Free Big Weed by Christian Hageseth

more you put your plants on view. All American “experts” on marijuana cultivation were outlaws before the state laws started to change, and they mostly grew indoors.
    I wasn’t married to the idea of growing my precious harvest in a giant cement box, but all the current wisdom on the subject said this was the only way to go. So I stood by and started writing checks as Adam went to work, subdividing a room within the warehouse into four smaller spaces each with four 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium lights and a wall-mounted air conditioner in each room.
    I was surprised, maybe even shocked, to see what a resource-heavy crop indoor-grown marijuana really was. One requirement for plant growth quickly demanded another. First you start with the given that plants need light. So you install powerful lamps that deliver 3,500 foot-candles of light, which sometimes feels like enough light to illuminate every business on the average American Main Street. But powerful grow lamps produce not only light but also heat. Too much heat is bad because it starts to raise the temperature of your grow room. As plants heat up, they transpire, releasing moisture from the minuscule openings in their leaves called stomata. Now your grow room is both too hot and too humid, which marijuana plants don’t like. To reduce the temperature and dry up the air, youinstall air conditioners, which suck that much more power from your local grid.
    One power-suck inevitably leads to another power-suck.
    Growing marijuana this way is like driving your grandpa’s gas-guzzling Chevy Bel Air from the 1950s. It’s a sweet ride, but you’re paying through the nose to get anywhere.
    But there was an upside. If we calibrated all these factors just right, we could manipulate the plants to grow exceedingly well. Instead of starting every plant from seed, we could start a “mother” plant and take cuttings from that plant. When we dipped each cutting in a rooting hormone and stuck it in some growing medium, each cutting would sprout roots and grow into healthy clones of the mother plant. Clones saved us time; we didn’t have to wait to grow from seed. From clone to harvest was still a good thirteen weeks, but we could stagger our crops in such a way that every few weeks or so we were harvesting something.
    It was a humbling experience for me, seeing those first few plants poke their heads out of the soil and reach toward the lights. Seed-grown or clone, plants grown in this manner were utterly dependent on the care of humans for their survival, but they stubbornly stuck to their own clock. They would not be rushed.
    That was a lesson I had to learn, because so much of my life had been about trying to do things quickly. In college, I could cram for exams if I needed to. Stay up all night reviewing the notes I’d taken all semester in class, walk into the exam room at 8:30 the next morning, regurgitate everything onto paper—and ace the test. In my business life, I could cram for a presentation if needed. I’d walk into a room and nail the meeting because I had stuffed every factoid needed into my skull, and I could do it quickly.
    Humans are good at cramming. Good at speeding things up. Forcing things to happen ahead of schedule to hit some arbitrary target. Americans, in particular, are experts at this.
    But plants don’t cram. Within certain parameters, they stick to the clock nature has imprinted on their genes. Like it or not, bro—the plant’s schedule was its own, and nothing we could do would speed it up.
    But there were things we could do to shape them, nurture them, nudge them to do what we wanted them to do. Every day I’d go to the grow to watch Adam work. If he wasn’t building a lamp bracket or fixing some piece of equipment that had gone on the fritz, he liked to talk to the plants and stroke them as he pruned off their excess leaves. By pruning, he was not-so-subtly instructing the plant to