What's in a Grow: Designing Your Operation
At this point, you’ve cracked the code on the type of building you want, now you have to lay this building out. How do you partition out the different areas of a grow - security access from the reception areas from grow areas. How do you design your grow operation?
Really the regulations are going to do that work for you and basically tell you what you have to have and where it has to go. They'll tell you that you have to have a security booth right by the entrance. You have to have certain kinds of locks, certain types of doors, you can't have viewable access from certain areas, so they'll pretty much lay that out in the rules for your build up.
The main components that you're going to have are your entrance, which is where security guard is going to be, then you're going to have your administrative offices for your clerks doing paperwork. There's so much paperwork in this industry, it's ridiculous. You generally have a small break room for the employees, plus bathrooms, and I have a small lounge area just for people that chill and hang out.
We have an administrative boardroom in ours, which is not required. It’s basically so we can talk and run the company while not having all the employees in and out around us all the time while we're trying to have a private conversation. Then you're going to have your actual growing room, so generally starting out with a veg room, cloning room, and a mother room. You can combine some of those together because they're all the same type of lighting and controls.
But yes, we have a veg room, which is where you veg mom and clones, then you're going to have multiple bloom rooms depending on how big your building is. Veg means vegetative.
The plants grow in two states - a vegetative state and a blooming state. Depending on what state the plant is in, they’re going to be in one of those types of rooms.
These two states do not influence each other, which is why you can combine these rooms. Only the light influences the plants. That's why in the veg room, we keep the lights on anywhere between 16 to 24 hours, and in the bloom room we do 12 hours on 12 hours off. Every grower has their own version of what they do, but it's somewhere in that variation, but the bloom room is 12 to 12.
That light change signals to the plant to stop growing and start producing, so it stops stretching and growing as a vegetative plant and starts blooming to actual buds that it produces. It’s interesting, that actually starts a death cycle of the plants, because a vegetative plant can grow perpetually forever as a plant, just like all plants do. But once that plant receives that that signal to flip and go into the bloom cycle, it begins his death dance.
What happens is that it spends all its energy to grow this bud, and that’s when we start pumping it with nutrients and more feedings and this and that's a whole other subject. But beyond that once the bud is done, the plant actually sucks all the nutrients out of itself. It starts eating all the leaves off, and it starts dying. It literally starts cannibalizing itself just to produce the last bit of bud in the plant before it dies, and that's when we harvest.
From harvest, that’s when we put everything into a dry room. The dry room is where you hang up the plants to get rid of the moisture. Then from there you're going to have your trim room, where you trim everything down, and then your curing and/or vault room, where you store the cannabis for its curing process to be burped all the time and then vaulted up and locked away.
A lot of places also have packaging rooms. Depending on your size, your packaging room and your trim room could be used as the same thing, just because you're not trimming all the time. We generally do because we do perpetual harvest, but most people do room rips so they can trim 2-3 days a week, and then package the other days. That's pretty much it for the rooms that you have to have, as well as security rooms, where all your cameras go. You have to have all the security stuff locked away. Your cameras, the backups, all your door access control panels, all that security equipment.
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Cheers!
.: Adam