coming up on garden talk in a fabric pot situation that doesn't have that living soil liner we want to bring drippers or emitters we want to bring them further out towards the edge of the pot generally so that we can keep that edge more consistently hydrated so as the soil moisture dries out it dries out this ceramic tip just a bit and that pulls some of the water that's inside down into the ceramic itself which creates a negative hydrostatic pressure if you want that nice even watering coverage and you know maintaining that upper level of soil very very moist and consistent three drippers is is a good way to go so the solution to that is peck acid there's a product called drip clean that's like super common yeah using that like as directed on the bottles that'll take care of all those issues happening is the plants is going and grabbing the valve the water control valve and now the plant's in control of how it gets watered and when it gets watered what's up everybody if you that don't know me my name is chris aka mr growit and you're tuned into the guard talk podcast this episode number 50. 50 episodes deep wow incredible super thankful to all of you who have tuned into these episodes i'm going to keep them going definitely going to keep producing these episodes because many of you have made it clear that you want these episodes to continue i did this on episode 25 as well but i think it's important for me to reiterate my vision for this podcast my vision for this podcast is to talk to growers from all over the world both beginners and experts and seek to learn more about what they know about gardening i'm not going to judge people for the way that they grow and this isn't a debate i'm simply seeking to learn more about the guest and what they know about gardening and how they do things in their garden my vision is for these conversations to not only just help me expand my knowledge but you the listeners knowledge too so once again thank you to all of you who are riding along with me on this journey i truly appreciate it i'd love to know who is your favorite guest on this podcast so far let me know down in the comment section below in this episode i interview michael box from sustainable village he has been gardening for over 22 years and he specializes in plant irrigation in this episode he talks about the different methods of auto watering he also gets into his recommendations for different size containers thanks to all of you support this podcast or patreon if you'd like to support you can do so by going to patreon.com mr growit before we get into it i want to acknowledge that one of my goals for this podcast is to bring zero costs for information about gardening all plants to the general public that being said i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's episode who helped make that goal possible thanks to spider farmer for being a sponsor a new grow light they released here in 2022 is the se1000w this was designed specifically for those of you who run co2 in your grow space and really want to maximize the light intensity it has a 10 bar design for an even light spread pulls 1000 watts from the wall and comes in at 2.9 micro moles per joule efficacy the recommended coverage area is 4 feet by 4 feet or five feet by five feet use discount code mr growth 5 to save on all spider farmer products and i'll leave a link in the video description section below thanks to dutch pro for sponsoring this podcast dutch pro products are now available in several countries across the world for those of you that don't know dutch pro is a plant fertilizer company that has base nutrients additives and ph regulators they have different formulas of base nutrients for if you're in soil or if you're in hydro or cocoa they also formulate their base nutrients for if you're using hard water or if using ro or soft water i will leave a link to dutch pros amazon store down in the description section below and you can use coupon code mrgrow10dp for a discount on their products ac infiniti is a sponsor of the podcast coupon code mr growit will get you a discount on their products i've been using their cloudline t6 and t4 inline fans for several years now and absolutely love the automation built into them on the inline fans controller you can have set points for high and low temperature as well as high and low humidity this greatly helps control my indoor garden environment so the temperature and humidity stays in the ideal ranges i will leave a link to ac infinity down in the description section below and don't forget to use coupon code mr growit for discount on their products and we are back welcome to the garden talk podcast today i am joined with michael box from sustainable village how you doing today uh great really great it's good to be here yeah glad that you decided to come on so we know each other from mj biz con actually we met i think it was like three years two three years ago yeah i think in 2019 yeah we were i think you're out there with chris there that one time yeah chris from happy hydro yeah my uh he's actually on episode three of this garden talk so oh excellent yeah we've been working with chris for a long time too he's kind of a friend of the company nice nice yeah but you know all about irrigation and that's what we're going to get into today really i think most of my audiences probably home growers certainly do have a folks on the commercial side of things i would think more of them are more indoor versus outdoor but i'm sure we'll talk about things that are relevant towards everybody now one of the things i want to get we'll go over in this episode would be the different common container sizes and how the best way to irrigate them is you know i know a lot of folks are hand watering right now but they're interested in actually going to the automated system so we'll go over you know what the different automated systems are the different options for the different container sizes so on and so forth so it should be valuable on that aspect but but uh first before we get into that can you give us an introduction tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of how you got into gardening uh yeah absolutely um uh yeah uh i i currently well so i currently work for a sustainable village we're based out of boulder colorado um and you know the sustainable village has been around for about 20 years i've been here in this role as the lead designer and a bunch of other things for probably uh four years now and kind of been friends of the company here for a while donor for a long time as far as my own personal background i got into working on organic farms as a teenager back in pennsylvania where i grew up working on organic farms back there and once i moved out to colorado in 2000 i was involved with the local farm scene here quite a bit and the permaculture community did permaculture design certification about 12 years ago i've run a market garden here in boulder county and a csa program and a farmers market stand as part of the farmers market and uh yeah just you know that's some of the background i have i've just always been an avid gardener you know personally i've done it in commercial settings um you know i've been in colorado here for like the last 12 years you know there's some newer industries and i've been involved with those as well as far as gardening goes we've been really heavily involved in those industries to be particular um and uh yeah that's a real real brief background uh throughout all that time i've always been very very interested in irrigation though so i don't know i like water i like rivers i like i like moving water in general it's just the theme in my life and uh so i've always been involved in irrigation