energy. So it's important to understand that if you want to expose your plants to higher energy, like higher PPFD energy, that you're going to inherently need more magnesium as a direct result, and obviously loosely associated with that. We won't get into it too far, but you're also going to notice your plants have an increased appetite for nitrogen, obviously, as a result of more energy coming in, they can make more chlorophyll, and as they make more chlorophyll and more robust, they're going to need higher concentrations of nitrogen and magnesium. But as you, as you transition your plants, let's say you root them out their cuttings. You root them out under T, fives, then you go to HIV, like metal halides, for example, or HPSs. It's during those transition stages where your light intensity is increasing that you do want to bump up the magnesium concentrations a little bit, not too much. These are still micronutrients, just in terms of their overall concentration in ppms. You know, we're not looking at several 100 ppms of these elements. In fact, for phosphorus in particular, it's been shown that the sweet spot for cannabis is somewhere around 30 to 50 ppms. And even in the most intense environments, like the best facilities, best genetics, dialed in everything, you won't really see a benefit above 100 ppms of phosphorus, which is also on the very, very high end. It's like, absolutely the high end. So as you increase CO two concentrations, you know, the energy of the light is used to convert the CO two into a sugar, which phosph You know, it's a phosphate sugar. So Phosphorus has to be there to accept that as a result of magnesium catalytic function. You know, magnesium fires, and then that that power that it produces is going to be captured and stored by a phosphorus containing sugar. And so it's really important just keep that in mind as a home grower, as you're cranking up the light intensity and as you're cranking up the air flow and the CO two concentrations, this magnesium and phosphorus thing should actually be kept pretty close to a one to one ratio, meaning you want to keep them as tightly coordinated as you possibly can, because they go hand in hand with each other. One produces the energy, the other stores the energy. And if you have any kind of incongruities between the two of them, you're going to find that there's this disbalanced activity that's happening the plants they're not quite capable of storing as much energy as they want to produce, and that can cause some kinds of burns, or even worse, lockouts for the plants.

What are we looking at there? Is that, like, is that going to cause a shortage of phosphorus? Let me give you a specific example. Like, I am one to keep, I know it's an old gardening trick. I know some nutrient guys like you might be like, Oh my gosh, I keep the Epsom salts around the magnesium sulfate, right? Because, you know, sometimes the plant will be a little hungry for sulfur during that stretch period. I'll just, you know, bump up the Epsom salts for this one cultivar and throw in some extra magnesium. But let's say I'm cranking a really powerful light and I'm upping that magnesium, what's going to happen to the phosphorus? At that point?

You're going to create an additional demand for phosphorus, because as you increase the magnesium, so let's say the nitrogen concentrations are kept more or less in line with what the plant expects. You know, you bump up the nitrogen a little bit. In other words, what's going to happen is your plants going to produce more chlorophyll, and it's going to produce more Rubisco, and it's automatically going to want more phosphorus, so that the activity of those two, which are the major proteins in plants that produce energy, right? You know, Phosphorus is going to be required to sink it. So on the receiving end, you always want to make sure that there's ample concentrations of phosphorus available to plants so they can actually carry out that kind of activity efficiently. Otherwise, it's the effectively. It's like the analogy of a high horsepower motor that is just spinning its wheels. You know, you're not really going anywhere. There's this energy that's moving through the system, and it's burning fuel, but it's not actually resulting in the vehicle moving forward. And the vehicle, obviously, is the plant. And moving forward is positive growth. We want to see nice structure, you know, good enzymatic activity, a nice photosynthetic efficiency, a high photosynthetic efficiency. So whatever sunlight you're shining on, the plants ultimately get sunk into the creation of new tissues, new cells, divisions of those cells, the stockpiling of resources and raw materials, because the plants will need those raw materials in order to make terpenes and cannabinoids. Again, these are high energy molecules, so that's what we want to see as a level of magnesium and phosphorus that's correlated and coordinated with each other. So if you're doing a bump in in your magnesium by adding a little bit of Epsom salt, it's also maybe a good idea to try to find a phosphorus source, and maybe instead of watering it into the soil, a good strategy might be to use it as a foliar spray. If it's the right kind of phosphorus, obviously, if it's rock phosphates is not really going to do that much, but if you've got soluble, bioavailable phosphorus, it's going to work out great for the plants. And usually you find that soluble form of phosphorus, frequently is bound to potassium, because potassium salts of phosphates can actually have very high solubility in water, which means. They're very available to plants, and you really don't need that much to actually get the plants to sort of operate in their peak and optimal range. It's about 30 to 50 ppms, which is way lower than what most people think, way lower than what most PK boosters out there would have you use.

Okay, so that's what I was saying earlier. Like something that's changed in my growing career was this huge application of phosphorus when I first started growing, you know, back in 2010 it's like zero, 5030, is a PK Booster, 50% phosphorus, right? And then the plant's still hungry for potassium. Because, like, you know, cannabis eats a lot of potassium, and it seems that I've had many guests come on and say, That's just too much phosphorus. Are you going to deal with the toxicity at that point like has have people come to realize that over the past decade or so, is this for cannabis specifically? What's up with the zero, 5030, man?

