 Welcome to Reader Syndicate 3.0, the next evolution of the look into counterculture that is Canada. My name is Matthew, owner of Riot Seeds, and this started as a one-man mission for Strain History and Breeding Science. Over time, it's evolved into something bigger, better, and more of a team effort. We will be joined by members of the Cannaluminati and other friends throughout the seasons to hear their takes on grow techniques, breeding science, Strain History, and more. Our mission is to combat the narrative that corporate cannabis and seed posers are obfuscating for their own financial benefit. Welcome to the Underground. We are The Syndicate. Welcome to Reader Syndicate. I'm Matthew. I'm here with Thousand Fold. And we have some other guests with us today. And today we are going to be talking about the vegetative situation. I guess you would say, is that correct, Thousand? Maybe you can word it better. Yeah, that's right. We're just going to broadly talk about the vegetative stage. We have talked about growing indoors in general, obviously, but I thought we could focus in on things like germination, seedling care, cloning, stuff like that. Also, just, yeah, Farmer Dan tried to get us demonetized right away. Instantly. No, I'll just start with, I'm coming. There we go. I thought to get us warmed up, even though you guys have all told us about your setups. I thought for this episode, you may as well just briefly tell us about your setups again. Maybe start with local, just broadly local. Yeah, for sure, dude. So I don't have like too extravagant of a grow, you know, a nice size closet that I use for veg. I have a storage rack in there that I use so I can keep like my solo moms and stuff. And then like off to the sides. I'll keep like full size moms just so I can actively take cuts off of them and then kind of cycle through stuff that way. It's kind of my first year in the setup because like I've moved. So it's been working pretty decent. I'm still trying to get used to the temperatures. But like in flower, I have a five by five grow under LED lights. And yeah, I kind of just grow mainly using one gallon pots and let them rip. Oh yeah, nice. Yeah, I'll go right after that. My setup is very similar instead of a closet. It's a two by four tent with a rack in it. And just kind of use that for different things, you know, poppin seeds and stuff like that. Just general veg stuff. I have a big veg tent that I sometimes, I don't know, it's kind of like my in between flower and veg tent area where I will get I'll transition plants into bigger pots and stuff like that, you know. So I will fit that tent into my little two by four. So I don't have like any like, like actual like any fans in there sucking anything out just a little bit of passive air. Just kind of keep it nice and humid in there and let them hang out. Yeah, it's pretty similar to what I have. I just have for my veg setup, I just have a little two by four. It's connected to my four by four with a duct. And so it passively pulls through it when it's exhausting through the tent. And so yeah, just a little two two shelf can pop some seeds half the time I have to clear it out to dry in so that's tenuous. But I just bought a house so I'm hoping to build out a nice framed room like a real working space again soon. Yeah, that's kind of one of the main reasons why I dry in the fridge is because otherwise I'd have to use the gross space, which I don't want to. Yeah, for sure. I guess still try that out, especially now once I have my new space, I'll have room for a second fridge. It's like just for drying weed, holding seeds and stuff. I can't wait for you to get more room so we can see all the weird experiments you're going to do. Yeah, man, like I want to do all kinds of shit. It's just like what can I afford to like do realistically off the bat. Like I want to do like a enough space for like a four by eight, like 2000 water, like two LED fixture set up and actually start moving through some populations again. Yeah. Yeah, I tend to like drained to waste cocoa, like I'm always running containers drained to waste cocoa. That's how I've always done it because most of the time I was renting, right. And you couldn't really be like the first time I was trying to run flood and drain tables and apartments. And when you have like an emergency situation, they want to, you know, have a 24 hour inspection that that's a that's a death note. I learned that really quick. So I just went to drained to waste cocoa drained to waste cocoa peat moss for a light mix. I know. Oh, sorry. What's that? Don't you go outdoors now, Matt? Yeah, for now. Yeah, for now. But still, that's the way I did it outdoor this this round, too, was very, very shittily trying to apply indoor techniques to outdoor. Yeah, that didn't work so well. I think next time I'm going to do the much bigger pots and probably pre amended soil as opposed to bottle. I like you should go right in the ground, man. I want to see you do like like a bajillion little one footers. Yeah, buddy, start them in like fucking August 1st, just like a little like 10 inch seedling and then just like grid them out. And like, I just think about like, it's possible CSI model with like a little space, you know what I mean, where you're cramming tons of small plants into whatever you got. And so have you guys seen that Instagram page stunted dot art? No, it's pretty rad. I showed it to CSI the other day and he was tripping out to like, it's basically these buds. They call them Bud sticks. I think they were calling them. And it's like solo cup growing, but they're literally like six inches tall. It's just like a big old fat bud. And it's like they have it all gridded out with like 30 of them just like fat everywhere. And I was like, you know what, like that's really respectable because they're actually growing really well in these little tiny cups, like it's it's decent bud. It looks exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, I love this. Yeah, I thought it was cool. And it's all in how they train it all and how they they do it how they