The Fillabong Show: HGB remix

[Fillabong]

Hi HGB. I first published this on HC and felt it needed a home here too:) All the stuff here is original and I wrote it on my own from my own little coconut. The info is from my books but nothing was plagerized. This is all Filla:D There might be some chronological foibles as I had a journal goin at the time. This was from like a year and a bit ago so pardon any holes in the thoughts:D

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Ok, I'm sure many people don't know the ins and outs of photosynthesis and how a plant breathes so I'm planning on giving everyone who doesn’t know a little lesson...

I made this thread because it is a very important yet often misunderstood or neglected aspect of cultivation. Mmm…how plants breathe. Plants are soothing to be around because they symbiotically respire with animals. They breathe CO2 and we breathe O2. We need each other to thrive, survive and create a habitable ecosystem.

First off, plants are autotrophs because they make their energy via photosynthesis: The process of making energy from the sun. Plants use CO2+H2O and light to make glucose+O2 and H2O. Glucose is the monosaccharide sugar that makes starch and cellulose. Now that we know what photosynthesis does, lets look at
where it happens.

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The magic occurs within the thylakoids within the chloroplasts within the mesophyll. The mesophyll is the middle layer of the leaf that contains mort of the goodies. The stomata are mostly on the underside of the foliage, but we’ll talk about that later.

Light absorption is very critical. Plants look green because that frequency of the spectrum is the wavelength reflected. Green light is the least efficient for making your plants grow.

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Now that we know what happens where, lets start looking at metabolic pathways within our wonder plants. Basically, light stimulates electrons; this splits water and makes O2. This little electron “cools down”, falling in energy levels and helps convert expended ADP to ATP.



ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate) is needed for almost all actions within every cell. For our current intrigue, ATP is mostly needed in the Calvin cycle. I won’t get into the deep chem because people either hate it, don’t understand it or both. The Calvin cycle breaks apart CO2 and uses ATP to make glucose. That’s photosynthesis in a nutshell!

[Fillabong]

Naturally, every grower wants their plants to grow quickly with happiness and strength. Any organism, in this case our lady friend MaryJane, can grow with outstanding speed and efficiency if housed within the ideal climate. I want to focus a bit on breathing.

Transpiration is the evaporation of water from the surface of the leaf to the air and occurs in the stomata. We want lots of transpiration because that means our plants can drink faster. More water use(resources)=more plant=bigger and better buds! The stomata of the plant are like little lungs. This is how plants breath and move air to and from its tissues. As long as the stomata are open, then the plant can breath and air will not be a limiting factor in the growth. Here is a chart showing optimal conditions for stomatal dilation.

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Wind: Closes stomata a bit, but allows more CO2 to pass by the leaves.

Temp: Higher than 30C can cause closure in hope not to lose excessive water through the leaves. (transpiration)

Humidity: Closing occurs when the water content of the air in relation to the water content of the leaves varies too greatly. Stomata really respond to RH quickly.

CO2: Sometimes less is more. Lower concentrations of carbon dioxide result in stomata opening in hopes to absorb more of the precious gas.

Light o’ wonderful light: Blue light is more effective in opening stomata than red light. Word is that most HPS have enough blue in their spectrum that stomatal dilation due to light is as great as possible already.

Nutes: Our friend and foe. With nutrient concentration too high in either soil or solution, water will be sucked out of the plant, into the medium. It’s called reverse osmosis. When a solute concentration is greater in one area than another, the fluids try to balance each other out making equal strengths on both sides. Your plants can only take so much fertilizer and as soon as there is a significantly greater amount in your soil in comparison to your plants, the water is drawn out of the plant hoping to make equal potencies in both soil and plant. That’s why often over fertilized plants appear droopy and flat.

Remember that transpiration is needed for nute and water transportation, stability of the plant and removal of heat. It’s really just how plants sweat! I know I need to post more info on the xylem, phloem and water potential gradient, I figured this would be enough to chew on right now.

