Jay Brown: Growing Marijuana Indoors

You also need to be careful visiting hydroponics shops. If I were a cop and wanted to find out who was growing pot in the neighborhood, I would either set up an undercover sting operation in a local hydroponics store or start up my own. It would then be relatively simple to set up a surveillance team to follow a marijuana grower to his grow operation after he picks up a large load of supplies from the store. I’m certain this is done on occasion, and I always make clear to the salesperson that I have only a little indoor growing setup that I use for growing fresh herbs. If you are a commercial cannabis grower, it is wise to divide your purchase of supplies among several stores so as not to raise suspicions about the size of your garden. The only reason to visit a hydroponics shop when you are growing a container garden is for replacement indoor grow lamps and certain accessories such as pH meters and special timers. The less frequently you visit hydroponics stores, the better the security of your pot garden. When you do visit a hydroponics store, park your car some distance away and walk to the store. Always pay with cash. In general, you shouldn’t chat with hydroponics and seed salespeople about anything to do with your pot growing other than the cost of equipment or the health of your “tomato plants.” You might even suggest that the supplies you are buying are for someone else.

Paranoia is not a disease in the weed-growing business. It is good. It is necessary. Paranoia keeps you and your garden safe. It’s not just the police you have to worry about these days. Rotten little thieves and even worse individuals with guns and bad attitudes will enter your home to steal your little bit of weed. Small operations are at a lesser risk because of the small payoff, but remember the Second World War slogan “Loose lips sink ships” and keep quiet about your garden. It’s tempting to show off your results, but resist the temptation. If only you know about your garden, it will be safe.

For those of you into James Bond techniques, there are surveillance and monitoring systems available that will protect your grow room while you are absent. There are even systems to control nutrients and pH from remote locations, but they are very expensive and totally unnecessary for personal marijuana setups. If you want to go the commercial growing route, most hydroponics stores can obtain remote and automated systems for you.

I recommend a simple container system for growing cannabis, which means your plants can be grown anywhere — in your living room, in a closet, or in a room of their own. If you’re not sure where you’d like to grow, it may be helpful to consider how many plants you’ll need. The average size of a full-grown indoor marijuana plant in bloom is about three to four feet tall. Each cannabis plant of that size, grown to maturity, will yield about two ounces of dried cannabis. (Note I said dried pot, not the shitty, wet stuff that street dealers often sell.) Each plant takes four months to grow from seed (or clone) to maturity. Therefore, each plant produces about two ounces of pot every four months. If you smoke an ounce of pot a week, you’ll need a total of eight plants. Four plants will be growing in a vegetative state, and four plants will be growing in a budding state. The four plants in the vegetative state will produce nothing smokable, but the four plants in the budding state will produce two ounces of dried pot every two months, for a total of eight ounces. One ounce of primo dried pot per week is probably enough pot for most people who smoke bud and maybe even most couples. If you need less cannabis than that — say only a quarter of an ounce per week — you’ll need only a quarter of the eight plants that a one-ounce-a-week smoker needs, a total of two plants — one in vegetative state and one in budding state.

Once you’ve decided how many plants you’ll need, you can consider where you’d like to grow them and select one of the next three possibilities: growing weed around your house, growing in a closet or grow bag, or growing in a dedicated room (or rooms). I’ll cover smaller setups first, and then we’ll move on to the design of a custom grow room.

Just like regular house plants, a few cannabis plants can be scattered around a living room or dining room without any problems. The difference is that your house plants are in a perpetual state of dormancy, except for a brief growth spurt every spring. Your cannabis plants, on the other hand, are always kept in a vigorous growing state that requires a lot more watering and attention. During their flowering stage, they need at least 12 hours of undisturbed darkness every day for at least two months in order to bloom and produce buds. If you are growing cannabis in a living room, when the plants are budding you’ll have to cover them with dark plastic for 12 hours a night because the television and house lights will prevent proper bud development. Don’t just throw a plastic bag or cloth over them. Build a wood or wire frame to keep the cloth or plastic covering from actually resting on the branches and “sweating” your plants, which can cause mold.

Use as much natural daylight as possible to grow your plants, and add lighting over their 12-hour light period on dark days and in winter months. You might have to turn on your supplemental lights early in the morning or evening when natural light is not strong enough to grow your plants. Supplemental lighting can be provided by LED lamps, 400-watt halide lamps, or even four banks of fluorescent grow lamps. Lamps of 1,000 watts are probably too bright and hot to use comfortably in a living room and are unnecessary for only a few plants.

Grow tents are practical tools for growing cannabis in an apartment or townhouse living area where there is no basement and only a few plants are required. These tents cost from one hundred to several hundred dollars, depending on size and features. They are flexible and mobile and solve the problem of creating a plastic night cover for your living room plants. Grow tents are self-contained with lighting, odor control, and vent fans suitable for cooling the small grow area. It is not a good idea to have other plants alongside your cannabis plants because any bugs on your house plants will eagerly jump or fly over to the cannabis plants, which generally provide a much tastier meal.

A walk-in closet can accommodate half a dozen plants or so as long as the closet is vented. A 400-watt metal halide lamp is a good fit for a closet grow-op. A 1,000-watt lamp is probably too hot. A 250-watt lamp can work but grows plants very slowly. You might try an LED grow light for vegetating cannabis, but a 400-watt light with a vented hood is probably the best all-around choice for both vegetating and budding cannabis in small spaces. The vegetative clones required for a closet grow-op should probably be grown in a different location, either in another closet or anywhere convenient, including under fluorescent lights beneath your ensuite bathroom counter.

Grow room walls should be painted white or covered with heavy duty white plastic or silver foil. A stapler is the best tool for attaching a foil or plastic wall covering unless the walls are concrete. With concrete walls, simply paint them white or nail 1”-wide wooden slats to the wall using concrete fasteners, and then staple the white plastic or silver foil to the slats. The plastic or foil can be purchased at any hydroponics store. If you intend to grow your cannabis in a spare room in the house that might be used in the future as living quarters, be sure to cover the walls with plastic to keep them clean and free of mildew while using the room to grow plants. Simply remove the plastic and repaint the walls if you decide to close down your grow room.