fired off. But yeah, check it out. If I, man, if I ever try to force myself to run like six to eight, that's what I would have to do. Yeah, they've got it down to a science. It's pretty neat. Yeah, it's just cool to see. Yeah, it is. Did you want to add anything? I cut you off earlier. No, I was going to say the same thing that was saying I do drink twice as well. I just didn't mention like medium or anything like that. But that's, I think, I think quite a few of us do like drink twice. Yeah, I do as well. Yeah, same. But I do, I do pro mix, which is the beat massive. Yeah, same exact thing. I like the pro mix HP. Yep. Okay, well, how about we move on to germination and I wanted to ask her in this one, partly because it's, I think it's very good at telling us about like his journey when he was first learning. And I, because germination is one of those topics that has like, I don't know, everyone has their own opinion. Yeah, I'm going to be a Nazi on this one. I'm going to let you guys go all before I rip it all apart. Matt has opinions for sure. Very opinionated on this specific one. Yeah. Yeah. And tell us about like what, you know, what you first tried and what was like what you read about online, maybe that kind of thing. Yeah. So like, I remembered, I mean, when I was in elementary school, we learned how to germinate lime of beans, putting them in paper towel and a plastic baggie. So I did that, you know, that's all I knew how to germinate seeds. So I did that, and it, you know, worked fine. I think like sometimes I would dampen them off by leaving in there too long or something, you know. Then I, then I started reading about how you needed to use like, maybe it would help to have like a heat map, you know what I mean. And I started thinking, man, I need a heat mat. So I got one of those and I started the first time I did that, I had like a plate and a wet paper towel in it, and it was sitting in there and I left it overnight with no paper bag or anything. It just dried, killed all of them. So then I was like, that was stupid. I don't know why I thought that would work. So I put a bag on it the next time thinking this is going to work. It did not. It also dried it out somehow because those plastic baggies are not like, you know, obviously impervious to moisture loss. And so it dried out, killed them. So then I was like, look, this is crazy. I don't need to be doing the heat map. Obviously I'm killing a lot of seeds. So I, I ended up just started like I soak mine for 24 hours, like in water. I just, I don't like push them under the water or anything. I literally just like float them on top of some water. They stay float for like 24 hours. I take a look and just make sure that they look like they're kind of opening. I don't do any kind of weird seed cracking or anything like that. I tend to just put them, I take them and put them straight into my, I use like a, just my cocoa and just put them straight in there, water it with a really, really light nutrient solution. And like the same stuff that I use for my clones. And then that's it. I just direct. Yeah, sorry. Well, and that's, and I will say that's been really successful for me. Like I have really good germination rates with it. I don't have, I don't tend to, I just, for me, I feel like the more I mess with it, the more I tend to like. Scouts got opinions too. I was just going to say that during learning how to germinate seeds when you're in school for me was one of the most magical things like looking back. It kind of really stands out in my mind as like, I don't know. Yeah. It's still so cool to me that like, you plant this little thing and then a couple weeks later you have like this root fall, you know what I mean? It's amazing, like how fast it all happens. It's amazing. I mean, the tech, like look at the tech of the seeds, like it's, it's amazing. Yeah. Sorry, little interjection. Who's next? Dan, local? Yeah, I go. I really like sprouting in like a real kind of soil blend if I can, like especially if it's going to go outdoor. I kind of like to have it in more of like a real, like where it's going to end up. Like I don't really like going from like a inert media to then like a living like like a hundred gallon smart pot or something like that. They've been amending for years and like has its own biology going on. And so I've done a bunch of stuff of like direct sowing like right into the soil to like actual like mineral soil and the plants blow up so quick and they're so happy. But then like birds eat them and shit. But when I'm growing inside, I always just start my promix and occasionally if I'm like really like at their rare seeds or something that I don't want to lose, I'll do what like earn was talking about of like I'll soak them in a little bit of peroxide, let them just like open up and just shoot that tail out and then I'll put them immediately into the media. And that way you can like, you know, put them in upside down, so to speak, or like how the shell opens up, you know what I mean? That comes up and then you have the two cotyledons that come out of that. And so you can definitely put your seedlings in the ground and then have like a root just pop right up, you know, and then everything else. So it's completely inverted. And so I don't really do anything that special. I just like to go right into the soil as soon as possible. All right, look when you're up. Yeah, so one thing that I kind of always do with my seeds is give them a bath in H2O2 hydrogen peroxide 3% about two minutes. And then after that, I mean, recently I've kind of been choosing to soak my seeds for 24 hours and they usually crack by then. I'll move them to the into like a moist paper towel after that, just because I'm like kind of anal about checking the progress, not like checking it every day, but being able to have eyes on, you know, what's my seed doing. Yeah. And then once I kind of see that taproot like actually like stick out stick out, I'll just move it to Cocoa. But yeah. Other than that, that's kind of what I go through. I mean, everything's been relatively new. So I