The Master Plan...

My second grow room design, made it all from 8x6 ft sheets of white peg board, 3/4 inch PVC and a buttload of zip ties...it was actually pretty great.

So I think its time for a document that ties all the bits of this together to paint the big picture. Its been a chicken-or-the-egg process I know because I can't explain the overall process w/o the reader knowing how the individual bits work, and explaining how they all work in isolation leaves the reader with only half an answer w/o knowing why the design is as it is and how all the different parts work as a whole. This document is meant to satisfy that.

I still must explain a few inter-connected strategies though and will do the best I can. Little of what I present here is new; however it does represent what I think of as best of breed techniques for the disabled grower of cannabis for medicine.

The system as described here had the following design goals:

• Had to produce at least 1/4 of a pound of high-quality cannabis per month using no more than the usual allotment of plants in each state.
• Had to be usable by the complete novice.
• Had to be affordable for anyone on Social Security. IOW cheap.
• All parts had to be available in any part of the country either through Amazon or local retailer such as Lowes, Home Depot, KMart, Walmart, etc.
• The system had to work with a minimum of work and management on the part of the patient. Disabled people have less to work with energy-wise, or it might be focus or it might be eye-hand coordination. It doesn't matter. If there is an easier to use system available, I have not seen its like.
• The system had to be flexible to work with any of the common mediums, including hydroponics and soil-based solutions. There are as many opinions as to what is best as there are pot growers. The system doesn't care which is as it should be.
• Another way the system helps the disabled is, once a seed is placed in a special grow container, the roots or tender parts of the plant are never touched again for the life of the plant, regardless of how many transplants you do or what type of grow medium you use. This is beyond important because I can't tell you how many times I have ripped roots on tender young plants due to crappy eye-sight, inability to focus mentally or control my limbs (ataxia I think its called). System gets around all that with ease. 
• Where possible, I tried to "science the shit out of it", to borrow a phrase from The Martian. I figured the less the system was "art" and more a science or repeatable process, the higher the odds were the grower would be a success. It is up to the reader to decide how close I came.

First, some theory and conceptual stuff. Spark a fat one if you have it available...

VERY generalized cannabis plant life cycle:
Most strains of cannabis:

1. Takes a month of growth to get from seed to "pre-teen", where pre-teen is defined as there are at least four sets of real leaves going, not a lot of branching yet.
2. Takes about another month of vegging to get to where the plant is big/robust enough to reach maturity properly.
3. Cannabis is photo-sensitive. What that means is, for a vegging plant to start to show sex and bud (the part you want), it needs to think that its now "fall" and should start to think about propagation. This process is also known as "flowering". So by setting the plant in the bloom tent, where the lights are set to be on 12 hours a day and off (TOTALLY dark) 12 hours per day, it fools the plant into thinking its October or so if it were growing with a natural sun. This is the light-cycle the plant will remain in for the rest of its life.
4. On the average, cannabis takes about 6-9 weeks from the date the flowering is triggered to full maturity. This is where knowing your strain will help.
5. If a strain lists (say) six weeks for a flowering period, that actually puts you in the middle of the harvesting window. That window is actually a week or so on either side. Regardless of strain, the effective medicine in cannabis becomes active about a week before the suggested harvest date happens. The medicine at this point will produce a "spacier", more cerebral effect when ingested. By waiting for a week afterwards, the medicine will have a less cerebral but more sedating effect. The suggested harvest date puts the cannabis right about in the middle. Thus you can not only pick the strain thats right for you but also, you can harvest at the peak of perfection (again, for you), something you never can get at a dispensary.
6. Clones cut about a month off the process, skipping the whole "seed to tween" step.

I am going to describe an application of a technique called a "continuous grow" or "continuous harvest" where you establish two light-controlled areas, one for vegging and one for blooming. The lights in veg are 18/6 and the bloom lights are on a cycle of 12/12. You start four plants in your veg tent and grow them until they are "teens" or about 18 inches tall, getting some nice bushing to them. You move one from veg to bloom where the light and nutrients trigger blooming. When you do this, you replace that plant in veg with a new seedling.

