Made in Holland

Part 7

“My basic starting point is a good organic manure that I supplement with chemically pure fertilizers. For the de natural irregularities that go with the territory when you’re growing organically, I top up my plants according to their individual needs with, pure N, P and Ks. I do not really use all that many Boosters because I actually tend to have too many trace elements anyway. The addition of metals is something I keep more firmly under control, because having too high a concentration of trace elements is not a good thing, it’s overkill; twice during each grow – maximum - is enough for the whole harvest. If any deficiencies do develop, depending on the varieties you are growing, then these are easy to make up during the bloom. If you discover small white stripes between the veins of the leaves that means that they have been given a few too many trace elements and that you have to stop giving supplements to your plants. At the same time you learn that next time you grow this variety to go a bit easier with your hand.

I first started growing on my 18th birthday. First on my balcony; nice in the outdoors, and excitement all Summer wondering how the last few weeks of blooming would turn out: nice weather and an abundant harvest, or a wet Autumn and mould among your buds? Back in the beginning of the 1980s (grow shop pioneer) Wernard Bruining introduced me for the first time to smoking the “new” Nederweed, Skunk, it was called, I believe. I was immediately smitten. And of course I got hold of a few clones as soon as I could, at first for my balcony. From those plants from the early days I have been growing their descendants for years. In the beginning I had selected two different genetic lines from the newcomers, one that was totally white and another that was more or less purple. A real dark red, something it most probably got from an ancestor of the Skunk, the so-called Fallbrook Redhair, names after the place between San Diego on the Mexican border and Los Angeles, so in California, and developed by the local farmers between the avocado trees. And take note – during the 1970s, because since Nancy Reagan kicked off the War on Drugs in the US you don’t find very much dope in Fallbrook any more, or if you do it’s come from the US Marines who have put some seeds to use in the wilderness surrounding their nearby Camp Pendleton.

Seven years ago in the space of a day I lost my house and my wife (and so my balcony too), and I was forced to set up camp in a cramped attic. I had no room for more than a bed and a cupboard, and this is where I lived for a while. The cupboard had a footprint of about 60 by 60 centimetres – exactly big enough to be able to carry on growing my green friends, with a bit of help from some good lighting. And to make new crosses, of course. a wonderful Mexican male, a Sativa in fact. Out of this I had one stroke of good fortune. A Haze, and a really strange one at that, that I went on to cross more times, made selections and bred from. The result was that I picked up First and Second prizes for organic weed and that my home made hash has now been voted a couple of years in a row by the Americans (at High Times) as the best Bubble Hash in the world. That plant is the Hawaiian Haze, the original, and developed by me, in a cupboard next to my bed. It really is a strange world.

By determining yourself what levels of NPKs to add to your organic manure you can slowly get your plants to change in to something that you want. Agriculturalists and growers in greenhouses often give their products some extra nitrogen at the beginning of their crop; so you can assume, since growing under lamps creates conditions that are usually more extreme than in our domestic outdoor spring, that in the beginning you also need to give a lot of extra nitrogen to your plants too.

The majority of A and B nutrients when used on soil are not sufficiently adequate, because they provide too fierce a transition for the as yet still young plants that are in a growth spurt. That sort of nutrient is really only suitable for use if your soil is really very poor, but then you are missing a good base and it is actually pretty pointless to grow in such soil. With soil you have to play around and make use of the buffering qualities that good soil has naturally. You should just make sure that you give precisely enough that the plant should after a week show signs of a deficiency. And then in the days following this point you give exactly what the plant needs for the next five days.

In short I would say that that I let the fertilizing with nitrogen (N) peak in the beginning, from the 2nd up to and including the 4th week, and then after this to slowly let it be phased out until two weeks before the harvest.

I allow the phosphorous (P) to peak in the 2nd week, when the super growth begins, then in the same way to reduce to a minimum, and then gradually begin to raise it again from week four to reach its maximum in week eight or nine, a level I can maintain until the 13th week before stopping giving it a week and a half before the harvest.

I gradually apply potassium a bit more, actually throughout the whole cycle in relatively steady levels with a light peak in the middle of the bloom. During the ten to fifteen days before the harvest I only give my plants water, since the plant is barely taking up any nutrients, if any at all and so she has enough just with what still sits in the soil. In addition to that it is a nicer smoke for me and the consumer, because an excess of salts in the last week before the harvest gives the plant a sharp taste when it is smoked. I do not want to taste what kind of manure was being given the plant while I am smoking, thank you very much. And I’m assuming neither do you.

I mix All-Mix with cloning soil in a 1to-1 ratio when I plant the young clones in small pots. I begin with giving them a bit of extra nitrogen and phosphorous so that I arrive at an Ec-value (salt value) of 0.9, working from the assumption that the mains water has an Ec-value of 0.6 as a base. I bump that up a notch at the end of the week to an Ec of 1.3. In the 2nd week I re-pot the young plants in the soil, that has a base with an Ec-value of 1.6. I enrich the first watering with a few crumbs of magnesium and a little nitrogen, due to the huge demand at that moment, to a maximum of 0.9 Ec. The second feeding I give a little more, up to an Ec of 1.0, and for the third a little more again, with an Ec of 1.1 or 1.2, depending on what the girls need. At that moment you can still jump in directly with fast results. My green girlfriends understand me, and I understand them...