haven't done any fancy germ tax. So I wanted to kind of prompt something around the paper towel method and to a degree also the soaking method, I guess one benefit is that you get some additional information before you so you so. So at least you know whether or not the seed cracked whether there's a taproot before it goes in. That's one advantage I can see. I personally I just like soaking and sewing without even seeing the seed crack or the taproot. But yeah, I think that's obviously one one quite big benefit. Um, I guess I can also add every time you open that towel, you are risking something entering, you know, so it's not ideal to check it. But it's like you said it's one of the advantages. It's not like I'm looking every fucking 10 minutes. It's once every other day, I've changed the towel. And after that, I mean, after a few days, you can kind of see like little spots of mold sometimes if you've left it, you know, orange and brown. So I mean paper towels just like a prime medium for any kind of mold or bacteria. I don't know why I moved away from that is I started like I would get busy or something and you leave them in 24 hours too long and then suddenly they you start having losses over that mold. All right kids. All right. Right. So now what I will point out is that a lot of you guys, what you're talking about is popping modern new seeds. And that all these are perfect for that. During the time when I was learning how to pop a lot of seeds were very old that were being sold by the Dutch as their their seed stock. So I was learning on a lot of really old seeds, and they were still really expensive at the time. I mean, like, you know, the pack of blueberries $350, DJ shore, for example, some of the sensey seeds like Jack Herrera again $300. They're all kinds. So we were spending lots of money on these seeds. And it wasn't like it was like a lot of people would use this argument that in nature that trees drop their own seeds and they sprout on their own in the dirt. Everything's fine. Right. But a tree generally speaking, if it's getting pollinated, a cannabis plant is dropping tens of thousands of seeds for one to grow in that spot, ultimately to grow under it. So it's not a really good odd system to be playing if you're spending hundreds of dollars on seeds. So what I learned early on was to be as sterile as possible. And that was just for making all kinds of mistakes using people's like hippie voodoo powder, you know, saying, oh, this this, you know, humic acid is great. You know, wash your seeds in this dip them in this, you know, all that shit. And all I saw was just infection. Seeds not popping. They start stall out mushiness. So that's when I started looking into using the hydrogen peroxide wash for seeds first, because I was thinking, OK, a lot of these seeds are coming from like a PM environment. Like no doubt, like some people are going to sell seeds from PM environments. Right. So I want to clean off that husk first before I put in anything. Second thing I want to do is wash the hell out of my hands. Like people dig in their ass, their nose, scratch your fucking head, you know, all day touching everything. And a lot of people forget like how important it is to wash your damn hands before you start messing with something where you're going to bring you're going to want like an anaerobic environment. Is that right locals? That's the right word anaerobic environment. You want it to be as sterile as possible to sterile. Yeah, you mean sterile. You want to sterile. So, so, you know, if your hands are dirty, that's what you're already introducing issues. So if you if you've washed it in H202 solution, a light one, wash the outside. I like to dip my paper towel in a mixture of H202 and water, but a lot lighter than I would when I wash the actual seed. And then I ring it out because the other important part is the consistency of the moisture in the paper towel. You don't want it sopping wet. That's not a good thing. You want your your seed to have to work to get to the water outside of it. Yeah, and then there's other other cases where like people give up on seeds when it's really just a really thick, healthy shell and no moisture is able to enter. And there's certain things I do like hand cracking seeds. Sometimes if they're really old seeds, I'll hand crack ahead of time so that they don't have to use a lot of the stored energy or whatever's left of the stored energy in their shell to work to break open that shell and do all that process just to try to help it have enough energy to get out easily. Another thing I do is I like to hang the plastic bags in the backside of a cupboard door, like so it's dark where it's at. I like to hang them using like tape tape into the backside of it. And that's just so like it acts like gravity and pulls the seedling chapter downwards. Like that's important for me. I don't like trying to plant something ultimately. It's all curly cued. It makes it annoying doesn't you know, you want to plant it nice and that just makes it easier. Another thing that I do it's a lot different from people is I let the seedling grow until I see the green cotyledons in the actual baggie. I don't immediately plant it the first second I see a tap root. The main reason for that is because I want the plant if something does in fact like whether it's from the cocoa, the medium, wherever in between planting it and getting it in there. If something does start to attack the root zone, I want to be able to feed it from the top from its actual leaves. And the true leaves are just about to pop up at that point if you wait that long. So that's just another reason that I like to do that is just like ultimately giving that seedling the ultimate chance to make it. And that's just from learning on old seeds and having a lot of rare strains and and having to play the odds games. Okay, there's four of these seeds that we have left on earth, like all of them need to make it. They're all really old. What's the best way to do this? And that's like, I always use that method on even new seeds just because it's become a