Rooted Leaf Agritech

Rooted Leaf Agritech Powered By Plants | Do As Nature Is
Engineered With Sustainable & Organic Inputs
Designed From Scratch
Made in Arlington, WA

08/14/2026

Physics says plants never lose, and on Tea & Terps, Nik makes the case with three equations and then a fourth.

This clip pulls together Planck, Gibbs, and Nernst to explain how a plant manages energy at the molecular level. Planck's law tells you how much light energy arrives. Gibbs free energy tells you what work it can do. Nernst governs the electron-and-proton dance: separating charges now, recombining them later through metabolism. That's textbook physical chemistry.

Then Nik makes his move. Photons strike the chromophores in anthocyanin pigments, one of the plant's protective layers, and protective pigments, antioxidants, and chelating agents can help those pieces hold the most favorable positions possible even as NPK shifts around. Here's the metaphor that ties it together: the NPK model taught us to ask which pieces we can manipulate on the board, while these equations taught us to ask which pieces we can manipulate the board with.

The closer rests on a fourth equation, the one Nik thinks these physicists were really onto: electrical potential is directly related to useful work. Learn how to work with energy and, barring the extreme ends of the laws of physics, plants hold their ground. The way Nik puts it: they never lose.

Practical takeaway: before adding another round of NPK to a stalled plant, look at the energy side of the board: light reaching the leaf, minerals staying chelated and available, antioxidant capacity holding the position.

Full episode of Tea & Terps at rootedleaf.com. Powered By Plants.

08/11/2026

Two rooms can run the same VPD and get different results, and the difference is usually sitting in the pot rather than in the air. Nik's fix is to stop measuring them separately. Put the soil side and the air side both in kilopascals, and you can talk apples to apples.

From there the directions are opposite. Zero in the soil is field capacity, and moving away means the remaining water is held harder. Zero in the air is near saturation, and moving away means the v***r pressure deficit climbs. Soil pushes water out of its pores; dry air, having room to hold more, wicks it out of the leaf.

The operational point is that the ceiling is set in the substrate, not in the air handler. What matters is moisture retention capacity: how much water the mix holds and how long it holds it. A substrate that genuinely holds water can carry a drier VPD, and running it drier is what lets the water pump effect work naturally rather than stalling.

Practical takeaway: treat substrate water retention as an input to your VPD target rather than a separate variable, and let a high-retention mix earn a drier setpoint.

Full conversation on Tea & Terps EP3. Learn more at rootedleaf.com.

08/03/2026

Rubisco is the most abundant protein on Earth. Every leaf you have ever seen is full of it, and its job is to take carbon dioxide out of the air and start building sugar.

The paper Nik reads on this episode calls it "characterized by a slow rate and low specificity for CO2, which leads to photorespiration". In plain language: slow and sloppy, takes forever to do anything, and it does not work too well on CO2 because it also happens to act on oxygen as a substrate.

Low specificity means something specific here. The enzyme responsible for capturing atmospheric carbon cannot reliably tell carbon dioxide from oxygen. When it grabs the wrong one, the plant spends energy running photorespiration to clean up after itself.

So why did nature evolve to use Rubisco when clearly there are more efficient things out there?

A great many scientists have arrived at the same conclusion. Rubisco is the bottleneck, so rebuild Rubisco. Modify it genetically. Make it operate faster. Bias it toward carboxylation so it stops grabbing oxygen. Nik's word for that whole conclusion is "unfortunately".

Nobody is arguing that Rubisco is fast. The step he objects to is the jump from slow to genetically modified. Then he opens the paper and starts walking through it.

Practical takeaway: measure what is actually reaching a bottleneck before you redesign it.

Full conversation on Tea & Terps EP1. Learn more at rootedleaf.com.

07/23/2026

Nitrogen is powerful, but reducing it isn't free. That's the thread Nik pulls on The Adam Dunn Show, and it reframes how you think about feeding nitrogen.

Here's the chemistry. Nitrate is fully oxidized nitrogen. The nitrogen inside an amino acid is fully reduced. To turn one into the other, the plant has to reduce it, and that reduction runs on the reducing power and energy it makes, much of it from photosynthesis. It's real work.

Nik puts a number on it: converting a nitrate to an amino acid may take about 25 percent of all the energy a plant generates from photosynthesis. Then set that against what it buys. Nitrogen is only a few percent of the plant's mass. In his words, the tires are spinning: fuel burned, not much weight gained.

There's a second layer. Free-form amino acids are expensive to build, which makes them an energy sink themselves. They aren't there as bulk building material, so a plant usually holds a free pool of them to fill a specific electrochemical role.

So here's the Rooted Leaf angle: if reducing nitrate is expensive, the form you feed matters. Delivering nitrogen already in reduced or amino-acid form is one lever of many for sparing the plant part of that cost.

Practical takeaway: don't just ask how much nitrogen you're feeding, ask what form it's in and who pays to reduce it.

More plant science at rootedleaf.com. Powered By Plants. Do As Nature Is.

We hold these terps to be self-evident 🪶📃 A happy 7/10 to all! 💎🔥 🎆 Use code RLA710 for 42% off our entire product line ...
07/10/2026

We hold these terps to be self-evident 🪶📃 A happy 7/10 to all! 💎🔥 🎆 Use code RLA710 for 42% off our entire product line of carbon-based fertilizer. Only at rootedleaf.com.
#710

07/02/2026

You probably learned about the Boston Tea Party in school. Here's the part they left out: most of the tea was Wuyi.

