Grow Room Consultant
When I started my consultancy in 2022 I didn’t know exactly how it would go. I thought I would be teaching a lot of people how to grow from scratch, and while I do a lot of that, most of what I do is teach people how to properly diagnose and solve their issues or problems they are having with their grows. And honestly that makes perfect sense.
Growing cannabis is not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Here is why I believe that is the case. When I discuss with people who have nothing to do with cannabis how I run a consultancy teaching people how to grow they are surprised that this is a reasonable profession. The reason being maybe they have grown vegetables in their gardens and they think “you plant, you feed and water and you get the fruits of your labor!” Well that’s not how cannabis growing works.
Cannabis in the Wild
If you have ever watched a documentary on people that search for landrace cannabis – meaning cannabis that is growing naturally in the world unaltered by human interaction – it looks more like corn than what you’ll see in a High Times centerfold. The point that I want to make here is that in order to get cannabis to produce what we want – which are female flowers – we have to hack or edit the plant in a certain way to achieve this. So a plant being happy and healthy is not enough. We need to take steps to ensure that whatever steps we need to take to produce as much female flowers as possible.
Sinsemilla
Do you know what Sinsemilla is? It’s a Spanish term that means simply “without seeds.” The process of growing cannabis without seeds starts by engineering plant seeds that do not produce males, known as feminized seeds – which I always recommend – then once you have the female plants growing you have to make sure you are not exposing them to males. This entire process was developed by the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico in the 1980’s. For more on this check out Narcos Mexico on Netflix. So basically the female flowers become larger and larger because they are trying to create as much real estate as possible to catch male pollen. In fact almost all desirable characteristics of the female flowers are designed for pollination and perpetuation of the species. For instance the terpenes attract insects that cause pollination, the bright colors also attract insects (darker hues also help to keep plants warm in colder climates like the Hindu Kush Mountains). The stickiness of the buds allows for pollen to be caught more easily, the list goes on and on.
So you can pretty much attribute a great deal of the methodology to growing cannabis plants for female flower production in a very unnatural way. So what I’m saying is every step of the way we are simultaneously fighting nature to keep the plants from reproducing, but also doubling down on the plants’ abilities to create female anatomy abundantly.
So it’s important that we understand these basic facts before we can even get into problem solving, as most gardening problem solving is much more straight-forward.
A Problem Well Articulated is a Problem Half Solved
When I work with a client – and I’ve mentioned this in my blog post about Why are my Leaves Yellowing – the first thing I do is I ask them everything they are doing in their grow, from the medium they are using, to the lights, to what climate they are in. Often times a client will come to me and say, “I have an ‘x’ deficiency how do I solve it? Well my first question to this question is, well why do you think you have this specific deficiency? And just like when I first started growing often times they have misdiagnosed the problem. In fact understanding the correct levers to pull is really half if not more than half the battle when it comes to problem solving. Having a guide like the one from The Cannabis Grow Bible where there is an illustration of a bunch of leaves with different deficiencies I think actually complicates things. Because a plant can only show you a handful of stress signs but there are an unlimited amount of things you can do to screw up a grow – trust me I’ve made all the mistakes for you. So even those illustrations are flawed. It’s not really possible to have an accurate problem solving “chapter” because problem solving, in order to be successful has to be a process where there is a dialogue. So you may be thinking “I’ll use AI!” Yeah, most of my clients have tried to figure things out using that, good luck, no matter how advanced AI gets, I believe there are just too many variables to think AI can realistically solve grow issues.
So how do you solve your problems?
You have to work with an experienced grower like myself who has made the mistakes you are currently facing and have correctly amended them in the past, so that they know to a certainty how to solve them, and Chat and Claude haven’t grown cannabis before. One Love.
Related Articles:
Beginner Growers Don’t Need More Information – They Need Better Direction (Indoor Cannabis Guide)
How to Prevent Pests in Your Cannabis Grow Before You Even Get Started
Why You should Grow From Seed and Never Buy Clones
The Top 5 Things New Growers Go Too Cheap On (and Regret)
The Top Items New Growers Spend Too Much Money on