[Fillabong]

Everyone now knows that transpiration is the loss of water into the atmosphere from the leaves. Cool! We also now know that as water transpires and is lost to the surrounding air that it must be replaced. I want to post some info on fluid transport in plants and how nutrients are moved around.

Plants have 3 types of tissue: dermal, vascular and ground. For my current interest in breathing, I’ve already covered a bit on the important part of the dermal, which were stomata. In regards to vascular and ground tissue, we want to understand the workings of xylem, phloem, pith and cortex. All of these pathways, tissues and vessels move water, gases and nutes to various parts of the plant. The xylem moves water and dissolved nutes from the roots to the shoots. The phloem transports sugars and proteins made in the leaves to non-photosynthetic parts of the plants like fruit and roots. The pith and cortex are the interior and exterior parts of the roots. Roots still have epidermis though. That is where the little rhizoids start. Rhizoids are the fine fur on roots. They maximize absorption and help little plants get a good start! The parenchyma, collenchyma and sclerenchyma are types of cells within plant tissue but I’m too lazy to talk about those and a lot has to do with plant growth and I’m not heading there right now.

This kicks ass. I’ll keep breaking this down in components and principles until everyone has a better understanding about the inner workings of plants.

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This picture is the best example I could find of an overview of transport in green friends. Even with no other knowledge, this diagram does an excellent job of explaining how fluids move and plants breath.

[Fillabong]

Active transport is where proteins use ATP to move solutes across membranes to different levels. If the concentrations on either side of the membrane were equal, osmosis could take place. In any osmotic system, water will move from hypertonicà hypotonic. AKA: from a solution with a higher concentration of salt to an area of lower concentration. Unlike animal’s cells that simply have cellular membranes, plants have a cell wall that contributes physical pressure. Thus, solute concentration and pressure in the case of plants can be incorporated into a single measurement called water potential. First off, water moves from area of high potential to low potential. Water potential is measured in Y units in megapascals (MPa). 1 MPa is equal to about 10 atmospheres (ATM). To give a comparison, a car tire is inflated to about 0.2 MPa. All right everyone, time for some chem. Yahoo! Pure water in an open container has water potential of zero (Y = 0 MPa). A 0.1 molar (M) solution has a water potential of -0.23MPa. If the pure water solution and the salt solution were placed on either side of a semi-permeable membrane, the water would diffuse to the salty side. It would diffuse from the higher Y(0.0) to the lower Y (-0.23). Why does this matter? Well, extremes in either case may cause cells to shrivel or explode. Crenate and lyse are the terms I believe.



Soil, which is usually coated in water with dissolved nutes and minerals, sticks tightly to the rhizoids. The soil solution freely flows into the epidermis, through the cortex and into the xylem. Sometimes little carrier proteins act as transport allowing concentrations of various minerals past cell membranes creating an ion gradient. With all the confusing crap out of the way, we can finally learn why I’ve tried to teach you all of this…



XYLEM SAP TRANSPORT!



This is the blood. This is the blood of your plant and it’s very important to know a bit about how it works. I’m still learning mind you but I’ll try to pass on what I know.



How can this “plant blood” be moved against gravity up 100m trees? Is it pushed from the roots or pulled by the leaves? When transpiration is very low at night, the roots are using lots of energy to move mineral ions into the xylem. This higher concentration of minerals now in the plant in comparison to the surrounding soil lowers the water potential (Y). Water flows in from the roots, creating a positive pressure that pushes fluid up the xylem. This is called root pressure. Root pressure causes guttation. There’s that magic word Buzz! Guttation is just a fancy word for dew. It’s root pressure that causes water to be pushed out of the leaves overnight. So root pressure is the night reaction of xylem fluid flow.

Here's a pic of what I'm about to go on about...