That's a great question. I still don't understand the agronomical justification for it, because actually, you know what I do. And maybe this is one of those things that I always like to say at the very beginning of episodes like this, which is like, Hey, if you really think about it, like we discovered DNA just a couple of generations of humans ago, like we're on the cutting edge of all of these scientific understandings and explorations. And around the time that fertilizer technology was developed sufficiently to actually create these PK boosters, you know, to create these potassium salts of phosphorus and phosphates. We didn't quite understand what was going on on a molecular basis or on a molecular level. It was just understood that the availability of phosphorus is oftentimes a rate limiting factor in almost all crops and all soils. That's why it's considered a macro nutrient. In reality, Phosphorus is required in minor concentrations relative to nitrogen and potassium, but it sits there in the middle. It's the P in the NPK. Plants have this huge need for nitrogen because obviously it gets sunk into chlorophyll and Rubisco and then potassium, like we'll get into in a future episode, is also required in massive concentrations. But even something like calcium, which is considered a micronutrient, you know, we went through this in our last episode, your plants may end up taking up 10 times more calcium than they do phosphorus, because calcium gets sunk. It gets buried and actually has an outlet. You can actually shove it into the cell wall, and that's where it lives. Phosphorus is reutilized. It's repurposed. It's this energy currency that is recycled within plants. You never really need to accumulate a huge and significant amount. The one catch that I'll say about that is that if you're growing for seed production, the seeds themselves are actual physical sinks for phosphorus. So it's important to get a PK Booster in if you're growing for seed but you don't need huge concentrations. You may need to go an extra 10 to 20 ppms above what you typically would. You know, again, we're not talking about like 150 Yeah, we're not even talking about 150 to 200 ppms like we would for nitrogen. The other thing I want to mention real quick is that when you look at that number p in the middle, the number that you see on the label like zero, 5030, for example, that 50% is actually expressed as P, 205, rather than just elemental p. So there's a little bit of conversion that you have to do. I think it's basically you have to multiply it by 0.4361, or something like that. There's a conversion factor, basically, because what we want to talk about for the plants is elemental P. We just want one single unit, one piece of p, but when we look at the label, that's p 205, now we have this molecule with the extra five oxygens and an extra one phosphorus that contributes to that 50% in reality, you know about less than half of that is actually just the P that we want to look at. Yeah,

man, it seems like that understanding has definitely shifted over application of phosphorus, like you said, utilized more like a battery, right? It's swip swapped out, it's it's shot around, and it's not sunk anywhere. That's a very important takeaway from from this episode,

yeah, yeah. And it is recycled. And these processes by which it's recycled are very important to pay attention to, because even in the process of recycling and coordinating the activities of magnesium dependent proteins and phosphorus dependent proteins. There's a whole bunch of coordination and cross talk that occurs. One of the things that we'll get into just here briefly is the biosynthesis of ATP, and how that is actually how magnesium actually participates directly in the biosynthesis of ATP. And what most people call ATP is actually a magnesium ATP chelate. That's the biological form that most plants actually utilize ATP. And in other words, if there's no magnesium that's physically bound or chemically bound, I should say to the ATP molecule, it's not the same thing. It's that's not what people refer to when they think in their head of ATP. Okay,

I want to talk about this. Again, I've heard this kind of described as the universal energy currency. So anytime the plant wants to do something, it needs to expend this currency. How is ATP created? How would you explain that? And what are some of the processes that this currency is used to exchange?

Yeah, so ATP is created through photosynthetic activity. 80 basically what happens is the photon energy comes in, and there's this thing called charge separation that happens where the it's the electrons, they get excited, and they go down this thing called the electron transport chain, which ultimately is what people are talking about when they think about photosynthesis, but when you know, we're looking under the hood now. So we've got very complex series of reactions here, very dynamic environment. There's enzymes that are embedded within thylakoidal membrane. There's also participating enzymes that sit on the opposite sides of the thylakoid membrane, the one that the etc, is embedded into. So as the electron energy flows through that electron energy is ultimately guided and focused like a laser towards this process of splitting water molecules apart, and when water molecules are split apart, it's actually a very interesting phenomena. A better way of thinking about it is that plants have learned this is why I think they're masters of carbon chemistry. Plants have learned how to use the power of the sun to oxidize oxygen. In other words, they are removing electrons away from oxygen, and oxygen is so good at what it does that we have this constant. We have this term for it, called oxidation. Oxidation is losing electrons because oxygen likes to come in and it's going to strip electrons out of everything. It really likes to party, and it's very difficult to get it to not party with everything. This is one of the reasons that oxidative environments can be harmful or kind of degrade biomass overall. We don't want to oxidize our terpenes, we don't want to oxidize our cannabinoids. So plants are moving the needle towards this reduction thing rather than this oxidation thing. It's kind of fits into the umbrella of redox chemistry. Okay, so we have this electron transport chain. We got the energy being focused like a laser. Oxygen is being oxidized, aka, water is being split. As the water is split, we have the H, which makes up the H, 2o and the O also being split the H the proton gradients themselves. That's really important, because it creates this charge, a positive charge that is much like how a battery operates. We want to store this electrochemical charge within a particular membrane of the plants themselves, as this proton pump is being created, what happens is this, there's this enzyme called ATP synthase that sits and it's kind of embedded so that one end is facing outside of the chloroplast, the other is facing inward. As these protons accumulate on the inner layer of it, they start to build up, and as their numbers build up, it's obviously the charge, quite literally, is building up within the plants. Well, at a certain point that charge starts to penetrate into this ATP synthase enzyme, and it has a little narrow corridor going down it that connects the two sides of this membrane. So on the one end, you have these protons in the form of hydrogen that that were derived from water, the H plus is quite literally flowing through this little channel that exists in the ATP synthase enzyme. And along the way, it turns this rotor, and the rotor itself requires a certain amount of energy, and as these protons build up, they quite literally push past this rotor. And this rotor spins in three dimensional space, and as it spins, it creates ATP using the power of this proton gradient. So now we've gone from these electrons and the electron transport chain to protons. And as the protons move, they create this molecule called ATP, which is adenosine triphosphate. And the important thing to understand there is that we've gone from redox energy, reduction energy and oxidative energy, you know, electron energy, basically. And we've created chemical energy. We've created a molecule called ATP, which it's that triphosphate bond. It has so much energy stored inside of it that as it's released, it can power quite literally any and all metabolic processes that plants are capable of going through.