Of the ~342 chests the Sons of Liberty dumped into Boston Harbor in 1773, 240 were "Bohea" — the old Western name for the oxidized rock teas grown on one small stretch of China's Wuyi mountains. By volume, the single largest thing in that harbor was Wuyi tea. So when Nik says on Tea & Terps that this tea basically caused the American Revolution, he's closer to the truth than you might think.

His riff: real Wuyi came from such a tiny area that counterfeit "export teas" flooded the market centuries ago, so the patriots were tossing the diluted knockoff. What would they have done with the real, uncut leaf? Nik's deadpan verdict — nuclear weapons, two centuries ahead of schedule.

Why is one 4-mile stretch of rock worth faking for 300 years? Terroir is chemistry, not mysticism: a plant's aroma comes from carbon-based secondary metabolites, and how much it builds is shaped by soil minerals, drainage, and mild stress.

Practical takeaway: you can't relocate your mountain, but those levers are yours — feed the root zone, sharpen drainage, and ease off heavy nitrogen late, since lush growth often trades away the concentrated aromatics you're after.

It's the same conviction behind our carbon-based biofertilizer: what goes into the soil is what comes out in the leaf. More at rootedleaf.com.

06/09/2026

🌱 Your plants aren't in it for the nitrogen. Carbon is the goal — and once you see that, the whole picture snaps into focus.

Here's the logic. Nitrogen is what plants use to build chlorophyll, the green pigment that captures light energy. Magnesium sits at the center of every chlorophyll molecule. Phosphorus keeps the light reactions running — generating the energy that powers the Calvin cycle, which pulls CO₂ out of the air and turns it into organic matter. Even calcium ends up incorporated into cell walls as calcium pectate, a carbon-containing compound that gives the plant its structural backbone.

And the end products of all that carbon capture? Terpenes — the compounds behind flavor, aroma, and plant defense — are built almost entirely from carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. The valuable stuff is carbon molecules through and through.

N-P-K are essential machinery. But the goal they're working toward is carbon.

Practical takeaway: before adjusting any nutrient ratio, ask what that element is actually doing for the plant. Most of the time, the answer traces back to carbon capture.

Find out how carbon-first nutrition works in practice at rootedleaf.com. And catch episodes of Tea & Terps live on Wednesdays at 4:20PM PST on our Youtube channel and mirrored in FCP4.

06/05/2026

🌱 Everyone obsesses over the flowers — but the rest of the plant is quietly running its own chemistry.

Here's the part most growers skip: in some lab profiling, the fan leaves carry more flavonoids by weight than the flowers do. The stalks can flush those purple anthocyanin pigments under the right stress. And the roots build a completely different toolkit — triterpenoids and sterols rather than cannabinoids. Same plant, very different chemistry depending on where you look.

What links it all is carbon. Those flavonoids, terpenoids, root triterpenoids and pigments are carbon-hydrogen-oxygen skeletons — built from the carbon the plant captures and then routes wherever it's investing. It clearly doesn't pour everything into the bud. N-P-K runs the machinery, but carbon is the raw material the plant is building with, top to bottom.

So feeding for a great flower really means feeding a whole-plant carbon economy — leaves, stalks and roots included.

Practical takeaway: treat carbon as a whole-plant input, not a flower-only afterthought — match root-zone carbon to your feed schedule the way you'd manage any other nutrient.

Curious how a carbon-first feed actually works? We break it down at rootedleaf.com.

06/02/2026

💡 Switched to LED and notice your plants need more cal-mag? It's probably not your soil — it's your missing infrared.

Nik makes a sharp point here: plenty of growers move from HPS to LED and find they suddenly need more calcium and magnesium than before. The trail leads back to the light itself. Old HPS lamps pump out a ton of infrared — basically radiant heat — and LEDs make almost none. Cooler leaves transpire less, and that matters because calcium rides into the plant almost entirely on that transpiration stream.

Calcium travels up with water through the xylem, and once it settles into a leaf tissue the plant cannot move it again. So when leaves stay cool and still, the fastest-growing tissues — new shoots and leaf tips — are the first to run short, even when there's plenty of calcium in your feed.

It's not that the lights are stealing your minerals. It's that the delivery truck slowed down.

Practical takeaway: Treat LED cal-mag problems as a transport issue first — bump leaf temperature, tune your VPD, and keep air moving so transpiration carries calcium where it's needed, then top up cal-mag to match.

More science-backed grow tips over at rootedleaf.com

🌱

05/22/2026

🍯⚗️ Old-school molasses vs new-school PK boosters — and why the answer is yes to both.

Nik says a plant's sugar levels are one of the most powerful levers you can pull, and the old-school "feed your plants molasses to bring out the flowers" trick isn't wrong — it's just half the story. The newer reflex of dumping phosphorus and potassium (PK) into flower isn't a competing theory either. Both camps are pointing at the same thing from opposite ends.

Here's the link: plants don't actually use plain sugar to build things. They have to attach a phosphate group to it first — and that's the actual building block the plant uses to make terpenes and cannabinoids. To form these the plant needs phosphorus to supply the phosphate, and potassium to move the sugar around and switch on the enzymes that do the work.

Run short on either and it doesn't matter how much sugar shows up — the plant can't use it for flowers and ships the carbon somewhere else entirely.

Practical takeaway: Sugars and PK aren't competing strategies — they're partners. Keep PK sufficient (not maxed out) and the whole sugar-to-flower pipeline stays clear.

Full pathway breakdown on our Discord community — find the invite at rootedleaf.com 🌱

Address

Arlington, WA
98223

Telephone

+12063314700

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Rooted Leaf Agritech posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Rooted Leaf Agritech:

Shortcuts

Share