Growing/Cultivation

Hydro or Soil? Checmicals or Organic? Want to learn how to grow? Need to sharpen up your skills for harvesting? Want to find different techniques that work for others? Then you're in the right place.

On this page we will have growing techniques for beginner growers as well as advanced growers. These techniques will be for both indoor and outdoor growing as well as for how to sex your plants and perform the infamous Sea of Green. This page will also have different things you can do with marijuana as far as cooking and using marijuana in everyday life. Updated each month.

PURE GROW KNOWLEDGE
(what every indoor grower should know.)
Mr. Green

Okay, so you’ve decided you want to grow some beautiful ladies in your crib. You’re on the right track. The most important thing to think about is: what exactly are you smoking when you load a bowl or roll a spliff. Is that aftertaste really from not curing or is it from chemicals? When you grow your own cannabis, you control the taste and the nutrients. Along with lighting, CO2, height, weight, etc…

First and foremost, don’t open your mouth. Or if you can’t refrain from your excitement, grow someplace that nobody knows about. But keep it indoors. We’re in America and you know how big bitch brother has to criminalize the very plant that their forefathers were blazing up. Growing outdoors is crazy unless it’s on your own property and well protected. Plus you have to deal with the seasons. Which can ruin a crop or make you wait forever…but it’s well worth it.

Next, make sure you have seeds of your favorite strand. Buy enough to make sure you have enough females to satisfy your smoking habits. The reason I say females is because when you plant all your seeds… say 30. 10 -12 might be females and the rest males. I mean you could grow the males up and smoke em’ but I just get rid of them right off the bat. That way I know I have 100% females growing at all times. You could also keep them to breed, but that’s a completely different subject altogether.

Okay, let me break for a sec. Remember when you’d get that sack in high school or college and you’d be breaking it up and a bunch of seeds would fall out? That’s because the motherfucker that grew it didn’t take the males away from the females when they were flowering. The males bust a nut all over the females pistils (or vagina, pussy – whatever you want to call it) and inside the calyxes a seedling forms. You want to have buds that are seed free That’s why it’s very smart of you to want to grow your own plants. My recommendation is to get your scrip from a medical cannabis doctor and get some clones up in L.A. or Santa Barbara. That will take at least 2 months off your harvest time.

– You’re going to need a light. This is where it’s completely dependent upon the size of your room. If you have a generalized closet or a small room, I would recommend going with a 600 watt hps or metal halide. HPS is more red end of the spectrum and Metal Halide is more blue. Blue is good for veg. and red is good for flowering. Remember that. Fluorescents are great for vegging. They also save you a lot of money. Run fluorescents in your veg. room and HPS in your flowering room. Fluorescents run on the blue end of the light spectrum as well.

If you have a bigger room than by all means shoot up to 1000 watts in that bitch. Just keep in mind two things, one, you’re going to have to keep the temp. in the room at a consistent 75 degrees in the day and 65 degrees at night. You could push 78 or even 80 but you will see a sign of heat stress. And two: You’re going to have to divide that room up into two rooms if you want a continual year round harvest. One room will be for vegging and the other one for flowering. The vegging room can be about a quarter of the size of the flowering room.
I highly recommend getting a cool tube along with your light. Which brings me to vent fans. You will need a can fan or a Dayton blower and a six or eight inch duct fan. Place the can fan or Dayton up at the top of the flowering room. Attach a carbon filter to it where it’s sucking through the carbon filter and have the blowing end come out and blow through your cool tube. This keeps your light cool and also vents out the carbon cleansed air. You can thank me later on that tip.

- One thing before I go any further. I don’t know how to ghetto grow. I did my research and read up on the subject for at least four months before I even bought my seeds. I use as they call at my hydro store, “the ballers system”. I’m not going to write about cannabis and tell you to use your 150 watt three way fluorescent and plant your seeds in some potting soil and use miracle grow to make it bloom. That’s stupid and idiotic. I use only top grade nutes and top grade medium. My advice would be to start saving up money cause it will cost you on the front end. But when harvest time comes, you will make your money back 3 fold.