design and installation kind of run my own install design companies and then you know being able to be here at sustainable village for the last while we've been able to take a lot of um well so at sustainable village here we sell uh blue mats which we can get into later but they're these moisture sensing valves they're carrots they're ceramic carrot and yeah we can dive into those and talk about how they work but what's been really cool here uh is is to take some of the some of the designs and the strategies people were using kind of you know customers were figuring out on their own there was r d happening in the company and then to take those ideas and really expand them into you know commercial settings or or just really easily very modular easy to replicate systems for the home growers that can easily expand into a large like a medium system to a very large system and then from there we've kind of really branched off the last few years in irrigation and uh we're doing big ag projects now you know hundred acre farms that sort of thing uh we're we're not using blue mats for those we're more traditional drip irrigation or even some high powered overhead watering in certain circumstances but yes and it's been a real journey of learning and understanding and kind of coming to know the whole irrigation industry and world for you know the last couple decades yeah i mean just speaking with you in person i could tell that you have a ton of knowledge in regards to it it's like clearly a passion for you and the way you explain it just makes things fun like the way you get to design different ways to do it it just sounds so fun to me yeah yeah there's lots of ways to do different things and it's all it's all about finding the most simple you know cheapest way to do things and um yeah that's it's a it's a fun puzzle yep so let's talk about grill pots first before we actually dive into the different sizes right so plastic grow pots versus fabric grill pots can you talk to us like specifically how it impacts in regards to irrigation yeah um there's not a lot of difference so you know most of most of the work we do with blue mats and um is is in containers right so we're like you said we're in you know round pots uh plastic pots nursery pots that kind of stuff or fabric pots um and then also in all kinds of different raised beds that's a real common you know container growing for indoor gardening or greenhouse gardening and stuff like that people doing large raised beds um there's not there's not a big well if we're just if we looked at the round pots kind of thing you know that's that's one where there's a lot of plastic pots in play there's a lot of fabric pots in play um you know the the there's a there's the product uh grassroots you know the grassroots living soil products i'm kind of a pretty good proponent of those they're a they're a fabric pot with a non-permeable liner that you know that's about eight or ten inches deep so it gives a like non-breathable uh layer on the upper part of it you know so one of the big problems we see with irrigating um fabric pots in general is they dry out kind of in an uneven way the edges like the couple inches near the edge of the of the fabric tend to dry out much faster than the rest of the soil mass so uh roots tend not to colonize that outer edge as densely as as they would in even in a plastic pot where moisture is able to be held right up to the edge now fabric pots are actually but they're also very handy right they're like light weight you can ship them really easily they're you can kind of reuse them pretty well and so that's again that's we come back to those grassroots pots i really like those for being able to hold moisture right up to the edge of the pot um and but not uh but still have kind of a lot of convenience of a fabric potter particularly in the fabric raised beds when we see those because they're they can do big ones and you know set them up really quickly without a bunch of carpentry um yeah so really i guess the the thing to think about is you know if we're in a raised bed or sorry in a fabric pot situation that doesn't have that living soil liner we want to bring our water distribution whatever drippers or emitters we want to bring them further out towards the edge of the pot generally so that we can keep that edge uh more consistently uh hydrated but but really i mean not not a ton of difference um as far as how we're gonna how we're gonna irrigate like if we're looking at a five gallon pot it's really not gonna be that much different between a a plastic nursery pot or a fabric pot okay that's good to know yeah now let's let's go over some of these grill pot sizes we'll start with just a one gallon pot right so we have folks that are using just one gallon pots maybe they just have one plant in one pot yeah what would you say the optimal way to to irrigate that would be would it be like a blue mac classic and then what if they were to have like multiple one gallon pots so just an individual one versus multiple ones right well i think um in order to answer that i just want to explain blue mats a little bit sure and what they are and how they work yeah so what what they are is they're they're moisture sensing valves and you know i have one here i just pulled it out of a plant so it's got some dirt on it and stuff but you know they they have a a screw cap here so they they're empty when you get them like this they have this silicon line it's a three millimeter silicon line that goes through the top they have this little brown dial um on the top as well and that kind of helps you adjust adjust moisture content but essentially what you do with these is you fill them with water there's a little process for that and seal them so now they have a sealed uh there's a sealed cone full of water and then this whole cone is buried in the soil um right up to the you know so that the ceramic tip the ceramic tip of the cone is completely buried and seated snugly into the soil and and what happens actually is we so we charge one end of this line um with a constant pressure so one end of this this water line will be a constant uh anywhere between about 2 and 15 psi is the range we want to work in and that's 24 hours a day we have a pressurized line all the way up to to the point where the where the tube passes through the carrot and because the carrot's also a valve and it's controlled by the soil moisture so as the soil moisture dries out it dries out this ceramic tip just a bit and that pulls some of the water that's inside down into the ceramic itself which creates a negative hydrostatic pressure negative water pressure inside the cone and that pulls against the little membrane here which opens a valve in the top and allows water to flow through that tube and then drip out the other end of that tube and you can either have that drip out directly uh directly out of this tube into the pot or through a series of distribution drippers or we have a really cool soaker hose material called blue soak it's a it's made out of medical grade tyvek it's it's really pretty durable if you treat it right and it gives very very even slow water distribution so we can do up to a couple hundred feet of that downstream of one of these so to answer your question um about the best way to irrigate you know a one gallon pot um the other type of blue matte product there is you mentioned is the classic um i have some here kind of just in my in the plants here in my office and really what these are let's see here is uh these are a little different if you can see this here these guys are they just have a a a hose connected right to the top but doesn't pass through and one end of this tube has like a weight a weight