So it's almost like a little, not like a bomb, but it's almost like a little engine or a rocket or a bottle rocket that's ready to expend this energy. Yeah,

and plants, or plants, you know, enzymes themselves have little receptors on the outside of them, so that when magnesium ATP comes and it docks on the outside, the triphosphate bond is broken apart, and then energy is dispersed through the enzyme, which changes its shape and its conformation, which therefore gives it a different function overall. Now the enzyme can be active. It can go through its process because it has the energy flowing through it in order to catalyze a reaction. One of those reactions may be to produce terpenes and to produce cannabinoids. These are very high energy molecules. They do require a lot of ATP to function properly, because in order to configure those carbon bonds, requires a huge amount of energy going into the system.

That makes a lot of sense. So you can't get those frosty, stinky buds with low phosphorus. If there's too little phosphorus in the medium you're growing and you're not applying anymore, none of its plant available, you're not going to get you're not going to get quality cannabis,

correct, yeah, and the narrow, the sweet spot for both of these elements is actually quite narrow, because when you over fertilize with phosphorus, what happens in the soils? It starts to accumulate. Because again, most of it is not so. Label. Most of it is not available for the plants. It actually has to get mined, just like we're talking about mining rocks. You know, these are these are geological sources for these elements, and in order to mine them effectively, there has to be this energy expenditure going in. So if you have too much phosphorus, it starts to interfere with the other plant nutrients, because it decreases the pH over time, things become just a little bit more acidic. So as the soil profile becomes more acidic, you start to have problems with some of the minerals, like calcium and magnesium, and it can start to affect the activity that's going on in the soil. And then same thing with magnesium, if you've got too much magnesium, it does create other nutrient imbalances. And we can look at things like calcium, again, and potassium. Manganese is also another one that's really important, because if you out compete manganese, you're going to have problems with water metabolism in the plants. There's this thing called the oxygen evolution complex, and it's a subset of the electron transport chain. It's one of the links in the chain, so to speak. So at a certain point, that electron energy that we were talking about magnesium first accepts and it funnels that energy outward. One of the places that is a sink for that energy is this thing called the oxygen evolution complex, and its job is to split the molecules of water apart. That's its one thing. And that's the one thing that it does, really, really well. Turns out manganese is actually a critical component of this oxygen evolution complex. So when you start to have manganese limitations inside of your plants as a result of too much magnesium being in the soil, this lack of manganese directly affects the plant's ability to split water molecules apart, which in turn affects the rate of ATP biosynthesis, and that leads to downstream effects like not enough cannabinoids and not enough terpenes can get produced because the water metabolism is not possible to achieve at the rate that the plants need to achieve it at in order to produce these compounds. Geez. Now within the plants too, the excess phosphorus that accumulates within the plant tissues, interestingly enough, just like it does in the soils where it lowers the pH, it can also lower the pH and create more acidic environments for the plants, which actually can be difficult, because a lot of these, you know, pH ranges are very, very important to pay attention to, because you've got these distinct compartments when the plant within the plants where you want a low pH, and then on other sides, you don't want a low pH. And so when you start crossing those signals and getting the low pH where you don't want the low pH, it starts to affect the ability for certain enzymes to power their processes, and one of them, interestingly enough, is the biosynthesis of phenolic compounds, of flavonoids, of terpenes and cannabinoids, and excess of phosphorus, can actually interfere With the catalytic activity of those enzymes, meaning that they're less efficient at doing their thing. It can also start to interfere with magnesium dependent proteins, which rely on magnesium binding to them in order to function properly. And excess phosphorus can actually limit the ability of these cations, like like magnesium, but not limited exclusively to magnesium, but specifically for this, for the purpose of this conversation, because we're looking at magnesium, yeah, it can affect it overall,

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most certainly, yes. And it has both a. An indirect effect. Overall, the direct effects may come down to things like signal transduction pathways. We're talking about repressing gene expression that's sort of responsible for the biosynthesis of these compounds. There's also this interesting mechanism of disruption between the carbon and nitrogen metabolic cycles, because if you have excess phosphorus, which leads to an increase in the availability of inorganic phosphates, there's less carbon that's allocated. There's less energy, I should say, that's allocated towards nitrogen metabolism, which decreases the production of certain compounds that require nitrogen for their biosynthesis, because that phosphorus is kind of out competing it. But then also with iron and zinc. You know, excess phosphorus can affect the availability and the transportation of those, and those are obviously, you know, required for the biosynthesis of specialized metabolites as well. So

when we talk about actual biomass accumulation, how do they take part in this? You did a really great job explaining the photosynthetic processes and the kind of terpene production processes. How about the accumulation of biomass? And

