 can you guys hear me okay cool let's get started so first things first i'm not a lawyer this is not legal advice um i will not assume any responsibility for anyone's use of this information measurement products is made through this presentation i've not been paid by anyone blah blah blah no one sue me i'm also not a cannabis expert i'm a hobbyist and this is going to be this entire pockets from the perspective of a hobbyist uh commercial cultivation is an entirely different beast and i do not purport to know anything about that uh also don't believe anything i say do your homework so now we're going to talk about a perhaps relatable situation you have a nug you're picking it apart maybe you're getting ready to pack a bowl or roll a joint and you see a little a little seed in there and you think to yourself i can just plant this seed water it and then a couple of weeks later i'm just gonna have a bunch of free weed who's not about this yeah yeah top will elucidate why trying to grow weed from like a stray seed you found in some bunk weed is a bad idea uh all righty so we're gonna be covering uh growing weed from a hobbyist perspective not about industrial or commercial marijuana cultivation that is a different answer i'm also going to talk a little bit about operational security concerns uh this talk is in no way comprehensive there are 500 plus long page books dedicated to this subject and i am just barely scratching the subject or scratching the surface uh i specifically also will not be talking about hydroponic systems that is a completely different setup that in my mind requires a lot more attention and care and testing and chemistry and stuff that i'm bad at so we're i'm going really for like the easiest way that you can do this what is this it's growing weed in your closet or a grow tent or anywhere you have space inside your house um this is not uh how the pros do it this is how normal people can have weed um what is cannabis actually it's a plant it grows all over the world it was probably originally from somewhere in the Himalayas but it's typically found in the wild like throughout the northern hemisphere uh hemp production hemp is a material that it's a textile that can be cultivated from the uh stem of marijuana there are really strong fibers so it was used as a textile for thousands of years uh in the 19 in the 20th century with the war on drugs and all of this cannabis craze hemp was being called from the wild even though it has really low thc um and cannabinoid concentrations uh possibly as a consequence from the world war on drugs but not just hemp also uh other more psychoactive strains of cannabis it's real sad else about cannabis uh it's in the angiosperm phylum which is the seed producing phylum of plants so this is fruiting seeds it's in rosalees other famous members of the rosalees order include strawberries blackberries raspberries apples pears so uh these are all fruiting plants uh cannabis is one of those it's in the cannabis family and fun fact there is another famous member of the cannabis family and that is hops morphology so cannabis is actually usually a dioecious plant which means the plants are either male gendered or female gendered uh occasionally if you really fuck up a gro you can get hermaphrodite uh which would be a menaceous plant but as a grower that's not what you're trying to do what you're trying to do is provide is produce female only plants that have unfertilized flowers which are called sphinxemia which i don't know how to say that in english and spanish that literally means without seed um these flowers are going to have are going to be the largest they're going to be the most resinous have the most trichomes um and also the highest cannabinoid content so your goal as a producer is to produce the most bud and the highest quality bud and the highest quality is going to be bud that is unfertilized without seeds uh where can you do this uh if you google this there's a lot of really creative setups online i would say if you're a beginner grower maybe just you're scrappy like look around your house uh figure out where you have space if you don't have space you can get one of these extremely convenient throw tents um they're lined with mylar on the inside which is a like high reflective surface so that you can make the most you can utilize all of the light from your light source because of this highly reflective surface um the outside of the grow tent is typically constructed from like a heavy duty material like herdura so they're actually pretty sturdy uh they're also another benefit of getting one of these grow tents is that they have pre sewn holes for ventilation so it pretty much is like as hermetically sealed as you can get um you're not going to have have to worry too much about light leaks and if you want to throw in like some kind of ventilation or filtration system it already has the hole sewn in for that uh they're also pretty easy to set up so if you can set up like a camping tent you can probably set up one of these i did it in about 20 minutes when should you do this so this will depend a lot on your local geography oh this slide got messed up a little bit uh so if you're growing in a cellar typically cellars maintain a pretty constant temperature throughout the year so you can do it whenever if you're doing it inside and you live in the northern hemisphere you might want to wait until winter and that's because you're going to be using lights that produce a lot of heat so it will provide free air conditioning if you're doing in winter and you won't have to like pay for heating uh if you're living somewhere that's warm you're around you're probably going to try to find a cooler place to do your grow but you typically want a place that's not varying in temperature too much like outdoors unless you live in california and