Three weeks later, you take another plant from veg and start it in bloom with the first one. The first should be starting to get serious about flowering by now. Again, when you move a plant from veg, you replace it with a seedling.

Three weeks later, the process repeats, a plant goes from veg to bloom and a seedling takes its place in veg.

Three weeks later, you do it again BUT this time, you take the first plant out of bloom and harvest the cannabis on it. If done properly, you should yield at least a quarter of a pound of high-quality cannabis when dried.

So now you are at the "lather, rinse, repeat" stage; every three weeks, one plant is harvested, one is moved from veg to bloom to replace it, and a seedling replaces the one from veg. Using this method will yield the quarter pound every three weeks forever and if you become adept at cloning, this system can perpetual itself forever. Even with seeds though its highly and cheaply sustainable.  Also, aside from a bit of odd cleanup, the system largely runs itself once you get things rolling and you will find you will have 2-4 very busy days between three-week stretches of almost nothing. And your medicine chest is always filled while staying within most states medical marijuana plant allotment.

This will ensure you the patient have enough medicine such that you never have to pay for it unless you want to.

OK so now you know what the big plan is, how can I, the disabled dementia patient, hope to pull this off?

First, I wish to state for the record there is no one perfect or correct way to grow cannabis. There is the right way for your needs, there is the right way for the laws in your locality, there is a right way for your financial and growing ability but there is no one "True Way" to grow. Anyone who claims otherwise is blowing smoke up your ass.

What I present here is what I consider the best way for me to grow my own medicine, even as the dementia and Parkinsons-like features of the disease make themselves known. It only makes sense then that there are features designed into this system to account for those deficiencies. Is this a perfect solution? Of course not; version 1.0 of anything is just a step towards a more functional version of anything.  It is my hope that some thinking disabled folks will take these strategies, adapt them to their needs, and then pass on what they have figured out. For what its worth, this is the core belief behind open source software like Linux as well.

I was taught by a master in Northern California, an extremely understanding dude that lead me from my first shaky "never grown anything but older" steps to where I am now, fairly competent. His advice was always the smart advice containing my enthusiasm for too much new/advanced stuff too fast...back then I had no diagnosis so had no idea what the damage was going to be or how fast it would happen..but I had been tracking the mental break-down process (as I saw it then) for some time and had some pretty solid ideas about needing to absorb as much grow-knowledge and more importantly, experience as I could as soon as I could. I shared these concerns with my mentor and after my first official "crop" was complete (he had me do it extremely old-school) he has worked with me to develop and test out lots of things he would not normally touch. I have so much to thank him for that I know I never will adequately.

So during this period of my first 2-3 crops I put everything I had mentally into gaining real-world experience with as many different growing methods as I could, so I could know from first-hand experience what will work for me and what would not. I did soil, hydro (ebb/flow, deep water culture, etc), aeroponics, fog-ponics (yes you read that right, made a grow container that kept the roots surrounded in a fog of nutrients, was kinda cool), indoor and outdoor growing, seed propagation, plant cloning, even tissue culture propagation. I got experienced at making my own hashish, my own BHO wax, my own pen cartridges, my own infused coconut oil for making edibles and more.

Oh and for all these things, I not only built all of my own equipment but I also tried several popular commercial grow systems like Autopots, Octopot, etc and then reverse-engineered what made each commercial thing worth the price tag, finding common ways of producing the same result/effects on the cheap.

I took what I learned from all this and came up with a simple system made from parts you can get from any local store (for cheap) or Amazon.com for still pretty cheap. While I do live in a totally legal state (Nevada) I still recall what life was like living in other places that are not so enlightened; all of the items you need are common multi-purpose items for the common home garden or home office so even if you live in such a place you can get all this stuff and not raise eye-brows.