force to have it. But that's that's really where I like to take that. You know, there's other things you do like jabralic acid treatments and whatnot, but I highly don't recommend doing that because it gives other issues. I wouldn't do that unless I absolutely had to with old seeds, but everybody should know how to do it if they ever have to. Yeah, that's cool because I had a question about like how long you could leave them. You know, and like paper towels or whatever because I thought maybe you were just leaving them in there a long time. A lot of times like the tap roots and will grow into the paper towels and stuff and you just kind of gently tear it apart real slowly, you know, move it out. But other than that, it's it's I like making sure that I have a fully established plant in the cleanest environment possible before I put it in. That's essentially it. Would you mind elaborating a little bit on like what actually takes to crack seeds with big shells. I know you've got that. So so like I would use me see if I can have a pair here. Yeah. So what I like to do is use really small really sharp scissors they have these viscurs or whatever they're called on. These are singer ones on Amazon. I think like five bucks a piece. They're really small, really sharp and precise. And you can actually have really, really tight motion of movement and you can feel when the seed the shell actually is penetrated because it'll pop. You can feel it and because because they're small and you have really precise movement of it, you can stop before you then cut the embryo because once you once you cut the embryo, you're killing the plant or the seedling inside. So you only want to do enough to gently penetrate the shell enough for water to get in. Sometimes it's easy enough to do with like matchbooks and like rubbing the the seedling against a matchbook covering. Some people have luck with that and that'll be enough. But I always had a lot of luck with these. Man, those techniques freak me out. I know that like you have to do it for some, you know, under some conditions. I've just never done it before. With the like with the very first round of the Clockwork Horned Jess Ones. A lot of people had to learn how to do hand cracking because it was just that the seeds were fucking vigorous as hell. But you had to get water in there and they were just so the shell was so thick and healthy that you had to crack. You had to do it to get them in there. That only happened one round. But I have seen cases where like really healthy seeds. Yeah, I know I've seen it too. Yeah. And I see a lot of people throw away seeds like they don't pop and they don't even look at why they're not popping. There's like, oh no, bummer seed, shitty breeder. It happens, but I like to make people aware that maybe they should try that before they totally give up. And back to the sterile part, like when I'm leaving him in these bags sometimes for up to 10 days, like to fully form these seedlings and stuff. I changed the paper towel anytime that I check it to open it. I change it instantly. Like I change it every time. And I do it often every three days at least to change that paper towel, whether I'm checking it or not. Like I have to change it because you just want to keep it clean. Yeah, that's about it. Man, this is making me realize that if I was smart, this whole episode would just be germination. And then we could have gotten like five episodes from this, but oh well. Yeah. I think I covered it pretty well. We did. Yeah, reflections on what Matt said. Yeah. Well, I was just going to say like I had never really thought about it. I remember hearing you talk about it. I think on your cracker, the video where you talk about cracking seeds and you talk about like cleanliness. And it's like, I'd never, like I always think about it as far as like, well, I don't want to be extremely dirty, but I had never gone as far as just like literally the oils on your skin. Don't touch your face. Like avoid all those types of motions like you're working. Like it's how you have to be when you work in a tissue culture. Yeah, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. And so like applying those principles to even just those initial steps like helps a lot. I also was thinking while you were talking about the gibberellic acid, I was like, oh, we should play around with other more gentle cytokines. Because there's definitely a bunch of others that like induce cell elongation and like stem growth and all those things that may actually work a lot better than gibberellic acid. Because it's so active in such minute quantities. Yeah. But I tried to tell people like, I get a lot of questions about using gibberellic acid. The first thing I'll tell people is, do you actually need to use it or are you just assuming you need to use it? Because if it's not old, old, old seeds that are already having trouble popping, do not use it. Don't just use it because what it does is it causes the seedling to like be like a two foot tall seedling. Just picture that. Like, like barely true leaves coming out having a two foot tall seedling that you have to stake. And then it tries to grow taller from that and elongate. And it takes a few months for the, the gibberellic acid to stop being so active. So you're like trying to grow a solid plant on top of taffy bottom. So you're trying to clone off as fast as you can. So you don't use it unless you fully have to and understand what you're using. Funny enough, they actually found that gibberellic acid number three from some kind of rice fungus or fungus that would infect rice and cause rice to elongate a lot more than it would. But they found it, I believe, beneficial and then began to synthesize it. There's like 60 something different forms of gibberellic acid. I've talked about three. Yeah, number three is the one that like is almost always used the other ones. I've never tried the other ones, to be honest. I don't even think they're commercially available like that. Number 20 is the best. Number 20 was popping. But yeah, just a little fun fact. Yeah, they called