5. General Tools of the Trade
(Grow Bed #7 of 18, 2018, Quincy, WA)
Go the extra mile. It’s never crowded there.
General Sanitary Requirements
While tissue culture cultivation most resembles the work of doctors or scientists in a clinical laboratory; sanitary, sterile conditions are also required for growing from seeds, and to some extent clones.
In addition to a sanitary space, you’ll need clear air and water. This will mean some kind of air exchange, scrubbing or HVAC system, and a water filter. Again, all of these items will still be required for general indoor growing, but the initial start-up costs of building out a tissue culture lab will still be much higher.
If you are generally a discombobulated mess, or are the type of person who can’t say, at any given time, with 100% certainty, that there aren’t rats living under a pile of garbage on the floor of your car, then you will probably want to stick with clones.
With clones, there is a little more flexibility in terms of both the medium used and the ambient conditions. For instance, in Troy’s outdoor garden plan, sometimes he would leave trays of cuttings outside in the early spring, allowing the plants to acclimate to the cool wind of the open-air garden.
While this can stunt some of the cuttings, the ones that make it are incredibly hardy, robust, and resistant. Plants that we have started like this, have gone on to survive deep freezes, well into November!
Nutrients, Fertilizers, and Pesticides
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
Thankfully we are no longer in the days of black-market pot growers treating their pest infestations with Myclobutanil, DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), or cans of Raid wasp spray. The good news is that pesticides are strictly, strictly prohibited for use in all cannabis production, in every State that allows for legal cannabis commerce.
The bad news is that pesticides are strictly, strictly prohibited for use in all cannabis production, in every State that allows for legal cannabis commerce.
While, the pesticide regulations, provide a much-needed safeguard for consumers, the prohibitions for producing cannabis are far more onerous and restrictive than they are for producing food, tobacco, or any other consumable product for that matter!
This places an added burden and cost on cannabis producers, who are usually small business owners that are already struggling and behind on their bills.
The incongruousness of pesticide regulations for cannabis and those for other industries, is due in part to the limited data available for the health effects of combusting or vaporizing pesticides.
This is in contrast to consuming pesticides through food, in which the effects are more well known, albeit still not that great.
In the case of the tobacco companies, they just have a whole lot of money and lobbyists ready to help them to continually evade accountability and perpetually avoid real consequences.
In addition to chemical pesticides, one of the most effective and commonly available non-toxic chemicals for dealing with pathogen vectors after an infestation is already underway, is hydrogen peroxide or H2O2.
Non-Chemical Warfare
I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are non-chemical ways to deal with pests. Prevention, being better than a cure; you can proactively apply topical oils that may keep bugs from visiting and laying eggs in the first place.
Aside from inducing chemical reactions, other sprays work by physically knocking the insects off of the plant through the use of force or force in conjunction with other treatments.
Another type of non-chemical remedy, is one that works by smothering or suffocating the insects, like Neem oil, which is applied in a foliar spray that forms a thick protective coating around the leaves of the plant. The Neem oil is systemic, meaning it’s absorbed into the plant, making it undesirable for your pests.
Overuse of Neem can potentially cause a flavor fouling in your product. Peppermint and Rosemary essential oils, have the same smothering effects, and can be used as alternatives to Neem, or in conjunction with it, on a rotating weekly cycle to avoid Neem flavor build up.
Another non-chemical approach to staying ahead of pests is vigilance coupled with a quick reaction time. If you walk through and thoroughly inspect your garden every single day, you increase your likelihood of identifying an outbreak early. Then, it can be neutralized quickly before it gets out of control. For a large enough garden, just the daily task of checking the plants, could mean one or more full time jobs.
Quit Being a Pest!
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
On one of the worst days in my life, I went from thinking I would be a millionaire to thinking I was going to wind up in the poorhouse, when I was growing my first outdoor pot crop in Central WA. What happened was that towards the end of summer one day it rained, and suddenly, the next day it was as if God had turned on a pestilence from above, like one of the ten plagues of Moses on the people of Egypt. Whereas we hadn’t really had to deal with any pests all season, now our plants were swarmed and rapidly got covered with every imaginable insect, mold, and fungus that you could think of!
While there are many different vectors for mold and fungus, one of the main catalysts for outbreaks in a cannabis garden is the damage to plant tissue caused by harmful insects.
Even if you were allowed to launch an all-out, scorched earth, chemical warfare campaign against the little buggers though, that isn’t always the best solution. Sometimes it’s best to fight fire with fire.
For instance, when Godzilla is on the loose in Tokyo, and all of humanity’s best efforts can’t seem to make a dent, who else can we turn to but another terrible monster, i.e.- Mothra, to save the day?
Likewise, one of the best, preventive approaches to keeping harmful pests at bay is the use of beneficial bugs such as predator mites, green lace wings, praying mantises, ladybugs and lady-bug larvae. These heroic predators will relentlessly seek and destroy a number of different harmful insect species as well as their eggs, and larva.
Just don’t accidently kill your good bugs with pesticides too, or you’ll have to start rebuilding your predator population from scratch!
Starting a new business can be a daunting task, but you don’t have to go it alone. The experts on are team are here to help guide you through the maze.
Water and Soil PH
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
It’s crucial for the health and growth of the plant that you have the right balance of acid and alkaline in your water and soil.
You can read your water with an inexpensive handheld pH wand. Ideally, you want your water to be at around 6-6.5 pH, slowly increasing, over the course of the plant’s life cycle. Exceptions to this range are Live Soil (~6.8-7) and Hydroponic media (5.6-6.2)
If you need to raise your pH, you can add calcium, phosphorus, potassium carbonate, and other alkaline minerals.
If you want to bring up your water’s acidity, the best thing that you can add is, well… acid. During the vegetative stage a product like N-furic acid, which is sulfuric acid with added nitrogen, is a good option. During flower, you can use phosphoric acid to decrease your pH.
Make sure if you’re handling a 55-gallon drum of any acid that you’re taking proper safety precautions.
There’s nothing more fun than getting covered with toxic, flesh-eating acid when you’re still only in your second hour of a 12-hour shift.
You can change your soil pH through watering, or apply many different amendments as needed, to get to around 6 pH.
Lime and ash work well for raising the pH to make your soil more alkaline. To lower the pH of your soil you can add acidic amendments like compost, manure, and mulches. Gypsum is a good choice, although if you don’t have that available, Elemental Sulfur is an additionally effective, albeit smelly, option.
Temperature Range
It doesn't matter what temperature the room is, it's always room temperature.
For your water, you ideally want to stay around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, as long as this isn’t too great a departure from the seasonal soil temp in the fall. This is obviously much easier to control in an indoor garden, especially if you are utilizing a hydroponic reservoir.
In general cannabis grows best at 65-85 degrees F. Remember for an indoor garden the temperature will probably be at least ten degrees higher in your grow room, when the lights are on.
While you can control the ambient temperature and stay within that range for the plant’s entire life in a warehouse or a greenhouse, as you can imagine, that won’t work when you’re growing outdoors.
While temperatures below this range may stunt your plants growth or even kill them depending on the strain, it also gives them richer colors and potentially more terpenes at harvest.
At the same time, we had plants survive multiple deep freezes, or even continue to pack on flower weight when it was 40 degrees F. Troy and I, on the other hand, didn’t fare quite as well in the cold.
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Keep your space clean to ensure healthy plants
- Do– Pick the best grow medium to match your budget and experience
- Do– Pay attention to the PH of your water and growing medium
- Don’t– Bring mold spores into your garden
- Don’t– Forget to clean the leaves off of your plants and out of the growing area
- Don’t– Don’t forget that pot plants can freeze to death!