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75 degrees (23.8 Celsius) and 60% humidity.

Those are some perfect numbers. When I look at our garden weather station and I see 75 degrees and 60%, I have to pinch myself and smile. It’s June 2, all my plants are completely adjusted to their beds and they are reaching toward peak growth.

Only a month ago, one of the early feminized starts, Purple Punch, looked like this:

Exactly one month later, she looks like this:

She was being attacked by aphids and the daytime highs were around 52 degrees (11.1 C), not warm enough to grow. 

Then one day, while I contemplated which plant I was going to bring from the cottage to replace Purple Punch, it became 60 degrees (15.5 C). I literally sat there and watched that little plant wake up and connect with the sun. The amount she grew over the next 48 hours convinced us to keep her for the season. It got me thinking about ideal temps for growing, and how to coordinate those with the best time for planting. 

I frequently watched the temperature while my feminized plants suffered in the beds. It remained ungrowable cold. The general belief is that the minimum temperature for cannabis to grow effectively is 65 degrees (18.3 C). 

But this year I noticed that particular minimum effective temperature isn’t necessarily true. My plants seem to perk up at about 60 (15.5 C) degrees.

So I got one of my weather sensors, connected to my online weather station, and set it up under Ró́́́́śe.

I can now follow this sensor online for temperature and humidity. What it has immediately revealed is that once the air temperature is 60 degrees in the garden, about twelve feet above the plants, that means it’s over 65 degrees at soil level and the plants are in full growth mode.

Phase one of this year’s grow is complete. All plants are now growing outside and the cottage is officially closed. Power is off; except for the dehumidifier, which is always on, and for compost teas to be brewed every week. Cannabis teas are getting the full 48 hours to aerate, and then immediately after pouring tea for the cannabis, I use the same bags and make another basic ten gallon tea for my vegetables and flowers. The veggie tea brews for 24 hours. To this point, both cannabis and veggies have the same ingredients. That changes this week. Cannabis will continue getting a basic tea, with nothing special added except for local fruit once it ripens. The veggie tea, however, will start getting some Pura Vida Grow formula this week. I want to give a little boost to my tomato plants.

Introducing Apple Crumble, in the 25 gallon cloth bag.

In addition to the Apple Crumble we placed in a 25 gallon smart pot, we had one more female plant to grow in a cloth bag. The last plant to be grown this year is an AK-47. Of the six seeds remaining from an old stash of AK-47, only one popped open. It was a slow growing plant, too. Not going to be large, she’s going to be diminutive. She will grow and flower as best she can in a small smart pot. We are immediately thinking of this plant as one that will be perfect for bong rips while we trim. We won’t test it, we’ll just consume it while we work.

AK47, for trimming purposes.

This morning, when the air temperature hit 59.7 (15.3 C) degrees, it was 65.5 (18.6 C) at soil level. I think that’s handy to know; especially if you live in cooler growing conditions like us.

As I finish the first phase of the grow and everything moves outside, I turn everything off in the cottage except the dehumidifier. Our electric bill should be significantly reduced. In a couple of weeks, I’ll spend a day completely cleaning out that room, scrubbing, dusting, vacuuming, and mopping in anticipation of harvest. Harvest will begin in September, whenever all the CBG auto flowers arrive from the grower up north. We’ll have a few weeks to dry those before my own plants start to come down in late September and early October.

Before I lock things up for a couple of months, I want to spend a few bittersweet moments reflecting on the grow lights in the cottage that will need replacing before next season. I got these classic tube lights for $700. They cost $2,000 in 2016, but they were not being made anymore, so I got a huge discount. 

I never used these lights for flowering, only to get the plants started, and then I’d take plants outside. They were only used six to seven weeks out of every year. They lasted for ten grows. I get a little emotional when I think about this. Those first years . . . were hard. My wife was in bed, coping with perpetual pain, with no prospects for getting up and active on the horizon. I spent my share of hours in that room, under those lights, staring at each and every start, hoping it could be the one that finally turned this thing around for my wife.

Now, the plants are in the beds at the perfect time of year. There are still a couple more weeks of longer days, and then, the sun almost holds in place for a few more weeks to conclude vegetative growing. Further, I will force the flowering issue a bit earlier, since I started earlier. The goal is for the plants to have a full season of growing, but to also induce into flowering a week or two earlier than they might have on their own. The trigger for this will be turning off the supplemental lighting after July 21. 