it a foolish rice syndrome when they were first discovering it. They would elongate so tall and collapse and so the plant would die. Yeah, that's exactly what weed does. Like it elongates and then folds over on itself like taffy. It sucks. Man, it's fascinating. I have seen photos of cannabis plants that have like stretched themselves to death. Yeah, something kind of abject about it. Sometimes too. Like I did this just happened to me recently. Like I was popping a bunch of OGS ones and we only got like 50% germ rate, but the seeds were like fully beautifully developed, like still that nice rich tiger stripe on it and everything. And like I cracked a bunch that wouldn't go. And so just because you like get a seed and it looks great doesn't doesn't mean anything. Yeah, I had white seed that pops pretty high rate too. Yeah, I had one of my early, early rounds with the SR 71 Purple Cush. And I made a big bag of fem seed S1s with it. I thought I was going to be rolling in bank because this is like 2009. Yeah, money, you know, Purple Cush S1s. And not a goddamn one would pop. And they looked so healthy and so nice and unreviable. And as you kind of lifted them, you realize that there probably wasn't a solid developed embryo because they just didn't have that heft that they needed. But they looked perfect and they weren't soft and you couldn't like hand crack them. You know, it sucked. And I know CSI's run into it too. It's just one of those things where you just don't know it's going to happen until it happens or why it happens. Are you like referring specifically to fem seed or would that ever happen in a reg case? For me, it's only been fems. Word. I would kind of inbred fems too. Yeah, I've never had it happen with regs ever. I don't think CSI has either. For sure. Yeah, it pops up occasionally. Like if I pop 15 different like fem hybrids, like maybe one, if it's a hybrid out of all of those, and that's not even every round. It's like every other round or maybe more. But the like the S1 stuff, especially like the OGs, it's just like it's already inbred. And then you just inbred it further. And you know, even the ones that pop, like they're run to little messes, you know, so. Man, fascinating stuff. We probably come back to this since to some degree at the end because we're going to talk about tissue culture, which, you know, there's going to be some overlap. There's one thing I did want to touch on too. I think it is going into this. And it was only maybe, maybe I'll wait. It was just something that Ern mentioned briefly about giving seedlings nutrients, but we could touch on that whenever. Yeah, no, that's cool. We're about to go into seedling here. And just before I'm going to hand this to Dan, but just before we start, like why I think this is cool to talk about is that it's just that awkward period of like the first one or two weeks. And I don't think when I look it up, people don't write that much about it. But it's not well known. Yeah, Dan, do you want to start us off? Yeah, so like I'd say like the number one thing I'm always like watching and like looking for regardless of any setup or anything is just those initial drybacks. Like you really don't want to keep that young seedling over saturated. You want it to have like a nice aerobic medium to move through and have healthy roots. And if you don't see roots hitting the edge of like, you know, a three inch pot by the end of like the second week, like you probably over watering, you know what I mean? Like, especially in cocoa, I see it because it's like, Coco's drybacks are kind of weird. Like I never used to like to let it get like where the color changes on the cocoa. But like you still want it to be light, you know, and not like keeping it too wet all the time. Yeah, and that's why I kind of like moved away from it for the pro mix is like it's kind of the same thing, I guess. But like I just have it's got a larger margin of error and I'm sure these days. And so but I would really be looking at like what media you're starting in because like there's a lot of soil blends, especially if you're in soil that come with fertilizer in it and you don't need to give it hot. Yeah, yeah, man. Like if you're in the like King's mix or the I forget what it's called the green bag of the Royal Gold. Oh, yeah, Ocean Forest is probably got two to four weeks of food in it. You know what I mean? Like, but so I don't really normally start with very much food at all. I'll probably do like my like I'm on cutting edge. And so I'll just throw a little bit of edge like literally like 200 or 300 parts per million. And I'll even then water it down a little more from there. You know what I mean? I like it to be really light for this first few. But then I occasionally I'll throw in like some additives like I really like the primordial solution sea green. It's good for everything. It's like compost tea extract fish and kelp based and you follow your spray plants with it and it's just like they fucking love it. And it's a it's got enough food in it to where you could literally just do that. I've also had really good results with mill starter. I don't really know what that is. I think it's a kelp based nitro feed. I think it's like a six zero zero. But you're only adding like a few mls a gallon and so he's the bills, bro. Yeah, exactly. It runs the hill too. I've also used super thrive in the past that was kind of like an old school. I like to do people shit on it because it's a technically a PGR. But like the old dude who ran suit who like created super thrive, he was he would go like and talk to everyone who bought his shit. If you wanted to talk to break down. Yeah, yeah, that dude was cool. But I hate when people use PGR you PGR. I'm just like, dude, there's it's so rare to see anyone like like nobody has protocols for like I spray next is a PGR. It's a PGR. Yeah, rooting. Helps is loaded with like hundred. I think it's like 80 to a few hundred different like minute quantities of different PGRs and stuff. Yeah, it's it's there. A lot of them are naturally occurring. And so like if you use