on it and that weighted tube just gets dropped into a pitcher of water and then the cone itself gets buried in the soil here and it actually just siphons water up from the from the from the pitcher of water into there and it's kind of an even flow rate so if you're doing a lot of small plants like you know one gallon size plants one of those classics would work i know people who want to do they're doing a lot of uh clone propagation for whatever they're growing they they might when they transplant those clones into smaller pots um they'll use you know maybe you have a whole bunch of them maybe get you know you know 20 50 of these in small pots having a whole bunch of carrots can work for that definitely done that i've used that technique myself um but if you're if you're growing so that's like would be like a veg like a plant that's in a vegetative state if you were flowering a plant out you might want to do it in a um you might need a little bit more water to do that so having the adjustable flow rate that comes with the with the troph blue mat is probably what you want in a circumstance like that you know things for that are geared towards production the tropes work good because they really really meet the plants need wherever they are house plants the blue mat classic is an excellent choice to keep all your house plants nice evenly watered and such yeah a one gallon pot and it could go anywhere from just one blue mat uh trope two or one classic and that's all i would do i wouldn't use any distribution drippers or anything like that okay and you mentioned a specific psi that needs to be fed to the regular blue mat carrot i don't want people to worry about measuring that because it's just really it's gravity fed right so you just as long as it's above you know hooked up to a reservoir and as long as it's above the pots is that how high it needs to be and then it will yeah pretty much enough psi right so just to give you guys a a little context um so you know psi it's a unit it means pounds per square inch it's just a unit of pressure and so if you have a container that's so 2.31 feet of vertical head right equals one psi so the graph you know the gravity pressure from 2.31 is is enough to isn't is really enough uh one psi is enough just to if you're just dripping right out of a tube it's enough to run that um and yeah it's absolutely right with blue matte systems in general we can run them a few different ways we can run them off of gravity so have a reservoir that's you know on a shelf and then that's providing the gravity is just providing the pressure that constant pressure also we can have we have a pressure reducer that just screws onto a hose bib that's a 15 psi pressure reducer uh you screw that on your hose bib and then have the hose bib open and it's just all your lines and your system will then be charged at uh at 15 psi all the time and we also have we build pump kits so if you have a reservoir that's on the ground that maybe you want to mix nutrients into or something like that you can do that and then just pump out of that and then we keep the lines uh pressurized with a little pump that has a pressure switch and a pressure accumulator tank and then a pressure reducer so we're able to uh kind of you know maintain a constant pressure just pulling out a reservoir with a small kind of like almost pre-assembled pump kit that comes that we can that we offer here at the sustainable village those are kind of the three ways to uh provide that back end pressure either gravity a hose bib you know or or a pump kit gotcha all mine are gravity fed i've had the blue mac carrots go to three gallon containers five gallon containers and seven gallon containers actually run in seven gallon containers right now for three gallon grow pots let's move on to that what's the optimal irrigation method for it would you put one carrot in there two carrots in there or what would you do yeah you know again i would stick with just the one carrot and and no drippers probably i mean a three three gallon pot like what is that like a maybe an eight or nine inch diameter pot or something like that um that's um it can be more than that i think it's probably like roughly 12 inches i would say okay yeah so you know you're getting to a point you know with all these like you know smaller pots like pots under say 30 gallons really one carat per pot is all you really need i mean in the past people have wanted to do more and you can and there's there's some there's some advantages to adding adding more carrots but really first you know i just like want to see things work well for people and you know improve plant health improve yield that sort of thing and you know they can do that um uh really well with just like one five inch carrot and and and a series of of distribution drippers so um i don't have any sitting right here but um basically what we can do is with this three inch tubing we can connect these little distribution drippers that just go in line and make it make a chain of them they're different than like a drip emitter like a pressure compensating drip emitter but there's but they're similar in their idea so you could have like the carrot and then when the carrot opens and it waters and it turns on it drips in like you know two places or three places or five places so you know going going up from the three gallon five gallon you know five gallon pot um or even a three you know i would i would go with like probably a carrot and then if you want to do it cheap and easy you can just do one you just have it drip right out but if you want that nice even watering coverage and you know maintaining that upper level of soil very very moist and consistent you know three drippers is is a good way to go and we mount those drippers on little stakes so they sit up above the soil they kind of drip down on the soil and yeah i don't know if anybody's there's a lot of like we get these like root porn pictures people send us all the time where they'll be like a dripper it's like you know maybe three inches above the stake and then and the plants are just like have built a giant mound of roots and they're kind of just you know tentacling their way up to the dripper oh yeah i've seen that people's drippers haven't gotten clogged before that way right oh yeah well that's when we started putting them on the stakes because we would lay them on the soil and the roots would just kind of go into them and just get all up in there so we need to we need to keep them away from the hungry plants um a little bit there to but yeah that's that's pretty cool to see that kind of action it re you know it really speaks to the kind of sensitivity with the blue mat systems because you know with these with these plants like you say we're growing a plant indoors for you know three months or something like that and at the end of that three-month growing cycle i might i'll pull the carrot out and look in the hole and the hole is nothing but it's just white it's all white roots so that so after a while the plant grows its roots all around the ceramic cone and there's not actually any soil touching it anymore instead it's just it's just uh root tips have have grasped this this valve and and really then the plant is the one that's operating the control because i mean you the you know the root exudates they can they basically create negative pressure fields and pull you know material in from the soil and they're able to do this they can actually exert negative pressure um against that so the what's happening is the plants is going and grabbing the valve the water control valve and now the plant's in control of how it gets watered and when it gets watered um so it's physically turning the water