On Roots
Description
Unlock the subterranean secrets of your garden's success by tuning into our latest episode, where we unearth the incredible world of autoflower roots. Expect to gain an understanding of the taproot and fibrous roots, the key players in your plants' health and yield. This isn't just your average root talk; it's an exploration into creating the perfect home for these vital systems, where the balance of microbial life, strategic watering, and environmental control can lead to an explosion of growth. We're talking a root revolution that promises to elevate your autoflower plants to their peak potential.
As we navigate through the root realm, we're not just stopping at the "what" — we're giving you the "how." Learn about roots needs for oxygen, temperature, water and nutrients. Get the scoop on the symbiotic magic between plants and mycorrhizal fungi and how this partnership can supercharge your garden. Plus, we'll reveal how to harness the protective prowess of Trichoderma to give your plants a fighting chance against pests and diseases. You'll walk away from this episode equipped with the knowledge and strategies to nurture roots that are not only healthy but are primed for a bountiful harvest. Join us for a journey into the roots that power your plants to greatness.
Transcript
00:12 Ladies and gentlemen, stoners and growers, welcome to a midnight rendezvous like no other. I'm your host, Socratesgrows, broadcasting from a server in the heart of America. Join me on this extraordinary journey through the lush foliage of my Autoflower garden to learn how to grow your own fired home. This is Autoflower Power, the podcast that takes you deep into the hidden realms of the horticultural marvels that we call autoflowers. On this episode, we'll be discussing the roots of your autoflower plant. We'll be discussing what the roots are and what they do for your plant, the factors that make your roots grow and stay healthy, how your roots and the life in your medium work together to produce healthy and happy plants, and some things to avoid in the root zone. So sit back and enjoy this episode of Autoflower Power.
01:12 The topic of roots is important to understand if you really want to get a handle on growing any plants, but especially autoflowers. Understanding not only the type of roots but what the actual type of roots do and how to encourage their development will really get you ahead when you're trying to understand your plants and trying to grow them bigger. The roots really have a disproportionate importance to your plant. I mean, especially considering that for the most part, they're completely invisible to us. The area directly around your roots, which is called the rhizosphere, and the roots, contribute really to the major success or failure of your autoflower plants or any other plants. So to nail these down will really get you a great foundation for success with your autofowers. Basically, right from the get-go, you're already dealing with your roots.
02:06 The tap root, which is one of the types of roots that we're going to be dealing with, is the first thing you see when you pop your seed in germination. It's basically the little white tail that you see from the husk of the seed shell that comes out in your germination. However you're doing it, the tap root, once you put it into the medium, will make its home. So you want to make sure that it's got a comfortable temperature and a nice surrounding, which is the medium and any kind of microbial life around it. We'll be discussing that a lot more just a bit ahead. But you really want to make sure that you're taking care of your tap root and you'll be rewarded well, the tap root is really important for your autoflower plants. It's one of the things that determines how big your plant's going to grow and if you're going to stunt them and also to some degree how much vigorous other root growth you can get and how quickly that develops. So the tap root is the primary driver into your medium. It basically burrows its way down and it stabilizes the plant. The very tip of the tap root is called the root cap. You can see it when you've got. You can't actually see it, but I mean you can know where it is when you see the little tail when you're doing the germination. So the very tip is called the root cap and it produces a lubricant of some type called musigel and basically what this does is it leads the way for your tap root to burrow its way into the medium. So it's just like kind of making a little slipperier and you know it's just lubricating the way down for your tap root to make it down. What the tap root actually does once it's established is that it helps regulate a lot of the hormones that the plant is going to get. So the other roots will take up nutrients and water and the actual tap root itself will sort of be the main highway that regulates how much can actually go up to the plant from down below. In addition to that, you just want to keep it super healthy because it is the attachment and the only way that your plant connects with the rest of the root system, and the medium that it's in your tap root is super important to make sure that you are nailing and encouraging good growth, especially early on, as early as germination.