the cumulative accumulation of biomass ultimately comes down to how much energy did the plant capture and store effectively? You know, that's why we shine such highlight intensity on cannabis plants, because they require high energy loads coming in. But it's also, it also comes down to, well, what about the efficiency of conversion? Because it's one thing to just shine lights on the plant, but it's another thing to have your micro and macronutrient ratios dialed in so that the plants are capable of accepting as much energy as they possibly can. You know from that light source, obviously, if you have a very high intensity light but you're deficient in magnesium, the plants are going to be yellow because there's not enough magnesium to fit into that porphyrin ring in chlorophyll, and therefore the plants don't have the ability to actually accept that light energy. And so this is why, when you crank up light intensity, you may notice, either with nitrogen or with magnesium, that the levels of both of those have to increase in correlation with light intensity. So in terms of biomass production, you know, we're looking at things specifically like the transfer of energy from the sunlight itself to stored forms of energy, like ATP molecules during this process of ATP biosynthesis. I had mentioned that when water is split apart using the power of the sun, photolysis, photo meaning light, and lysis, meaning to split. So using the power of the sun to split water molecules apart, generating that gradient, that proton gradient, is really important. But it's also important to note that magnesium has a positive charge on it, just like hydrogen, but hydrogen is a lot smaller. So in order for ATP to be biosynthesized effectively, there's actually free magnesium ions that have to be present, and they have to accumulate on the same side that the hydrogen ions accumulate on, because they contribute to that positive charge, and they can lower the overall amount of water that has to be split in order to drive the biosynthesis of ATP. Because remember, this is just like, you know, when you're at a train station, you go by the clicker, you move forward, and that, that thing spins right, just exactly the same way as when hydrogen builds up on one side and it moves through. There's this rotor that quite literally turns, and as it turns, it clicks ATP into place. Now, ATP is made out of two precursor molecules. One's called adenosine monophosphate, meaning it only has one phosphate group, that's a MP, and then the direct precursor for ATP, which is a triphosphate, is, as you can probably reasonably guess, is diphosphate. So we've got monophosphates, diphosphates and triphosphates. Monophosphate, the monophosphate form amp, is found more or less loosely within plants. But when we're looking at adenosine diphosphate and triphosphate, they have huge stability constants with magnesium, meaning they really like to be in relationships with magnesium. So most of the time when we talk about ATP, I'd say over 90% of the time, probably closer to 99% of the time when we're talking about ATP, we should really be talking about magnesium ATP. And then same thing with ADP, that adenosine diphosphate form. It doesn't have such a strong connection to magnesium as the ATP form does, but it still nevertheless coordinates very, very tightly with the activities of free magnesium ions. And there is such a thing as magnesium ADP, meaning that we've got this chelator. We've got the sandwich that consists of chemically bound, covalently bound, magnesium with adenosine diphosphate. But it's important to note that that is more or less balanced in terms of its charge. It's neutralized. It doesn't really have that same cationic properties as free magnesium, because magnesium has that positive charge, the ADP has that negative charge. So when the two come together and they make their little chemical handshake, the charges are neutralized. Now all of a sudden, that magnesium doesn't quite have the same charge on it. So when we look at the pool of free magnesium ions that are required to make ATP, it's important to understand. And the free magnesium is very, very important because it contributes a positive charge that drives that proton gradient across and allows plants to take free ADP and convert it to ATP. And that requires proton energy. That's where magnesium can fit in directly to the biosynthesis of ATP, but even on the subsequent end, on the other end of that channel, where you know, just like if you're going into a train station, that clicker only moves one way, it doesn't move the reverse way. And at least not to my knowledge, not that I'm aware of. I mean, it could very well do it. Maybe someone who's more experienced with train stations can correct me, but that's the concept I want to drive to people, is that you have this forward movement, and it only moves in one direction, you take this building block and you store energy, very high energy load that is created as a result of this, the presence of free magnesium and the movement of these hydrogen protons, these hydrogen ions, across that membrane, overall and on the other end, ATP is accepted by magnesium,

and not just in plants, right? This is also in humans, the crazy thing about this ATP process, yes,

yes. And the process that I've been talking about is called Photo phosphorylation. Photo obviously meaning lighter. Photosynthesis and phosphorylation is this process of adding a phosphate group to a molecule. In this case, we're talking about taking adenosine diphosphate and using the power of the sun to basically attach that third phosphate group which creates ATP in a mitochondria inside of humans. Because we can't photosynthesize. We don't have chloroplasts. The mitochondria go down this pathway of oxidative phosphorylation, where they use oxygen as the electron acceptor overall and sunlight is not necessarily required, although it should be mentioned and and stress that in order for the mitochondria to proper fun to function properly, their fuel source is actually the byproducts of photosynthesis. So you can't have operations of the mitochondria without something to break down first. And the thing that's always broken down is glucose. Well, where did the glucose and where did the sugar get produced? Or where did the fatty acids get produced, and the answer to that question is always through photosynthesis. So the chloroplasts ultimately create the energy that the mitochondria utilize. Whether those mitochondria are present inside of plant cells, or whether those mitochondria are present inside of human cells, which lack chloroplasts, we need to consume the forms of energy that were produced by plants, and there's no way around this, we are entirely dependent on plants and the activity of chloroplasts through photophosphorylation to actually drive 100% of the energy that we need to grow and sustain our bodies, even if we eat a protein rich diet. Well, what did that pro Where did that protein come from? It came from cows. What did the cows eat? Oh, they ate grass. Well, that makes sense. You know, the core plastics are always going to be the major source of the energy produced that

link. Again, just really, really cool to dive, to dive into that side of it. But back to the plants here. What should we as cannabis growers, be looking for, for, like, visual cues, you know, we talk about, again, magnesium running off and seeing magnesium deficiency when maybe a grower is in some soil and he over waters, and the magnesium runs out, and then he's getting some yellowing from the bottom up, that sort of thing. Like, what are the cues that we look for in our plants? And to know that we need to raise one or both.