valve on and off whenever it wants a drink um so that that's pretty cool i think that is pretty cool yeah i want to talk about some other auto watering options as well you know folks that are watching this we we've been introduced to blue mats right you know you work for sustainable village you don't want people calling this out as an hour long infomercial there are other options out there can you kind of just talk to us about like how they work for example the auto pot system that's something i've had before where you know it's it's it's down below drip irrigation systems pump systems can you just talk about like some of the other options out there um i don't know too much about the auto pots i've never used them personally they're kind of like a like a product and i know you have to buy like special pots and special trays and yeah but i think they basically there's like a water tray at the bottom that's filled by a little float valve and then there's like a wicking action that happens um exactly well i've heard people have good luck with them i know that they yeah i think one of the uh just one of the downsides is you have to use these these special containers that they they have um but i've heard people get really good results with them too um but then you know besides that like there's hand watering of course and you know that's not it's not that bad like there's nothing wrong with hand watering so people have been watering plants for a really really long time um and you know especially we're just talking about like home gardens and you know backyard gardens or indoor gardens and things like that smaller scale stuff you can totally get away with hand watering i'm sure we've all done that at different times done some hand watering i've done lots of it and you know there's the downfalls of that it takes a lot of time is the main thing and you're putting a lot of human subjectivity into it which um isn't like always you know as high quality as it could be um you know people make mistakes in my point and and errors and and uh forget to water and and then over water you know over watering in general is a really big problem it's probably the worst problem um that you might have with uh uh irrigation in general um you know with like house plants it's like something like 80 percent of all problems that with house plants people experience are are over watering so um it makes sense people like wanna they want their plants to do well they think that like uh you know water equals love for the plants and so they're just like giving lots of love you get lots of water but it's too much um they want just that right amount so that your soil doesn't get oversaturated there's a lot of things you know there's a lot of downsides that can happen when when too much water is in the plant the the the root exits will seal up they won't they won't absorb any more water and that means they're not absorbing any more nutrients at the same time it can be really detrimental for the soil health too as far as the microorganisms in the soil if there's if there's too much water and it can even you know go on to create different pathogens you know different pests and as or as well as just like anaerobic bacterial conditions in the soil that you know generally want to avoid the other the big thing as far as automated irrigation is drip irrigation so you know lots of people have used drip irrigation and it's there's tons of really amazing um applications for that it was kind of started getting i think it was developed in like late 50s early 60s in israel they started coming out with it and then a lot of those technologies came to states in the 70s and and since then it's really blown up in this huge you know multi-billion dollar global industry of manufacturing irrigation parts uh drip irrigation parts and those can look anything you know from like the uh just kind of basic drip emitters uh that are like punched into half inch poly tubing or um a lot of people see you see uh you know they'll connect in a lot of indoor gardens you see these systems where they'll be like a main line and then there'll be some sort of emitter with multiple lines coming off of it and stakes that go into pots you know those things all those those systems definitely work and really for like outdoor stuff if you're doing anything outdoors just doing standard drip irrigation you know i did that for years i mean it if you're providing regular consistent water it's not that's not too much you know it's enough um it's it's definitely better than nothing than doing this to then doing nothing at all um you know you want to be sensitive to environmental conditions so like if you're on a timer and you get a bunch of rain like you got to turn the timer off or whatever if you don't have some sort of you know moisture sensing control that's going to account for that and then just adjusting flow rates as plants get bigger and providing more inputs but yeah just you know traditional drip irrigation works really good the problem the problem with it is um one it's not very sensitive it doesn't have same sensitivities uh like it's just gonna water the same amount every day if it's on a timer and then at two it can be a little tricky getting uniform water distribution so you know you have to size your pump with the flow rates that you're putting out into the system or your pump or your hose or you know you have to have enough flow and pressure to operate the system in a uniform way so you know again there's just some some things that need to happen with that as far as planning that out and designing it so at home you know you can usually just do stuff you know fine if you're doing your home gardens if you start to get on in scale at all it's nice to have a designer come in and design the system for you and do the engineering behind it because those systems do require some actual engineering as far as um you know again understanding you know things like friction loss and flow and pressure i don't know it kind of actually kind of go all over the place here and we can talk about little systems or big systems but and there's there's different it's like different strategies like different different goals have different strategies that's the main thing it's like what are you growing what you know what size container are you in what is your environment like and you know taking that information and applying different strategies finding the strategy or the technique that's going to best match up what you're trying to achieve is that's kind of what we do over here but like that anybody can do it too you just need to do a little homework gotcha yeah i can see how those all the variables would certainly impact it right let's get into five gallon grill pots i think you touched on five gallon grill pot when we talked about the three gallon grill pod was it one carrot i think you mentioned on that or you could do like the one carrot but have it come out in several different areas so you get more distribution across that yeah you know i think um we i you know i like to think about things like uh good better best you know a lot of times like what's the what's the economy version what's the mid-range version what's the deluxe version and you know for a five gallon pot it's pretty much you know just have one dripper point would be your real base level economy it keeps the plant alive keeps it pretty healthy and maybe it's not in there for the whole life of the plant maybe it's just for like a you know a period of vegetative growth and then you're going to transplant into something larger but if it's if it's that's it's forever home or whatever like i would go you know three or five drippers just depending on what you know