that's also a different talk why should you do this um there are a lot of reasons someone might want to grow even their closet and this these reasons will vary person to person maybe you're just really excited about gardening and you want like a fun project uh for people that are like new to gardening weed is actually a great starter project because it grows really fast and it is literally a weed so it doesn't require like the same attention as something like roses might um marijuana is oh and it's also pretty adaptable to a lot of different environmental conditions so that's pretty cool uh if you live somewhere that marijuana is criminalized it actually in some scenarios could be safer to grow it yourself if you practice good operational security uh if you have more time than money so uh I think there's this misconception that somehow if you just like throw up a little planner on your windowsill and water it every day for a couple weeks that you're just like magically going to have a ton of dank but at the end no this is work with a capital W so really make sure that you're willing to like set the time aside to do this um and if you do that you will be rewarded how okay this is the bulk of the presentation how are we gonna do this so when you're talking about growing weed there are two principal constraints space and time uh you don't necessarily need to make a gantt chart but you might consider at least throwing some key dates up on a google calendar or something uh let's explore the space dimension first though so there are three species um in the cannabis uh genus ruderalis indica and sativa so ruderalis is as you can see on this uh infographic that someone else made that i stole from the internet the smallest uh it also has the lowest thc content but what's notable about ruderalis is unlike cannabis and sativa it matures according to um just time so cannabis and sativa enter the uh flowering phase according to the length of the photo period meaning as the days shorten chemical signals are triggered within the plant to let it know to start producing bud ruderalis is just like oh i've been alive for a hundred days i should start producing bud so this is really interesting for when we get to talking about seeds but typically people aren't growing ruderalis for consumption like cannabis consumption because it has this low thc content but it has this uh auto flowering capability that we'll get into uh indica as you can see is a little bit bigger than these small ruderalis plants it's a bushier plant it matures more quickly um and it also does produce like a larger yield typically sativa if you're not constrained on vertical space uh is a really good option unfortunately it grows really tall so if you are constrained in vertical space this is maybe not a great plant for you also sativa is like less beginner friendly but it depends on like what kind of effect you're looking for cannabis you're going to get sativa you're going to get like the more creative active high uh indica it's like the couch lock effect like yes appetite simulant uh sedative uh different like psychoactive properties uh the minimum space requirement that i would recommend for a single plant like if you're looking at getting one of those mylar grow closets would be two feet by two feet by five feet but even five feet um you need to leave enough space for the light like around the light because it is going to be producing so much heat so like you don't really want it touching anything like you don't want fires so definitely like leave enough vertical space because uh yeah if you're really watering your plant and giving it a lot of nutrients it's going to grow how much time do you have so otter flowering is going to be the fastest so this is the um ruderalis uh genetics plants that are um genetically engineered to have this ruderalis uh component will typically mature the most quickly and you don't have to change the light cycle the plant will know on its own to start beginning to produce flowers um but they're also going to be the least potent if you have the most time um let's go ahead and look at my convenience rubric so i prefer the effects of sativa so i prefer to grow sativas unfortunately sativas are the least convenient plants to grow because they require the most vertical space and the longest period of time to reach maturity like from seed to harvest integers typically in the middle it's like a medium sized plant it takes a medium amount of time to grow and medium amount of talking like about three months 12 weeks from seed to harvest uh the ruderalis hybrids um are going to be the fastest but you're going to get the least amount of yield and also uh the like the lowest like psychoactive like uh like cannabinoid content okay so i've talked about this a little bit but these are two words that you're going to encounter when you're online shopping for seeds uh feminized and otto flowering any seed that you think about planting you specifically want to look for the feminized label feminized mean that the reader who has produced the seed has exposed it to certain environmental conditions that will cause the mother plant to produce exclusively female seeds so the reason you don't want to plant a seed that you randomly found in some weed is because one it tells you the grower of that weed was careless he let a male plant fertilize his female bud so it's like you just don't know anything about that plant it could be male it could be female uh it was probably an accident um and you know there could be other weird things going on with the seed like some kind of defects or mutations and this is kind of a lot of work so you don't want to waste your time you really want to go in and like look for the seeds that you know are feminized that you know are going to give you a good yield um otto flowering these are