kelp, you're kind of using PGRs. They're just naturally derived. And so it's like if you're using salts, then like what the fuck do you care? Yeah, I just I just imagine how many people are using Clonax shitting on PGRs. I'm pretty sure Clonax has some sort of an antimicrobial in it too. Yeah, you know what I mean? Because like I know I've seen other like organic quote unquote or more all natural rooting gels. And they yeah, we can get into this in the next one of the later topics. But I just think that that's so funny when people get caught up on the PGR thing because like even at commercial scale like nobody if it's not like a commercial weed product. Then we don't even know or like then no one's doing it. Like no one's like blending custom blends of phyto hormones and like spraying them on the plants and has done the R&D to like see like, oh, well, this makes the buds bigger but doesn't affect anything. Like that used to be like Paco Butrus all back in the day and like bush load and shit to keep the plant short. But anyway, back to the main topic seedling care. Yeah, I mean I just try and do really low and slow. I've definitely been that idiot that puts like, you know, I don't know, like eight or 900 ppm and just like fry stuff right off the bat or like over amends. Like I like to throw a little bit of an all purpose like dry amendment into my pro mix. And so I've definitely over amended that before to blend big batches. Don't blend like top dress little pots. You can't you can't measure the quantity you need. You're just gonna kill your shit. I've actually probably killed more seedlings at this stage than fucked up germinations for sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, easily. Yeah, I'm also a clutch and so I was killed one just by like, you know, falling on it or my existing. Yeah, around the plants and like somehow one of them gets just fucking deadheaded right off the bat. I'm like, anyways, bro. Fuck that plan. To me is always incredible. Like how little water they do need at that stage. Like I was like a dropper and then sometimes I don't need anything for like over a week. Yeah, or more. Yeah. And earn what are your thoughts on what's your vibe with early seedling here? Yeah, I mean, so I direct so they pop. I'm in cocoa. Like I said, sometimes I'll use like pro mix or I don't know. Like if I'm at the hydro store and like some, some, some soil that I meant that I'm okay with is on sale. I'll get it and use it for to start seeds with, you know, like recently I have some nectar for the God soil that they had on sale. And so I've started something there. But basically, like if I start so if I start seeds in soil that's amended, I will, I won't give them any nutrients. I just will give them plain water and like I'll give them a little bit of like some kind of beneficials. So like I use like the Vam endo mix or whatever, you know, my go and I'll just give a little bit of that, give them a little bit of water. But if I'm in my cocoa, then I use, I mean, I use canna and be so I'll mix it very, very light, like super light, you know, like I, I measure it with the. I use a pen. I know it's like some people love them. Some people hate them, but I use a, you know, PPM and I'll mix it like my water comes out at like zero, like 20 PPM, like super duper low. So when I'm when I'm talking when I make something light, I'm talking like 200 PPM maybe. And I, I feed that just because they're in, you know, cocoa and cocoa has nothing in it. But otherwise, I just try to make sure they dry back really good, you know, that's, I focus more on stuff like that. I focus more on good watering practices and just making sure that I'm not like over watering at that stage, more so than the food and stuff. I think that it's probably not like you could probably go without it for a little bit and be okay. Yep. Nice. And I will spray it to when they're little. I'll spray water on them instead of just like pouring it in there because like, I don't know. Cocoa is really easy to like wash it out and just like really destroy like where the roots growing and stuff. So I just like to spray it. So it's a little more gentle. So you're not flowing it. That's a really good call. I used to do that when I was doing big, like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of seedlings. It's way easier to get in there with like a two gallon sprayer and just missed overhead. Yeah, yeah, I will inevitably pour a little bit too much water and then like see the seedlings start like floating around or something. That's probably not good. Local. Yeah, I don't have much different to say it is a lot of or a lot of it is in watering practices. Most of my fuck ups with seedlings have been because I've watered them too much and since the roots small they can't drink your dry backs not going to be as big assuming that you're not running extremely high temps or whatever. Yeah, in terms of feed, I mean, I'll take a like a small amount of my main feed that I use for my veg plants and then dilute that into like a two gallon three gallon bucket that they sell at Menards and use that. But I don't do that for like the first few days because I mean I was always told that those cotyledons are going to provide your plant with food for like that first week of its life. I mean, I don't want to say there's no need to feed it that early, but if you're in cocoa you might want to start earlier, rather than when they need feed because you can. You should can go south fast and cocoa that early, especially if you're not adding food. But yeah. Matt, anything to add, Matt? Were you going to comment on, yeah. Yeah, I mean like when it comes to seedlings like I just I really don't believe they need food until the first few weeks. Usually when when you start to see it gently, slowly like you don't you don't want to let it get yellow right when you start to see the color slightly changed that's when I start feeding always I don't. I don't see a reason to do is just in the reason I like to give people that advice, it's most people will always feed feed and water to