- So now that you have your rooms set up, how are you going to grow. Hydro or is coco? DON’T USE POTITING SOIL. Find a hydro store or order coco fiber online. I use Canna Coco and won’t use anything else. I won’t grow hydro anymore either. Coco is too easy. So for this article I’m going to explain Coco. I’ll write about growing hydro in another article.
The reason I like Canna and swear by it, is because they wash they’re coco fiber for a whole year before they even bag it up. What does that mean? Coco fiber, washed, keeps a completely neutral pH range. There are no salts. And for the people who think using regular tap water against distilled doesn’t make a difference. You are sadly mistaken, my friend. Get a pH/ec/tds meter and measure. You will see that all water, except for distilled carries anywhere from 300-800 ppm. That shoots your ec way up and burns your plants. To break that down, ec = electrical conductivity, pH = pH was originally stands for pondus hydrogenii which means "potential hydrogen". The terminology refers to acidity being due to a predominance of hydrogen ions in an aqueous (water containing) solution.
TDS = totally dissolved solids in the water Having a pH neutral growing medium and water with an ec of 0.0 is a for sure way to keep your plants healthy. And, if you don’t have the money to buy a good meter, you can always measure your nutes out correctly and use distilled water and you’ll be in the safe zone of having healthy plants.

Let’s say you’re starting with seeds. Get some rapid rooters from any garden store or your hydro store. Get Canna’s Rhizotonic. It’s expensive, I know, but like I said, I only use the best. If you appreciate cannabis, use good nutes. Plain and simple. Get a bowl, fill it with distilled water and about 10 drops of Rhizo. Soak how ever many rapid rooters you’re going to use in there, squeeze out the excess water and plant your seed. Put your seedling in a humidity dome and in about 1 to 2 weeks your seedling will sprout. You can always spray the rapid rooter with a mixture of a few drops of Rhizo to about 300 ml of water to keep them moist. Not Soggy. Squeeze any excess water out of the rapid rooter.

Turn the lights on in the vegging room for 18 hours on and 6 off. Get a timer to make it easier on you. Once your seedlings have grown to the point of the roots coming out all over the place, it’s time for a transplant. Get a 3 gal. grow bag fill the bottom with hydro clay (for drainage) and use your Coco. Water it first with some Rhizo and water. Plant the seedling in and then mix Coco A and B, Rhizo and Cannazym. The measurements are easy. Coco A & B 9ml per gallon, Rhizo 4-8 ml per gallon, Cannazym 9 ml per gallon. Use those measurements and your plants will thrive.

These are the best nutes available in the world. For any one who disagrees, do the research and comparison. Or if you want to see it first hand, take two plants, same genetics, use two different nutrients. Grow one with Canna’s nutes and the other with whatever nutrient you choose. The proof will be in the pudding.

Spray your plants daily with Rhizo. You can also use Dutchmaster but that will be for an increasing your yield article. I’m keeping this simple. Once they are ready to go into the flowering room, get ready to see your all your hard work start paying off, literally.
In the flowering room the main difference is the lighting schedule. You will need to have the lights on for 12 hours and off for 12 hours. This replicates natures fall schedule. Keep watering your plants with the measured nutes and you will see in about two weeks little flowers starting to form. This is where I add a dose of Canna’s PK 13/14. It adds a boost to the flowering cycle and makes the flowers robust. Just keep watching and you’ll see the flowers swell. This is where your carbon filter comes in handy. About 3 weeks before your harvest add another dose of PK 13/14 and then just finish off the last two weeks with plain water. You really don’t need to flush with Canna but I’d recommend it to get the full flavor of the plant. During the last few weeks make sure you get a 30x microscope so you can look at the trichomes. They are the little bulbous heads you see.

This is where a lot of people get things wrong. No matter what strain of plant you have if you harvest when the trich’s are clear or transparent, you will get more of a cerebral or head high. The kind where you’re talkative, you can concentrate on the task at hand, just an all around good high. If you wait another couple of weeks until the trich’s turn amber, you will get more of a body high. The kind where any pain you have is pretty much numbed, if you’re an insomniac, this is the kind of high that will put you to sleep. An incapacitating sedative effect, as some would say.

