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We’re finished with supplemental lighting in my beds. Thank you lights for fooling my plants into thinking that you’re the sun. You’re going to be put to use earlier next year.

The first flowering tea has been poured, pumping phosphorus and potassium into my beds, and after a scorching hot week, the temps have finally returned to something resembling normal here at the coast. I didn’t even need to spray Regalia last week. Powdery mildew does not exist in 100 degree temperatures.

Last Saturday, we received a surprising and long sought for favor from one of our next door neighbors. This is the house where we share their back fence as our south facing garden bed fence. We recently went 50/50 with our neighbor on a new fence, which is taller and gives everyone more privacy. But we had another issue that needed resolving that was a long time in coming.

The issue has been a cherry laurel tree on the other side of the fence. I had watched this small tree become a monster that had soaked up my compost tea runoff and impacted my garden for many years. I haven’t written about it, because there was never any progress toward a solution.

In California, we have the California Tree Law, which states that I, as property owner, have the right to cut branches from trees that come onto my property. Many years ago, I spoke with the original property owner, and he said, “If it’s over the fence and shading your garden, cut it down.” 

So for many years, that’s what I did, even though I hated doing that to the tree.  Unfortunately, when you cut only one side of a tree, it will grow in every other direction. Mostly, it grew sideways and up.

There’s me, waving to Karen, and you can see the cherry laurel on the far right of the photo. You can see how my trimming it off the fence was sending it higher up. This was several years ago. It got much wider and taller.

You can now see how much of it was shading an entire row of beds. It had grown where I couldn’t safely reach it, and frankly, trimming it needed a professional.

Clearly, the entire back and side rows, along with two beds in the middle, were being shaded by the cherry laurel next door.

Not much light got through the canopy until after 10:00 am, and it was gradual.

I have worked around this for many years now. I used to grow 12 cannabis plants in the middle row and the row next to the spice rack, while growing all my veggies in the beds against the fence. I even occasionally grew cannabis along the fence. That had become impossible.

I have been a good and patient neighbor. I’ve never been a jerk about it, just calmly insistent that I needed relief from the tree. The original owner passed away and the property went to his eldest daughter. She asked me to financially go in on the tree work with her, because it primarily affected me. I told her that the tree was not my responsibility to pay for. The roots are on her property. I helped pay for the fence, because we share that space. But the tree is hers to do with as she pleases. This is California law. I was only asking for the same thing I asked from her father: Relief from the tree. She promised to do something, as long as I helped pay for it. I told her no thank you. I also reminded her that if the tree ever fell and damaged the fence, the repair cost would be entirely on her. It just kept growing. 

While I patiently waited, 12 of my 22 beds were rendered largely useless for growing anything other than spices and lettuce.

Last Saturday, while I was pruning my plants, I got a shock when a chainsaw fired up only a few feet away, and a tree person began to prune the cherry laurel.

It went from this:

You can see how much of the fence she covered.

To this:

The removal of so much of the cherry laurel; especially from the sides, has opened up all the beds of my garden to the sun. Veggies barely getting six hours of sun are now getting ten plus hours. The difference in vegetable growth in the last week has been astonishing. We’ll have more food than we were expecting. This will also allow for more sun on my plants during flowering, which means extra trichomes, etc.

This tree trimming will have a profound impact on my cannabis growing, at least for the next couple of years. I’ll grow cannabis in all my preferred beds, numbered 11-22. We’ve grown giants in those beds, but haven’t successfully grown cannabis there for four years. Next year’s 10th anniversary grow is going to be . . . as I always envisioned growing here, something I haven’t done since 2020.

With the first blooming formula poured, I now await the transition from vegetative to flowers. It is the perfect week for serious pruning. It’s time to start selecting the stalks that we’re going to keep, and cutting off the smaller, in-between growth that will not get as large, and suck up valuable resources meant for the bigger flowers.

