Internationa l Growers
Soft Secrets
Canadian grower Kootenay
29
By Bart B.
Power growing with 28.000 watts! In his series of interviews with foreign growers Bart B. talks this time with the Canadian grower Kootenay. He began growing commercially around ten years ago, back when thanks to an explosion in indoor growing the Canadian city of Vancouver was nicknamed ‘Vansterdam’. Having started out just growing a couple of plants outdoors, but after a year of indoor growing Kootenay developed a passion for the cannabis plant. “From that point on I just could not get enough information to cram into my brain about how to grow this fantastic plant. I just get off learning as much as I can and I try to continuously improve. I think that when they say that cannabis is addictive they are really referring to cannabis growing being addictive. Up to the present I have grown many varieties of cannabis, so many that I have completely lost count in fact. If I had to take a guess, I’d say I have certainly had at least 100 varieties in my grow room at some time or other. I have a few favourites that I especially love to grow. Breeder Steve’s Spice of Life varieties such as Sweettooth 3, Shiskaberry and Ultimate Indica in particular are a pleasure to grow and smoke. I still have a few Blockhead seeds from him lying around waiting to be tried out. On top of that, I grow a lot of BC (British Columbia) Hashplant and Chemo in my gardens. These are favourites among my friends, plus both weeds look terrific. This is something that is very important around here, because the better the weed looks the easier it is to sell. The BC Hashplant is my all-time favourite for growing commercially.”
System
The set up of the hydro-bucket-system, tidy and orderly – as it needs to be..
Ï have tried earth beds, hydro tables, soil in pots, and hydro-buckets for growing cannabis. The earth bed system is my favourite for raising a lot of plants with a short pre-growth period, but the yield for a 12,000 watt grow room is nine kilos every seven to eight weeks. If all the climatological variables are just right then up to 12 kilos per space can be achieved.
It is my opinion that the simpler you keep it for yourself, the less things can go wrong.
contains 48 plants. So everything together took about two months for setting up and pre-growth, and then another two months before the first harvest was ready. In total then, four months, after which every month I had a room ready for harvesting.
One of the problems I have encountered using so many lamps is with the ventilation. You can’t just go re-building a whole house to accommodate extra ventilation holes. I solved this problem by removing all the old doors and putting in new, cheap doors. In these new doors I make a ventilation hole that is sufficiently large to keep the whole grow room optimally provided with CO2 (carbon dioxide)-rich fresh air. In this way, you don’t have to go and bore massive holes all over the house. I have been using this system for several years now and I’m mostly a grower in soil, but I find this system in the end produces less waste remains at the end. It practically runs itself once you everything set up right. With less waste produced, the neighbours have less chance to become suspicious.
The clones are nicely established and grow at top speed.
The average yield for a 12.000 watt grow room is nine kilos in seven to eight weeks.
“The system that I use for growing is the hydro-bucket system, which consists of 20 litre-sized buckets each with a four-litre mesh pot (pot with holes in) inside. Below the bucket is a hose that allows the feed water to flow back to the reservoir. The system is fed by 1800 gph pumps, one pump for each row of six lamps in the room. Each plant is fed by two drippers that via a branching layout can keep the feed water in constant circulation. The nutrients are kept flowing all the time during the blossom. The excess flows back again to the reservoir. It is essentially a re-circulation system that uses about 60 litres of feed water per day. During the growth phase the plants receive one minute of feed water every five minutes. The plants seem to do better by having different feeding cycles for growth and bloom.
During the bloom period I feed the plants with General Hydroponics’ bloom- and micro feed with no additives.
Thanks to the huge number of plants I need, I make my own clones. I take them from my mother plants. I only save a mother plant if she has exceptional qualities. I let the clones root in Jiffy pots and use Rootech gel on them. This is a root hormone in gel form that is clean and easy to use and works a treat to make clones take root. In a separate room I have a rack for clones with lamps hung above it. A rack offers space for 660 clones, but I only stick 200 clones each time in it. The most important aspect of cloning and to make sure that the clones root 100 % is to make sure the mother plant is healthy and disease-free. Also, the root temperature needs to be kept above 20 degrees, so that the roots will develop nice and quickly.”
Grow house A few weeks later it has become a veritable jungle.
“This 28,000 watt grow house has two rooms with twelve 1000-watt hps lamps in them. On top of that I have a further, separate, room with 4000-watt metal halide and hps lamps for the pre-growth of the plant. The cloning room is in the wash room which is always warm and moist.
With buds like these you can literally blow the socks off anyone!
The biggest problem in building the large grow rooms was getting everything I needed indoors without arousing suspicion. I’m talking about 28 lamps, carbon filters, extraction ventilators, and so on. It is not easy to bring all that stuff in without being noticed. Also, it is too much work for one man alone, which is why I enlisted a few good friends to help out. With five of us it took about two days to get just one room harvested and all the plants trimmed. I chose to harvest and trim the plants wet, and then remove the buds from the plant to let them dry out later on special drying racks. I used to use the Canadian version of the Dutch Kermit, the Big Red Schredder, with which to trim the buds. But I went back to using simple shears. I think that
Each 12,000 watt grow space is ready for harvesting at the beginning of every month, when new plants are moved from the grow room to the bloom room. Clones from the cloning room are moved at the same time into the grow room so that these too can be raised into mature plants. Whopping great plants can support whopper buds
I give the plants four to five weeks of pre-growth and then switch them over to blooming. This lasts, depending on the variety, for seven to eight weeks. I get about 120 to 200 grams off each plant.
It took about a month to get the whole house ready for planting the first clones and to ready the first 12,000 watt grow room. After that it took about another whole month to raise the clones into mature plants of about 40 to 60 cms, after which they could be placed in the bloom room. The hydroponic bloom room
An excess of light creates weight. Enjoy the view.
trimming by hand just results in prettier buds. The Big Red Schredder - for those who did not know – is a trim machine to which you connect a vacuum cleaner which sucks up the trimmed leaves while it works.
