Article - Trichome Trio - Soma, Cervantes, Kushman

[align=center]Trichome Trio
The cannabis cup cultivation counsel

Article Taken From: High Times (April 2002)
Written By: Soma â?? Jorge Cervantes â?? Kyle Kushman[/align]

Soma

I started my seed bank here in Holland six years ago. In the six-plus years Iâ??ve been here, Iâ??ve learned a lot more about cannabis than I knew before. Iâ??m finding more freedom in this country than any other place on Planet Earth. Every day I wake up and in my mind and in my heart, I kiss the ground of this country.

This planet right now is kicking out a vibe of fear and chaos stronger than Iâ??ve ever seen, and that vibration is what takes the planet down sooner or later. I prefer the less-stressful feeling that cannabis gives you. Cannabis is the sacrament of my way of living. If you look up the work sacrament, it means â??sacred substance.â? â??Sacredâ? means â??not to be violated.â? You donâ??t violate sacred stuff, and cannabis is one of the sacred plants of Planet Earth.

If you ever want to try any of my weed and you canâ??t get a hold of me, go to de Dampkring coffee-shop, because thatâ??s where most of my genetics go. They make a point of trying to sell organically grown cannabis. Iâ??d love to see more coffee-shops doing that, so when people try to buy their products they know it is not going to have Malathion, or be dipped in some heavy-duty chemical poison so it never has bugs.

For insect control, I use ladybugs and neem oil. Neem oil is cheep, and itâ??s totally safe. You can spray it on your skin, on your hair, drink it, spray it on the ladybugs and they drink it. Neem oil is kind of like coconut oilâ??when itâ??s cold its solid, when itâ??s warmed itâ??s liquid. You have to mix the neem oil with lukewarm water so it melts down, then you can add a little cold water so it stays in a homogenized state. Then shake it up in a pressure sprayer. Spray 2/3 under the leaves, 1/3 over the top, twice a week. I do it into my third week of flowering. When hairs start to really come out, I spray 90% under the leaves. About that time, I open a box of 500 ladybugs. If youâ??ve done right with the neem oil, you wonâ??t see any bugs except the ladybugs.

As far as food goes, I use bat guano and seabird guano for the main parts of flowering. Those ingredients are really the only things you need if you want crystally, high-THC, fantastic buds. You donâ??t need all the laboratory-made phosphorus and potassium.

I like watering from the top using kelp, brown and black seaweed. Cannabis plants just love seaweedâ??so do humans. In the vegging state I water from the top, but also from the bottom. Within about 10 minutes, those moisture levels meet and get equalized. Then I wait until it gets 80% dry before I water again. Plants really hate to get over-watered. I keep the soil at a temp of 78*F. Itâ??s really important for soil to be warm when the lights are off. Roots cannot grow in cold environments; they just take a vacation. If your room is too cold when the lights are off, you can really stunt your plants and even cause hermaphrodites.

I grow in a bed, not in pots, to get an even canopy. I put 25 plants in each bed. The organic coil is about 25cm deep, and the roots not only get a chance to go down, but they go sideways, they have so much space. But in that bed, there are always a few plants that try to hog all the light. You can take the young branches that are getting too tall and just roll them between your fingers until you hear almost like a chiropractic sound, you feel it in your fingers too. Then you just bend it over like an elbow.

By the next day, itâ??s already growing back, and a week later it has a really strong elbow. The stress makes it stronger. (Link to an article about creating â??elbowsâ? in your plants.) In the meantime, all the plants that werenâ??t quite tall enough get a chance to catch up. Plants are genetically imprinted with the courage to deal with stress and to deal with hard times and unfavorable conditions. Itâ??s amazing what these plants do.

Jorge Cervantes

My whole program is about growing after 9/11. Itâ??s a whole different trip. I think the borders are a lot more closed than they used to be. You donâ??t see nearly as much Canadian pot coming down anymore. So what weâ??re going to have to do is overgrow the government ourselves. We have no other choice. That means weâ??re going to have to grow at home.

getting caught. A few things are going our way. The Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot use thermal-imaging devices to secure a search warrant against us. However, that doesnâ??t mean they wonâ??t use them to detect plants inside the house.