04:38 The next set of roots that we're going to be talking about is the fibrous roots. These roots grow out from the main tap root. What these roots do is that they explore the medium. They're going out basically exploring the world. They're trying to find water. Anytime they come across nutrients, they take those up. Basically, they're chasing after water and they're also taking in nutrients at the same time. These fibrous roots, they're really familiar looking. They're kind of stringy. If they're healthy, they're kind of white moppy looking roots, very similar to what you'll see in a tomato plant or really a lot of other vegetative plants.
05:23 These roots, the fibrous roots, are the ones that you'll see on the side of the transplant cup, if you're using a clear transplant cup method, when you pull your plant out at the end. If you do that and you don't reuse your medium, this is the majority of the roots that you'll see and encounter when you pull out that big root ball, there are these fibrous roots. The fibrous roots will grow out to the edges, hopefully, if you water them properly, and they will expand and grow. They will also help stabilize your plants. The fibrous roots will stabilize your plants. They'll take up water and nutrients and they'll feed it to the tap root, which then regulates the water and the nutrients to send to the rest of the plant when it's required. Both of these roots are super important to your autoflower plant. There is one more type of root that is not super important to autoflowers. These are adventitious roots. These are mostly important to people who are cloning plants. Since we can't clone autofowers, I don't think it's really worth too much time worrying about that.
06:33 Let's go ahead and talk about how to develop the root and the fibrous zone. The tap root and the fibrous roots will primarily grow during the seedling and the vegetative stage of growth. While the plant grows larger above the soil, a similar rate of growth is also happening below the soil to prepare for the larger and larger structure that the root zone is going to need to anchor. Just keep that in mind. We can promote more vigorous root expansion growth in a couple of different ways with watering. If we're thinking about the expansion of the roots following the water and we're also considering that it's going from the top of the pot lower and we also consider that it's growing at about the same rate as the plant above it.
07:23 There's at least a couple things that we can do to encourage the roots to expand and expand. The first one is to water around the drip line of the plant. This encourages the fibrous roots to grow outwards more, towards the edge of the pot, so that they're not just staying in line under the tap root. If you could go a little bit outside of that drip line the drip line is, by the way, when you look down at your plant, anything that's on the outside of the leaves, just to the outside. That's basically your drip line. If you want to just water around that area, that does promote root expansion. Another thing we can do is use subirrigation. This is a similar idea and because, instead of watering from the top, with the roots automatically getting water from the top and trickling down, the roots have to go down and really seek out the water. This is one way to get really explosive growth in a vegetative stage, because those roots are going to be searching and they're going to want to get down to the bottom as quickly as possible and they're going to fill up that pot much more quickly.
08:32 We can also use the actual pot itself to encourage thicker and stronger root development. If we use fabric pots, they can encourage air pruning. Basically, what this does is this stops the root growth at the edge of the material, as opposed to just swirling around in a plastic pot. What this does is it encourages stronger, fatter, more resilient roots to be grown and more roots to be grown overall. It's just something to consider as the pot type. We can also consider the medium type If you want something. As far as the medium, that's both easy for the plant to be able to push through, but you also want it to be stable enough to be able to anchor the plant in place when there is the added weight in the flowering stage, and the proper porous medium will help the plant grow more vigorous roots and more expansion with the roots themselves. So really, there's four things that we need to grow happy roots Oxygen, proper temperature, water and nutrients.