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During the day hours of our lovely 18/6, the humidity of the air is usually less than the water content of the cells of our plants. Water is lost through the stomata as vapour and drawn up back via the xylem. Aha! Push from the roots, pull from the leaves! Time for a mindtrip. All the mesophyll cells are covered in a thin layer of water. As this water replaces the water lost in the leaves’ air spaces by transpiration, the meniscus of water between all the mesophyll thins out but becomes more spacious. The curvature radii decreases and water tension increases. Tension is negative pressure causing more water to be drawn back to the leaves from the xylem. Aha! Push from the roots and pull from the leaves.

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Here is an over all pic of water potential and generally how it moves in plants.

I think I'm done for now but I'll be here all week As soon as I think of what I want to talk about next sunday, I'll post it. I might do hormones as a topic. That'd be really cool! Any botany majors or endocrinologists PM me and we can chat. TTYS everyone

[Fillabong]

Guess who’s back, back again… Yes people it’s me. This time I hope I can live up to the hype I sadly failed to create Anyways, no downers here. We’re a happy bunch.. All right, Hormones? Yup, hormones. They make plants horny, create epidermal problems and make plants grow. Sound familiar? I'm no longer a teenager next sunday. I'm gonna shake my cane at young’uns and say “Uhh! Get off my lawn you good for nothin’ kids”! Oh my, I’m gonna be the worst old man. Assuming I age


Okeydokie, better get down to business.


As growers, we fully are aware that plants are just as receptive to changes in environment and chemicals as we are. Plants are cooler though. They can live hundreds of feet under the ocean beside searing thermal vents and on the highest mountain peak with little air or food. Humans are kinda weenies. We b!tch when it’s hot or cold


Ok, first off, for a plant to be receptive to any stimuli it needs receptors. These receptors are just molecules which after being receiving a stimulus, starts a series of biochemical steps. When this series is complete, the plant acts upon the information. Smart aren’t they:wink:. I don’t think I can teach worth poop, as my topics are usually disorganized and confusing, but I try. I’m going to start at the beginning. Surprise surprise eh? It’s called greening. Yup, just greening. No –ism, -ialga or –isis. Just greening. When a shoot reaches sunlight the sun acts as a stimulus and creates reactions: stem elongation slows, leaves expand and roots spread. I know I haven’t explained yet, keep readin’.


There are 3 phases to signal processing: Reception, signal transduction and response.


Reception is just what is says. Either internal or external signals are detected by receptors. These are special proteins that change in response to a stimulus. The receptor responsible for greening is a phytochrome. There is a path of reactions that I found really confusing and I’m sure would be lost in translation, so I’m not going to attempt to rephrase it. Perhaps Mendrel would give us some input! Oh hell, I’ll try… Think about when you pick up a board in your backyard. I know most of you have lifted up a board or piece of crap on the grass that’s been there for a while. The grass is always really long and very pale. If no light hits the phytochromes, the plant will continue to stretch. A small amount of light, even moonlight will activate proteins within the plant and reactions will occur. The light activates G-proteins, which after several steps help produce greening proteins.

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I know I didn’t really explain with any depth, but I didn’t like this topic and I found it very confusing, as I hate intracellular pathways. All the terms and sound the same. Basically, what happens is when light hits a phytochrome, the light starts a chain of reactions which change the protein production in a cell’s nucleus. Lets go with that. That’s easy enough to understand.

[Fillabong]

Ok if this goes well, people will know a little more on the science of topping. Phototropism is where a plant responds by moving towards light. We’ve all seen a plant by a window face the sun throughout the day. Even in my growroom I’ve seen my flowering ruderalis tops bent towards the light in the centre of my room. It’s cool! I started a thread a while ago, but I lost interest soon after. I will pick it up again when I experiment with clones. That way I can have more controls.


Plant hormones are produced in very small amounts but have profound effects on our plant friends as per the process of signal transduction. One little molecule of gibberellin can affect an entire plant.