Yeah, it's a yellowing thing that occurs for sure. And you know, the deficiencies themselves look oftentimes a lot like nitrogen deficiencies. There's perhaps some minor and nuanced, subtle differences in terms of how that yellow manifests and how exactly it comes out in in a spatial form, and what it looks like across the full leaf surface. But the idea in general is for people to understand that, you know, if they have a good grip on all of the other variables that are present in the grow, like the environment, for example, in the air flow and light intensity, if they start to notice, like, you know, I cranked up my lights and my plants got yellow, but I'm pretty sure there's enough nitrogen, because I just fed them some, let's say it's some amino acids or something like that. You know, you can kind of trace down this yellowing to a lack of magnesium. And the nice thing is that the plants actually respond very, very fast to foliar sprays of magnesium, even if it's something like Epsom salt, which is soluble, is a bioavailable form of magnesium for the plants, still requires a little bit of energy in order to process. But that's okay, because the plants will respond very rapidly, usually within a matter of hours, and definitely within 24 hours. If they're magnesium deficient. And you do foliar sprays, you'll see that yellowing correct itself, phosphorus deficiencies, you know, they just result in decreased CO two metabolism overall. So when you're looking at your CO two meter, you may notice, like, let's say, hypothetically, you go through, you know, you know what amount of CO two you go through in a fixed amount of time. So let's just say you go through five pounds of CO two every week. And now all of a sudden, instead of going through five pounds, you may have, you know, you increase your light intensity by 20% but then you notice that you're, you're only going through about four pounds, as opposed to five pounds, or maybe you expect it to go up by 20% so now we're talking about five pounds. Up to six pounds, and let's say the total amount of CO two that was metabolized didn't change. Well, you could reasonably anticipate that with a phosphorus deficiency, that the process of fixing CO two becomes less efficient. It takes longer as that phosphorus has to get recycled, and that ribulose phosphate sugar has to get regenerated, because it's it's going to be accepting the CO two, and if there's not enough phosphorus present, it won't be able to accept that CO two, which means you're going to see decreases in the overall CO two metabolism of the plants. That's a really good way of looking at it. I know that in some cases, it's not entirely clear cut, but there are some cases where phosphorus deficiencies can result in other visual cues for the plants, like a discoloration or purpling of the stems. That's a little bit more of a complex process. There's a number of different reasons, right? That, you know, the stems can turn purple and old,

to genetics, to all sorts of things, right? But I have definitely observed that, and it's and it comes, sometimes appears on the leaf surface a little bit too. Does it not the purpling?

It does. It does. Yeah, it can. You know, that's kind of a complex thing. Ultimately, it does interface with things like gene expression overall and temperature can be a major factor in it as well. But yeah, most people just look at purpling stems automatically, and they assume that it's phosphorus related, when in reality, it could be a number of different things. You also start to lose flexibility in the actual stocks and stems, meaning, going to be dealing with plants that are a lot more rigid and also a lot more brittle. They don't have quite as much give before they break. And they end up being really snappy where they should be very so true.

If you can tell that it goes from streaking stems to darker purple stems, then they start to get Woody. You're so right about that man, snap in half instead of bending. Yeah,

and that's where, again, if you have a good source of phosphorus that's bioavailable, like our peak bloom, for example, you can supply a small amount across the leaf surface, and the plants will actually respond very quickly, because most of the work that the plants are doing is actually in the leaf surface. The roots are kind of there along for the ride, but they're more passive in the process. They obviously are responsible for, you know, transporting water and minerals, and they play a critical role in primary metabolism. But most of these enzymes, like chlorophyll, for example, you're not going to find that in the roots, and you're not really going to find ATP synthase enzymes to the same extent, you're obviously going to find mitochondria within, you know, the root hairs, because they breathe, they do oxidative phosphorylation, just like human lungs. They actually, quite literally, breathe like human lungs. But you know, the point at large is that this, this foliar surface, is this interface that exists between the energy that's coming in from the biosphere in the form of the photons of the sun, and the plants major sites of metabolic activity. So by supplying these energy molecules, these energy elements like magnesium and phosphorus, directly to the leaf surface, you're capable of generating a very fast response, particularly in response to a deficiency, because most of that phosphorus is going to get utilized by Rubisco, which is at the leaf surface anyways, and most of that magnesium is going to get shoved into that porphyrin ring of chlorophyll, which is at the leaf surface anyways. So again, direct application there results in the fastest turnaround times, but you have to make sure that your forms are bioavailable. You're not applying too much, and that the amount of magnesium and phosphorus you're trying to make them as tight as possible. You want those ratios if you have them in a one to one ratio across the full lifespan of the plant, I personally haven't seen anything that indicates there's harm associated with that. If anything, there's actually beneficial properties associated with feeding them in the same ratios. Not worrying too much about doing a PK Booster and then a separate magnesium booster. Just keep the keep the levels the same, and you'll be good. Now

I want to talk about that availability, because you mentioned, you know this phosphorus needing to be mined. I know that microbes play a role in that as well. Can you talk about the microbes that solubilize and help the uptake of phosphorus and and the microbes that are in root anchor as well? Yeah, definitely.