the ruderalis hybrids that you don't have to modify the photo period they're just going to mature on their own and begin producing flowers i've never done otto flowering but i've heard people have had good success with it so if that's something you're interested in and you don't want to like get too finicky with the light set up this might be a good option for you timeline okay so realistically you're looking at three to four months during which you're not like going to death con for example uh you can't be planning like european vacations or having a ton of other stuff to do during this time because you're gonna need to be pruning or watering or doing something with your light set up for at least three hours a week um during like the duration of your grow uh at the beginning there's also going to be a larger time requirement while you're acquiring all the materials and setting up the space for your grow and then also at the end when you're curing trimming harvesting um and disposing of the bodies um the last thing that you want to do when you're getting ready to set up your grow is to talk to the people that you live with so if you live with your parents or with a roommate and you know that they're not cool with weed and you think that you can somehow hide this from them you are woefully mistaken uh don't try and do don't be a dick be a reasonable person ask for their consent growing marijuana in your living space has the potential to significantly reduce your quality of life um not just from odors but like there are legal implications to this as well so make sure that everyone that you're living with is cool with this and it has signed on for it just use common sense like one illegal hobby at a time guys uh if you have a face that cops like to fuck with like maybe it's not a great idea for you to grow a weed um if you're constantly getting complaints for noise or smoke or uh if people are coming by your house a lot if you like to talk to people about your fun illegal hobbies you probably should not grow weed um also never consent to a search without a warrant and uh exercise your fit amendment privileges uh yeah talk to a lawyer uh don't take pictures of your grow don't talk about your grow uh this is gonna be really hard because you're gonna feel so proud about it and you're gonna want to show people but if you live in a prohibition state this is a really bad idea okay step one so uh let's buy some materials where can you do this uh amazon home depot lows uh this again is a function of like your risk tolerance and your ability to transport things with a vehicle i don't drive i am like a pedestrian and bicycle only transportationist i'm a professional passenger so i actually procured most of my materials on amazon i looked up what amazon's policy was for providing information to law enforcement and provided a link on here um there was some document they have that says that they require a valid and binding legal demand aka subpoena to surrender any information to law enforcement so um yeah law enforcement knows that i bought a groten on amazon uh if you are worried about uh people surrounding your information to law enforcement maybe go to home depot and just buy things cash and maybe not all in one trip so like on the trip that you buy the groten don't also buy like your high discharge lamps um and then for seed sourcing uh you can uh i'll get to this later in the slide but there are lots of places that you can buy seeds i also highly highly highly recommend checking out your local hydroponic store if you live in an area that has one those people are super knowledgeable and they can answer any questions you have about setting up your grow and it's also like someone you can kind of talk to about this and be reasonably confident that they're like not an arc okay so what do you need uh you need a space so closet cabinet or otherwise fully enclosed like someone hermetically sealed place that you're going to do this uh you need a light source or two or three and that's because uh the plant and different points in its life cycle will have different lighting requirements uh you're going to need different sizes of pot because as the plant grows its roots are going to develop and you want to give the plant enough space to really like develop as complexes of a root system as it needs to because the more space it has for roots the more growth you're going to get on top the more vertical growth the bigger your plant's going to be uh but you also don't want to just like plant a seed in a big ass pot either so like the plant size should correspond roughly to the size of the container that it's in uh you're going to want a christmas lights timer and that's helpful that's going to be helpful for when you need to change the light cycle for your plan and trigger it trigger this uh flowering period you're going to want a nutrient kit one of these grow boxes is great because they actually come with instructions and like a feeding schedule so um you don't have to do a ton of research about like what your plants nutritional requirements are you just like follow the rubric it's like a very paint by numbers type of thing um you're going to want seed obviously and some soil like i said at the beginning i'm not going to cover hydroponics the reason i really like soil grows is because soil is a natural buffer so you don't have to worry too much about like measuring the pH of the water before or after you water the plant um the soil will just kind of like absorb any like extremes and you'll be pretty safe with your growth you use soil uh other things that you might consider and by consider i mean you probably definitely need this stuff too is uh two lights one for vegetative growth one for flowering growth a fan so um actually wind is really important for stem development of the cannabis plant so