For lighting, this farm uses one vertical 1KW MS metal halide, running 24 hours a day for maximum vegetative growth. The vegetative area measures approximately 1.8m x 2.4m (6' x 8'), and so is provided with a total of about 230 watts per square metre (wpm2) or about 21 watts per square foot (wpf2).
Four vertical 1KW systems illuminate the flowering room. The flowering area measures 3m x 3m (10' x 10') plus an additional .75m x 3m aisle on one side. This works out to about 430 wpm2 (or about 39 wpf2).
This degree of lighting intensity is at the top of the scale for a soil based garden not using CO2. Using hydroponics and/or CO2, intensity can be pushed up to 550 wpm2 (50 wpf2) or more, as long as heat can be kept in check. This will increase bud density and your yield per square meter.
Two of the four light systems run 940W Iwasaki sodium conversion lamps, the other two are MS metal halides. This combination provides a nice blend of two healthy light spectrums.
When using halides, it is important to replace them every six to nine months of continuous use, regardless of the light cycle used. After this time halide lamps will decrease to 60% or less of their original output, and your yields will drop accordingly.
A circuit breaker panel with a built-in heavy-duty timer is hard-wired (with 10 gauge solid copper wire) to the 240v clothes dryer plug. It runs the four flowering lamps, the exhaust blower, (980 cfm), the intake blower (265 cfm), circulation fans and the ozone generator, a device used for odour control. Electrical usage in a garden this size is generally considered close to the maximum as far as not arousing attention.
We consider ozone the equivalent of stealth technology: serious odour control for the serious cultivator. This unit incorporates a small exhaust blower to deliver the ozone where you want it, in this case piped through a 3" duct directly to the intake of the 980 cfm blower exhausting up the chimney.
With four 1KW lamps and ballasts in a room this size, heat build up can be a serious problem. Each lamp and ballast acts as a small but powerful heater, yet while these lamps obviously have to be in the grow room, the ballasts do not. If you can put the ballasts above the room, for example in the attic above a bedroom grow room, you can substantially reduce the heat in your flowering room.
It should be noted that putting them in an adjacent room may not help unless the division is insulated and airtight. Heat rises, so placing them above the grow area insures that they won't contribute to the heat of the grow room.
Many times however, the garden is in the basement, and directly above the garden is the living room, or another room not suitable for ballast placement. The solution in this case was to somehow isolate the heat put off by the ballasts. A lightweight box was built out of foam insulating board and duct tape, to cover the ballasts and isolate the heat put off by them.
A 12cm (5") duct was installed in the top of the box. This duct was routed, using a small cardboard box and another healthy dose of duct tape, into the intake of the ozone generator. Thus the heat is sent through that blower into the main exhaust, and then directly to the outside. This reduced the heat in the room by 4-5¡C (8-10¡F).
If you don't happen to own an ozone generator, any small exhaust fan would work for this job. 55, 70 and 100 cfm bathroom fans are available at most hardware stores for less than $30, which is very inexpensive compared to an equivalent heavy duty exhaust blower. These kinds of fans can also work well as the primary exhaust for a small closet garden.
At any given time, there are plants in six stages: clones, small vegetative, large vegetative, beginning flowering, finishing, and drying. We use clones of varieties that finish in under 45 days, so one half of the plants in the flowering room finish every three weeks, yielding around two pounds of dried, manicured buds. This works out to roughly 30 pounds a year.
This 1KW vegetative with 4KW flowering is a common SCCC set-up. Other typical SCCC setups include 400W vegetative plus 1KW flowering, or 1KW vegetative plus 2KW or 3KW flowering, preferably on a Suncircle.
If you haven't heard of the Suncircle, it's time you did. Similar in purpose to linear light tracks, this light mover rotates one, two or three lamps in continuous circles over your plants. When the lights are moving, it is impossible for any part of a plant to shade any other part of a plant all of the time, which increases the coverage of your lights by about 25%. In other words, a Suncircle will effectively increase the amount of light received by your plants and your yields will increase accordingly.
Another neat thing about the Suncircle is that if you use a combination of halide and conversion lamps, every plant in the room gets an equal amount of light from each lamp. The only drawback to the Suncircle is that they are typically quite expensive, around $520.
Linear back and forth light tracks are not recommended, especially for flowering. They cause very uneven lighting and can reduce your wpm2 to an unacceptably low level, resulting in leafy, hard to manicure, and undersized buds.
The SCCC has Canada to thank for a few of our best tricks. Most of our cloning trays are Canadian, as are the Jiffy-7 peat pellets we use for rooting clones. Most importantly, Pro-mix BX, our preferred planting medium, is a fine mix of mostly Canadian sphagnum peat moss. This medium has a very light, airy composition, which allows the roots to breathe and allows the soil to dry out readily. This gives you good control over the watering and fertilizing regimen. Pro-mix BX is also very pH stable.