This is kind of a funny one to talk about, especially in the context of living soil, because a lot of people, they don't fully understand or appreciate there's this kind of it's a very selfish thing for microbes to do, because when plants are limited in their phosphorus, that means they can't generate sugars as fast, which is a problem for the microbes, because the microbes require sugars and other compounds, like flavonoids, for example, that are produced other secondary metabolites, they use that as a carbon substrate to grow. And so if there's this bottleneck in the operation of plants where the plants can't access enough phosphorus, it's in the microbes best interest to find some phosphorus to free it up. This is why fungi are so good at doing this, because their surface area extends across the entire soil, whereas the roots themselves of the plant may only take up a smaller volume and a smaller surface area of the overall soil. So if you're dealing with a very large battery, if you're even outdoors and planted directly into native soil, those fungal colonies in the hyphae, they're very, very important, because they can act. As little pockets of phosphorus here and there that may be several inches to several feet away from the plants, the plants cannot otherwise access them. So by not having enough phosphorus, again, it creates this limitation on the amount of sugar that can be produced in the plants, and that sugar goes directly towards feeding the microbes and the fungi. So in a funny way, it's actually a very selfish expression for the microbes and fungi to have these enzymes. Like pgk enzymes is one that you'll find quite often. There's a number of microbe supplements out there on the market that claim that they can increase phosphorus availability and therefore improve yields and quality. Well, those microbes are just specialized workers. They have these specialized tools, just like if you need to cut wood versus cut metal, you have different tools associated with those two functions. If you're trying to mine phosphorus out of the soil, you need special kinds of tools. Those tools have been developed by both microbes and fungi. Those pgk enzymes, among others, are the tools that they rely on to actually access the phosphorus and make it available for the plants, they pass the phosphorus to the plants. The plants insert that phosphorus into that Calvin Benson cycle, which can operate faster. And now that the phosphorus Starvation is no longer an issue and it's no longer a limitation, which means they can increase the rate of converting CO two into sugars. And as they convert into sugars, the microbes create a draw on those sugars. They say, Hey, you feed us sugars. You keep feeding us sugars. We'll keep feeding you phosphorus to prevent deficiencies from occurring. This is a very, very important phenomena to consider from the perspective, from a macroscopic perspective, because if you're looking at your plants, when those plants are small, the overall amount of sugars that's being produced is fairly low overall. But as that plant gets bigger, it gets taller, it starts drinking more water. It can handle higher light intensity, higher EC load. It's creating a lot more sugars, which means it can support more microbiological activity, more fungal activity. And so it's always in the microbes best interest to continue to find phosphorus and to keep plants on the side of the curve where they're they have ample concentrations. You know, it's always about following the curve, because the plants are always growing, particularly during the vegetative stages, when they're increasing the overall biomass, they're actually physically growing and rapidly growing. Well, now all of a sudden, you've got more cells in the plant. Now you've got more robust you've got more chlorophyll, you've got more stuff that needs to use that high energy phosphate molecule, ATP, and do its work, because if that slows down, so too does the rate of growth. And that's the last thing that a microbe wants, because if the plant slows down in its growth, then the microbes can't flourish, they can't proliferate, they can't be as happy. So it is kind of a selfish thing, but that's ultimately in a gist, how microbes and fungi participate in this phosphorus cycling process is primarily from their selfish perspectives of wanting to get more sugars. Well, the

important part about keeping that fungal network alive too, right? And making sure that what we put into the soil isn't knocking that back, like back to those zero, 5030s, with the crappier sources of phosphorus that can't be great for fungal life, right to load a product like that?

Yeah, and it primarily comes down to, and this is why there's kind of a big discussion right now about whether mycorrhizal fungi are even necessary in commercial grow operations where you're you're constantly feeding soluble forms of phosphorus. The work that would otherwise be done by these mycorrhizal fungi doesn't really have to be done because we as humans are introducing feed water solutions every single day or several times a day that contain soluble phosphorus. Now we're doing work that the microbes and fungi would otherwise be doing. However, I do want to be clear and say that the benefits associated with inoculating your plants with beneficial microbes and beneficial fungi extend far beyond just this one little, tiny thing we're talking about here, which is phosphorus availability in that Calvin Benson cycle. That's such a small it's very, very important. It is hugely important, and oftentimes it is a rate limiting factor. But microbes also produce antibiotics that can help ward off disease pressures. They produce proteins that confer heat and stress resistance, the fungi themselves can also prevent dehydration stress within plants, because they they function like an extension of the roots, an extension of the rhizosphere overall. So now we can access more water from different parts of the soil and bring it closer to the plant to prevent the plant from dehydrating. So there's huge benefits associated that extend beyond just the question of what's going on with this phosphorus.

Man, it's really, really wild. And I love to see, you know, products like yours that feed beneficial microbes. And, you know, are kind of hybrid styles that work in tune with nature. Very, very cool stuff. Man, so listen, this was a wonderful overview here. Let me try to recap some of the things that we learned here about phosphorus and magnesium. And you tell me, if I got this right, these are largely energy focused, energy producing nutrients, you know, from magnesium being there at the very start, at the site of the acceptance of energy from your light all the way to storing it in this kind of currency that. Is adenosine triphosphate with three phosphorus molecules. These are energy based nutrients. You don't need much of them, low dosages when it comes to like ppms, but it's got to be available. Got to make those things available so the plant can actually utilize them. When you increase the photon exposure. You're also going to want to increase these in a ratio of one to one, and don't let them get out of balance with each other. Is that a good overview? That

