Guide To: Building a Marijuana Grow House
By any measure, the marijuana business is huge. Cannabis sativa, weed, pot, grass, Mary Jane or whatever name you want to attach to the cultured hemp business, is immensely popular. The medicinal and recreational use of marijuana has been around a long time and is growing fast. It's a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it's not going away.
America is just beginning to legalize marijuana. Not just as an approved medicinal drug but also as a socially acceptable form of relaxation. It’s being legislated much the same as alcohol and tobacco. Washington, Oregon, and Colorado have already permitted the commercialized production sale of marijuana. Recently California, Massachusetts, and Nevada voted in favor of decriminalizing cannabis.
Federally, the laws surrounding legally grown marijuana don’t allow an interstate trade of cannabis, but that’s bound to change. Cannabis products will soon be traded across state lines as well as internationally. Canada, who is America’s largest trading partner, has been growing and selling medicinal marijuana on the open market for three years. It is in the midst of legalizing recreational use.
What used to be a secretive, black market sub-culture has emerged into a respectable, professional, and extremely lucrative agricultural industry.
Where to Grow Marijuana
Marijuana grows naturally in warmer climates. However, to keep it in lucrative production, no matter the location, greenhouses must be used. These greenhouses rival anything used in sophisticated indoor farms that grow fruit and vegetables. They have advanced building systems that incorporate steel structure housing climate-controlling devices. For example, there’s lighting that replicates the sun and capitalizes on the plants’ natural growing cycles.
High-yield crops are produced in indoor microclimates. With the help of computerized watering and nutrient delivery, advanced air conditioning, ventilation systems; and disease and pest controls. And, of course, being held in a safe and secure environment.
All this high-tech and high-dollar effort results in delivering a tremendous rate of return on investment. Now that the legal penalties are lifted, the marijuana industry is gaining above-ground respectability. People from all walks of life are getting into the “green-gold” movement and building their own cannabis farms. That might be in a small closet within their home or an economical marijuana grow-house in their backyard. Or even a large commercial-scale, free-standing, steel structure in a legally-zoned industrial area.
Experienced marijuana growers know that the right approach to building the best marijuana grow house is to work backward. They start with the end in mind and select their building materials and components to suit their needs.
This approach to growing marijuana is quite simple. It starts with a basic knowledge of the marijuana plant’s scientific properties. Then accommodates the plant’s needs to produce the best flowering buds.
Basically, cannabis plants require water, nutrients, heat, humidity and regulated lighting that replicates the natural environment it needs to survive and reproduce.
In giving marijuana plants that environment, it is crucial to building a grow-house that can provide all that. A successful marijuana grow-house starts with a plan of how to get there. Simply put, the higher the expected yield, the more light, and space the plants need. However, when light is increased, so is heat, and this requires managing the heat with cooling and ventilation systems.
The bigger the marijuana growing operation is, the more systems will be needed to manage it and the more the costs will be. With this in mind, here is a general guide to building a marijuana grow-house.
Marijuana Horticulture
The horticultural name for marijuana, or the hemp plant, is cannabis Sativa. It is found naturally in warmer climates, but it has been cultivated for centuries. It’s primarily for using its fibers to make fabrics and a host of articles. Additionally, the intoxicating ingredients, as well as the medicinal benefits of cannabis ingestion, are long proven. However, marijuana has only recently been accepted by mainstream American culture.
The active ingredients in marijuana are tetrahydrocannabinol or THC as well as cannabinol oils. It is THC that gives the “buzz” as well as providing the healing relief which marijuana is well known for. The source of THC comes from the plant’s flower or bud, and it is only the female plants that flower. Having a male plant in a marijuana grow house is disastrous. Pollination will stop the THC production and kill the crop’s value.
Marijuana plants grow, bloom and die on a predictable cycle that can be manipulated in a controlled grow house climate.
New plants can be started from seeds, although, most commercial or larger hobby grow-houses use marijuana clones. Then, they are cut off from a mother plant and rooted in a solution. Once the plants are sturdy, they are transplanted to either a growing medium or to a hydroponic system where the roots are immersed in nutrient-rich water.
The next phase of a marijuana plant’s life is the vegetation stage.
Here, it reaches maturity by growing its stalk, stems, and leaves. This requires an exact light cycle of sixteen hours of bright light in a blue light spectrum that simulates spring and summer. It is crucial that cannabis plants then get eight hours of total darkness before the light is applied again. As “fall” approaches, the amount of light is decreased to exactly twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. The light spectrum is changed to orange, and this forces the plant to go into its reproductive phase, which is to flower.
Marijuana flowers are not colorful, showy displays like annual bedding plants. The flower is a spikey “bud” which contains the valued THC compounds. Commercial marijuana plants do not contain seeds unless they are specifically being raised for seeds. Seedless plants are known as “sensimilla,” and the buds are harvested just before their THC is naturally released in the form of resin or oil – which is what hash is made from.
The valuable buds are dried, then trimmed, and packaged for sale while the leaves and stalks are left to die and be composted or otherwise destroyed. Other forms of extracts can be made from cannabis flowers, but the majority of buds are rolled into “joints” and smoked or blended into all sorts of baking, teas, and edibles.
How to Build a Marijuana Grow House
Controlling a marijuana growing environment starts with the structure. Advanced, commercial marijuana greenhouses can be huge operations built-in converted warehouses or in specially designed steel buildings that contain different grow rooms and support sections. A number of these industrial grow operations; for example, have many rooms dedicated to housing plants that are in different life cycle stages, from clones to vegetation to flowering.
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