09:42 Oxygen is required for roots because your plants need to breathe, just like us. They need some air to be able to do their job and to regulate the nutrients that they're taking in. This is why overwatering does so much damage, especially to auto flowers. You can literally drown your plant, so please make sure you're not overwatering your auto flowers. To keep oxygen in the root zone of your plant, you can do a couple things. You can use fabric pots, as I mentioned, to maximize airflow to the entire medium. You can water more frequently with less water. You could allow dry back periods to make sure that the plant is able to catch its breath. This is another thing that you can do. If you're getting any kinds of bug problems or overwatering, you want to make sure that that medium has some time to dry out. Regardless of your nutrients or whatever your watering system, you want to give it a little bit of time so that it's not always super soaked. You can do hydro, and cocoa is a little bit more forgiving, but even with cocoa I found it better to give a little bit of a dry back period now and again to promote the root to go out and actually seek more water, especially early on in the vegetative stage. Another thing that you can do is to use a more easily draining medium or medium that holds more air, like cocoa, so something that's more draining would be like a cocoa, or if you're using soil to add some perlite to it, and those should help you keep some oxygen in your root zone.
11:21 The next thing you want to consider is temperature. We've gone over this so many times. The rest of your plant, your root zone, wants to have its ideal temperature. This plays into the VPD that we talk about on every episode. Check the show notes on environment and there should be a VPD chart on there. Basically, anything above 65, but you want to keep it a little bit higher if possible, like to 80 or 75, would be ideal. Fine, for your root zone it's going to be great. You don't want to have big swings in temperature. Your medium doesn't like it, the microbial life in your medium doesn't like it, your roots don't like it, and big swings in temperature can definitely stunt your plant. So try to keep it stable in right about 70, 75, something like that.
12:16 All right, let's talk about water. You've already kind of touched on it a little bit. Really, the journey of your roots is to go out and seek water, since your roots mirror the size of the plant during the seedling stage, only water around the drip lines, like I mentioned before, if you're hand watering, this will encourage the roots to go and explore the outer edges of the pots. Sub-irrigation, again, is a great solution for roots, not only because it allows the medium and the roots to dictate the rate of water consumption, but also because it encourages roots to go deeper and deeper in search of water, maximizing their exploration. When you're watering, make sure that you keep your pH in check. You want to do that based on whatever your medium is and your nutrient line. It's going to be different for each one, but that is imperative to the root health of your plant. The pH of your water is going to positively or negatively affect your grow.
13:20 If negative, the problem is that it can lock out or lock up your roots and your whole plant. And basically what lockup is is? It means that your plants can no longer take up nutrients. They're just like the door is closed, there's nothing else coming in, and what that does is it stars your plant of everything that it needs. And with autos, like I say, over and over, you can't stunt them because you don't have time to get them back. So you wanna make sure that you don't lock out your plants. If you do, you're gonna have to go into something like flushing, but just make sure you're not doing it in the first place. It's pretty easy to avoid if you're not overfeeding your plants and you're making sure that if you're using a nutrient line or water that requires it that you are pHing it before you add it to your plant.
14:12 All right, last but not least, we're gonna talk about the nutrients that your roots enjoy. Like every part of your plant, your roots do need nutrients. They're not just growing magically, and while nitrogen does provide a lot of the early growth in your plant that leads to the green branching and all the leaves, it's primarily phosphorus and potassium that grow your root zone, so you don't really have to worry about too much. Your feeding line or any kind of recipe that you get online, will almost guarantee, take this into account and provide plenty of nutrients for both your green zone plant and the phosphorus and potassium you need for your root zone. There's ways to kind of boost your root zone. I haven't particularly explored any of these products, but there are like root zone boosters and stuff like that. But I think the next thing that I'm gonna talk about, which is beneficial fungi, is kind of like an awesome way to boost your root growth. So let's real briefly talk about beneficial fungi.
15:25 The area that your plant actually grows in, the roots grow in, is called the rhizosphere. This is the medium and all the life surrounding your root zone. If we're gonna try to get the best roots possible for our plants, we can bring in some help from fungi. Adding fungi to this rhizosphere, basically, is an easy way to get a bunch of additional benefits. The particular type of fungi that we're gonna be talking about is mycorrhizal fungi. You can find this fairly easily at a lot of like gardening centers nowadays, because it's beneficial both to cannabis, but also to tomatoes and a couple other plants. So if you do have this around and you like tomatoes, I would definitely try these on. There have had some great success with them and grown some nice big tomato plants as well, with some mycorrhizal fungi, and it's available from several different manufacturers. If you can't find a local store, of course, you can buy it online. It's available on Amazon and a bunch of awesome growth stores too. So the fungi can be introduced to your medium or the rhizosphere in a couple of different ways or in a couple different times in the plants process.
