Hydrolife Magazine June/July 2016 (CAN Edition)

grow
MYTH #1:
Cannabis is hard to grow.
TRUTH: Cannabis is actually a pretty
easy plant to get a good harvest out of.
In my opinion, it is about on par with
tomatoes as far as difficulty level is
concerned. There are only a few special
things that have to be learned, such
as dark periods, determining lighting
levels, and figuring out when and how to
harvest the buds.
In general, cannabis isn’t a particularly
finicky plant to grow. Unlike with fruits
and vegetables, flower production is
what is desired in pot plants—the pollination
and fruit-set phases are generally
skipped to avoid seeds (sinsemilla). In
many areas, cannabis plants can grow
wild outdoors without human intervention.
In the days before seedless buds
were the norm, cannabis seeds thrown
out of car windows were known to take
root along roadsides, resulting in what
was known as ditch weed once stumbled
upon and harvested.
So why the confusion over difficulty
levels? Many people see cannabis
as hard to grow because there is
a technical side to it for those who
choose to pursue getting better at it.
Someone can be taught how to make
a grilled cheese sandwich in a matter
of minutes, but cooking can be studied
and improved upon dramatically over
a lifetime. This doesn’t mean that one
can’t eat grilled cheese sandwiches
while learning how to make roast beef
dinners with all the trimmings.
While there is a lot that can be
learned about growing cannabis well,
growing a plant that produces at least
something pretty much amounts to
not killing it, setting the dark periods
to flowering at the appropriate times,
and then continuing not to kill it until
harvest. The infamous loco weed is an
easy plant to grow, but improvements
in techniques will allow for bigger
and more efficient harvests, and can
improve the final product.
MYTH #2
Grams per watt is a good indicator
of garden performance.
TRUTH: Many folks will claim to get
X amount of harvest out of Y number of
watts of lighting. The trouble with using
this number as a measure of success is
that it doesn’t give a time value (duration)
for how long the harvest took to
grow. This is a flaw because it gives
an unfair advantage to heavily trained
large plants, even if they are less efficient.
As an extreme case, take the
example of the sea of green method (lots
of small plants grown quickly) versus the
screen of green method, which is a single
(or few) plants heavily trained through
a screen to maximize the canopy. Using
grams per watt as an indicator of success
in this case is misleading, as a sea of
green may produce less weight per harvest
but be a better-performing garden
overall since it takes less time. (I am
not advocating one style over the other,
this is just as an example—there are
other factors such as plant counts that
should also be considered in a garden.)
There is also the problem of comparing
plants with different harvest times, for
example, a quick-flowering indica versus
a long-flowering sativa.
A much more useful number to calculate
is grams per day (GPD). Subtract the
planting date from the harvest-start date
to find the total number of days grown,
then take the weight of the harvest and
divide it by the number of days grown.
This will show you how much harvest was
produced each day. Calculating the GPD
for each harvest allows a grower to compare
the success of different grows even
if the number of days for each is different.
Once a baseline is established, GPD can
also be used to calculate operating costs
and estimate future harvest size.
MYTH #3:
Cannabis flowering is triggered by
the length of the light periods.
TRUTH: Part of the trouble behind this
myth is that cannabis is said to be a shortday
plant, which implies that it grows in
size over the summer, and flowering is
triggered by the shorter days of fall. The
reason this thought leads to the myth
is that it is wrong—cannabis flowering
is triggered by the length of the dark
periods. Specifically, photoreceptors in the
leaves will signal the release of flowering
hormones when exposed to the long,
dark periods of fall, winter and spring, or if
indoors long dark periods of 12 hours or so.
These hormones will be used to trigger or
continue flowering during the next lightson
period. If the dark period is shortened or
interrupted, the level of flowering hormone
will drop, hindering flower development.
“Calculating the GPD
for each harvest
allows a grower
to compare the
success of different
grows even if the
number of days for
each is different.”
MYTH #4:
Cannabis grown in the such and such
region is by far the best in the world.
TRUTH: I’ve personally smoked enough
of the “best” cannabis from around
the globe to make the following claim
with a clear conscience: after a certain
level of quality, it is just about personal
preference. Well-grown and cured cannabis
tends to have a lot in common
with other batches of well-grown and
cured cannabis for other regions. There
are some places where getting quality
weed is more difficult, and the overall
quality of street weed may vary, but the
best weed from the West Coast, the East
Coast, Spain, Amsterdam, etc., has so
much in common it’s impossible to tell
where it was grown just by the quality—provided
you keep tobacco out of
the Amsterdam sample, of course. In
addition, what is best from one person’s
perspective may not be the best as far
as someone else is concerned. Everyone
has different tastes and priorities, so
keep an eye out for your personal favorites,
no matter what the popular opinion
seems to be, and realize that like fine
wine, the differences get smaller the
better it gets.
Grubbycup has been an avid indoor
gardener for more than 20 years. His articles
were first published in the United Kingdom,
and since then his gardening advice has
been published in many languages. He
is considered one of the world’s leading
authorities on crochet hydroponics.
22
grow. heal. live. enjoy.
myhydrolife.ca