The main thing you want to do is get a light and start growing. Almost every country is overtaking the U.S. as far as growing goes. Indoor and outdoor growing is very big in Holland, Germany, France, and Spain. Switzerland is ready to legalize marijuana for cultivation and commercial selling. IT will be the new marijuana Mecca when it does.

I can start to say a little about hydroponics. This is basically growing without soil, or with a soil-less mix. All that means is the soil-less mix is inert, it doesnâ??t react with anything, so thereâ??s no biological activity going on in the substrate or the soil. So virtually anything without biological activity is hydroponics, whether you water it by hand or dose it automatically with nutrient solution. From what I see, a lot of people waste so much time dinking around and playing with hydroponics that they forget how to grow plants. They donâ??t pay enough attention to the plants, which is where you should take your main cue from.

To me a decent garden, depending on the variety youâ??re growing, should be able to produce Â½ gram every month for every watt of electricity used. That means if you have a 1000-watt lamp, you should be able to produce 500 grams every month. A pound is 454 grams, so thatâ??s a little more that a pound for every 100-watt lamp. If youâ??re not, then thereâ??s no reason to start anything new, because you need to get to a benchmark.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed a guy in Switzerland and he was producing twice that much for every 1000-watt lamp he produced 1000 grams, a kilo, 2.2 pounds every month. He was growing hydorponically in five-liter buckets, equal to about two-gallon buckets. The main thing he did was he paid attention to how fast the plant was growing, and he kept it growing incredibly fast all the time. Rather than look for technological answers to simple problems, he listened to the plants. Heâ??d just look at the plants and see the roots were not getting enough oxygen, and he would take the plants out of the container.

In B.C., Canada, I visited a huge warehouse with 80 1000-watt lamps. These people spent all kinds of money on a big aeroponics system, but they didnâ??t know how to run it. Everything looked good for a couple of weeks, the roots grew big, but the plants never got that big. They were only about a foot tall and produced miserably, about 1/10 a gram per watt. Way low. The main reason was they didnâ??t know how to grow. I advised them quickly to get rid of all this aeroponics stuff and get grow bags, fill emâ?? up with peat-lite special or any kind of soil-less mixâ??Fisonâ??s, Jiffy has one as well. Just get a coarse mix and grow in that until you get some skill, then worry about a more heavy-duty system.

My favorite hydro system uses three-gallon buckets. You water them from the top via a reservoir with a pump. You water heavily once a day, maybe twice, then thatâ??s it. You can look at the plants, touch them, see everything, If you like, you can water each plant individually you can move them as necessary. If you have a sick plant, you donâ??t have to fix it, just throw it out. I have seen a lot of people wasting time with a sick plant for months on end.

The sheer volume of Swiss harvests creates some unique predicaments. Imagine youâ??ve got 14 tons and you have to get it dry before it rots, and youâ??re in a cold climate and you do not have a place to hang it. These guys cut it in pieces 6-8 inches long, then they put it into a big bin and let it rot for two days. This gets rid of the chlorophyll real quick. Once thatâ??s gone, itâ??s quick and easy to dry. You usually donâ??t run into drying problems that the Swiss have.

Think about how many clones it takes to fill a six-acre field. These growers prefer clones because they wonâ??t get as big as plants from seed. This makes tem easier to hide. Some people have trouble with cloning. The variables are temperature and humidity. Keep it pretty moist the first couple of days, keep the humidity up around 95%+, right around 98% for the first couple days, and keep the soil warmer than the ambient air temperature around it. Your chances of striking roots go up like by 1000% if you use a rooting hormone. Keep the root temperature up there around 76*F, air temperature 72*F, and you wonâ??t have any trouble.

