Marijuana Horticulture Fundamentals. K of Trichome Technologies
Lofty expectations.
Excessively moist or heavily insect-infested areas are unacceptable places in which to grow. Dehumidifying a large area can be difficult and expensive for the beginner, and even if you have taken great precautionary measures, if the surrounding areas are infected with insects and molds it is almost inevitable they will migrate into your garden someday!
Eliminate the possibility of any and all water leaks and spills. Water leaks and spills have been the downfall of many growers. Downstairs neighbors can call landlords. Water can cause electrical shorts, fires, high humidity, and mold.
Many unlikely devices, such as an early-warning water leakage system or a perimeter sensor alarm system, can be utilized for your purposes. There are many out there, and they work for indoor and outdoor settings. Some good ones include the Swann Security monitoring system, the Campers Alert portable detection system, a good quality water detection system, and an all-weather motion-detection camera in either 35mm or digital. These are just three simple things that could help you avoid problems. The first will alert you (but not your neighbors) to a water problem. The others will alert you to intruders, human or animal.
Ventilation intake and controls.
Photo: Freebie
Eliminate or minimize all noises. Place rubber mounts on all fans and moving equipment. Place condensed foam under all ballasts to reduce buzzing noise. For small gardens, inline fans are much quieter than others. Place all ballasts in a separate, designated room, vented to avoid heat buildup.
Never steal power or water! This will make you a thief and a criminal. Never show or tell anybody about your plants—trust no one! Do not put marijuana grow-related waste or evidence of it into your garbage; once you place your garbage out for pickup it becomes public property and anybody can search through it to gather evidence against you. This means plastic baggies, stems, rolling utensils, and so on: all of it must be separated and disposed of properly at your local landfill or secure disposal site.
Chambered grow operation with ventilation, air filtration, and security systems visible.
Photo: Freebie
Growing equipment and literature must not be sent to a marijuana growing location and should not be paid for or addressed in your name. Stay away from other growers. Do not telephone growing supply stores. Do not telephone or e-mail other growers or online grow sites. Instead, seek out the information you need online without contacting the sites, and then buy (with cash) what you need from a growing supply or hardware store. Alternately, mail order to different addresses: be creative, safe, and smart.
Above all, use common sense. If your basement floods every winter, don’t grow there. If your neighbor is an angry police officer who hates you, don’t grow at home! When considering a location, ask yourself if you can withstand close scrutiny there. Do you belong? Will people who drive past or see you come and go ask themselves what you’re doing there? And will they wonder if what you are doing might be illegal? These are some of the many factors you must consider when building your growroom / garden. Every situation and location is different. Each will have unpredictable nuances, good and bad. Ultimately, you must choose! Hopefully, this information will help you make the right decisions.
Place ballasts in a separate, designated room, vented to avoid heat buildup.
Photos: Freebie
The electrical system controls are located outside of the grow space.
Think safe, be safe.
Outdoor OG Kush.
Photo: K
The Symbiotic Rotation Process
For our purposes here, symbiotic rotation is essentially the practice of having all stages of your plants ready exactly when you need them. On the day of harvest you must have vegetative plants ready to install in the flowering room, and your clones must be ready to be moved to the vegetative room. After cleanup and decontamination, the clone room should be ready for more clones, taken from the plants in the flowering room. Empty space is a waste of time, resulting in a diminished supply of bud at your disposal.
For all practical purposes, you don’t want plants ready before or after they are needed, but exactly when you want them: thus creating a symbiotic rotation! Refining the variables is key. Catering to the plant’s every need is the first priority. Second is maximizing its full potential.
Understanding the parameters and limitations of your chosen cultivar is also paramount. You must experiment and investigate all possibilities and options. All plants are different. Here we discuss the two basic cultivars and their strengths and weaknesses in regard to symbiotic rotation; for their fundamental differences, see the chapter on choosing a cultivar.
Cannabis sativa typically grows tall and lanky with long internodal spacing, creating long, airy buds. They grow too tall for most indoor situations and take far longer to finish flowering than cannabis indica; sativa can take 8 to 16+ weeks to finish!
The symbiotic rotation style is more labor-intensive if you are growing cannabis sativa. It can be done, but you must skip a vegetative cycle, meaning your flowering sativa plants won’t be finished for (probably) 12 weeks or more, so you will have a quandary! By skipping a vegetative cycle the next cycle of vegetative plants and clones will be ready when you need them.
While you are waiting for the flowering plants to finish, your vegetative plants will grow too tall and lanky. The clones will quickly root and deteriorate because of overcrowding and lack of proper lighting, causing internodal (the space between the branches) stretching or slow growth development, and stunting.
This Blueberry Haze is an example of a high-yielding sativa. It eventually produced two pounds of bud.
Photo: Mel Frank
Juicy Fruit in full flower. This wonderful cultivar derives its name from its unique smell and taste. She is sativa dominant.
Photo: