Fast forward to the year of our Lord Two Triple-ought. I'd made a very good friend (I wonder where he is now ... he hasn't returned my twenty phone messages) who suffered from a variety of ills, including depression and a propensity to panic. He smoked modern pure sweet seedless bud, and on a trip to visit him on Oregon I broke my promise with great ceremony.
This was also the heady time when California's Prop 215 promised to be the sharp end of the wedge that would sunder the darkness of the Anslinger era. I listened to my friend's supply woes, and i decided that I was going to make a go of this. At the time I was married, and I'd enlisted the spouse's support. (That story ended up turning slowly and irreparably sour.)
After converting a homemade back compartment of a garden shed into my secret lab OAR a 'try (cue Frankenstein laugh) and becoming a member of Overgrow (still have the t-shirt!!!) I started with soil ... big cheezy plastic pots from Home de Pot filled with garden-variety (sic!) potting soil. I wish i could remember what seedbank I used, but I ordered 10 beans each of "Kimo Sno-Bud" and "Northern Lights #5". My Google searches for Kimo Sno-Bud are coming up dry, so i can't even find out more about it.
Nine Sno-Bud germinated, and five of these were girls. Only one NL germed, and fortunately she was a girl also. After about five months I discovered the oh so special joys of trimming a harvest and ended up with about four ounces of rather nice smoke. I assayed a Sno-Bud nug. It was 11% THC by extraction and gravimetric analysis (weight, basically) of the refined THC. The crude heated extract (essentially bho) was an honest 89% by weight THC. The NL#5 didn't yield much, but oh did it smell hashy.
I then decided I wanted to try hydro. I lived close to a rather good hydro store ... thse guys were mega helpful, and they steered me toward NFT. I set up an ebb&flood table for veg under a 250W MH lamp with the combo hood/ballast. The flowering room, about 4x7 feet, got 2x600W HPS in glazed hoods. For a strain I selected Bros Grim "Cinderella 99".
The other thing that I did was research hydro nutrients. I bought a lovely book, "Plant Nutrient facts for Hydroponics & How to make your own Fully Formulated Plant Nutrient" by Jim McCaskill , published by Foothill Hydroponics, N. Hollywood CA 91601. Using formulae in that book, along with individual nutrient ppm guidelines for cannabis gleaned from web searches, I devised my own salt fert recipes for veg and flower. I compounded these out of entirely ACS reagent salts, available to me because at the time i was still a pro lab chemist. My experiment was to grow a thorougly controlled non-organic crop from seed to bud. I used deionized distilled water and MES (morpholinoethanesulfonic acid) as a non-metabolizable buffer.
All ten beans popped, and they did well in veg for about 6 weeks. They took to my 100% artificial nutes like seals to surf. I transferred them to the NFT gutters, veg'd them a little bigger under the HPS, then flowered them. I was left with 5 femmes, four nice ones and a runt. I kept a small male branch alive and chucked pollen at a pair of lower branches for my very own cindy F1 seeds. Those buds seeded while none others did. I still have the seeds, although after several HOT Rednekistan summers I doubt their viability.
I yielded a bit over a pound of meticulously-groomed bud from that grow. I presented it to a San Fran dispensary where i had an "in" thanks to an Overgrow acquaintance. Even after I disclosed my zero-organic policy, my bud still got top marks, as evidenced by the fact that I sold that pound at their highest purchaser rate.
Very soon after that grow finished, I lost my job and had a full-scale nervous breakdown that led me to where I am today ... a shadow of my former self, relentlessly depressive after every med (incl. green) failed me, alive only by grace of SSDI.
Now that I am really truly alone for the first time since college, that gret pioneer spirit (fuck it, got nothing to lose) kicked in, and I'm almost finished completing my new grow facility. More about that anon. cn