you're going to want like kind of a steady flow of air blowing on your plant so that it develops those really robust stems and roots um air filtration system so this is kind of operational security uh at minimum i would say HEPA filter if you're having a small grow uh if we're talking about like up to six plants i would consider something that's like maybe a carbon filter or some kind of forest air system uh i've never set one of these up but this is where going to your local hydrostore and talking to the guys at the counter there might help you out um humidity and temperature monitor uh like i said cannabis is pretty adaptable but you're want to you're going to want to keep like a relatively humid like around 30 to 50 percent and like a relatively warmish environment cooler in the evenings is typically fine so if it's like dipping into the 60s or the high 50s that's okay during the day you don't really want it to get much hotter than like 80 um trim scissors so you're going to need that the end when you're harvesting latex gloves dear god do not harvest without gloves we're going to get so high and like not in a fun way um a watering can ph trips again i don't fuck with that i just use soil um and goggles definitely if you're going to be using like a high intensity like high lumen light you want to protect your cornea and like just wear glasses seed sourcing so fun fact it's actually legal to buy salt and possess non-germanated cannabis seeds in canada in the uk so you actually will find a lot of these seed vendors based out of those countries they take credit card you just put in your info and then like two weeks later you get this really stealthy packaged um thing i will tell you like what stealth tactics they use but it's very clever and within this package um are the seeds that you ordered and also this is nice because these are pros like you can really look through their catalog and see like you know i want this type of indica or i want something that i can harvest in 10 weeks like they'll have all that information on there uh alternatively if you know someone who's a breeder you can get seeds from them alternatively you can do this thing called taking clones uh there are some pros to this you don't need to germinate seeds with a clone uh you're basically taking a cutting from like a somewhat mature plant already um and then propagating it uh the other cons are that you because you don't have to germinate seeds you can harvest much more quickly you kind of are starting a plant from like the middle um and you have guaranteed genetics so if your clone if the mother plant is like you know a female sativa whatever this is going to be a hundred percent a genetic clone of that so it's it's guaranteed what you're getting cons they're diminishing returns when it comes to using clones so like if you're taking a clone of a clone of a clone of a clone you're not going to harvest that much blood like every generation is less and less also after you go a couple generations like genetic mutations and pests and all sorts of weird things start to happen so there is kind of like an upper limit to how much you can use cloning this also depends on local availability if you're living in an area where like you you're just not plugged into the community you're not going to be able to get a clone okay so a lot of this talk is just general information like botany and gardening like how do plants work so plants are typically absorbing um light in two parts of the spectrum um and that's because this is how the sun works the sun is like a full spectrum light and you're also going to want to purchase lights that are full spectrum but the two main important parts of the spectrum are on this blue axis so these are the shorter wavelengths around like 450 nanometers this is important in the vegetative cycle of plant growth so at the beginning when your plant is really like producing a lot of leaves and getting a lot of vertical growth um and then towards the later part of your plant's life cycle like around the 650 nanometer wavelength this is more the orange and yellows and these this is the time of year like fall when the sun is kind of at a lower angle and you're naturally getting this kind of wavelength you want to grow light that simulates or multiple grow lights that um are optimized at different points in the spectrum so at the beginning of your grow you're going to try and use a blue light that has a lot of um that is in this 450 nanometer wavelength towards the end of your grow you're going to switch to one of these orange lights to simulate like these long summer days so um there's a critical choice that you're going to make when selecting a light to use for your grow should i use leds or should i use this corny and melting high intensity discharge light um the pros of leds are honestly like they're a lot safer um i don't know if it's true anymore that it's a higher upfront cost because like now they're making these in china and they're actually pretty cheap you can get them on amazon for even like a hundred a hundred bucks like a thousand lumen you know some kind of crazy output led light uh they're also optimized at the spectra that i was talking about earlier and they have a switch on the back and a built-in fan so you can like easily switch between vegetative and flowering and it'll emit different wavelengths it also cools itself and doesn't get super hot because it just consumes less energy uh the downside of using led is that it's not you're not going to get the kind of yield that you would get if you use one of these high intensity discharge lamps but the high intensity discharge lamps come with significant drawbacks the drawbacks are if you're trying to be stealthy forget about it the electricity bill if you're using a high intensity discharge lamp is going to be through the roof uh