Auxin is responsible for cellular elongation in coleoptiles. The rooting hormone many of us use to clone is an auxin! Auxin is also need in plants for root growth, developing fruit and apical dominance. Auxin never moves up plants, but is produced in the tips and moves down. Not because of gravity, but carrier proteins. This is regulated more or less via a proton gradient like so many cellular transports. The theory is that cell walls have H+ ions pumped into them causing the cell wall to become acidic. This acidity breaks hydrogen bonds in the cellulose, weakening the cell wall allowing it to expand. The vacuole in the cell takes on more water and keeps the cell large as the H-bonds reform. Cool eh?

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Cytokinin helps meiosis and mitosis. This growth hormone was named cytokinin because it stimulates cytokinesis, a phase in cellular reproduction. Cytokinins on their own can do nothing; only with auxin can they influence cellular division. The ratio of cytokinin to auxin determines cellular differentiation. If cyto and auxin are both balanced, a ball of cells will continue to divide and remain undifferentiated. More cyto=buds, more auxin =roots.


In terms of topping and common belief, auxin is not directly responsible for making a plant bush out. I was shocked to discover this while reading too! Many people think that when you remove the terminal (main) bud, auxin is re-routed to the secondary buds resulting in elongation and a bushy plant. Wrong! Cytokinin and auxin live in an antagonistic relationship and its cytokinin that causes the plant to grow it’s secondary shoots. With the auxin-developing region now reduced, the cytokinin is unopposed and can work its magic. The inhibition of secondary growth has been removed! Awesome! Ok not so fast you say… I understand. Botanists have found that auxin actually does increase in secondary growth in topped plants, but is not entirely responsible for the new growth. Both theories are in the air right now and both are quite valid; the inhibition theory and the theory of hormone redirection.


Gibberellin is a fun word to say Plus it’s a plant hormone! Yahoo! Not much to say here. They act they same way as auxin does by expanding cell walls resulting in stem elongation. It increases internodal length and the size of fruit.


Abscisic Acid (ABA), unlike auxins, cytos and gibbs, generally slows down growth a bit. It is very important for our friends at seed banks though! It ensures seeds stay dormant until the acid is gone. Why don’t apple seeds sprout inside the apple? Or why don’t seeds sprout as soon as they hit the ground in autumn? ABA! Usually a cold period (winter) or heavy water flushing (spring rain) will dilute or destroy the ABA within the seed. What’s cool about ABA is that it helps out our plants when we space out and forget to water them. I’m sure it’s happened to some of us. When a plant starts to wilt either from no rain or stoner negligence, ABA accumulates in the leaves and closes up the stomata decreasing transpiration. Smart little chemicals aren’t they:wink:.


I don’t really want to get into the depth of which the study of ethylene can go because I’m tired and my eyes are getting sore Ethylene is produced in response to a physical stress. Drought, flood, injury, pressure, infection etc… If a shoot hits an obstruction while growing eg: a rock, cement etc… and it can no longer grow in that direction, the plant will respond. The stem will shorten, thicken and start to curve and grow horizontally. Ethylene will soon decrease and the plant will probe upwards hoping to grow normally again. If it does, yeah! If not, it’ll keep growing sideways. Ethylene is also responsible for apoptosis, abscission and fruit development. I’m tired and want to work on my journal for a bit, so if you’re curious, PM me k?


I didn’t do half the stuff I wanted to cover. I wanted to hit plant responses to light and external stimuli. Damn. Guess that’ll be next week. I’ve learned lots of cool stuff about how plants respond to gravity! It’s really sweet so be sure to check back next Sunday or later this week and I’ll through something up here about gravity.


heres a hormone table for a little reference

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[Fillabong]

Most plant processes like transpiration and protein synthesis oscillate throughout the day. They generally are cyclic variations that respond to fluctuations in temperature, humidity and light levels. What we try to do as growers is find the ideal conditions and keep them homeostatic. If we can manage to keep the ideal conditions the same for as long as possible, we should get a higher yield and potency. Yippee! So…we monitor our pH, RH, temp, nute [M] etc to keep our habitat stable. One thing that is totally contingent on the plant is its circadian rhythm. A circadian rhythm is how a plant is affected by a light cycle. Some plants know by the length of light and certain frequencies of light to raise and lower their leaves. Smart aren’t they


MJ is a short-day plant. AKA: to flower, it needs a shorter day than night I want to talk about the phytochrome switch because it is really important, but I hafta go out tonite. I’ll post a picture tomorrow.