The soil that I have used for a second time has become pretty much depleted of nitrogen and trace elements during the first harvest I used it for and so I add extra to the old soil in order to be able to take a second crop off it. What I have a shortage of I make up with All-Mix. The Ec of this ready to use soil can vary a bit and tends to be between 1.8 and 2.4. if you start out with a heavy hand on your base and the Ec of your new All-Mix is a bit on the high side, then of course I don’t give any extra nitrogen and pay

attention to how the plants develop during the first five days they spend with their roots in the new medium. That is why I always mix it in to my old soil. And with a totally new set up I therefore always mix it with cloning soil to get my Ec around 1.6.

At the moment I have 24 different mother pants. That alone is a hell of a lot of work. I number every clone, so that I always know what is going on. Even four years later I can still tell what the original mother was for any plant I happen to have in my hands at that moment. Then I can also tell, even over the longer term, which plant makes more THC and / or the loveliest buds, which is more compact and less vulnerable to mould infection, and which type changes over time, for the better as well as for the worse. That is why I tend to make a selection every two years, to be constantly maintaining the quality or, where necessary, to improve. I only got in to growing to provide myself with something good to smoke, not to go making the best hash in the world, because actually that does not interest me one little bit. It’s all about my own health and my own head and what I feel most comfortable with, right? In short, what I do I do for me only. You gotta do what you gotta do. That is why I only harvest once or twice a year. I just do not fancy doing it more than that; 15 weeks per cycle is quite enough, and I have my own work to do making furniture, something that remains to base of my existence.

I do not grow in pots but in 6 trays of soil of about one and half square metres per tray. I have put castors under each tray so that they can be wheeled in any direction and I can allow them to make the best use of the light and I can make paths to where I want to move them. I normally pot 15-by-15 plants or 225 plants per tray, but at the moment I just happen to have 17-by-19, which is 323 plants in each. I topped al of these in the 2nd week of growth, so that in total I now have 646 tops. I use for these almost two and a half cubic metres of soil and I have nine 600 Watt lamps hanging above them. It is a good rule of thumb that I can easily get around 1 gram per Watt and always have a total yield of around 5 kilos per harvest. As long as I have had no diseases or insects affecting my plants or have had to deal with any other inconveniences that have a tendency to arise when dealing with growing, I keep a light hand. But a bit of pyrethrum, 100 % organic and made from chrysanthemums, in the beginning phase of the cycle cannot do any harm to use. In addition there are various precautions you can take against all sorts of pest, including against spint. Your own hygiene and working cleanly are both essential and can prevent a whole bunch of heartache. Did you know that house plants often harbour spint? On a Benjamin Ficus there only have to be seven lying in wait in order for them to explode in your bloom room to a population of 700.000. Of course you can also bring spint in from outside, but with a little bit of decent air management you will not have trouble with them so easily. I also expel the air outside, but first I let it run via long pipes under my floors so that the worst of the chill is taken out of it. By doing to I very rarely get spint in my space and if I did I could always put a filter in the system, right? The air does have to be fresh from outside because the buds as a result will remain more compact than if I had allowed warm air in, certainly when starting up the lamp, which is something I have learned from experience. Doing so suggests to the plants a morning glory, including the cold air that comes with it. The depleted air exits my house via a carbon filter and if necessary via a heat sensitive valve partially back in to the blooming room again. If the filter is no longer working optimally, then I am the first to smell it, before my neighbours get any wind of it, or ‘coincidental’ passersby feel compelled to phone a snitch line.

Ten years ago I made my first skuff. Back then it was all about the Pollinator, a sort of slowly turning centrifuge that I had bought from Milla. The only drawback with it was that the finest filtering was not available so that there was relatively a lot of plant matter in the hash left behind, thanks to which the hash sometimes had a rather sharp taste and coughing is never really very good for the lungs. I was pretty pleased then when Milla showed me six years ago how I could make Ice. With the Isolator of course: silk cloths of with different fineness, that you hang in a bucket of icy water at about 4 degrees which with the aid of a food mixer inserted through the lid of the bucket you keep you weed waste churning with a large quantity of ice cubes. After an hour and a half of churning you get such pure THC from a single load of fresh leaf- and flowerwaste in the lowest silk bag, with no plant matter and no coughing. If you hold a flame next to the hash, it cooks as if there were no plant matter in it at all. If you have made it well then you may be able to make out tiny bubbles, and that is why these days it is also called Bubble Hash, premium quality Ice. That is a marvellous feeling, I can tell you, to make the best hash in the world. And all done in my own modest little kitchen.”