is, yeah, yeah. And the one of the important takeaways for people is just understand that you want to get a good feel for what it means for your plant. Like, what does it mean for a plant to be healthy and active? I know we can look at it and we have these visual cues, like, the plants are praying the leaves are they look like they're trying to eat the the lights themselves. They're trying to stretch as close as they can to the sun to get that increase in light energy. But there's other things that you as a grower start to develop sensitivities to. One of those may be, how often are you watering the plants? You know, it may be a good sign for you to come into your grow and think to yourself, holy crap, the soil is already bone dry. I just watered yesterday. These plants look like they're about to rip out of the soil. These leaves are like anti gravity, you know, they're just stretching and praying so hard. There's all kinds of these little things that we want to start to build an understanding of of what it means for the plants to be energized, to be active, you know, to actually go through this process of lifting several pounds of water up out of the soil and then splitting that water using the power of the sun and then creating biomass efficiently. As a result, even though you can't see with your own bare, naked eyes, chlorophyll and you can't see Rubisco, you can look towards these other things and start to realize, like, Oh my God, my plant is growing like wildfire. Like, I can't water this thing fast enough. That's a good sign. What it means is that the energy coming into the plant is being utilized properly by the levels of magnesium that are present. And if you start to notice that there's this healthy biomass formation, maybe you've got really good stuff going on inside of your living soil. You can also take that as a sign or a cue, that the amount of phosphorus that the plants have access to is also adequate. But when you start to notice a decrease in these things like, hey, my plants aren't really reaching for the light anymore. They're starting to turn a little bit yellow. They're not drinking as much water. I noticed my CO two tank is a little bit more full than it should be. These are all signs, cues that a grower wants to, you know, get comfortable identifying and saying, Okay, now it's time to bump up magnesium a little bit. It's time to bump up phosphorus a little bit. And there's also transitionary stages where you want to do the same thing. When you're going from T fives to, you know, metal halides, or you're increasing the overall light intensity. Or even if the plants during the stretch phase a flower, if they work their way closer towards the light, because they just grew two feet over the past two weeks, that's going to make a big difference as far as how much energy they're getting from those lights, and therefore how much magnesium is required to accept the energy transferred to phosphorus and stored in that phosphate bond. If you look at our Foliar Spray charts, there's a reason that we have solar rain and peak bloom being used in conjunction with each other for the first two weeks of flowering, and I always recommend this to people spray those two use solar rain, use peak bloom. We recommend very small use rates, very low use rates of peak bloom about two and a half to five mils per gallon, because one mil of peak Bloom is equivalent to 10 ppms of elemental phosphorus. And again, the sweet spot for plants is 30 to 50. So when we recommend to people use 25 to 50 ppms of elemental phosphorus, that always puts plants in the sweet spot in addition to whatever's going on in the soil. You may kind of ride the the high side of the sweet spot, but it could also just come down to the intensity of the grow. If you're just growing at home, and you know, you're not under 1000 PPFD, as always, you may find better results from two and a half mils, which is perfectly fine, because even a quart will last a very, very long time the last several years at that point. The other thing that I want to mention is, so you know, the solar rain and the peak bloom being utilized together creates this removes all those bottlenecks. It creates this massive and explosive growth and activity within the plants, because now all of a sudden, they have enough magnesium to capture extra energy if they need it, and they have enough phosphorus to store that extra energy as needed. One thing I want to just really quickly mention is that the amount of magnesium and the amount of phosphorus that the plants accumulate, because these are energy molecules, or energy elements, I should say that they could be recycled within the plants. There's a certain point where the biomass, in terms of your leaf surface area and your root surface area, the plants stop growing. And it's typically right after the stretch they start to focus on flower formation. And while these flowers do have chlorofilm, they do have Rubisco, you know, they never really turn as green as a water leaf or a fan leaf, and they never quite experienced the same protein density, meaning you're going to have more chlorophyll. You're going to have more Rubisco on an actual leaf than you will within the flowers, even though it's still present within the flowers. So at a certain point you want to stop adding as much phosphorus. There's no extra benefit derived from the additional phosphorus, because now we're talking about taking stored energy from the plant. It's that have accumulated over the, you know, entire vegetative cycle, and then also for the first couple weeks of bloom, as they stretch and they transition in a bloom, there's a certain point where they just, they don't benefit from additional supplies of phosphors, because the photosynthetic machinery isn't being progressively built up anymore. We're not growing new leaves. We're not creating new chlorophyll pigments. You know, we're kind of utilizing what's already there. So more or less, the plants needs for magnesium and phosphorus kind of drop a little bit. It's still important to understand that chlorophyll does get broken down. It's a very energy intensive environment out there. So, you know, it's not like you have one molecule of chlorophyll that just sits on the leaf surface and it just hangs out in perpetuity. No, the energy of the sun comes in, and it quite literally bombards the surface of the planet. It's very active, very violent, very high energy environment. So chlorophyll does get broken down, and then it gets built back up, and then it gets broken down and it's built back up very, very constant, dynamic process. So you just want to make sure that your magnesium levels right around week three or four of bloom are enough to keep the plants sufficient, but you're not jacking them up with magnesium. Same thing is true with phosphorus. There's a certain point where the amount of phosphorus that's inside of the plant, it has sufficient stores in order to properly cycle and go through those that Calvin Benson cycle, it can kind of move that phosphorus fast enough to where it's not rate limiting anymore, and because there's not huge amounts of Rubisco being produced within the flowers, there's still minor amounts, but not huge amounts, that the overall amount of phosphorus you don't need to constantly keep bumping up. You don't need to go from 30 to 50 to 50 to 70 to 70 to 100 200 250 you know, it's not a linear thing like that. It's just about getting enough phosphorus into the plants, typically for the first two weeks during the stretch phase where you can do foliar sprays, and then from there, try to avoid the PK boosters. Honestly keep your phosphorus levels somewhere around 30 to 50. But don't boost them. Don't spike them, because maintaining that constant phosphorus availability allows the plants to be optimized without throwing them out of their equilibrium, and that equilibrium is important to understand from the perspective of like during the vegetative stage, they will accumulate more phosphorus because they're growing more leaves and they're trying to make more chlorophyll and more Rubisco. But when we're talking about the flowering stage, chlorophyll and Rubisco, no one really cares about it's the terpenes and cannabinoids. In fact, even during senescence, when the plants break down that chlorophyll and your plants stop drinking as much water. Rubisco activity stops too. This. The focus on the plants is still, how do I get more terpenes and how do I get more cannabinoids? The answer to that is not going to be found in adding more phosphorus. That's why I think the PK Booster is a myth.