how much coverage you want to do and really like how many plants you're going with because a lot of this stuff it's just it's all about like scalability so if you've got six plants at home you can really just like you got why not go deluxe like you're gonna have these six really lovely big plants and they're just for you and your friends or whatever and but if you're trying to if you've got 500 5 gallon pots you know it's it's maybe you don't need quite the deluxe version on every one of them you can do something a little bit more commercial economic that kind of thing do you have a recommendation for like reservoir size per container or something like that like i was running three of them and i had this massive reservoir it was sent to me it was like it was kind of a little silly having like a 64 gallon reservoir something crazy like that actually i think it was like a 32 gallon reservoir but like i only needed like five seven five to seven gallons because off of like three plants and three gallon containers yeah it like a general recommendation for like reservoir size yeah it really depends on so many different factors a lot of it has to do with like how many plants are you watering and like how big are the plants um and what size containers they are so with like five gallon pots you know if if you're growing plants in there stay in an indoor environment that's you know warm you know it's in the high 70s or something like that or whatever um and there's a lot of transpiration what not you know you might you might have a big plant in there you could figure that it could go up to a half gallon a day of water could be used in that five gallon pot so that's kind of one way to think about it if you're relying purely on like a gravity fed situation um which works again works great for that like 6 to 12 plant kind of thing um and then pressurized systems tend to work a little better for for larger systems and by pressurized i mean like with a hose bib or a pump um the uh yeah as far as flow rate and container size you know it's all about how often do you want to refill it so if i had a 32g i would i mean i like having a big reservoir um and you know because you don't have to refill it as often it's really the main thing um and a lot or you can have a small reservoir and you can have a float valve on it so you know as soon as you use some of that water the flow valve kicks on and keeps itself topped off um because it's another thing to think about when using blue mats and and gravity is like if you have a big reservoir it's tall like say it's like five feet tall when that thing's full it's going to have you know a couple psi more than when it's almost empty of pressure and these the carrots are set to like a relative pressure sensing so they're you you can get some inconsistency if you have a very tall reservoir that you fluctuate from full to empty um if you do have a larger reservoir we always recommend when people are setting the carrots they fill the reservoir like halfway and then they set it and then fill it the rest of the way so you're kind of getting that median uh pressure that you're going to find is when when you're dialing in the carrots um but yeah i like having them i like this i like having a small one on some sort of uh float valve and that float valve the supply line that float valve doesn't even have to be on all the time you can have that on a timer too for instance so like say you had just a five gallon bucket as your reservoir and you had a bunch of plants maybe a couple times a day the timer kicks like a timer kicks on and charges the water line up to that float valve and then the float valve you know is if it's open it oh it's open and it fills and shuts off and then it and then the timer turns off and it depressurizes and that way you don't have a pressurized line like you know running through your house or whatever all the time because that can be a little um you know scary or whatever just a little there's a little risk having pressurized water lines inside i hear you and you mentioned the five gallon bucket i was going to say that you know for most homegrown applications people who are growing maybe maybe six plants or less can get away with a five-gallon bucket right typically you'll put you know four you know top it off to five gallons of water in there and it's going to take a little while for them to eat through it so you could just go in there every day and just add in water if needed you know so i currently have a like i bought a trash bin and it's like a 14 gallon trash bin and i use that and i don't fill it up all the way you know i have it filled up probably maybe five gallons at a time so i can potentially downgrade for for my particular scenario but certainly i feel like folks can get away with running you know carrots right to a five gallon bucket do you sell the reservoir too or do you just sell the piece that kind of connects to it right uh we sell a lot of buckets so like one of our more popular products is just it's like our bucket kits so it'll be it'll be a reservoir with the bulkheads drilled into it and then like packed inside of it you know it's like enough for like six or twelve plants and all the tubing and supply line and that sort of thing and um so that like that whole kit like a bucket with all the components it's like a standalone kit that's really nice for someone that wants to test out blue mats or something like that and try them out um we sell those we we also sell some other reservoirs but not once we get i don't do a lot of the big large ones you kind of need like a anyways we're just not really set up to sell really large uh reservoirs we have some cool stackable ones that go anywhere from like 45 to 300 gallons but yeah i don't get i don't get into like the cis turns the you know multi thousand gallon cis turns and stuff like that one you know one of the things we see people use all the time is just the the ibc tote um like uh it's i'm sure you've seen them they're they're on like a pallet like a pallet skid with a metal cage around it and they're about 275 gallons oh yeah super common they're cheap like you can pretty much find those in any like town city in america like they have them you can buy them for you know 150 bucks or something and uh those make pretty good you know they're cheap easy water reservoirs you want to make sure you get a food grade or something one that was had like food grade materials in it and not like motor oil or something but um yeah that's uh those are those are great easy reservoirs for larger systems or you can if you if they're sitting on the ground you can pump out of them as well i currently have seven gallon pots that's what we'll talk about next i have two carrots going in each one so you've got the the plant in the middle right the stock in the middle and then a carrot on each side do you think that is sufficient for that or would you go a different route to irrigation on a seven gallon or what no i mean like i said like you one carat is probably fine this is fine two is nice and we have different size there's different size carrots too right there's a that was this is a five inch here but i but i also have a nine inch carrot so we can measure different soil depths so a lot of times when we're using multiple carrots in a container we're using different size ones so we're measuring different soil levels so if one one of those moisture levels dries out there's you know waters applied to the plant so yeah i know yeah yeah you know there's no like there's not a wrong way or a right way to do stuff there's there's like good ideas and that work you know more efficiently there's there's other ideas that are given even like give a little bit