Jeffrey Hickey Writes Blogs

Royal Kush in bed 20.

Over the winter, I picked up some subscribers, thank you very much, and I recently received a batch of questions from a couple of them, so I wanted to take a moment and address them. Thank you for the questions. I encourage others to do the same thing, so that everyone may benefit from the responses.

Question One: “If you only need the outside lights on for a couple of hours, to fool your plants, why do you keep them on until 9:00 am?”

Excellent question, and I apologize for not explaining this better. It’s true that the “fooling my plants” part of the lights being on occurs between 5-7 am. By the time these plants hit six weeks, the sun will start hitting them around 7:00 am. But the angle of the sun is such that for over two months, the row of beds against the fence don’t become fully in light until after 10:00 am.

So I want to give our veggie starts in that first L shaped row a better chance. As the sun moves in the opposite direction after solstice, the beds against the fence will see more sun, until there comes a point where the L row gets more sun than the cannabis plants while they’re in late flowering stage. This makes for wonderful late season tomatoes. Last year, our final tomato harvest was the week before Thanksgiving. The late season sun in that row is also responsible for the shishito peppers we love.

Additionally, because of the height of the fence, and the angle of the sun, beds 11 and 12 (cannabis beds) don’t get fully in the sun until after 9:00, so I want to keep them active and awake until the sun can take over. We’ve grown huge plants in beds 11 and 12 before and I’m anxious to do so again.

Question Two: “It looks like you’re hanging the lights from the privacy screen. Isn’t there a more secure way of hanging them from the fence?”

Yes, we were hooking them on the screen, but we could not point them toward the beds with accuracy. The only way to do that was to nail each light into the fence and swivel the lights down, which they can do. So, we did this a couple of days ago. There are slots on the stand where you can put in a screw. It only took one in the center. They look permanent now, and I can swivel them up or down. Given we’ve got 750 watts of lights in the garden, having the angle down toward the beds makes all the difference in terms of capturing the light and not sending any directly toward a residence.

Note the slightly downward angle.

Question Three: “How do you not disturb neighbors with those lights?”

We are uniquely situated against a hillside. We have no neighbors behind us up our hill. The lights are mostly pointed toward the spice rack on the forest side of the beds. The edges of that light reflect on the canopy of trees rising above our property. The closest neighbor with even a remote line of sight to our lights is up the hill about 200 yards west of us. By angling the lights properly and not allowing them to point upwards, only indirect light approaches that house. From up there, the light is greatly diminished. The houses on either side of us are both built closer to the road than our property. We’re up a driveway a bit and the garden is beyond the fence we share with one of our neighbors. So we only point the lights toward the dark hillside. No lights are pointed directly toward any structure with people inside. When I walk down our driveway with the lights on, as soon as I round the corner from the garden it’s pitch black dark again. No lights are shining on any neighbors house. If they look out a window, they can see lights hitting the hillside, but they cannot see a single source. There are no klieg lights shining in anyone’s window. We haven’t had a neighbor complain to date.

Oregano anyone?

Question Four: “With the remaining cultivars in the cottage, do you have a system to prioritize which cultivars are more important to grow this year?”

Great question, and the answer is yes. Some cultivars do have priority over others. I grow for a few people who are not well, so I am constantly monitoring the plants that I need to grow for them. I am also growing new cultivars that I think might be beneficial to those I provide for. I need to have backups, or other choices, should my preferred choice not be available, or no longer be as effective. 

I repeat this story from some months ago. The stroke victim I care for, Mr. M, needs specific terpenes from his cannabis. He needs beta caryophyllene for mood stability, and he needs limonene to prevent nausea. A few months ago, they ran out of the meds and were having a difficult time contacting us. Mr. M went about a week without our meds and he was deteriorating rapidly. Vomiting a lot. They tried other cannabis, but without knowing what medicine was inside, it was a crapshoot, and Mr. M was suffering. His wife was concerned that we were at end times, but all he needed was the proper cannabis. We reconnected, and on the first day Mr. M resumed our pills, nausea stopped, appetite returned and he slept through the night.

So I grow a lot of cultivars that could help him and a couple of others. The West Marin Mystery is his favorite, but I grow others with similar terpene profiles. Royal Kush, for example, is half the lineage of the West Marin Mystery, so it would also work. Some of the new cultivars that I’m growing this year, specifically Cherry Punch and Special Queen 1, are 50/50 plants, and balanced plants like that tend to be less paranoid. Many of them have the key terpene advantage of having more beta caryophyllene than terpinolene, which is where the clown car resides. Everyone in my family has noticed a reduction in anxiety when we ingest cultivars higher in Beta Caryophyllene. 