Cannabis is considered ripe when the plant reaches Peak Floral Production. This is when the flower clusters have filled out with calyxes and single and triple resin coated leaves are popping out. Only the oldest pistils (white hairs) will have turned brown so the bud has a distinct white look. Resin heads will be sticking out of the flowering parts of the plant and some stalks. These trichomes (capitate stalked trichomes) have the highest concentration of THC acids. At this early stage these are at a peak, while CBD and CBN are at their lowest, giving the user an uplifting high. CBN and CBD have sedative effects. Terpenes, which give the herb the beautiful tastes and aromas we all love, are also at a peak. There are 103 aromatic terpenes known to occur in cannabis, and these can join (polymerisation) during curing to form new polyterpenes, with different aromas. Leaves, especially lower ones, should be yellowing off. An easy way to check for this culmination of converging factors is, when the leaves start to change colour, look at the trichomes with a magnifying glass. When most can be seen to be changing from clear to opaque/golden/amber, it is time.

Another little note to remember. All sativa varieties… diesels, pineapple, strawberry cough, etc… have long skinny leaves and grow to be tall girls. Indica varieties, (my favorite)… such as any kush, afghan, some berry varieties, etc… have thick leaves and grow short and stubby.
So the trich’s are the color you want. Now it’s time to harvest. I like to cut the branches that are ready first and let the other ones ripen a little longer.

Get a cardboard box and lace some dental floss across the top, weaving it back and forth. Make sure there is enough room for the box to close all the way without the stems getting in the way. I like to take off the big fan leaves and leave the smaller leaves to droop over the buds. Your calyxes (seed brackets) should be plump and ripe. Hang the branches upside down on the dental floss. Sometimes I use little clamps that I found at a local hardware store to clamp onto the stem. Cut some holes around the box, just enough to let the air escape and circulate out. It is recommended to put a little 4 inch duct fan at the bottom of the box and have it just shoot straight into it. Put the box in coolest place in your house. Check on the buds every couple of days.

I take scissors and trim off all the leaves that don’t have resin on them after about 3 days. Keep these trimmings to make hash, butter, or kief. Usually after a week they’re dry enough to put into a paper bag – grocery store bags. They don’t have bleach and they are perfect to extract the excess moisture out of the middle of the buds. When the buds are dry enough on the outside but still a little smushy in the middle, throw them in a paper bag. Fill it up about a quarter of the way. Crumple the top of the bag enough to close it and store it in a dark cool place. I like to mix the buds up a couple of times a day. In about a week or so they should be to the point to where the stem cracks. All the chlorophyll should be drained from the leaves and stem by now. Make sure your stems are a grayish light green color. This means the chlorophyll is gone. If you smoke chlorophyll it tastes like mint flavored hay. It’s nasty. Once the stem breaks your buds are ready to smoke. If you want the full flavor and full effect of your harvest, you’re going to need to cure your buds. Curing your buds give you a 30% more of a high and taste.

Take the buds and place them into glass jars. Mason jars are perfect. This is called the curing process. Curing can take anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. It’s all a matter of taste and effect. The longer a bud cures the more potent it becomes. This is when all the essential oils come out and flavor the bud. It also has to do with cannbinoids and THC but that’s for a different article as well.

When you first put the buds into the jars, only pack them about a quarter of the way and open the jars a couple of times a day. Take the buds out and put them back in. This makes sure mold doesn’t form. You are still drying the buds. They are just completely drying from the inside out. If you start to smell a funky smell, take them out, inspect them and if no mold has formed put them back into the paper bags for a day or two. After about a week of opening the jars and inhaling the beautiful aroma of your ladies, they should be ready to keep in the jars for as long as you need. I’ve heard of people keeping them in jars for years and still being fresh. I don’t know how anybody would have bud laying around for years unless they were growing some serious weight. I hope this helps.

That’s it. Easy as pie.
Written by: Mr. Green
Cannabis Patient and Activist
mr.green@anonymousspeech.com

ARTICLES

The cannabis plant has managed to travel across the globe without the involvement of humans. Marijuana seeds have been carried by the wind, in bird droppings and has attached itself to animals that trek over long distances, thus globally dispersing the plant, naturally.

Today, human intervention has forced the cannabis plant to be grown under more controlled conditions and in areas where the plant would not have previously existed. It is estimated that there are between two and twelve different cannabis strains growing wild in countries that have not culled the plant, but there could be more. These wild strains, known as landrace strains, are often cultivated by local residents for their hemp material and herbal qualities. The Afghani plant, which has been used by many a cannabis plant breeder to create strains like Kush, Master Kush and the Hash Plant, is a well-known landrace strain. Farmed hybrid strains often make their way back into the wild, creating new landrace strains. In Afghanistan in particular, there are now several different strains of Afghani growing in the wild.