more edge on performance but might be a little more complicated um the yeah i guess the way i look at things i tend to look at things on like a larger scale a lot of the time so i want to i want things i don't like to over build the systems we design i want them to just the work like just right and and to approach it more so you know there's this whole market of like indoor you know medicinal plant cultivation then then there's usually everything's expensive it goes along with that right like the fertilizer might if you're using that same fertilizer to like grow vegetables versus medicinal plants you might uh it's going to be like drastically more expensive and there's like it's like a tax that's put on there so that's the case for a lot of the big commercial drip irrigation systems that we see i see people putting in and they're over built they're overly complicated and if we take the um principles and kind of like ethos of how to irrigate at an ag level like if you think you're like imagine you're like a beet farmer or something like your margin is super super tight so it really makes a lot of you have to just do things just not as cheaply as possible but like as efficiently and economically as possible and there's ways to take those principles and irrigate you know the indoor their common indoor plants that get cultivated at scale uh and um and do it like much more efficiently and economically if you use those kind of ag principles for irrigation instead of like you know specialized like kind of lots of lots of bells and whistles hydroponics kind of style irrigation i think one of the main concerns for folks is the medium drying out and you know that's one thing when you're growing organically you need to have a moist medium at all times or else the microbes aren't going to be active and my viewers hear me say this all the time the amendments aren't going to get broken down and you could run into deficiencies i feel like i'm kind of running into a problem right now having two drippers in a seven gallon the top layer still kind of isn't moist at all times even you know when you top dress in organic nutrients the area right where the dripper is is moist you can clearly see it but like behind the dripper is like dry and you know how does how do is there a better way to go about it you know what i mean should i have a soaker hose in there for example in a seven gallon in order to help ensure moisture i don't like to use that soaker hose until maybe like a 15 gallon pot or something like that okay um it just it tends to you're gonna be better off with the drippers you know to your point about using dry organic nutrients or dry nutrients at all there's a technique we like to use sometimes we call it the nutrient well and you know the idea being if you have a dripper and your carrots controlling a series of dripper um you know some of them might drip right in the soil but they're going to be suspended over the soil and they're going to be dripping out of the onto the soil so if you had a dry amendment one thing you can do is actually carve out like a little hole um and fill that with like don't you know with a with the pure nutri like dry nutrient mix or something like that um you know i used to still use this stuff growilla a lot i liked that for a while but it's like you know there's there's lots of dr earth's a big one it's really similar kind of one i've been using but there's uh you know they're just like mixes of all these like really good bone meal and blood meal and now you know with alpha and all kinds of cool stuff they and and if you have if you have this kind of well of that dense nutrients and you have a dripper right on top of it you're gonna you're gonna every time it waters it's gonna drip right on that nutrient well and kind of just you know it's almost like not really time release but kind of it's sort of every time it waters you're getting this this little bit of a flush into that nutrients and you might not want that for um every spot but on a seven gallon pot you're still a relatively small container and you know the plant's going to be able to uptake a lot of those nutrients your point about soil drying out and nutrients not being available i mean that is that's like almost the most important thing around thinking about how to irrigate plants um and yeah it all has to do with that that that that ecosystem is created in the soil um all those microorganisms if it gets too dry they're going to go dormant if it gets too wet they're going to go dormant but if you're able to hold them in that it's called hydro neutral zone like goldilocks zone right not too dry not too wet um they're they're not going to go dormant as often and whatever their job is whether it's solubilizing phosphorus or fixing nitrogen or transferring nutrients or whatever like they're going to do that like 24 hours a day instead of you know only when the up you know when the when the soil moisture conditions are optimal for it so yeah i mean i really i'm glad you're telling your your listeners that um because it's very very true i'll have to try out the nutrient well method that you mentioned i mean i kind of did when i top dressed but the the problem is it's so much right like i'm using a cup of build a soil craft blend and like putting that into a seven gallon container and two spots plus worm castings it's like it's hard to keep it all in one area and i'm also afraid of like digging down in that area where the roots are already established to create that well so i don't know if the well is created like in the beginning when you first plant or what another thing you do if you're using blue mats is you can still topstress liquid inputs so you know if you have your blue mat system set up it's all dialed in it's maintained as moisture if you go through and either like mix up a liquid nutrient and pour it over the top or put a dry nutrient mix into the surface and kind of just scuff it in with your fingers just a little bit and then take you know your a wand or you know some water and water that in that's fine the blue mat itself is going to just turn off and it'll just stay off until the the soil moisture's dried down to that optimal level that you've you've set it to to maintain so um yeah i mean again like in in big like living soil you know grows that we we see there a lot of like raised beds right and with with those you know all this there's wonderful soil mixes and stuff and um but we will only run we'll only run water through the blue mats and if they want to top dress in inputs like a compost tea or something those come through the greenhouse like once a week or whatever and have like a nutrient vat mixed up somewhere a little day tank you know day mix tank put whatever they want to put in there you know and a small sump pump and a garden hose and a wand and just you know top water in whatever they want to feed it it's really not that much water going in generally so it doesn't really affect the moisture level it's only a few gallons generally you know per raised bed or whatever but that's sort of standard operating procedure for uh there's like more commercial living soil applications that are in raised beds they'll run just plain water through through the irrigation system or through the blue mats and then you prevent things from you know like building up like because you can run nutrients and liquid inputs through blue mats or drip irrigation um in general but you have to kind of account for like biofilm buildup or if you're running synthetic nutrients and you have like salt buildups mineral buildups um and uh and there's that's fine you just there's some products you can use to treat that and and break up the build up that's happening