aggressively so I like to try to send in the opposite direction because you're probably going to end up hurting the plant more that way, especially for new growers, you know, and I always assume most people are new growers that are asking questions. Yes, sir. No, I think that was great. I think that might be that little section might be new to some people, just in terms of some of those considerations. Like you said, especially the newer girls. We can move on to the vegetative stage in general. And I thought we'd invite local to start this one. What comes to mind local I mean we've got a few obviously a few different things you could speak to but when you think about the vegetative stage. Yeah, what immediately comes to mind. Yeah, that's a tough, not tough question but there's a lot that comes to mind. I mean, I feel like when you're in bed you kind of want to run warmer times higher humidity to kind of like, let your plant know that it's summertime, you know, I typically like to run my medium or not a lot more moist than I wouldn't flower but I wouldn't allow for larger dry backs in bed particularly. And let's see. I mean, I grow a lot of my stuff in solo cups, if I'm being honest. So, I mean it's just like trying to cycle through them. In terms of feed, nothing too special I just use the Canada and be like earn. I found that plants and veg aren't necessarily as sensitive as plants and flower with their veg diet or with their diet. But, again, that's not all strains. I mean, for example, Matt's blue resin dude off the bat it hated jacks, which is high and and can't really separate and from the calcium. So, I just had to switch because I was not going to accept a plant that looked like that. But I don't know. Yeah, it's, it's not hard. I also don't want to say it's easy but I don't put too much thought in it. I can let me rephrase part of this for you like, what would you worry about? Is there much that you would worry about? Worrying and veg. All right. It's a little more specific. I guess staying on top of your IPM broke is like that's really the only place you can actually actively do your IPM without, you know, busting the bank buying insects or, you know, relying on insects to figure your problem out. So yeah, I kind of just like to stay on top of spraying and veg. That's honestly kind of why I like veg a lot though, because, you know, it allows you to fix any errors that may have occurred. But yeah, I also, you know, veg is where my moms are at. I'm much more lenient about my flowering plants getting less water than my veg plants because like, they're shit in my bedroom that, you know, it would suck to have to hunt through stuff to find something similar. So yeah, just being sure to live really. Awesome. Good way to start this topic. Can punt it to earn? Yeah, for sure. I mean, a lot of the things I'm going to echo, I think like I tried to, for my veg face, like I'm okay with the temperature and humidity riding a little higher. Like for me specifically, just to like say kind of where I am, like with lights on a lot of times I'll be like around like 80, 82 degrees in my tent. So I'll let my humidity ride up into like the 60s a little bit. You know, I know that like the VPD thing is kind of like a joke sometimes, you know, like it's made into a meme or whatever. But like using the VPD charts like has this is what helped me as a beginner. I mean, to like give me an idea of where a plant needs to be and stuff, you know, I'm not saying that it's like an end all be all. But like if you're just starting and you don't really know what the plant needs, that's like pretty, you know, that'll get you in the ballpark. So I kind of will sometimes use, I don't do it anymore. But when I was starting, I would, you know, really dial my tents into those numbers and stuff. And I've noticed that like some plants do better with lower humidity. Some do with better hot, you know, it just depends. It just depends on what you're using. But I think stuff like that gets you into good ballparks. Yeah, I think what I just wanted to say here and that one of the points that you've made in the past, I think is really good. You're not following these numbers necessarily because they're perfect. You're paying attention to them because that way you can calibrate your own grow relative to something, you know, it's actually something you can track. Yeah, yeah, I'm big on like having something just a baseline. I just like to have a baseline because, you know, if you have any kind of issues or whatever and you stray from your baseline, then it's kind of easy to point out the issues, you know. So, and I do the same thing for flower, you know, all stages of life. I have my tent set into like a general parameter and then I just kind of adjust accordingly. And so like, I think like, you know, it gets easier the more that you do it, you know, just looking at your plants and stuff. So that's, that's always going to be the thing that I say is repetition, repetition, repetition. That's like the only thing that's maybe better. Thanks, man. Dan. Yeah, so I agree with like what local saying earlier, I like to try and I turn off any like DQ I really have going and really trying just like normally I think my relative humidity is kind of in like like 6065 kind of that range where when I'm flowering I try and keep it like 45 to 55. I've seen people go up to like 7075% their plants look great. For my lighting, I definitely kind of as their seedlings, I usually have it dimmed down and dropped on top of them because I have LED bars. It's like the four by four grid space for my tent too. And so I kind of just dropped the whole thing down. I started like 20% and then as they're growing up, my most of the time I'm vaging at about 50% power on those LEDs. And that way it stays nice and cool too is don't have to run AC really ever. Power bills cheap for those veg months. Feeding and watering like I'm just like normal like a cutting edge and a nice veg powder that I kind of sprinkle a little top dressing on the top of the pot. And then I'm feeding around 1000 ppm of like a veg and