We complement these strengths by using ESU's Greenleaves "Grow juice" and "Bloom juice" hydroponic nutrient solutions. These are very high quality, full-spectrum fertilizers that require no mixing of parts, unlike some more common solutions. They seem to work as good or better than anything else we've tried, and also have a built in pH monitor. As long as the solution stays yellow, your pH is around 5.5 to 6.5, where it should be. If it starts to turn orange or purple, you know that your pH is too high. This, coupled with the pH stable Pro-mix BX, eliminates the additional trouble of pH testing.
Our clones are rooted in Jiffy-7 peat pellets, which are soaked in a solution of 1 fluid ounce of ESU Great roots and 1 ounce ESU Grow juice in a gallon of chlorine free water, as recommended on the labels.
A clone is cut from the donor plant with scissors, taking one or two more nodes than will be used.
The leaves are then trimmed by touching the thumb and forefinger together and pulling the clone through them.
When you pull a cutting through your thumb and forefinger, the leaves bunch together, something like an upside down umbrella closing, if you can imagine that. The intended result is to remove about one-half of each of the larger leaves, by cutting the individual leaf-fingers in half.
The thumb and forefinger technique is somewhat less accurate than doing each leaf manually, but is also much quicker. The largest leaves automatically give up the most, while the smaller ones lose less. You can do this more carefully by simply cutting each finger of each leaf in half one by one, but this is rather tedious, especially with larger amounts.
This trimming improves water retention by reducing the amount of leaf mass, helps prevent fungus growth during rooting, and allows you to fit clones into a tray more comfortably.
The clone is then put onto the surgery table (usually a scrap of 2x4). Using a new razor blade sterilized with flame or a dilute bleach solution (and rinsed), the lower leaves and nodes that won't be part of the final clone are cut off, leaving only nubs. Then the clone is cut to length at a 45 degree angle, leaving one or two nubs above this cut. Sometimes you just won't have an extra nub, it's ok. Nubs are helpful, but not necessary.
The best length is a matter of personal technique and opinion. My preference is from anywhere from 8cm to 13cm (3" to 5"), but ones as small as 3cm or as large as 16cm or more can work.
Clones with extra fat stems or extra thick skin are gently scraped around the nubs to expose the tender inner portion of the stem. They are then dipped (to the same depth that they will be planted into the peat pellets) for five seconds in a solution of Dip-n-gro liquid, diluted 1 part to 13 parts water (chlorine free). They are inserted into the pre-moistened peat pellets and arranged in propagation trays, 25 to 30 per tray. At this point, temperature control becomes essential.
Temperatures must remain between 22-25¡C (75-80¡F) for the duration of the rooting process. Lighting should be fluorescent or halide, on a continuous 24 hour cycle. Instead of setting trays directly on the floor, a piece of Styrofoam is used to insulate the bottom. When the clones root they are transplanted into two gallon buckets.
When the clones reach about 15-20cm (5-7") the lower sections are carefully trimmed. First, any leaves touching the soil are removed. Then any lower branches that don't appear to be keeping up with the stronger (longer) lower branches are removed. Next, all of the inside growing tips on the remaining dominant lower branches are removed, starting at the main stem and working outward, leaving only the outermost tip. Nothing above one-half of the height of the small plant is trimmed unless we want to "pinch" (remove) the top-most growing tip, to reduce the finished height of the plant and encourage side branches.
Pinching is usually a good technique to use on sativas or mostly sativa crosses, because these will often get too tall if not flowered when very small. It should be noted that on most strains that are well suited to indoor growing, such as stocky indicas and hybrids, pinching may not be necessary, and in many cases can even be detrimental.
The trimming does shock the plant a little, and this is the reason that it is only done when the plants are quite small. The practical reasons for trimming are to make watering easier (less obstructed access to the soil), to encourage top growth, and to reduce the amount of "spleef" on the bottom of the plants at harvest. Trimming also helps to reduce any pest populations, as the lower leaves have been there the longest and so provide the bugs with more time to get established.
After this, no green growth is taken from the plant for the duration of its life. They are then grown to a height of 45cm to 50cm (18" to 20") at which point they are sprayed with (or even dipped in) Safer's soap or pyrethrin, even if no pests are apparent. This amounts to preventive maintenance and is not thought to contribute any pesticide residue to the finished, manicured buds.
After this, they are transplanted into seven gallon grow bags for flowering on a 12 hour on, 12 hour off light cycle. They will reach anywhere from 65cm to 1m (2' to 3') in height, depending on the variety.