However, I do want to talk about responses other than light.

Gravity is cool. We all know that and we all wonder what it would be like to have sex in space, grow pot in space, eat KD in space etc…all the essentials really In conjunction with the last episode talking about hormones, gravity also plays a role in plants growing up and rots growing down. Funny thing eh? A plant’s response to gravity is gravitropism. Auxin plays a major role in gravitropism ensuring the correct ends are in the soil/air regardless of the position of the seed. Statoliths are little plasmids in the root tips. Gravity pulls these plasmids down and this redistributes auxin down as well. As we know, high concentrations of auxin stunt growth. The concentration now on the bottom of the cells is too high where the auxin levels on top are fine. The root tip will elongate on the top causing the tip to bend down. I know it’s confusing, but if I leave you all perplexed you’ll do some research later right?

Hows does a fan blowing on our plants make stronger stems? Easy. Mechanical stimulation such as a blowing fan activates a signal-transduction pathway which affects cell wall properties and produces ethylene. I’m sure you all remember how sig-tran pathways work right?


When plants transpire faster than they are able to absorb water from the soil, they wilt. Easy enough right? When leaves lose their turgor abscisic acid is released and the stomata close up. Leaves may curl up too. This lowers potential photosynthesis and thus transpiration. Roots respond to drought as we all have read. “let your soil dry to promote root growth.” As soil dries from the top down, the deeper roots still have moist soil. The plant senses the soil water variation and its deep roots grow allowing more water contact.

Too much salt in soil is a very bad thing Too much salt lowers the water potential of the soil and pulls water out of the plant into the soil to attempt to balance the water content. The soil is hypertonic compared to the plant. Also, a build up of salts may all to easily create a toxicity of ions like Mg+ or Ca+. So if you have too much salt/nutrient, flush your plants. I cannot stress this enough people

[Fillabong]

All right, plants need food to produce certain molecules needed for life. Sounds easy? Well it is really! The backbone of amino acids, the substance that makes up proteins, consists of nitrogen and carbon. Cellulose, which makes up most of the plant, is made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Even THC, the yummy chemical that’s hiding in ooey, gooey, iky, sticky trichs is made of C, H and O. Crazy no?


Would it not be fantastic if we could fertilize our plants with the perfect combo of nutes? Never have a deficiency, our plants don’t burn and they grow with amazing speed. I guess that’s why hydro is so popular and has a great yield. All the hydro growers out there would agree: When we are able to measure our nute concentrations precisely we can grow our plants with greater efficiency. I’ve never grown hydro other than a pepper I have in a bubbler at the back of my room but I really want to give it a serious shot sooner rather than later.


Many growers and gardeners say that the essential elements are N, P, K, C, H and O. I think that a perspective so narrow is ignorant and disrespectful to plants. Those elements are essential but no more important that trace substances like Molybdenum or Boron. It’s true that during the plants life it will consume much more Carbon than Iron, but both are essential to a good life.


Now I’m not going to get into what every element does as that would take way to long and frankly, right now I just don’t want to spend that much time on research. Besides, the plant abuse page on Overgrow does a superb job already. It has great photos showing both deficiency and toxicity in many common cases.


Now here is where I’d like to be able to integrate a small poll into threads. Just a small poll asking who grows organic, chemical or both! We all know how lazy plains is, maybe he can try to build something like that for us. It’s not like he ever does any work for the HC.com community anyways I should really stop poking fun at admins Ouch! Back on track though, Brindie has said countless times that using organic and chemical nutes together may not be as effective as we’d all like. Apparently the harsh, chemical ferts may kill any microorganisms that the organic nutes help nurture and grow.