micro mix. And I mainly use sulfur, but you have to wait to don't spray sulfur too strong on some like fresh young seedlings they will all die. So I kind of wait till they're, I don't know, like basically toward the size that you could take a clone off of it like a single top cut. That's when I kind of start my ppm routine and it's sulfur pyrethrin mix just to keep anything at bay. I have an issue with thrips in my area. So I kind of always end up with thrips if I stop doing the sulfur. But yeah, I don't nothing nothing crazy special, but I love veg too because I like I like moms. I like keeping keeping them around and keeping them nice and healthy. And so I have a one mom in particular that's just like never happy. And so it's been my mission to figure out exactly what she likes. And I still don't know, but apparently not too much nitrogen that helped her to but she's got these purple stems and just hates the LED. So like mom health and all that is its own whole thing too. Because you can have stuff from different eras completely different lines and trying to keep them all happy sometimes is a pain. I wanted to ask local if you'd be willing to speak on his recent experience using not was it potassium local like you bumped something to try to get rid of the purple or red stems. I don't know if you want to speak to that just because it's interesting. Yeah. So one thing I've noticed with canna is it could lack a little bit in potassium. Now that's just in my grow. I'm not speaking for like the wine and entirety. But what I've noticed is under LEDs your plants get a little hungrier in some departments. One of those being potassium. And it's like I had no way to independently manipulate my potassium. So what I did is I got potassium sulfate from MPK. It's super cheap use almost nothing in weight. But it's just enough to bump. And what I've noticed is I've you know obviously like withing like conjunction of adding phosphorus. You know you're going to want to bump up your potassium a little bit. And since I was only adding phosphorus before you know my purple shrieking was kind of like going all the way up the plant. Whereas when I've started adding this and flower it's kind of helped mitigate that quite a bit. And I've also noticed tighter stacks. My sweet pea for example it used to have really large like really large inter nodal spacing and you know the one input that's changed is bumping up potassium. And it's like I must made it a little more compact kind of not like rugged but just overall kind of decent stature. I don't know. I've ran the plant for five times now. So I mean it's doing something. Yeah. If Matt I'm just remembering your prompt but if anyone has any thoughts on red stems under LEDs and you know anything you've tried to help mitigate that. Check it in the comments. In fact you know any anything that we've discussed you know seedling care any of that germination I'm sure many of you have opinions so. Yeah. Like I was saying too that this is specifically for my grow you know it might not happen to everybody else's grow if they apply it but. Don't you know. Just observation. Matt anything you wanted to add Matt. Over here. No I think you guys all covered that part. That's that's that's pretty easy. You know just follow a standard regimen. I mean I think the only thing I'll add is a lot of people that I'm learning read by PPM or EC. In just like one thing that they're taking into account or not taking into account is that a lot of these companies aren't very consistent with the product they're delivering like it's not homogenous. Just because it says guaranteed analysis doesn't mean that there is a guaranteed analysis of your bottle and I learned that myself when I was working with my spray and trying to figure out how to register it. And people are just like oh yeah you can put whatever you want on it. You can you know learning that like illuminated a lot for me. So that's when I started using very consistent suppliers of stuff and for a while House and Garden even kind of went down on their nitrogen for a while like they just totally dropped out of their bottles. So that's when I switched to Canada for a while but House and Gardens bounce back pretty well. I like both of those and they've been consistent enough over the years that I do know what like what I'm feeding them based on the amount of milliliters I'm putting in and I don't really have to second guess that but I think a lot of people maybe don't have that same luxury with the nutrients they're using all the time. So maybe take that part into consideration a little bit too. It's important. Hey everyone just wanted to thank you for hanging out with us. Like I said we're starting to cut these episodes down to 45 minutes so there's going to be a lot of two partners from here on out. Just quickly so it's not like a hard cut to the exit music. Go check out our Patreon. That's how you get access to our Discord. Go check out riotseeds.com we just did the blue dream drop the S ones and a few hybrids that are absolutely insane goat farm picked out some amazing amazing partners for the blue dream reversal. And there's lifted seeds. We have Gurt by seeds where you can also find riot seed stuff and go farm stuff. Even if you're across the pond in Australia and then we have riot seed co Europe if you're in Europe. So with that I'd like to thank everyone that joined us and yeah we'll see you next week. Want to sit at the table with the syndicate? Check out our Patreon and our link tree or description below. Our merch site is officially live. We have all sorts of shirts hoodies and goodies to sort you out and shipping is super fast and most importantly the quality is top notch. I've been saving old designs for years for this purpose so please check it out syndicategear.com. We also have an underground syndicate discord where we get together and solve old strain history together daily. It's an amazing community of learning away from IG and it's an amazing resource for old catalogs and knowledge. We hope you join our union of breeders and growers. Come check it out.