Medical Marijuana Grow Guide
An Incomplete Look at What it Takes to Grow Cannabis
Setting Up
Room/closet/cabinet: The first step to setting up your growroom is determining where it will be. Most personal level growrooms utilize either a preexisting room, such as a spare bedroom, an attic, or a basement, a closet, whether it be walk-in or not, or a cabinet. Cabinets of all shapes and sizes can be purchased from Home Depot or a similar store, but keep in mind that there has to be room in the cabinet for your plants, your lights (with a suitable distance between them and your plants), and ventilation. Also, keep in mind that the smaller the room, the harder it is going to be to dispel heat.
Soil
Pros: Smaller initial investment, more forgiving, quality (very debatable)
Cons: messy (especially getting rid of spare soil), each plant has to be watered separately, must buy new soil each run
Hydro
Pros: less messy, no soil to dispose with, only have to feed/water one thing
Cons: expensive initial setup, less forgiving (you have to feed everything), hydro nutrients can be prohibitively expensive, organic hydro is hard
Types of Hydro
It should be noted that “hydro” is a very general word. There are
at least four common kinds of hydro.
Ebb and flow, the first, utilizes pots or rockwool cubes on a table that can hold 1 to 4 inches of water. Nutrient solution is pumped into the table, then the table is drained, which brings new oxygen-rich air in contact with the roots. This works very well for SOG setups.
Air tables are tables of rockwool, coco coir, peat, or another medium that have nutrient solution pumped into them by an external air pump.
Deep water culture uses pots filled with clay pellets or rockwool in buckets of nutrient solution so that the roots of the plant dangle into the solution. A pump is constantly splashing solution over the roots. This is probably the easiest style of hydroponics for a beginner.
Top feed systems are the final style. It uses buckets with rockwool, gravel, coco coir, or clay pellets, and feeds the nutrient solution via spaghetti tubing from the reservoir to the base of the plants. The runoff is collected and sent back to the reservoir.