I love it. The myth of the PK Booster busted. That's great. Well, thank you. Thank you, Nick. This was an awesome episode. And what can we look forward to next? Where do you want to go after this? Going mineral by mineral, nutrient by nutrient? Yeah,

it'd be fun to go through sulfur. It's a, you know, it's an element that I think we should talk about in the context of terpene and cannabinoid biosynthesis. And, you know, maybe it would be good for us to segue into that, because I focused on during this episode, I focused quite extensively on what happens during the vegetative stages, and obviously this whole energy production, energy utilization, storage type of thing. But we never really quite got into, you know, what happens in the mid to late flowering stages, which I think would actually be a really good segue for us to talk about sulfur, because there's this concept of a sulfur booster. Now I call it PK boost v2 because, you know, back in the old school days, we had people over applying PK boosters. And now I see this general trend in the industry where people are over applying sulfur, thinking that sulfur is okay. And I've heard it countless times. Sulfur is a constituent of every single monoterpene. And can happen. I know it's not. It's really not. And I would like to have an opportunity to go into the specific functions of sulfur, the thiol groups, antioxidant, stress relief, and then kind of dovetail or segue into cannabinoids and terpenes, and maybe looking more distinctly at the relationships that sulfur has to plant metabolism And back to terpene and cannabinoid biosynthesis at large.

Oh, you know, I'm game, you know, I'm game sulfur up next. Stay tuned. All you listeners. Nick will be back with some sulfur talk. Can't wait. Man. Thank you so much. Where can people find you and all that stuff? Check

us out on Instagram, the rooted leaf. You can also visit our website, rootedleaf.com send me a message if you guys have questions, I'm also available on Discord, Jordan, you have a fantastic community there. I love interacting with everybody, and I do my best to always stay active. So if you guys have questions, or if you just want to know more information, feel free to hit me up Instagram. You can send me an email. Nick@rootedleaf.com nik@rootedleaf.com or find me on the discord. I go by the rooted leaf. It'll be very, very easy to tag me in a post if you guys have questions.

So I appreciate you hanging out in there, man. Seriously, it's, it's a lot of fun. Everyone. Get at them. You know where to find them, and always use code, grow cast at rooted leaf.com. Oh, and then the community cup, Oklahoma, May 7. Nick, you're going to be speaking. This is going to be. Announced soon, or maybe it has by the time this dropped, but I'm so excited for this. Man. This is a cultivators cup. This is a home growers showcase, and it's a day of education. So Nick is going to be speaking as well. You'll be down there May 7. What are you going to speak on? Nick?

Yeah, it should be a lot of fun. You know, I definitely appreciate the invitation, and I'm looking forward to giving people a really unique perspective and a deep dive into how they can increase the quality of home grows. The thing that I really want to focus on for people is this concept that their cannabis plants that they're growing, they effectively have what is analogous to a sealed flowering room within their cells. So if you're a home grower and you're concerned about quality and you're concerned about overall biomass and yield, because you don't have millions of dollars to spend on building out a sealed flowering room and getting really expensive equipment like air conditioners and humidifiers and fans and all this stuff. Don't worry about it, because your plants are naturally optimized. They have a sealed flowering room within their cells, and if you understand that, you'll very, very easily be able to increase carbon concentrations in the plants and achieve the same yields and achieve the same quality as you would expect from multi million dollar commercial facility to build out. You don't have to have that. So for home growers that are out there that are looking to better understand and find actual, real ways to increase yield and quality, definitely come check it out. It's going to be a lot of fun, and I'm very, very very excited to go down there and give this presentation on carbon concentrations.

Yes, I cannot wait. That's May 7, everybody. And tickets are on sale. You can check it out at growcast podcast.com/community, and you can grab a judge's kit if you want to sample, what is it? A half ounce of flour from licensed cultivators. And if you just want to grab the general admission, you can check out the education. And also, the general admission gets you in the home growers showcase. You can showcase your home grow and see if Brandon Russ picks it as his favorite sort of thing. See if Nick picks it as his favorite. See if we have, if you get wolf man's favorite, you'll have, you know, specific prizes for everybody but one more time. Thank you Nick. This was a dope episode. Thank you Jordan, and thanks for everyone for listening. Thank you all. We'll see you next time. This is Nick and Jordan signing off saying, Be safe out there, everybody and grow smarter. That's our show. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you to Nick from rooted leaf. These nutrient deep dives. Get great feedback, and we will be back for another one very, very shortly. Stay tuned for sulfur. Before we wrap it up, I want to tell you about all the awesome events we have going on. Of course, the community cup May 7, at the Oklahoma City Public farmers market. You're going to want to make the trip out for this one. Guys, it's three things. It's a day of education with speakers, your favorite speakers in the cultivation world, like Nick from rooted leaf, Brandon rust, okay? Callux soil guru, touched by cannabis farmer, John myself, Kyle from the foop, and more, come on down for a whole day of presentations from the greatest minds in cannabis. And it's only $20 open to the community, baby, you get free vegetable seeds, and you come have a blast. Now we also have the People's Choice Cup, which is a 28 gram flight that you get to sample and judge for $100.99 bucks gets you a judge's kit. So you can be a People's Choice judge and judge Oklahoma white market flower or bring your own homegrown and come and sit down at the home growers showcase table, where the speakers will be going around, picking their favorites and handing out prizes. The home growers showcase is free to enter. You need a medical card to be a judge or enter the home growers showcase, but you can come show up and listen to the education with no card from any state anytime. Come on down, folks. I'm very excited to see you find out all the information at growcast podcast.com/community, cup, it's all there. It's all on the website, all the details. And grab yourself tickets before they are absolutely sold out. And of course, we have Pesta Palooza on sale. Our Pesta Palooza kick off is right after that. We've got Long Island and San Diego Tickets on sale now. Grow cast podcast.com/classes, the greatest pest class you'll ever take, a Long Form Q A certificate of completion, catered after party where you can network and hang out with me and Matthew gates, and of course, the Pesta Palooza gift bag loaded with goodies worth the ticket price. Come and see us out there. Folks, grow cast, podcast.com/classes, they'll actually show you all our events. Can't wait to see you in person. I hope you're doing amazing things in your garden, though, wherever you are, be extra safe out there. Be careful, and we'll see you next time bye, bye. Everybody.

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