A lot of people prefer organics to chemicals as they say organics truly bring out and pronounce flavours specific to each strain. Bat guano is supposed to be really good at enhancing and defining strain flavour. Hey, my buddy drove behind a big parade we had here the other day and gathered all the elephant poop for me. I’m gonna toss it all into a Tupperware res and let it sit for a few months. It’ll be really stinky but I’m sure it’ll make great fert for my outdoor grow.

[Fillabong]

For the subscribers, you’ll know that I’ve been slacking off a bit for the past while. It’ll happen Well I can’t chill in my growroom anymore because I no longer have any space. My humidifier, bubbler and fan take up a bit of room. But my 3 flowering indica are really taking up a lot of room. That’s fine by me. The more space they take the more light they can eat up! I decided these shows took me to long to type up so I’m trying to excise useless bits and keep things short and sweet. So hopefully tonites show is smaller and just as good.


Plants are smart. I say that in every episode and I stand by it. Sure we have literature, space travel and HC.com but plants are still much more clever than we are. Can we regulate our hormones and biochem reactions from changes in light undetectable to the human eye? Yeah, I don’t think so. The effect of light on a plant is called photomorphogenesis. Plants detect the intensity, frequency and direction of light. Now from my first post you can see that there are 2 spikes in the chlorophyll activity, a blue one and a red one. Blue light and red light are the most important colours in regulating photomorphogenesis. From studying the reactivity in plants exposed to blue and red light, researchers have discovered 2 major classes of light receptors: blue-light photoreceptors and red-light phytochromes.


Blue light photoreceptors are most effective in Phototropism and light-induced stomatal dilation. Blues are the boring ones. I like red…

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It was when studing seed germination that phytochromes were discovered. Because of very limited nutrition reserves, small, plentiful seeds like lettuce only germinate when the light conditions are near optimal. Cool evolutionary concept Why did lettuce evolve to have many weak seeds over a few very large seeds? Perhaps because it can be eaten by so many herbivores, producing an army of small seeds might better allow the plant to spread via animal excretion? Anyways back to phytochromes Some of the really small, numerously produced seeds can stay dormant for years until the light condition is optimal. Cutting back some shrubs or adding obstacles can often allow new growth.



Back in the 30’s the USDA exposed some water soaked lettuce seeds to monochromatic light for 15 mins and stashed them in the dark. After 2 days they checked them out. The red light exposed seeds germinated vastly increases germination compared the control of no light. Seeds exposed to 730nm far-red inhibited germination! Now the effects of red and far red are reversible. The seeds react to the last flash of light they receive. This pic shows seeds and the last 15min flash of light they were hit with.

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The photoreceptor responsible for reversing the effects of the red vs. far-red is called a phytochromes. In phytochromes there are non-protein components called chromophores. These are the light absorbing areas. This chromophore reverts between two different isomers. One isomer absorbs red light and the other far-red! I want to use Pr as read absorbing and Pfr as far-red. In the lettuce seed bit you can alternate from far-red to red and to either boost or inhibit germination. This is a phytochrome switch!

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n that last pic we can see that the far-red stops germination. When seeds are growing they produce all Pr phytochromes and if the seeds are kept in the dark they stay in Pr form. When the seed is exposed to sunlight it picks up red light as well as many other frequencies and many Pr switch to Pfr. The generation of Pfr is one way that plants detect sunlight, thus when seeds are exposed to optimal light for their species, it’s the appearance of the Pfr that actually causes germination.

[Fillabong]

Yup. That's it. It looked better when it was full of smilies.

Enjoy:D

[CB]

when's the next filla show?

:D

[Fillabong]

Cheaps I'm up to my eyes in homework right now.

Pretty sure you just got the DVD box set. It was a one season show:D

[elzz]

sup filla...... i found ya. u run a show over here too? popular guy filla..

[gorilla]

Fricken awesome post!

might be a lit past due but good contribution. :eek: