[420 Girl]

Before I started doing it, growing marijuana seemed easy. Thanks to both the Internet and its growing acceptance as medicine, there's no lack of information available to maximize my crop and minimize pests and diseases. In the 1980s, the decade I would have been more likely to attempt this botany experiment as a college student, good beta was far more scarce: growers were terrified of being busted and advice, if it could be found at all, was piecemeal at best. Trial and error was an amateur grower's primary tactic, but today there are at least 50 how-to books to choose from and at least 10 times that many Web sites, all designed to make growing pot as idiot-proof as possible.
Upon a cursory inspection of some of that material, it seemed all I'd need is a little soil, some lights and a lot of water. Who cares that I can barely grow tomatoes? Marijuana is a weed, after all, and if stoned people can grow it, then so can I.

That quaint notion lasted for only about the first 30 minutes into constructing my grow room. There is a lot of unglamorous grunt work that goes into a growing operation, even one as small as mine. It's tedious business, but it's critical. Growing the plants is easy since the plants themselves do all the work. The grower's job is to provide them with the perfect environment in which to do so, and it's not nearly as simple as it sounds.

I'm lucky in that I own my house and there's a fairly spacious storage closet in the basement that required only minor modifications. The first step was to relocate all the Christmas decorations, empty luggage and other bric-a-brac to the garage and scrub the floors and walls clean. One wall was open to the crawl space, so I sealed that off with a giant sheet of marine vinyl I bought at a fabric store using a staple gun and an entire roll of white duct tape. I gave the walls and the insides of the doors a good thick coat of white paint and when I was done, the space was as stark and sterile as a mini operating room. Now it was time to install the equipment.

Marijuana plants can be temperamental, requiring the grower to balance airflow, temperature, humidity and light, not to mention water and nutrients. Because my room was basically an airtight box, I had to install a ventilation fan and ducting leading to an outside vent. Miraculously, I found an unused one in the crawlspace that exhausts under my back porch, making me wonder if the house's previous owners perhaps had a similar hobby to my own. Once that was done, I cut an intake vent in the drywall near the floor that draws air from an adjoining room. I added a large oscillating fan to circulate the air, a space heater and a humidifier. Finally, I hung two 90-watt LED lamps from the ceiling on chains, which allows me to adjust their height as the plants grow.

Since I've never grown marijuana before, I had the advantage of starting from scratch with my lighting choices. LEDs are a newer trend among growers, popular because they use less energy, generate less heat and deliver nothing but the light waves that plants need the most. From what I've gleaned from other growers using metal halide and other high intensity lights, LEDs have only just become affordable, but their effectiveness is still a source of debate. Considering I found a pair of 90-watt LED lamps for $180 each, I figured I'd go the affordable route and see what happens.

The drawback of using LED lights, I found quickly, is that they actually generate too little heat. Growers using the more typical 400-1,000-watt high intensity discharge lamps can count on the bulbs to raise the temperature, sometimes too high. Marijuana likes temperatures in the 75-80 degree range, but left without adding artificial heat, my LEDs keep the temperature only in the mid-60s. A space heater with a thermostat takes care of that problem.

Regulating the humidity is trickier. Here in Colorado, the ambient humidity is usually in the 15-20 percent range. My literature suggests boosting that to around 50-60 percent, but I've also been advised to keep it below 50 percent to thwart one of this state's scourges, powdery mildew. But I've also been told by other growers to keep it above 50 percent to discourage another problem, spider mites. As it is, I run the humidifier around the clock and can't get the humidity higher than 40 percent in any event, so I'm hoping for the best.

The last part of this alchemy is airflow. According to my calculations, I should move about 700 cubic feet of air through the room every five minutes or so, which I quickly found ruins my careful calibrations of temperature and humidity. I connected the exhaust fan to a rheostat so I can regulate the speed at which it draws air out of the room, so my first week of growing has been a round-the-clock attempt to find the precise balance of temperature from the heater, mist from the humidifier and speed of extraction from the ventilation fan to keep the room a consistent 75-80 degrees with about 40 percent humidity. (I've also found that humidity rises when I water the plants, adding another complicating element to the mix.)

Keep in mind that all of these contortions were done before I even set eyes on a marijuana plant -- I spent more time last month at Home Depot than at my neighborhood grow store or dispensary. Once I start the flowering cycle by giving the plants 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness every day, the challenges will only multiply. Budding cannabis plants are like buffets for pests and diseases and I can already picture myself spending my days fretting not only with temperature and humidity, but pH balances, nutrient levels and water runoff.

Lastly, there's another factor I haven't even considered yet, but which looms large in my mind: odor. Already my basement smells like a skunk farm and my plants are still in the vegging state. Once they start growing buds, I will face an entirely new set of hassles involving activated charcoal filters and ozone generators.

But I'll worry about that later. Right now, I'm just happy that my clones are thriving, making all the time, money and labor I spent on the details of the grow room well worth the effort.

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About this column: "DJ Hayes" is a pseudonym for an amateur Colorado pot grower, a medical marijuana patient who works as a professional writer and editor when not obsessing over a grow room. With medical marijuana inspiring increasing numbers of people to test out their green thumbs or go into business, DJ has agreed to share thoughts and experiences as a first-time grower with GreenZone, a dscriber.com section dedicated to the issue of medical marijuana.

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