This process is not quite as straight forward as it used to be. The reason for this is the anti-mold foliar spray that I prefer, Stargus. What we have discovered about Stargus is that we can now allow for more crowding amongst flowers than we’ve ever had. I don’t want flowers pressed against each other, but the danger of keeping them close together has been significantly reduced by Stargus. If any mold pops up on one flower, Stargus prevents it from binding to another nearby flower. It’s my intention to push the boundaries on this and try to discover the limits to how much, or how little I end up pruning. But some stalks are going to come down, regardless.

This is a job where experience is helpful, to understand the why and where of pruning.

Everything inside the cage.

We use our tomato cages for reference. Bee likes to say that we prune, “everything inside the cage.” While not entirely true, this statement is an excellent guideline. We train our plants out and away from the center. Rather than allowing them to grow up, we do everything we can to encourage them to grow out and away. This opens up the inside of the plant. With that point of view, it’s pretty easy to spot the inner growth that you’ll want to keep and nurture, as well as all the branches and leaves that need to be taken off. Pruning useless inner growth is another method of boosting growth for the rest of the plant. By removing stalks that waste valuable nutrition, the existing foliage will get a surge of growth. We have pruned enough off plants to actually make the plants look like they’ve gotten larger.

One more thing that training like this does is it helps keep plants from becoming too tall. That might not be a consideration for you. But if you grow outdoors, one should be mindful of one’s neighbors, and of not being too obvious with what you’re doing. My neighbors enjoy cannabis, and they also appreciate that I do whatever I can to keep my plants from becoming a concern for both of us. By that, I mean letting them grow to where they’re seen just walking around our valley. We live in a tourist destination with lots of rental houses. We don’t need our plants to visually stir the temptation of teenagers in town on family vacation.

I write a lot about training, in terms of stressing my plants toward the best possible medicine, but for some growers, training is more of a practical concern. Some people don’t want their neighbors to know that they’re growing. In certain cases, they’ve been told by their neighbors that they don’t like cannabis or want it in the neighborhood. Of course, if it’s legal where you live, your neighbors don’t have much they can do about it. Still, being a good neighbor sometimes means not rubbing their face in it. Grow discretely and without fanfare. Your neighbor may not like what you’re growing, but they might respect the way you go about your work.

Regarding pruning, the tallest and strongest tops are obviously keepers, but when pruning, when you have two tall tops and a smaller one in-between, conventional wisdom says to remove the smaller top below and in-between the taller tops. I agree with conventional wisdom on this, but there are exceptions, where you really don’t want to prune any of the potential flowers in a section. This is another area where training can help. You can separate the stalks through training and stress, allowing them to not only remain, but to become more potent. I can see how the plant clips are going to be especially instrumental during this pre-flower phase.

In this photo of vegging Rainbow Kush, at the bottom of the photo, there are two stalks to remove that would free the four other stalks to grow without any cluttering. I see two triangles of tops and the top stalk of each triangle would be the one that I would remove.

The timing of the next trains are critical. We need to see the potential flowers clearly, to know what to do with them. Hence, the deep inside prune, which clears the pathways and airways, allowing for more air circulation, and a better visual evaluation of what remains. 

Walking out to the garden right now is a lovely sight to behold. This new amount of light will primarily impact our vegetables this year, but everything will feel the benefit next year. With the discovery of supplemental outdoor lighting, my grow will start three weeks earlier, and at least half of my plants will sprout directly in the beds from feminized seeds, with no transplanting involved.

It’s a fun time of year. Plants will start to flower over the next three-four weeks. But right now, we can prune our plants for the flowers soon to come. I love watching the plants take on their ultimate shape.

Finally, I’m grateful to my neighbor. In this case, something good actually happened in a long conflict between neighbors. It was a total change in the energy, and it opened a door to something helpful.

Btw, I mentioned this story to a friend and he said, “In these times, perhaps we should all take note.” I agree.

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