Part of this is due to information. In the past, growers didn't admit what they did, much less discuss their techniques. Now they have written dozens of books and penned a steady stream of articles in print and online. They even teach classes at pot trade schools like Oaksterdam University in Oakland.
Wally, in-house grower for a warehouse dispensary in Long Beach, spent years honing his skills on the underground market after realizing pot helped tamp down the tics he suffered from Tourette's syndrome. A 36-year-old native of Santa Cruz, he first worked trimming the marijuana harvest for older hippies.
"I learned everything about growing, and I had a million questions and they were happy to share," he said. "So many little tricks: They would run molasses in the last weeks of flowering to have sweeter buds. Or they went into caves in Santa Cruz to get bat guano and make it into a tea to put in the soil."
He moved to Long Beach in college, and grew indoors wherever he lived. He learned by trial and error, inadvertently burning leaves when lights were too hot, shocking the plants with abrupt changes of nutrients or temperature, watching mold appear in poor ventilation, and fighting aphids and spider mites when he wasn't vigilant about cleanliness.
Over the years, Wally, which is a nickname, grew to recognize the myriad subtle and changing needs of the herb. He could read the yellowing or wilting or drying of the leaves as too much of this or too little of that. He balanced nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium-magnesium, manganese, silica, molybdenum, bone meal, blood meal and dolomite — manipulating the ratios throughout the plant cycle. He learned to keep up the carbon dioxide during the flowering stage but cut it down in the last two weeks to keep the tight buds from blowing out like popcorn. Darkening in the leaf veins told him the plant was "begging for Epsom salts."
He grew mostly for himself, while working at Bally Total Fitness. Then one day, he went to the warehouse dispensary with a couple of racks of clones he grew — plant cuttings that root and take life as new plants, which customers buy to grow at home. The owners were impressed by his skills and offered him a full-time job setting up their in-house grow operation.
The first three of seven grow rooms are expected to be operational in two weeks.
Much is riding on Wally's expertise. The owners say they have invested $400,000 in the build-out so far, including $90,000 in air conditioning. They paid $15,000 in fees to be one of 18 dispensaries permitted by the city. On the three rooms, they estimate they'll spend $5,000 on nutrients every six to eight weeks, and $10,000 in electricity every month.
If Wally succeeds, he should produce up to 80 pounds of medical marijuana every three or four months, retailing at $2,500 or $4,000 per pound, compared with $1,000 to $2,000 for outdoor-grown.
::
In San Francisco, the owner of TreeTown Seeds, a thirty-something man named Nova, breeds his own new strains. He wears a cap with the title "Master Breeder."
"You have to be a master grower before you can breed," he explained recently at a coffee shop in San Francisco. "Unless you can grow it perfectly, you won't know the genetic potential of a plant."
Nova sells his seeds and marijuana bud to the top-of-the-line dispensary, Harborside Health Center, in Oakland.
His mind is an encyclopedia of marijuana. He spends most of every day in isolation with his plants, observing and smoking. He conjures Mendel charts in his head to see which strains might be bred together to make a better new one.
"I put everything into this," he said. "When you're a grower, you're in a cave mostly. I'm like a monk."
He takes a minimalist approach to growing. If he has a mite problem, he uses predator mites to get rid of them, not pesticides. He doesn't put extra carbon dioxide in the room, as do many growers. And he tapers down the fertilizer a month before harvest to flush the buds clean.
"When you burn something and it crackles and sparks, those are signs there is too much nitrogen and phosphorous locked in," he said. "It tastes horrible and burns your lungs."
He said the rise of medical marijuana in recent years has allowed him to feel like he has a legitimate place in society, even if he still has to lie low to avoid federal law enforcement, which considers all marijuana possession illegal. For many years, he felt like a solo musician playing for himself.
"Now," he said, "it's like I'm playing in a band and we have a venue."
Big Wes has a much bigger band and venue. He has three investors and nine full-time employees. He pays more than 20 part-time trimmers to keep up with a near continuous harvest.
He delivers his product to more than 50 dispensaries from San Jose to Sonoma County.
He is nothing like the old-school hippie grower. He commutes to Oakland from out of state and, with his crew cut and athletic build, would be pegged as a "narc" at a pot convention if narcs didn't even bother trying to blend in. He voted Republican until a few years ago and owns a company that deals in the realm of corporate seminars. When the economy kneecapped that business, he decided to turn his side gig of growing marijuana into a real business and set up shop in California.
"We're trying to professionalize and perfect this business as much as we can," he said. "We're creating standards and procedures. If you're a dispensary, I can now provide medicine every week."
He says he is in full compliance with California and Alameda County medical marijuana laws, although the laws on cultivating are murky.
Unlike many growers, Big Wes' three full-time "reps" don't show up at dispensaries in T-shirts with backpacks full of weed. Instead, like their pharmaceutical counterparts, they dress in business-casual and carry briefcases with sample jars of the product, along with lab results showing it contains no molds, insect parts or pesticides. They take the rare precaution of having dispensaries sign paperwork, he says, so they can show they're in compliance with California law.
Part of Big Wes' challenge is to bring his output to about 11/2 pounds of bud every 14 weeks under each of his 300-plus lamps, so that he can still pay his $35,000 monthly electric bill, among other costs, as more growers enter the market and the price of marijuana falls. It's not an easy business, he says. A friend of his thought it would be, investing $2 million in lights and equipment, only to give up after a series of subpar grows.
And in Northern California, the high price and environmental cost of indoor marijuana have produced a small backlash, with some consumers now preferring North Coast sun-grown pot.
But by perfecting his delivery efficiency and sales technique, Wes is building something he suspects might be more valuable than the marijuana itself in the future: his distribution network.