if anyone else is paying the bill or if the landlord looks at the bill they're definitely going to see a spike in usage uh it requires more infrastructure because you can't just plug it into a wall you need a ballast they're pretty heavy and kind of expensive and require a little bit of electrical knowledge to set up uh and like when i was using this setup i was constantly worried that i like the lamp would explode and it would just set my closet on fire that didn't happen but it is a very powerful light um that said you will get a lot better yield if you use this and this is what from my understanding what a lot of professional growers are using also they produce a lot more heat so if you're like growing in the winter or whatever these are nice you kind of get a two for one um if you are worried about lights that generate too much heat how led is a better option because they run cooler soil okay so the main thing i'm going to say about soil is don't go outside and grab soil and bring it inside and use it to start your grow there's all kinds of bugs and critters and bad things in the soil that you definitely don't want to be bringing inside your house um buy soil from the store or amazon or somewhere the the soil that comes in those bags is sterilized uh so you can make pretty confident that you're not getting anything you don't want like pests or whatever like in your house um also uh you can opt to mix your soil with something called cocoa core uh cocoa core is like this pretty cheap thing it's basically ground up coconut husks that people use for hydroponic grows principally because it's non-reactive uh but i like to mix it with my soil especially if it's like uh soil with a smaller particle size from marijuana you kind of want a medium soil not something that's like super clay like a really small particle size and also not something that's like a sandy soil that has like too much drainage you want kind of like a middle of the road soil so um you can just go 100 soil or do like a 50 50 thing uh i usually do like 30% cocoa 70% like some kind of organic soil with soil amendments mixed in already uh also when you find a soil you want to make sure that it's a neutral pH so pH of around seven with npk values um that are roughly equal uh marijuana most plants are thrive in like slightly acidic soils cannabis tends to do best in soils that are around pH seven okay i talked a little bit about wind but here's just like a fun little graphic make sure you have a little fan that's blown on your plants and i'll make them happy okay so when we're talking about how much this is going to cost up front i would say best case scenario if you just get everything like on the cheap like amazon or aliexpress you're looking at 300 dollars um of course there's also going to be recurring costs like with electricity and water and nutrients but just setting up your grow this is what you're looking at if you're just wanting to do one grow this is not going to be more cost effective than like just buying it off the dark net or like buying it from a drug dealer so this is really something for someone who wants to like sustain and like make that up front investment to really like make it worth their time recurring costs obviously electricity um soil you cannot reuse soil between batches once you do a grow you're gonna have to check to check all that soil uh you've been you know putting a lot of nutrients and fertilizers uh in that soil also the plants been uh drying a lot of nutrients out of the soil so the soil once you do a grow is not good to reuse um seeds you'll also have to buy every time you guys are all beginners as am i i don't i'm not a breeder i don't know how to like produce feminized seeds so keep that in mind though cloning is an option set up already so you've ordered all the materials um you don't necessarily have to wait for them all to come in to get started because the only things you're gonna need to get started when you first set up your grow is just like a little pot you can even use like an egg carton uh a little bit of soil or cocoa so for germination you can just use cocoa core uh seedlings don't have nutritional requirements they just need to be wet and have light um and you also don't need a grow closet for this because even just litter literally a flashlight will be enough light to germinate your seed so you can just put this in a cardboard box uh with your little egg carton uh and your seed and your cocoa core and a flashlight or some kind of like low power light like a bedroom lamp or whatever um make sure it's really close to the top of the soil though uh because uh so there's two problems with this setup can anyone identify what the two problems are yeah stretch is one of the problems which i'll talk about later what's the other one this person planted multiple seeds in one pot so like then what happens you're gonna have to like somehow yeah oh you have a problem because there could be a male and a female inside that you don't know them so later on it can cause uh cross contamination between the two seedlings well not even that like this is what how big wheat gets like how are you gonna like take these apart oh yeah you can't you can't transplant that yeah i mean you can you can try to pick them apart but when the plants are really young like this you don't want to be messing around with the roots too much so one to one guys one to one just put one seed to one pot that way you don't have to be like trying to pull apart these like weak fragile little like budding marijuana plants um so this young gentleman over here mentioned stretch the when you see the plants that have like this really long stem and then some leaves that are like falling over like they can barely support their weight this means the grower is putting the light really far away from the plants and marijuana