have you ever wondered how long it takes to bottom feed well in this video we're going to get into it
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a great grow make sure to hit the join button on the bottom of every video also often in my
vip membership i'm always encouraging guys to do a bottom feed and why is that it's so that we build
their awareness of how long it actually takes for water to break surface tension and absorb into the
water and i was talking to dave a little bit about this morning he started rattling off all kinds of
things and i was like you know what dave why don't you jump on the call with me today and and share
your insight around this too so please jump in and tell me what you're what we were talking about a
little earlier i i am good at rambling on a lot of stuff but basically you know in my practices and
my observations as a whole so not just with our medical plans but with house plans gardening and
stuff like that i noticed that there's different absorption rates depending on your media and
while most will say well that's pretty obvious we tend to start mixing and blending or buying
pre-amended soils that have a variations of cocoa peat moss compost worm castings and really when
you start putting everything together you have to look at it as the sum of of the whole and
everything that makes up the full components of that soil or that media everything in it takes
different times to to absorb the moisture to be what i consider fully saturated if you take
it for an example like pure peat moss um and i was talking to you about how i i like pure peat
moss when i'm propagating and starting roots on my house plants so things like spider plants um
very easy plants you know you can put in water and they root but i like the pure peat moss because i
i kind of keep it in the element that it was found and harvested in which is a very
very moist environment fully saturated environment but when we start getting into these blended
products you know 50 peat moss 10 coke or whatever it may be we have to take into consideration the
amount of time that it absorbs that well so often i see people with you know top um especially with
fabric pots fabric pots if you water too fast it comes out the side you know depending on what
the the product is it could shrink and come out the bottom and you could be like oh it's fully
saturated but if you put that same pot that you thought was fully saturated in in nice you know
a plant pan um the saucer so to speak um you'll see that it takes some so i have five plants and
i just bottom watered yesterday and for the five plants i'd say as a whole it took just about an
hour in total for full absorption and what i'm looking at is eventually that water after about a
half an hour to 45 minutes is still sitting there at a certain level and so often if you come back
15 20 minutes later you'll be wait where did the water go well it absorbed in it's wicking up so if
you look at your components and you see that you have pieces of bar pieces of hay pieces of sticks
you know even stuff like kelp meal kelp meal is something that needs to be rehydrated it's going
to take a percentage of that water and absorb back into the media you find that not everything
is being absorbed as the same and if you have the ability to take the time it's extremely
important you're going to have a more even distribution of water through that that whole mass
causing just a beautiful domino effect so the ability for the plant to burn down trans you know
to move nutrients into the root zones and to have the a better ability to absorb that overall you're
going to have that with more consistent saturation of that soil where you're not thinking it's fully
saturated and it's not you know in some of these medias when they dry out you know life happens you
have to a family happens whatever in your life that happens and you come back and you water it
and it's severely dried back just note that it's potentially going to take a long long time to
fully be absorbed especially the higher peat moss content or even like me with the compost
and stuff the sticks the bark the overall matter you know that takes a lot longer to absorb it but
when i go and i kind of dig down and i pull out a piece of bark even though the top looks bone dry
i can the bark is bendable because it still has the moisture content that's withheld in that so
that's going to help overall how much you're going to have to water right so if you have a good even
distribution of water then dry backs and stuff like that are going to kind of decrease so your
the amount of time that you have to water kind of decreases with that now your environment also is
going to play a big role because if it's extremely dry then you have to take in consideration what's
the percentage of moisture that's being evaporated what percentage is being used by the plant you
know what's going back into the atmosphere what's being used by the plant and you know with fabric
pots you know they're they're great but i think too often at times too people see more severe dry
backs and are on the sides and stuff like that but if you're bottom watering then that pot as well is
absorbing that moisture so you have more potential moisture to kind of dissipate in that atmosphere
but more of the bulk is staying in the soil 100 there's you guys are watching the videos right
now that's why i put our video and overlay just give you a little commentary as you're watching
this process right and in these videos what you're seeing right here is how long it takes and i asked
one of our growers to to bottom feed once again to build his awareness he had a five gallon and
three gallon pot and he he comes back to me shot the video comes back to me and just this video
you're seeing it was a 10 to 15 minute video i'm not speeding it up and i'm not delaying it because
i want you to see how long it takes with in addition to this each video there i actually had
to splice many videos together because he ended up having to wait about five minutes in between
watering so technically this was these just these five a few three and five gallon pots was a 20 to
25 minute process you're also going to see how long it takes when leaves are completely drooped
over you're going to see how long because i have this other video showing you how long it takes for
the water to actually fill up all the capillaries and you can see the the leaves at different levels
start to uh you know like come back up and then the water goes up and brings up all the other
leaves and so on so and so at this point you have to really just take into consideration that if
you're already having a dry back period in your soil system that soil is already most likely a
robbing water from your plant so you kind of got to think of this osmotic effect there's constantly
we on one of our other videos we talked about how the the soil releases stuff back into uh the
the soil system same it's constantly going back and forth guys so anyways uh dave if you go ahead
if you want to contribute anything else uh yeah so the last the last big factor that naturally comes
when we talk about uh watering from the bottom up is when people say well what about top dressing
well when you're top dressed of course we got to water in from the top right we have to we have to
start pulling those nutrients in and uh you know maybe one two three four different times but you
can also do a combination where you add x amount to the top and then then do your bottom watering
secondly and get that even distribution but don't go past what you have to do to get those nutrients
pulled into it so you know depending on if you're doing a photo period or an auto you know how many
times you're top dressing maybe it's only once or twice or maybe just once during that grill
absolutely you got to water in from the top i still put my tees in from the top i think there's
more benefits just my theory is like i think that the fabric's gonna rob something but it might not
but i like to put my teas and stuff from the top but if you've never bottom watered
and you have severe dry backs i highly recommend just to do it and like mark is saying observe how
long it takes just add in x amount of water walk away come back set a timer whatever you got to
do come back 20 minutes if the water's gone add some more come back 15 minutes later if it's gone
add some more until you see that water sitting then you can hold up your pot and most of these
soils it's so hard to over straight because the contents it's part cocoa part peat moss
part perlite worm castings it's going to drain and aerate and create further
oxidation and evenness of that moisture in the pot but if you've never observed it you just have
to do it because it's going to open your eyes into how long it takes for the mass as a whole
and the more dry amendments and different things you have kelp meal bone meal whatever it may be
all these things have different absorption rates you can't platform them that they're all going to
absorb at the same amount of time especially bigger pieces like i said a bark and sticks
that's going to take some time but if you fully saturate them it's going to create longevity in
the evenness of the distribution of water in the mass as a whole whether you're in the 3 gallon a 5
gallon a 10 gallon it's just the time frame shifts just slightly how much more you're going to have
to water or the frequency that you're going to have to water and that's just a different mindset
from a five to a ten and then getting familiarized with that right and and seeing that observing that
recording that and seeing most importantly the results right so all this stuff in there and
we think well the plant has to be hungry and when you have things fully saturated properly
the plant has access to it the microbes have access it the roots have access to it and overall
the health of the plant is going to start to level out in my opinion a lot more efficiently i love it
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