I’ve been interested in cannabis since I first tried it in my mid-teens. I tried to grow some Thai seeds I found in some brick weed in a big cardboard box with a flourescent tube in it, which didn’t work.
While I was at Uni, a friend of mine who had learned how to grow from other friends in the weed black market, got a grow on and I learned from him and got going with a basic hydro setup in the 90s. It was rockwool in troughs with a twice daily soak cycle in a recirculating system in my friend’s granny’s loft. After 3 or 4 grows at different locations with pretty good success considering our ignorance, we’d all managed to keep ourselves self-sufficient and I moved my system home to my parents loft.
Sadly, that is when the cops came. They’d busted the company that sold the seeds - for selling cuttings - and while it was legal to sell seeds, the judge gave them warrants for all the addresses that had bought seeds. Yeah, I know I broke the cardinal rule, but I figured after a year, it would be safe to grow at that address because there’d been no comeback… I was wrong.
So it was something like 20, 25 years after that when I first grew again. Conditions had become a bit more favourable, though it is still illegal here. I am a medical patient now, so I figure if I did ever get busted again, there’d be some mitigation of the indictment.
Anyhoo, I went to a local seed shop and paid cash and got some Sweet-tooth autos on in soil in my greenhouse. It worked really, really well. So I bought a little propagator and a 100W Spiderfarmer light and grew a micro-grow under my desk, venting out of my bedroom wall. That worked pretty darned well too!
Eventually, I got a nice wooden shed, insulated it and bought a 4 x 2ft tent which is enough for my needs. I grow in soil, organically using 12L airpots usually, though I’ve also grown in 9L pots when I need to fit an extra pot or two in the tent.
I’ve grown a range of photoperiod strains in there and a few autos and have been able to keep myself going well.
I invested in a roisin press and some extraction ethanol so I can make concentrates and oils to reduce down the strains that I am less keen on. That means I have enough meds to use in edibles, vaporiser or dab rig and I am happy with my lot now.
With all that work behind me now, I can now make enough meds to keep myself afloat without paying high private medical fees all the time.
I made a drying / curing fridge using a thermo-electric wine-fridge and a small deconstructed dehumidifier inside and I use that to dry and cure my crops slowly with very good aroma and flavour whatever the time of year. That said, I favour growing in Autumn / Winter and sometimes through til spring as it is easier to heat the shed efficiently than it is to cool it.
So that’s me. Latest crop, Super Skunk, Lemon Venom, White Widow, Green Crack.
It was a very cool (no pun intended) idea I read on another group I hang out on. It works very well.