is like a really ambitious plant like it wants to grow towards the light and it's just like stretching as much as it can to get to the light so it can photosynthesize more but what happens is that it doesn't have enough time to develop the stem so you really want to bring the light as close as possible to the plant so it doesn't have to do this oh also at this point in the plants life you're looking at a 24-0 light cycle so um when you're first germinating just leave the light on 24 hours you know it's going to be a bedroom light or a flashlight or something uh after you see it start breaking so I'll go ahead and switch to 18 hours on six hours off so that's when you're going to want to plug in your Christmas lights timer and get this planned on a schedule uh the 18-6 uh cycle is what you're going to use for the duration of your vegetative growth which is going to be like 50 percent of your plants life cycle so you're chugging along your little plants are growing and then maybe a couple of weeks in you notice roots starting to come out of the bottom of your pot it's time to replant your plants so this is actually really good setup right here you see like those white little hairs at the bottom and like a lot of them starting to grow around the bottom ring uh that's when you know it's time to transplant uh this is also good because uh the roots look really healthy this is like actually the spitting image of what a super healthy root system looks like for a developing marijuana plant if you're getting if you're taking your plant out of the pot and see lots of brown and yellow roots that means you're probably over watering and you have something called root rod um so at that point it's not completely lost you may want to try and salvage your grow like trimming away some of those dead roots but really this is what you're looking for all right so here's a little schematic I found off the internet which is like not even fully representative of what I'm talking about because this is the hydroponic grow but this is gonna be the basic setup of your closet so once you switch your plant so you repotted it you switched it to an 18 on six off light cycle maybe you're moving it into your closet now you're setting it up with like a real grow light you're going to want to have your grow light between 12 and 24 inches away from your plants unless you're using the high intensity discharge those things are literally so powerful that it will burn the leaves on your plants if you keep it really close to the plant so just kind of experiment with that both the ladies it's pretty safe to keep it like pretty close to the plant um and then the plant won't have to work so hard to get to the light uh yeah you got your fan unless you're doing a lot a lot of plants you don't necessarily need a setup like this inlet and outlet filter system that's more of like a heavy duty thing and also if you set it up and you have like a small closet you could end up with like a wind tunnel inside your grow closet um but they do sell like you could this is like a hacker con right like you could make your own out of like you know a computer fan like one of those like desktop um like hard drive cooling fans like those totally work for this okay so you're checking along in your vegetative growth you have your light on for 18 hours a day your plant is starting to produce like more and more leaves um at this point on your feeding schedule you'll probably notice that it's telling you to feed in a lot of nitrogen and that's because that's what's helping the plant develop like these big fan leaves it's helping the plant get that vertical growth um you might have to even start doing some pruning because you want your plant to grow in like a particular direction like it's typically better if you're growing indoors to have like shorter bushier plants than like taller lanky plants so maybe you're like doing some training on your plant to grow in like a particular way if you want to take clones this is a good time to do it so cloning is basically just cutting off like one or two of the fan leaves sticking them in some soil waiting a couple of weeks and hoping roots grow and then you have like a whole new plant um we're going to talk a little bit about topping this isn't strictly required for growing but pretty much every grower that I know does this um so what topping basically is is a training method for marijuana plants that will produce more um top basically more mary stems which is like more points for the bud to grow on so the main shoot that your plant is growing out of the main mary stem if you're just grow starting to grow a plant it will just be one uh what you're going to do is pinch that the top of that main stem off and what it'll turn into is actually two main stems you wait a little while the two main stems are coming along then you take the those two tops off then you have four main stems there is a natural limit to how many times you can do this um top like three or four times over the course of your vegetative growth and get a plant that's like you know still has like some healthy growth on the side isn't like splitting at the center or anything um and it's always producing two shoots every time you top it's pretty scary also the first time you do this because you're like I'm hurting my plant intentionally like what if it just stops growing no it won't do that I promise um also taking clothes it's pretty easy you just cut at a 45 degree angle one of the uh branches uh stick it in some soil there are chemicals you can add to the soil to help the root propagation but I've never used any of those it is a weed like it will probably grow roots all right so about six weeks into your grow you're going to be looking at your big bushy plant and realize that it's about 50 percent as big as as the space that you have allotted