and flush the lines or you can use them in know kind of prophylactically as a throughout the growth cycle but um yeah okay so if you water in compost teas or sometimes i'll do a mix of like a microbial inoculant and then i'll water it in i shouldn't be taking them out or anything like that did the blue mask need to be recalibrated at any point only if you let the soil dry out really significantly so that it actually dries because if you get the soil really dry it'll it'll pull the moisture out here and once this inside of the carrot um loses enough water its ability to turn on and off that valve diminishes so then we then you can have errors like we call them runaways it's like it's like the main thing that goes wrong with blue mats is they'll over water sometimes because of there's some sort of issue and it's a very short list of like troubleshooting to figure out what that is but one of them could be if the carrot dries out there's a large air bubble in the top uh it won't doesn't have enough pressure to operate the valve and close it when it needs to yeah okay now what if your reservoir kind of dries out it drops all the way down to the level to where the you know the hose is connected to the reservoir the water level drops below that and it's no longer getting water to the carrots what will happen that the carrots will just dry out yeah just depends on how long that's going on for so if the you know if your reservoir goes dry and whatever it's like a day it's probably fine but if it's you know five days or something again it's all about just like you know you and you can check too like sometimes you know if your carrots buried in the soil and you and the soil's like really dry or something's going wrong like you know the water supply turned off somehow and you want to know you can always just like you take pull one carrot up and just sort of tip it upside down see if you see a big air bubble in it and if there's if there's a good-sized air bubble but not like uh you know but it's still it's still moist you know there's still some water in there you can really kind of get away with just having a bucket with you and and you don't have to re-soak it you can just unscrew it have a bucket stick both your hands under the water in the bucket and reseal it and then you know place it back in there you don't have to go through the whole like soaking process it just just to top off the carrot um so yeah okay that's good to know but no i mean really once you dial them in they should maintain for the for the full uh run yeah that's one thing i like about it is you kind of want to say set it forget it but set it just keep the reservoir full you know you know i've got all my kitchen gardens and stuff set up at home all my raised beds grow my produce and stuff and whatever else and it's like man up you know in may or june i'll go out there and turn on the whole irrigation system and like go through and spend a day or two getting everything dialed in and fixed up and re-soaked the carrots and then it's like i don't touch it until like i start ripping it apart you know taking it down in october so that makes sense now there has been times where i got the proper moisture level that i felt right i actually water and then the next day is when i i add the blue mats in right that's typically what my plants seem to like it the most is to wait a day and then add them in but there has been times where i you know i i dial them in and then i come back 24 hours later and i see one of the drippers constantly dripping is that a problem or is it just working as normal i mean it's you know they take con they do take some tuning right generally once they're you can kind of you can do that and forget it thing like once you get them dialed in maybe it takes you like a week or so to get it dialed in from once you put it in or maybe even two weeks like for really nail it and then it's fine for the whole rest of the growth cycle and that gets faster and faster the more you use them too because you know once you get kind of adept at tuning them you can almost like feel the tension point when you're tightening them up that you want to maintain a mat but if you see something dripping and the soil is wet it's too wet you don't want it to wet i mean you should dial it back you know make the adjustment for sure okay good job no things can happen like they can get bumped um in different ways maybe you don't notice it but like you bump the pot or something like that and it hit maybe because that's something like if if if these carrots are buried and they get jostled and then like all of a sudden the they're not flush up against the soil the ceramic part if there's air up against the ceramic then the carrot reads as dry if it reads it is very very dry so then it's going to get the valve's going to open up and it's going to over water so if these things get like bumped a little bit sometimes they can they can cause that's like the other you know so there's a pretty short list of troubleshooting if you're seeing over watering and you know uh ones the air bubbles inside the other is like something happened to the carrot where like you know a person or a dog or a clumsy employee or somebody like hit it you know touched it in some way that made it over water okay speaking of problems is salt buildup ever a problem like particularly when using the synthetic fertilizer since with blue matter there is no runoff right so like is there do you recommend like a flush to happen or multiple flushes to happen throughout the grow when growing it's all filled up in the soil yeah yeah yeah um well sure uh obviously that's like a downside right of of the synthetic program but what we recommend is if if someone's doing like a straight like cocoa salt type grow right so they're just running synthetic nutrients into their their plants with some sort of soilless medium um uh kind of like the you know the traditional wisdom is you flush that at the end of the growth cycle you know to get a lot of that salt out and and additionally whenever you water you tend to water into a significant amount of runoff right so you water until there's x amount of runoff and that runoff is just those liquid nutrients you just bought at the growth store for a lot of money just going right down the drain but um so with the blue mats we don't see that drain to waste uh we don't see that runoff happening because everything that goes in the pot stays there and to account for that what we like to do is recommend that if you're if you're growing a synthetic program to take the dilution rates that you're using and are successful with and cut them in half and and use half as much nutrients of course the added benefit you know right off the bat is you're using half the nutrients but people are getting as good or better results by doing that with the blue mats and and honestly like we have a bunch of folks out there uh that just run coco and salt and like just crush it like they come back and they're like i just didn't know we could grow like this another product i think we might start carrying this but we're not right at the moment i like it a lot though and i think it's an awesome component to work with the blue mats is this fertilizer product called beanstalk beanstalk ag if you heard about them there that's a synthetic it's a synthetic program too but it's like these little pellets they kind of look like like nerds or something like that actually yeah it's just sort of uh we were doing some r d but it's like these just little pellets and you mix that in with the soil and it's it's like a time release fertilizer but it's specifically designed to uh kind of like work with the growth cycles for you know uh the most common