16:42 The soil can be pre-amended with mycorrhizal fungi. It's also called myco, so we'll just call it that. From now on you could also add myco directly in contact with a taproot when you first plant it into the medium. So you dig out that little hole and you can actually apply some myco all around in that hole and in the medium directly surrounding that hole. So basically your taproot grows basically into a medium that's been inoculated with that myco. Additionally, if you're doing transplants, you could add to the transplant hole and you can also add it directly to the roots to stimulate them directly that have grown in your transplant cup. So when you pull it out and you see those roots and the root ball that comes out, just add it to there too. To the outside, just sprinkle a little bit and it's gonna do. It's a work on those roots. Just keep in mind that to fully colonize your medium it does take some time. So you might wanna consider pre-amending some soil with that so that it can start working its magic.
17:52 So what do these mycorrhizal fungi do? They're basically acting like friends to your plant. They go around the medium and they collect nutrients and they bring them back to your plant and incorporate them directly into the roots. That's pretty much what they do, and what's so cool about this is that they work together with your plant and they help the early development of the roots to make them stronger more quickly, and they also encourage more lateral growth and they help to establish the plant as a whole. And why this is so cool and why I think it's so important for autoflowers is again because a quick establishment is so important, because you're on a clock with autoflowers, you don't have time to make up mistakes or lost time. So if we can kind of nudge it in the direction of quicker, better, stronger roots earlier, I'm going to take that little extra bit, if I can.
18:51 So, in addition to MicroRizal Fungi, another fungi that's available and maybe a little bit less common you might not find in your big box store or your local gardening store, but you can certainly find it online in some grow shops is Trichoderma. This is a type of fungus that has a lot of really cool protective benefits to your roots. The Trichoderma basically plays defense to your Mykos offense. Trichoderma can help protect your roots from bad pests munching on your roots and causing damage to the plant, especially early in life Something like Springtails or I don't know if you've got any type of fungus gnats in there, they can munch on your early roots and this Trichoderma would be able to help to some degree protect it and inoculate your plant from getting attacked by these pests. They also help to produce more hormones for more stronger and resilient roots. So I would say using one or more of these two funguses can really help you establish and protect your early root zone and get you off on the right hand.
20:01 As I mentioned all the time, it's really important to get your auto flowers off to the right start and off to the races so we can grow huge plants Alright. So healthy roots are the key to healthy plants. Keeping your plants roots happy can be a bit of a challenge for any gardener, but going back to the basics, like we've been talking about today, and always talk about and keeping things as simple as possible or as simple as we can make them without causing any damage, can often help you both prevent or uncover causes of any problems you're having. The roots of your plants are central to your success, so thinking about what they may want will help you get the most out of your genetics. Keeping strong roots is a combination of proper medium watering temperature, nutrients and rhizosphere. If we could dial in those variables, our roots will be super happy and we have a better chance of larger, tastier yields off of bigger and stronger plants.
21:03 So for me, I think it's worthwhile to think about what's underneath that soil once in a while. Thanks for checking out this episode of the Auto Flower Power Podcast, where we've discussed what it takes to get the most out of your auto flowers roots. I hope you've taken something away from this episode that you can directly apply to your garden today to grow bigger, more vigorous monster giant plants. Check out the show notes at socratesGrows.com/roots. You'll find notes and links to resources from this episode there. Otherwise, always feel free to email me at socratesgrows@protonmail.com, and until next time, take it easy Bye.
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Music by: Sunshine Blah