for it to grow and at that point you will need to change the light cycle unless you have auto flowering I'm not talking about auto flowering here but at that point you're going to need to change the light cycle from 18 hours on six hours off to 12 hours on 12 hours off uh also if you bought a special light for flowering like one in the orange spectrum you're going to want to switch to that flowering light and the change in the photo period and also the change in the spectrum of light that you're giving to the plant are going to cause hormonal changes in the plant that will cause it to begin to produce flowers so um the initial phase in flowering uh oh also there are um I should talk a little bit about this slide uh on the left here we see the beginning of the female plant uh this like fine white hairy thing is called a stigma uh and this is what uh in nature like the part of the plant that pollen would collect on and where the seeds would be produced on the left that small little ball is a pollen sack that is your worst enemy if you see one of these growing on your plant you basically have to throw out the whole plant all of the work that you have done up to this point is for naught um some growers if they see that one of their plants has turned a newer home hermaphrodite after they switched the light to 1212 we'll try and just pick off the balls but the plant will just kind of keep producing them so good luck also marijuana in nature typically isn't pollinated by pollinating or by insects um it's pollinated by wind so plants that are wind pollinated actually produce a huge amount of pollen good luck so a couple weeks after you uh flip the life cycle to 1212 you're going to see lots of these fine stigma hairs growing all over the plant um this is a good sign you're also going to notice that your plant is growing like up to an inch a day at this point so in the first three weeks after you flip the life cycle you're going to be experiencing a huge amount of growth uh anytime so about once a week you're going to be wanting to adjust the the height of the light because you're always wanting it to be a consistent height away from the plant so you don't want the plant to be like running up against your light and burning itself but you don't want the light to be so far away that the plant is like not optimally like photosynthesizing so photosynthesizing uh also at this point after stretch you're going to see these like fine white crystal like frosty things start to develop on the leaves um i have a close-up of that these are called trichomes and these are like these resinous mushroom shaped hairs that contain all of the good stuff all of the cannabinoids the thc the cbn the cbd um that's that's the reason we're doing this whole thing uh they also contain terpenes which are awesome but are also not your friend when you're trying to do a stealthy grow terpenes are oh and here's more close-ups of pretty white stigmas and trichomes um terpenes are aromatic oils and cannabis that really give it that distinct distinctive scent uh so in nature terpenes uh are do have this adaptive function of like repelling predators but also luring pollinating insects cannabis doesn't require pollinating insects it's entirely pollinated by wind so really the function of terpenes and cannabis are to ward away predators which means they have this really aggressive strong scent that is offensive to a lot of animals but humans actually quite like so um if anyone here also likes sativa you may have noticed that sativa has like a really piney scent often and that's because sativas tend to have more of the terpene alpha piney in them which is the terpene that gives conifers their distinctive pine scent um it's not just alpha piney there are a ton of um terpenes and cannabis and also if you get more into like nutrient um like uh like the fertilizer requirements of your plants there are ways that you can feed your plants to produce more of a particular type of terpene so this is actually something as a grower you have some amount of control over uh just do your research i'm not a terpene expert but there are fertilizers you can use to really produce those like strong scents in your uh cannabis uh yeah so terpenes are your friend because they produce strong odors so something you want to be aware of at this point in the life of your plant is like if these odors are leaving your apartment or house basically you might want to be turning up the helpe filter at this point maybe you want to have like some kind of um outlet to the outside if you live on like a top floor uh if you don't have a way for these odors to get out they're gonna find a way out so make sure you have a plan for that uh also around this point it's like a couple months into your tax or into your tax into your grow so you're gonna start getting those high utility bills um yeah these are just things to be aware of also really like don't take pictures there's all kinds of metadata uh on those files and there could be visual clues in your pictures to tip off people to the location of your grow um also even if you're just printing those pictures out like printers leave like a unique uh sequence of dots uh like a signature basically on the printer this is how like reality winner was busted by the nsa when she leaked those documents so like really like trying not to document this guys even though you don't really want to it's gonna be so pretty okay so now we're approaching the end of the grow uh your your bud is getting nice and frosty uh the trichomes are starting to change from like that clear glass color to more of like a milky color maybe even like an amber color uh you're gonna want to start like not fertilizing your plant anymore and just feeding it water the point of this is you kind of want your plant to utilize all of those lingering nutrients