The main thing to remember about mother plants is to never bring them down to 12 hours light and back to 18 hours light, because theyâ??ll lose their potency. If you want to have a female for a mother, you always keep it lit 18 hours or more. If it flowers and then it goes back to 18-hour time, it will lose potency, or clones will lose potency. Some people keep their mother plant for a year, some for six months, some for several years. Itâ??s good idea to replace the genetics once in a while. The main thing is the light and stress. If you stress the mother plant you can have degenerative problems.

Kyle Kushman

Everybody should be able to grow their own marijuana. The way to go is to grow for your own personal use and not tell anybody. Keep it to yourself. You donâ??t tell your friends everything you do in the bedroom, so donâ??t tell them what you do in the garden.

Iâ??m talking about growing a few plants to free you guys from having to go out on the streets down to the dark side of town when your dealer runs out. I know friends that have gone down to Philly and got shot buying a dime bag. I praise you guys that have the courage to go out there and do the large grows. I did it myself once, but Iâ??ll never do it again. I commend you guys, we all do, and we get to smoke the fruits of your labor. But weâ??re talking about personal growing and how easy it is.

Iâ??d like to run a few indoor tips past you. First concerns mother plants. Itâ??s important to remember, if youâ??ve got the mamas going, you donâ??t want to feed them too much. If youâ??re gonna keep a plant alive for three or four years, it becomes more like a houseplant than a pot plant. So you donâ??t want to over-feed your mothers. A clone is always going to be slightly inferior to a plant from seed. It doesnâ??t have the same level of resistance to stress and disease.

If youâ??re growing for yourself, maximizing space is essential. I knew a guy who grew multi-budded plants and trained them with wire, rather than removing the extra vegetation. Heâ??d gone through several harvests, but wasnâ??t happy with the yield he was getting. I told him that what he had to do was fill the space up. You have to use all the available root spaceâ??in other words, get a bigger pot.

Then you want to manipulate the plants. Bend one branch this way, the next the other way. Itâ??s like a bonsai technique. This is a really good way to fill up your garden with vegetation, without topping or pruning or wasting time waiting for anything to grow back. Youâ??re just directing all the vegetation to the empty spots in the garden. Use the wires to wrap the branches and hold them in place. The pot should use the whole floor space, and the plant should use the whole growing space. This allows you to minimize the vertical height, and that allows you to keep the light lower.

Watch out for light poisoning. I once had a friend who used a lot of timers, and the timers had lights in the dials. This was why his plants grew to five feet tall without flowering. He learned to cover the lighted dials with duct tape.

I got a hold of this digital timer that allows you to fool with the 24 hour light cycle. You simply tell this timer how many hours on, then how many hours off. Thereâ??s two ways you can go with this. You can shorten the growth period, or you can increase the number of hours theyâ??re getting. You always have to give them 12 hours of light during flowering, which you canâ??t do yourself because youâ??d have to get up at a different time every day, you plug in this timer and program it so after their dark cycle you give them16 hours of continuous light. The plant says hey, itâ??s a sunny day, I can grow even longer today. To them itâ??s like it just took a little longer for the night to come. Then they get their 12 hours of darkness. They build up the correct levels of chemicals inside for them to continue flowering. This makes it so your lights only turn off six times each week instead of seven. This actually increases the time it take until harvest, but all that time is flowering and growth time. Thereâ??s no downtime.

Letâ??s say youâ??re in a place and your landlord says you have to get out, but you need another 45 days until youâ??re done. What you can do then is shorten their day cycle after you get a good bud-set and after a normal night cycle. Then u set the next day cycle for six hours of light instead of 12. They grow a little slower, but they grow. Then they get their 12 hours of night and they continue to flower. This shortens the time till harvest, so you can harvest an eight-week plant in six weeks and still have mature buds, because they still got their 45 nights of darkness.

There are as many ways to grow as there are people who do it. There are only a few rules, about water, temperature, and light. You want to start out traditional, but after a few years you find thereâ??s a lot of different ways you can go with it. Youâ??re always exploring new territory.