Further, one reason I made sure something like Amazon is a solid fallback is that many of the disabled simply cannot get out of the house to go browsing in the local garden store or whatever; online purchasing is their main form of commerce and I am here to tell you every item you need can be gotten online and delivered to your door. If you can get out, great; if not you are covered.

As my "crops" moved along I realized I had two main areas I was consistently screwing up my plants:

1. Handling of the roots: at germination or any of the transplants a plant goes through I found my decaying motor skills (not to mention eye-sight) were resulting in roots getting damaged, ripped in half, etc, invariably resulting in death of the plant. 
2. Dementia means different things to different people but for just about every one of us, dodgy memory is a real problem and forgetting to water/feed your plants is a sure way to take out a whole crop in a single shot. And with daily feeding comes daily remembering to measure out the right amounts of nutrients, etc. Mis-mixing your nutrients is another sure-fire way to waste your crop overnight.

I figured if I could reduce or eliminate the threat of those two things, my grows would continue to thrive long after I would normally be unable to do so. And that translates directly into Jeff getting the only meds that helps the dementia and Parkinsons side of this.

Mission 1: Protect the Roots!

To protect the roots I developed two things that work together: The Seed Starter and the To Go Cup...things. The Seed Starter is a germinator for cannabis seeds, a key part of which is that once you place a seed in a "shell" in the germinator you never again touch the roots or anything tender that you don't want to. This keeps the root-tail safest when its at its tenderest. When used with the next bit, you can see how the roots are kept safe for life.

The To Go Cup thing is so multi-use that it might make sense to explain the why before the what. So I knew I had to keep the roots safe through transplants AND I knew I had a need (due to the fluid nature of the continuous harvest) to be able to move the plants from one environment to another (and potentially, another) while keeping the roots safe from me and the environment. You see there is one other danger to roots having nothing to do with dementia or other disability. The roots are the most sensitive parts on the plant and react very quickly to abrupt changes in environment. What this means is if you take a rooted plant from a nice, safe environment with pH-balanced mediums and a specific nutrient strength, not to mention a specific temperature (roots are VERY touchy about temperature changes), and you do a traditional transplant, carefully rinsing the roots and carefully planting it/them in the new medium/environment, the roots are suddenly faced with new (say veg to bloom) nutrients, perhaps the pH is off/different, the medium could be different (going hydro to soil), the temperature can and likely will be different as well. This all adds up. Too much and your plant will go into shock. This sometimes stunts the plant, sometimes it kills the plant, sometimes it causes a sex-change of sorts. None of these are good things.

So to deal with all that, I figured out a way to use these plastic food-safe 32-ounce to go cups for soup, got them bulk off of Amazon. The page I wrote will explain the workings of it but for this conversation, once the germinated seed is placed in this container, that container will represent effectively a "mobile home" for the plant roots. What that means is for about half the life of the plant, it will have its root system pretty much contained within the cup which will also house medium that the plant is comfortable in. When times comes for transplant, the cup is placed in a hole dug for the plant, the "cover" is removed from the cup and the plant and root system go into the hole, complete with an insulating layer of medium. This gives the roots a much better chance to acclimate to the new environment plus you never have to touch the roots.

Read the pages on these two things if this is still unclear; going forward it will be assumed this is understood material.

At this point I had my root problems taken care of but still needed to solve my bigger issue, how to run a semi-successful grow with an incrementally worsening mind. I had done straight hydro grows (classic DWC in 5-gallon buckets), soil grows (my first one, just dirt in pots), watered daily, sometimes twice a day. With the hydro, I was taking pH samples, temperature readings, PPM measurements etc from each bucket. Daily. Topping each off with a specially-mixed bucket of nutrients to keep the mix right, etc. In both cases an insane amount of work and mental focus required, every single day. If I fell ill for a week, usually would lose plants with either system. Both systems worked, both had serious drawbacks for the disabled grower, namely me.