"If I could have the largest distribution of the largest cash crop in the world's eighth-largest economy, what would that be worth?"
Wally, in-house grower for a warehouse dispensary in Long Beach, spent years honing his skills on the underground market after realizing pot helped tamp down the tics he suffered from Tourette's syndrome. A 36-year-old native of Santa Cruz, he first worked trimming the marijuana harvest for older hippies.
"I learned everything about growing, and I had a million questions and they were happy to share," he said. "So many little tricks: They would run molasses in the last weeks of flowering to have sweeter buds. Or they went into caves in Santa Cruz to get bat guano and make it into a tea to put in the soil."
He moved to Long Beach in college, and grew indoors wherever he lived. He learned by trial and error, inadvertently burning leaves when lights were too hot, shocking the plants with abrupt changes of nutrients or temperature, watching mold appear in poor ventilation, and fighting aphids and spider mites when he wasn't vigilant about cleanliness.
Over the years, Wally, which is a nickname, grew to recognize the myriad subtle and changing needs of the herb. He could read the yellowing or wilting or drying of the leaves as too much of this or too little of that. He balanced nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium-magnesium, manganese, silica, molybdenum, bone meal, blood meal and dolomite — manipulating the ratios throughout the plant cycle. He learned to keep up the carbon dioxide during the flowering stage but cut it down in the last two weeks to keep the tight buds from blowing out like popcorn. Darkening in the leaf veins told him the plant was "begging for Epsom salts."
He grew mostly for himself, while working at Bally Total Fitness. Then one day, he went to the warehouse dispensary with a couple of racks of clones he grew — plant cuttings that root and take life as new plants, which customers buy to grow at home. The owners were impressed by his skills and offered him a full-time job setting up their in-house grow operation.
The first three of seven grow rooms are expected to be operational in two weeks.
Much is riding on Wally's expertise. The owners say they have invested $400,000 in the build-out so far, including $90,000 in air conditioning. They paid $15,000 in fees to be one of 18 dispensaries permitted by the city. On the three rooms, they estimate they'll spend $5,000 on nutrients every six to eight weeks, and $10,000 in electricity every month.
If Wally succeeds, he should produce up to 80 pounds of medical marijuana every three or four months, retailing at $2,500 or $4,000 per pound, compared with $1,000 to $2,000 for outdoor-grown.
::
In San Francisco, the owner of TreeTown Seeds, a thirty-something man named Nova, breeds his own new strains. He wears a cap with the title "Master Breeder."
"You have to be a master grower before you can breed," he explained recently at a coffee shop in San Francisco. "Unless you can grow it perfectly, you won't know the genetic potential of a plant."
Nova sells his seeds and marijuana bud to the top-of-the-line dispensary, Harborside Health Center, in Oakland.
His mind is an encyclopedia of marijuana. He spends most of every day in isolation with his plants, observing and smoking. He conjures Mendel charts in his head to see which strains might be bred together to make a better new one.
"I put everything into this," he said. "When you're a grower, you're in a cave mostly. I'm like a monk."
He takes a minimalist approach to growing. If he has a mite problem, he uses predator mites to get rid of them, not pesticides. He doesn't put extra carbon dioxide in the room, as do many growers. And he tapers down the fertilizer a month before harvest to flush the buds clean.
"When you burn something and it crackles and sparks, those are signs there is too much nitrogen and phosphorous locked in," he said. "It tastes horrible and burns your lungs."
He said the rise of medical marijuana in recent years has allowed him to feel like he has a legitimate place in society, even if he still has to lie low to avoid federal law enforcement, which considers all marijuana possession illegal. For many years, he felt like a solo musician playing for himself.
"Now," he said, "it's like I'm playing in a band and we have a venue."
Big Wes has a much bigger band and venue. He has three investors and nine full-time employees. He pays more than 20 part-time trimmers to keep up with a near continuous harvest.
He delivers his product to more than 50 dispensaries from San Jose to Sonoma County.
He is nothing like the old-school hippie grower. He commutes to Oakland from out of state and, with his crew cut and athletic build, would be pegged as a "narc" at a pot convention if narcs didn't even bother trying to blend in. He voted Republican until a few years ago and owns a company that deals in the realm of corporate seminars. When the economy kneecapped that business, he decided to turn his side gig of growing marijuana into a real business and set up shop in California.
"We're trying to professionalize and perfect this business as much as we can," he said. "We're creating standards and procedures. If you're a dispensary, I can now provide medicine every week."
He says he is in full compliance with California and Alameda County medical marijuana laws, although the laws on cultivating are murky.
Unlike many growers, Big Wes' three full-time "reps" don't show up at dispensaries in T-shirts with backpacks full of weed. Instead, like their pharmaceutical counterparts, they dress in business-casual and carry briefcases with sample jars of the product, along with lab results showing it contains no molds, insect parts or pesticides. They take the rare precaution of having dispensaries sign paperwork, he says, so they can show they're in compliance with California law.
Part of Big Wes' challenge is to bring his output to about 11/2 pounds of bud every 14 weeks under each of his 300-plus lamps, so that he can still pay his $35,000 monthly electric bill, among other costs, as more growers enter the market and the price of marijuana falls. It's not an easy business, he says. A friend of his thought it would be, investing $2 million in lights and equipment, only to give up after a series of subpar grows.
And in Northern California, the high price and environmental cost of indoor marijuana have produced a small backlash, with some consumers now preferring North Coast sun-grown pot.
But by perfecting his delivery efficiency and sales technique, Wes is building something he suspects might be more valuable than the marijuana itself in the future: his distribution network.
"If I could have the largest distribution of the largest cash crop in the world's eighth-largest economy, what would that be worth?"
Comment