This might make for a pretty crowded drying room, if all the plants are ready to harvest within a few days of each other. But I would rather have the onslaught of plants to harvest early than to have any plants linger past the middle of October, into the part of the year with the greatest rise in pathogenic activity. I’ve had November and late October harvests, and where I live, they can be challenging. Even with all the preventative work I do and sprays I apply, mold will find a way to appear the later the grow goes. So we’re hoping to be finished with trimming by the middle to the end of October. And a reminder to all that yes, we wash our plants at harvest to capture any residual mold that we haven’t spotted.

Everything at a grow site is constantly in motion, constantly transitioning to the next phase. As the grower, I have a certain amount of control over these transitional factors, as long as I’m paying attention and remain disciplined.

I am also mindful that the perfect weather conditions I’ve had so far could change, though that doesn’t seem likely this year. Good weather, however, is not guaranteed.

Two years ago, my transplanted plants had to endure 20 straight days without seeing the sun. It was the most discouraging start to a grow I’d ever experienced. All but two plants attempted to flower early. I had to butcher some beautiful plants in order to get them back to veg growing. That was my least favorite grow, and it burnt into me the notion of never taking good weather for granted.

Right now is perfect. I’m in a routine and on a roll. It’s Tuesday, June 3, and I have my weekly IPM spray in a few minutes. Stress training is ongoing.

It’s rinse and repeat for the next few weeks. I’m full of joy that this grow is starting to feel routine. Hope I’m not jinxing it by writing that, but barring some catastrophic surprise, everything is going according to plan. Carry on.

For those wondering what my experiments are this year, we have two that are very interesting.

First, this is the year I’m going to try dry farming a plant. By dry farming, I don’t mean cutting off everything. I’m only cutting off pure water. She will get a weekly tea the size of the blue pitcher until one month into flowering.

I have been hinting at doing this for several years now. I’m already cutting off my plants from water once they show the first signs of flowering. But I want to push that and see how far I can go with it. 

The reason for this particular plant being chosen is because it has already grown beyond the hardware cloth at the bottom of the bed. I can deduce this easily by eyeballs. At her current height, her tap root is obviously beyond the structural limits of the bed and is probably nestled into the mycelium network underneath. I have long opined that I could stop watering very early and simply allow the fungal network to take my plants to harvest. By not watering at all during the flowering phase, I’m already doing that. But now, I want to push this into the vegetative grow period and see how far I can take it.

Why do I want to do this? Because last year, I achieved the highest terpene percentages that I’ve ever grown. My top score was 3.975% terpenes, almost four percent. That was from a plant that didn’t even have a full season to grow. She wasn’t put in a bed until a couple of days before Summer Solstice. She missed all the veg growing weeks before, and yet, she still had almost four percent terpenes.

I had to ask myself, what would that percentage be if she’d had a full season to grow?

And then, once I saw the results, inevitably, I had to wonder what our terpene percentage could reach with the most minimal use of water? If I’m already cutting them off from water for the entire flowering process, the only remaining time is the veg growing period prior to flowering. I can’t do this when they are babies, but once they are mature and I sense their tap roots have found the fungus, how early can I cut them off from water? Is there any additional benefit to doing this earlier than just the flowering period? Is there potential harm to the plant? If the only water this plant gets from now on is wrapped in nutrients, what impact will that have on the flowers?

There’s only one way to find out, and that is to test one plant. This is how I first discovered I could eliminate water from the flowering period. I tried it on one plant. The next year, I tried it on almost half my grow. Last year, it was every plant, and it will be every plant from now on. 

It is possible, depending on the results of this experiment, that I could do an entirely dry cannabis grow in two years. If this year is successful, I’ll experiment with more and different kinds of plants next year, to see if we can go all in on a dry grow.

When I say dry grow, I’m not talking about starving the plants. Right now, my plants are getting about 1 ½ gallons of water a week, in addition to a full quart of fresh compost tea, that is all. They get a little condensation from fog and mist, but the rainy season is over. The plant in bed 15, the Cherry Punch, has been getting water from the start, but she’s now of a height where I don’t think she needs any more water, other than the one quart a week of compost tea.

Cherry Punch in bed 15.

We’ve had three consecutive above normal rain winters, so there is an abundance of moisture in the ground. In addition, there is the fungal network that basically controls everything we grow here.

So stay tuned on this. It has long been my contention that cannabis growers use too much water. I already use less water than anyone I know, and I’m going to push it. Not everyone is capable of growing like I do, I completely understand that, but more of you should be looking into this. If you live close to a forest, you probably have a fungal network close by. It’s certainly worth checking out.

Finally, we’re going to do phase two of growing outside our garden. Last year, I grew two very small plants outside the beds, protected only by lavender from the deer. They were never touched. We’re growing an Apple Crumble there this year. I expect her to be larger and the temptation for deer to be stronger. We’ll see if the lavender protects her again.

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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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