that are still in the soil or like trapped in the flowers um there's also some stuff on the internet that indicates that it makes your bud smoother to smoke if you just kind of only feed it water for the past couple of weeks uh but the idea is you just kind of want to use up the nutrients that are there and not add any more chemicals uh towards the end also it'll your plant will start dying off at this point so you'll notice like the leaves will be starting to yellow um cannabis is an annual plant it's not a perennial plant it's one and done you plant it it produces seeds and then it dies so this is the beginning of the end uh the million dollar question that everyone wants that everyone has their own answer to is when do I harvest uh you're gonna be really eager at this point you're gonna see the trichomes coming out and be like I should harvest now no the point you want to harvest is the point at peak resin production peak resin production will typically be when 50 percent of the trichomes or more have turned to this like amber color if you wait longer than that um the THC in the trichomes will turn into a THC metabolite called CBN or cannabinole cannabinole is a non-psychoactive cannabinoid which has which is great for the therapeutic effects it's like a slight has a slightly sedative effect it also has an appetite to appetite stimulants of people that are using cannabis like cancer patients in chemotherapy like using it for these therapeutic purposes might want to wait longer to harvest maybe to one like 70 or 80 percent of the trichomes have turned to this amber color but if you're like me more of like a recreational user and especially if like the type of bud you're interested in is is sativa you don't want these sedative effects you're gonna want to harvest it maybe a little earlier like 30 or 40 percent of the trichomes have turned to the amber color awesome so uh you think your work is done but it is not uh now the real work begins harvesting so you're gonna cut down every part of your plant that has this bud on it uh you're gonna put your gloves on you're gonna get your trim scissors out you're gonna trim up your weed uh and then in your girl closet or wherever you have space away from a window or direct sunlight you're gonna let it dry out um you know that it's ready and cured when you can snap one of the stems and hear like a slight popping sound so you want it to be dry enough that you can smoke it but not so dry that like it's just this like dried out like crumbly bud so you're looking for that sweet spot it's usually about three days in but again it depends on like the local environmental conditions of like wherever you're drying this stuff out but then dispose of the evidence so um the trichomes are pretty much only going to be on the flower and like maybe on some of the leaves around the flower but uh you're gonna have a lot of these fan leaves and the roots and the stems and a lot of stuff to throw away i would recommend getting some of those really thick two millimeter trash bags uh put in all that shit in there and then like finding a dumpster preferably not the one that's right outside your house and disposing of uh all of your organic materials there uh you're gonna have to throw out the soil too uh if you have a garden you can probably just cut up the roots and throw the soil in your garden if you have a compost you can compost all this stuff uh the pots that you're using to grow the weed can be reused but like i said earlier i don't recommend trying to reuse the soil make sure you clean the pots between grows so uh yeah marijuana is legal for recreational and medical in a lot of states mostly in the west and the northeast california proposition 64 went to infect earlier this year nevada question two has gone into effect it's been in effect now for a couple of years or gone interestingly enough has a marijuana subdomain which is pretty cool um but if you live in a non-prohibition state i would really encourage you to uh check up on like what the regulations are in your specific jurisdiction um you know there are kind of these like state laws um but really as far as growing is concerned a lot of that is like left up to the district like not even the county level like literally your town so just figure out what your local laws are for growing weed and try to adhere to those as much as possible unless you're in a prohibition state in which case you're just gonna go for stealth here's a fun map there's also a ton of info online um i actually really found the uh micro brewery subreddit to be super useful because people are doing the thing you shouldn't do and posting lots of pictures of their grow and being like should i harvest should i harvest should i harvest um but there's also just like a lot of good information on there and it's a nice community i'd also recommend these two books uh they're pretty comprehensive and yeah people on youtube that are like you know running their grow farms legally in canada make lots of cool videos uh that's it there's no substitute for hands-on experience so grow out there and grow some weed or don't maybe you can just get on the dark net and buy this stuff maybe that would be easier thanks any questions once a day because i've read on the internet that's a good thing to do but yeah i don't know anyone else yeah so those pictures i'm not sure who they belong to what was the name of that plant it looked really pretty yeah so marijuana is actually a really pretty plant um sometimes people get concerned when they're growing being like lilies or purple or you know some weird color and actually for especially indica dominant strains that's totally fine yeah like do you know who that was like oh no yeah yeah please don't hurt me people on the internet anyone else okay well i'll be around afterward for questions thanks guys