That’s a long way of saying that we’ll prioritize West Marin Mystery seeds over every other cultivar that I’m growing this year. If there’s more than one female, we’ll probably grow more than one. I will always prioritize the sick people I care for. Secondly, we’ll prioritize the S. Thai starts, because everyone who tried that strain loves it and I’m certain that Mr. M. would also do well on this strain. We want to see if we can break the four percent mark for terpenes, which we almost reached last year with this cultivar. S. Thai was by far the favorite “fun” cultivar we grew among the people we grow for. 

Question Five: “You’ve mentioned in the past that you always have some feminized starts in reserve, in case you run short. But you recently wrote that you’ll go with the regular seeds and if you don’t get enough, you’ll plant more veggies. So you don’t have any extra feminized starts in the cottage this year?”

Busted. Yes, I do have two more feminized sprouts in the cottage, just in case. I have another Royal Kush, and one Apple Crumble. If I end up not having to use them, I will give them away. Or I’ll put them in cloth bags and grow them on my deck. 

Question Six: “When do you top for the first time?”

Six weeks is when I top for the first time. Depending on the size of the plant, or the potential size of the plant, I might top more than once. But I don’t like topping more than that, because eventually, topping will impact flower size and will make for an over-crowded plant. After either one or two tops, we prefer training for increasing our yield. I think topping would be more effective indoors, and training better for outside. Crowded plants outside often develop pathogenic issues.

Question Seven: “When do your plants get their first compost tea?”

After four weeks. The roots are too small and fragile before that point. I also hold off doing anything more than a basic tea until six weeks. That’s when I begin to add guano, or possibly some kind of veg formula, like the Pura Vida Grow formula. A word of caution about adding things to compost teas: I do a lot of work on the soil over winter. Fish gets planted, favas are grown and teas are poured. The microbiology of the soil is alive and humming. Once I start getting into teas during the grow, I don’t get too fancy. I don’t need lots of extra fertilizer for vegetative growing. Don’t want to add more nitrogen than I need, or we’ll possibly get nitrogen burn. I will add loads of phosphorus and potassium when it’s flowering time, but only for a couple of weeks. Most of the teas during the grow are on the simple side: Molasses, humic acid, SEA-90, simple sugars through fresh fruit and other plants reflecting the exact stage of growth in my plants. I also use aromatic plants in my teas, because odor discourages both deer and many insects. So I pick fresh mint, lemon verbena, and lavender. I don’t add a lot of fertilizer once they are in the ground. At this point, less is more. Your grow might need more fertilizer if you haven’t done much soil prep work.

Question Eight: “I know your watering situation is different from other people. Could you explain again about how little you water?”

My situation is unique. I live on the edge of a fairly pristine wilderness. I live in very close proximity to an older buckeye tree. Most buckeyes can live a couple hundred years. This one is over 400 years old. With that older tree and the surrounding forest, I have access to a mycelium network beneath my grow site, beneath the entire property. It explains why things grow so well here. We have our own water supply from a spring that comes out of the ground, with no chemicals or additives, just unique micro-nutrients, and a pH that is between 6.6 and 6.7, which is literally the perfect pH for cannabis.

(I do not take any of this for granted, by the way)

What I have discovered in living here, under these circumstances, is that the fungal network beneath us basically controls everything. Once discovered, we only needed to learn how to grow with this advantage. When dealing with a mycelium network, you mostly want to get out of the way and not do any harm. When I say that I use less water than anyone I know in cannabis, I’m not exaggerating. 

Once my plant roots dive beneath the hardware cloth at the bottom of our beds, and become involved with the mycelium network, I no longer have to water at all.

The last two years, I have not given any more water, other than through a weekly, one quart compost tea for the first four weeks of flowering. We’ve had three consecutive years of over 40 inches of rain, including one year at 52 inches, so the ground has plenty of moisture. But it’s the way the network simply takes over and finishes the plants that blows us away. 

By not watering during the flowering cycle at all, our test scores have massively increased. If you read my blogs, you know about the terpene percentages I got last harvest.

So . . . my watering situation is unique, and I encourage growers to look for situations similar to mine. The fungus is far wiser than I’ll ever be in how to grow.

I’m grateful to be past the two week point for all the starts in the cottage. Those that are going to grow are safely in place and moving forward.

Readers: keep sending in your questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question.

Sexing begins next week. It’s almost time for the sad sack parade of departing male plants.

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Or contact me directly with your idea (good seeds are always welcome–and if I grow them, I will get the flowers tested and share with you the results.
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