Hot Wax

58

Made in Holland Curt, and his Advanced Nutes Part 2

In this series for the organic grower we will be profiling in each issue a different organic grower from Holland. This time around it is Curt, a pleasant American from the chilly state of Minnesota who took up residence in Amsterdam. After years of experimentation with all sorts of nutrients and other additives for his plants became enthused towards what is something of an oddity to the Dutch scene, Advanced Nutrients. Curt found the results so good that he immediately made a deal to become the importer for the European region, when he had originally come over here to chill out.

By Smiley Grass

Curt with one of his babies..

Curt: In order to get plants to grow indoors, you have to be ready to ‘play God’ a little and re-create nature in your grow room. You have to protect your plants against insects and moulds, while ensuring they have food, water, air and light at the right time and in the right amounts. The most important thing is that you have to be consciously aware of the plant’s needs. If you give her what she needs, when she needs it, you will be rewarded with a superior harvest.

The attention that you give the plants is the most important factor; knowing exactly what you’re doing and working in a hygienic way. Your grow room must be really clean in order to keep your plants free from all kinds of viruses, moulds and bacteria. In order to achieve a good yield you have to make sure that all conditions are good. The in-flow of fresh air, the out-flow of your warm air, the air moisture and temperatures. That is actually the secret; giving the young plant everything she finds pleasant.

I come from Minnesota, in the middle of the US, near the border with Canada, where every winter for five months it always freezes under a metre of snow. So it’s too short a season to grow outdoors, and I should know because I have given it a go. I just started out with the seed from some weed I was smoking back then, probably Mexican. We prepared some land down by the river, where it was really good soil with lots of clay, and planted weed we had started off indoors, once the frost was really out of the ground. Thanks to the short growing season and the highly tropical preferences of cannabis Sativa, it of course was not a very good harvest. So in the following year, it was 1975, I had a go with 10 plants indoors with eight fluorescent tubes. So that was my first indoor harvest, but still nowhere near what you’d call good. After I

had met my wife, who coincidentally happened to have the same horticultural interests as me, I got more into breeding by crossing plants with qualities I found attractive. One of the plants I developed through this I named Alzheimer, because we could no longer concentrate on our work, or even remember what we doing, once we had smoked some of it. So then I knew I was doing something right.

I always check the temperature halfway between the plants; between 25 and 30 degrees is optimal

95 % of clones rooted

I had an extra room in my cellar that I transformed into a grow room. It was not very large, but spacious enough for me to create separate spaces for my mother plants and my clones. I have been very successful with my cloning. I used aquarium pumps and bubble stones to get enough oxygen into my feed water. I reckon 95 percent of my clones rooted, so I was in a position to have enough material to be able to save the genetics if I found I had something good.

I have actually been growing ever since I left high school and went to college. For five years after, when I lived in Houston, Texas, I lived in a 2-room apartment on the 30th floor of a skyscraper with absolutely no opportunity for growing

anything indoors. But since then I have always had plants on the go, whether in Minnesota or in the Netherlands.

Once we had moved to Holland, I carried on growing with a friend. We had this really nice room in south-east Amsterdam, in which we had about 300 plants growing under nine lamps on light rails. We had come up with a system in which three groups of lamps could be driven by the same motor to move in and around three rooms. Using a conventional system we would have needed 15 lamps for 15 square metres, but with ours we were able to light the same area with just nine lamps. The yield was a reasonable 0.75 grams per Watt. We have tried using various grow media. First the polyurethane slabs that were popular for a while. The advantage with them was that you can re-use them, but the air moisture content of the room was too high , so then we switched over to stone wool slabs, which also did not give us the results we were looking for. I really didn’t care for having to throw all that garbage away, nor having to hold my breathe whenever I was working on my plants. So I now prefer to grow as organically as possible and use no chemicals, even for combating insects. I prefer to use carnivorous mites.

So that’s how I switched back to soil again. We had a complete irrigation system; we had the pumps, the reservoirs, the spaghetti of pipes and drippers and we just took 10-litre pots and filled them with soil. And we got better results immediately.

Over-fertilising

My favourite soil is now BioBizz LightMix. It only has a little fertiliser in it, only the most essential, so that you still have plenty of room to add the necessary nutrients yourself. One of the biggest problems that I ever had was from overfertilising. Certainly if you use AllMix; that’s just too strong for some varieties.

For my nutrients I use the organic line from Advanced Nutrients. I have also used their mineral and semi-organic products, also in combination, but the last harvests were fully organic. As well as the fertilisers I use a vitamin B supplement, a bloom stimulator and sea weed extract. The vitamin B helps with the root development and ensures a lovely dark green basis plant that grows quicker. It is in any case good to give these vitamins if you have problems with your plants; it helps if your plants have had too much stress or have been exposed to too dramatic swings in pH. It’s great for all kinds of problems, really.

What I have learned is that overfertilization is the biggest problem that you can encounter. That, in combination with a surfeit of water, leads to the very smallest roots no longer being able to take up oxygen and eventually to their being burned through too high a concentration of nutrient salts. I like soil, because a good mix will buffer the pH, which I always try and keep at about 6.3. With hydroculture, that is much harder to do because you are only dealing with water and nutrient salts and so you have to lower or raise the pH by artificial means. On top of that it is also more natural to grow on soil. With hydro you have a shorter cycle, the plants end up bigger , but what struck me is that the yield is never significantly more than when growing in soil. They look heavier and bigger, but they also have more leaves. And when you trim them you lose a lot of leafage, and so you also lose a lot of eventual weight. You think you’re getting more, but that’s not so. So for a load of reasons I reckon soil is better to grow on. I have tried all the current nutrient lines at some stage: BioBizz, Canna, House & Garden and so on and so on. My favourite, before I switched over to Advanced Nutrients, was BioNova; I got some pretty good results using that. Then a friend of