And both systems had a single common defect: they could not work together and if you wanted to do both soil and/or hydro you had to buy/make two different systems, and those systems did not work together. I never saw the sense of locking yourself down to a single grow method with your materials. Maybe this isn't a problem for others but it bothered the hell out of me.

Finally for the most part, neither method really lent itself to the continuous grow model.

Now I could list 101 other reasons why the design I came up with is the one I use over other methods but for now just assume they are there and that it works.

Ultimately what I came up with looks like this from a very high level. You have to have two distinct grow areas for this to work, one for vegging and one for blooming. Each area consists of a grow tent, lights, air (both in and exhaust for bloom) and a large reservoir outside the tent that feeds everything inside. Inside there are low 12-gallon tubs that connect to the feed line. Each tub has a float-valve installed to ensure there will always be about 5 gallons of nutrients in the tub. What this means is that even if you forget to fill the main reservoir for days, there are still 2-7 days worth of nutrients in the tub. "Belt and suspenders" as my boss used to say.

Now the tubs are designed such that you can grow two plants in each to maturity, or you can keep 4 plants up to 90 days old. Or up to a dozen seedlings->"tweens". You can put one top on and use it for soil, another top for a full DWC with 6-inch netpot experience, you can even go soil in one side and DWC in the other. Finally, you can stash a tub to one side and use it as an overflow area to ensure you always have enough crop on-hand to keep the continuous grow going. See the page on it for details.

Pardon the cave-man drawing but conceptually here is a diagram of how the tent/tubs/rez interact:

For more pictures and explanation, see this.

To put it all together then, with this system the concept of a "crop" no longer means anything, any more than a season will. You will find it is almost completely automated such where most days it will do the work of taking care of the plants for you. In this setup, the life-cycle of a plant can look like this:

1. Stick seed in germinator, wait about 48 hours. There will be a "shell" with a bit of root sticking out.
2. Fill one of the To Go cups with medium, I am using hydroton or clay pellets the size of small marbles, then add one of the shells with the root sticking down. Cover with layer of hydroton.
3. Set up in overflow; repeat with all others in germinator.
4. 2 weeks later you should have a nice bunch of seedlings. I pick the four best and move them into two tubs in the veg tent (before this they don't really care much about light).
5. About two weeks later I move the first one to a tub in bloom. If I want to go pure hydro I just drop a 6-inch netpot into one side of a spare tub and do the same trick with the cup as if I were transplanting to soil (see video). Else if I want to go soil, I have a 3-6 gallon wastebaskets I have turned into pots by drilling out the bottoms and bottom inch or so with my trusty 3/8 inch bit. Anyhow I stick a soil mix I make of 75% coco coir (coconut husks) and 25% Perlite, like styrofoam but heavier. The point is these are both totally inert nutritionally and the coir wicks (draws) the water well from the tub up thu the soilmix. Works great, doesn't mess with the pH and I can use the same nutrients for either soil or hydro.
6. If this were a BASIC computer program, this line would read something like: Three weeks later, if no plants in bloom are currently ready for harvest, move one more from veg to bloom and one from your overflow tub to the dedicated vegging position you just vacated. Then, GOTO 5.
7. If you do need to harvest, well just harvest (specifics to be covered). As your overflow tub gets low, just germinate some more seeds. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Overflow is great to have if you need to gen up some plants for a project outside of your main grow. For example in my case I use the plants from overflow to teach myself different cloning methods, prepping plants to survive the Nevada Desert Challenge, things like that.

Overflow: Cannon-fodder for experiments

This has been alot to absorb but its the heart of everything here. I will concentrate on a complete part and sources list next.

You may need to (re) read the individual pages and then review this one. This system can be built very cheaply by someone with crappy carpentry skills (me). I will say that if you are disabled, with a setup like this (can be scaled up or down very easily) you can grow a very nice crop of meds that can really help your life.

I would say to the complete novice to simply build this system as-described, start running plants in the system and just watch them grow. Let them teach you the important bits that I could type forever and not explain well.