Jordan Upkavage (12:42)
We'll do work and then we'll do fun. Because then that. That fun will then lead into lack of rain, which would then be back to you. Okay, so I got. I got the. I got the welcome to Green Setup podcast. This is Jordan Ibcavage. After 11 and a half minutes, I have gotten the flow of the show planned out in my head. So you mentioned Mitigro. So I'm gonna go talk about mitigro and I'm gonna talk about plant healthcare. So we. I have a plant healthcare mentor named Ken Miller. Ken Miller is a certified arborist and he has been a certified arborist for decades. He grew up in a family of fert and chem and used to own a tree farm and do ornamental and turf pest control. Fertin chem. Right. So he had a fertin chem business for a long time, had a tree farm for a long time, sold his fertin chem business, maintained his tree farm, growing cold tolerant palm trees, windmill palms, mule palms, what have you. And I think he's either still owns the land or is leasing the land or sold the farm or whatever. So he's kind of like halfway retired is. But he has the big boy CPO license, certified pest control operator license. And Ken is on my payroll and which is why I can operate a pest control business is because of Ken's big boy license. So Ken was instrumental in us starting plant healthcare legally by having that license. And we have purchased our trailer and spray rig from him. And that's what we've been using for a while. And Ken will come down to Tampa and hang out with the day, hang out for the day with us. And we do it as a Ken Miller training day. So we'll audit our systems and our fact sheets and our paperwork as if it's an FDACS inspection. He'll look at our SDS sheets. We'll go through the truck and look at our spill kit. All of the boxes that you need to check will, will audit. Right. And make sure that everything is, is current. And then we'll do some classroom training where we talk about, there's a, a spiral book which is applying pesticides correctly. That is the book. And we'll do some book training and then we'll just look at our operations and audit what we're doing and if it's the right thing for the tree. So out of our different chemicals, what our chemicals do, if we're, if we have the right fertilizer formulas, if we need to change them with seasonality, nitrogen bands, yak, yak, yak. We edit all of that. So in our editing process, I was, I purchased a fair amount of chemical from Plant food company and I purchased fertilizers from them, liquid fertilizers. I purchased Adam's earth, which is a liquid organic matter. And I purchase a polyphosphate, an O27. And what we have been doing historically was Every time we would deep root, let's say I have a client that's two times a year we would put fertilizer, Adam's earth polyphosphate in the tank. If we were doing a deep root four times a year, we do the same thing. Fertilizer atoms, earth polyphosphite. Except for the summer we would pull the fertilizer and we would put in mitigro during the nitrogen ban. And I was looking at this as like, man, I'm putting polyphosphate in the ground four times a year. Is that overkill? It'll like help boost some tree immune defenses. And then I'm thinking, do I need to continually boost the tree immune defenses? Constantly might be a little excessive. And as we were further reading the label, it can act as a fungicide and have some fungicidal properties. And per the label you can apply it as a root drench. So we're looking at our process of if we apply fungicides, we normally use subdue, that's expensive. But I have polyphosphite which has fungicidal properties and it's not as expensive. And we went through the one quart per thousand square feet math all the way down to how many square feet we would normally apply. Now let's say I'm root pruning a live oak for a swimming pool. It might be a 10 foot long trench, a 15 foot long trench, which is not very far. But we would take our gun and we would shoot the root prune trench with the fungicide, liquid fungicide to hit the exposed roots. And then we would hit on top of the soil surface between the trench and the tree trunk to get those roots protected. And we went through the math of the number of square feet we would actually be touching. And I should probably like, well, I don't even have my notes with me. Are going to be like 10 by 10 is 100 square feet. It would be anywhere from 100 to 250 square feet. So we did the math all the way down where we need one cup of polyphosphate to 12 and a half gallons. And that would be cheaper than doing a subdue application. And optically from a homeowner, if they were to watch us do it, it would look a hell of a lot more effective than applying subdue because applying subdue is stupid easy because it's a granular heap on top and then you irrigate in with a hose. So that was kind of a cool thing that we're pulling a chemical we're decreasing the amount of chemical that we're using. And we're going to use it some in deep root and as a fungicide, which was a fun audit. And we went through our liquids and then hitting on top with granulars, and we had a big conversation about ph. We've been taking a lot of soil samples and we've been submitting them to University of Florida soils lab. And we're getting a lot of soils that are coming back that are high. They're alkaline, which is kind of normal, you know, in Florida. So we're playing with elemental sulfur and applying sulfur to drop the soil ph by one unit. Right. So if I'm at a 7.9, I would apply enough sulfur to, in theory, drop it to the 6.9. So we're playing with that. Knowing that we're about to. This is classroom now.