indoor medicinal plants that people grow and so um that works great with with blue mats like the the beanstalk does we've been doing some r d with it because we were thinking about actually carrying it which would be a big departure for us to carry a synthetic product we're really geared towards organic and sustainability and regenerative agriculture so but i just think it works so well that it's worth you know promoting a little bit as far as the synthetic program i know there are some synthetics or some bottled nutrient lines for example that it could clog right clog things up so the solution to that is peck acid which is like uh drip clean this product called drip clean that's like super common just yeah using that like as directed on the bottles that'll take care of all those issues and keep it clean you know the distribution drippers is probably the weakest link in the blue mat system for nutrient buildup but so if you're doing a lot of plants of nutrients sometimes just like omit the distribution drippers and just drip right out of the tube uh is it a technique let's flip back into a few container sizes and then and then we'll wrap things up we covered all the way up to seven gallons anything different for like 10 gallon pots 15 gallon pots 20 gallon pots as far as how you would lay out the the bigger pots and again like 15 gallons up is where i start looking at this you know 10 gallon pot maybe you want to sink a nine inch carrot in there in addition so like a nice kind of deluxe setup for that or or higher and set up is you know it'd be a five inch carrot with like say five distribution drippers around the outside edge of the pot the distribution drippers would would water and then you take a second nine inch carrot and sink it right near the base of the plant so so the outer ring uh the outer outer you know outer edge of the pot is is being monitored by the five-inch carrot and and then the and then there's just one single drip point near the base of the plant that's being monitored you know being monitored by the the nine inch and that kind of mimics that like inverse pyramid that uh a root mass tends to you know you take a plant out and shake it and you notice that there's generally like a lot of roots on the top and then there's like the tap root down the middle so if you look at the the root mass of the planet kind of looks like that inverse pyramid so we're measuring um soil moisture kind of in you know in conju that corresponds to that structure so that's for that's nice for a 10 gallon nine inch in the middle and then five inch with five trippers um and then yeah once you get 15 and above you know having a little piece of that blue soak on one carrot is great you know it really gives nice super even coverage and then the bigger the pots we get you know we get into 30s 45 65s 100s 200s whatever really it's just usually a big spiral that blue spoke silk because that stuff we can turn corners with it it doesn't kink um so we can just do like one big spiral and you know soil dries out and a nice even layer of water gets laid down on top of it how about some of the common beds like i know a lot of folks are like three by three bed four by four bed five by five bed yeah what would you do for that you could still do that um you know you with the uh you know like three by three four by four you still do that spiral kind of shape if you wanted to with a carrot and then kind of over that we use this double manifold system where basically the carrot feeds into a little header of this eight millimeter tubing and then off of that are four lines of drip of drip soap of the blue soak the soaker hose so one carats can you know basically is controlling uh four eight foot lines that like on a four by eight bed for instance you know you'd have a one carat that when it turns on it feeds into a little header and that header waters four eight foot lines that run the length of the bed and um well actually sometimes we'll kind of mirror that structure on both sides of the bed so you have two carrots and they both feed into the same system so if either carrot dries out it turns on the water and and can fill it so you're kind of monitoring a couple different places in the bed with what with maybe a nine inch and a five inch but yeah the double manifold bed is that's how we water everything from like four by four four by eight up because again a lot of these guys are growing in like you know four by nineties or four by 120 even or something like that um and big greenhouses or big indoor applications and then we just break up like oh every 10 feet there's like a zone you know down the road or whatever awesome well we could sit here and talk for another three hours if we really wanted to but we're gonna end it here at the one hour mark tell us how can the listeners find you and what do you have upcoming in the future yeah um let's see a bunch of different stuff we're uh so first thing is if you come to the website sustainablevillage.com we do free design work for everybody that's another thing i forgot to mention um you know so there's a quote request button right on sustainablevillage.com and it's free just put some information in there if you have a home garden that you want an irrigation system designed for you hit the button you fill out a little form and one of our designers will get back to you really pretty quickly with like a drawing of the system a description of how it works and a complete parts list for everything you need for it and like no pressure to buy or anything like that so it's kind of a little service we do and have all the customer service and tech supports kind of back it up so if yeah everybody's interested in blue mass system they're curious about it they can go down to sustainablevillage.com and click on that quote request button um what are we doing i'm actually doing a trade show next week it's a it's a ag traditional ag show it's a colorado farm show so that's up in greeley colorado it's just like a big traditional ag show i'm going out there's a conference up in southern humboldt there's really pretty impressive lineup of people there i was really honored they asked me to come speak so i'm going to do a presentation there on just irrigation all kinds of irrigation techniques and stuff there so be out at that one yeah that's what we do you know we have our offices here in boulder colorado so um and a couple warehouses just stacked to the gills with irrigation parts um so we'll design systems and then you know we we sell the parts to go along with them um and check us out there you can check us out at uh on instagram bluemat watering systems is our main one that most people find the most interesting that's b l u m a t this blue matte blu m a t watering systems and then sustainable village on instagram too great stuff there for sure if you enjoyed this video click that thumbs up button trying to get as many thumbs up as possible helps with the youtube algorithm and we're releasing these episodes every single week so subscribe to the channel if you haven't already if you're listening on one of the podcast platforms particularly apple podcasts please leave a rating and review coming up on 200 200 ratings and reviews so hopefully we can get there within the next month or so thank you to everyone who has left a reading and review so far michael thanks again for coming on this has been awesome definitely answered a lot of questions that i had and i'm sure that it's definitely helped some folks that are that are tuning into this so thank you for your time and i hope you enjoy the rest of your day anytime man just let me know if you guys have any more questions and happy to jump back on whatever you need sounds good you