It also created a whole new industry. Open an issue of High Times, Weed World, or Skunk and you’ll find pages and pages of ads for indoor grow equipment: lights, nutrients, irrigation systems, filters, fans, DVD grow guides, and even special units designed to fit in your closet and provide everything you need to grow superior weed. A plant that thrives in almost any climate, in any country in the world, now mostly grows indoors.
As we drove down the mountain, I asked Crockett when he started growing indoors.
“I didn’t get into indoor until ’98, ’99. I’d been around it but I didn’t have the facility. Before 2000, outdoor was worth a lot more than indoor so I’d be able to make a killing on my plants and then snowbird—just work in the summer and play in the winter.”
He smiled. “Until I got my family.”
He was referring to his wife and two kids, his dogs, and his massive barbecue smoker.
Crockett listed off the stuff he used to build a successful indoor room. “I got one-thousand-watt high-pressure sodium lights, vented, A/C, carbon filters. I run CO2. I’ve got controllers that control the environment and a super-insulated building.”
“Where did you get all that stuff?”
“The equipment’s basic stuff you can buy anywhere. I don’t have any super special laser beams or anything.”
The truck meandered through the iconic California scenery, passing rolling hills dotted with oak trees and chaparral, down into the flats of the valley with its farmhouses and fruit orchards, until we passed through a couple of metal gates and headed down a road made of hard-packed dirt. Crockett spun the wheel and the truck shot through a gap in a fence and plunged down a steep hill, where it skidded to a stop in a swirl of dust.
I looked over and saw a building, about the size of a doublewide trailer home, sitting in a small area that had been dug out of the side of a hill. It looked like one of those prefabricated offices that you see on construction sites. Only this building was windowless. This was the grow room.
I followed Crockett past some two-by-fours and scrap wood piles to the door. Crockett unlocked it and I followed him into a small workroom—kind of a foyer—a mixed-use business office, seed library, and laboratory. He stopped and lit a cigarette.
“My stuff is all organic, all from soil. And to be honest I don’t fertilize a whole hell of a lot. A lot of the stuff I get around here is natural stuff. We know people who have turkey farms, chicken farms, stuff like that, or we get composted material that’s all made here naturally. We have a greenhouse that’s down in the farmland that’s a huge complex that makes organic worm castings. We get truckloads of that. It’s one of our major secrets in our growing.”
“So there is a secret ingredient.”
He laughed. “Go down to the fertilizer store and look at the hundred different bottles they got. Turn them around and look at what they’re derived from. Most of them possess the same stuff. These big-time guys like Advanced Nutrients will tell you that if you add this, which is almost exactly this other stuff, at this certain time it’s gonna do this for your plant. It’s just all true bullshit. Okay?”
I nodded. True bullshit. I believed that.
Crockett leaned forward, continuing. “You can get everything you need by staging your soil, which means putting the stuff into the soil that you want your plants to uptake. You can get different types of additives that go in your soil that break down at different rates. Now an indoor garden, it’s actually really hard to do this with. It’s easy to add a bunch of shit to your fucking soil and say ‘This made a big difference.’ But to really know what happened is different because some things take longer to break down than others, and your pot is only in there for sixty days or whatever the flowering period is. So if that bat guano you put in there isn’t partially soluble, then you’re just throwing it away. It’ll never break down in time for it to be used. So these companies that are selling you all this stuff are basically selling you stuff that you’re throwing in the garbage can, and you’re paying top dollar for it because you think it’s growing your plants better. In actuality, just use good soil, good base fertilizer, a good secondary fertilizer, and it’ll be fine.”
“So staging the soil is the secret?”
“There’s no real secret, yet there is: The secret is experience. That’s the whole deal. You’ve got to stick with it. Don’t get discouraged if you sink ten grand into a room and four grand into power and it all goes to shit. Because that happens. You’re a farmer and farmers get one good crop out of four, so save your money.”
Crockett opened the door to the grow room and flipped on the lights. I was hit by the smell of budding cannabis—it’s a nice smell—and a blast of cold air from the air-conditioning units keeping the room cool. The lights stuttered and blinked to life revealing a clean white room brimming with plants.
Powerful grow lights hung from the ceiling, suspended by chains; a simple house fan circulated the air; drip irrigation hoses spidered out to every plant, and a CO2 tank kept the carbon dioxide level high. It really did look like a space station.
I followed Crockett in and he walked me around the small room, pointing out the different varieties he was growing.
“That’s Super Lemon Haze. This is interesting. It’s L.A. Woman from DNA Genetics.”
I looked closely at the L.A. Woman, a cross between L.A. Confidential and Martian Mean Green. The buds had a nice stink and the thick dark leaves indicated that it leaned heavily indica.
Crockett continued his tour. “That’s some Cheese. And these are mostly Private Reserve.”
He had about twenty-five or thirty plants flowering. In a smaller room off to the side was an equal number of plants growing in what’s called the “vegetative stage”—the part of a plant’s life when it’s just growing and not worried about flowering. I guess you could say they’re prepubescent.
Flowering in cannabis plants is triggered by the change in daylight hours. In the spring and summer, when there are long days and short nights, the plants grow big and lush. When fall comes and the days are suddenly shorter, the cannabis begins to flower. To mimic this natural rhythm indoors, plants in the vegetative stage are blasted with light eighteen to twenty-four hours a day until they reach a good height. Then they’re moved into the main grow room and put on a schedule of twelve hours of sunlight and twelve hours of complete darkness. This switch in light hours makes the plants bloom.
A professional grower like Crockett keeps the vegetative and flowering rooms separate so he can maintain constant cycles of crops. With four or five indoor rooms running cycles like this, and counting his outdoor crops, he must grow a lot of weed.
“How much cannabis do you produce a year?”
Crockett thought about it. From the look on his face I thought that maybe he’d never actually bothered to add it up before. He finally came to a number but delivered it with a shrug. “Maybe two hundred to two hundred fifty pounds per year. But that’s not all from me. I have people who work for me, and partners, and everything else that goes with that.”
Before I could calculate in my head how much he was potentially grossing he read my mind. “A lot of it is put back into the gardens. To build our prototype garden like this costs about thirty thousand dollars and then another three thousand to run a cycle through it.”
He stopped to take a drag off his cigarette, then continued the tour, pointing out various gizmos and doodads. It’s important for indoor grow rooms to be clean—you don’t want mold or insects that might attack your plants—but Crockett’s room was cleaner than any I’d seen. It looked like an operating room in a hospital. The lights and the watering system were all automated and on timers.
“Do you even need to be here?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. When people say, ‘Oh, this isn’t doing so well’ or ‘This is getting pests,’ I ask them, ‘How long are you spending in your room?’ You need to notice things. Does the room get hot at this time? Is this fan kicking in? You need to spend five mayb
e six hours a day in your room.”
I can’t say that I was surprised by his meticulous obsession with details. If I’d learned anything from Crockett, it’s that the small stuff is what makes the difference between growing good weed and great weed.
“I see how you got your reputation.”
He shrugged. “Reputation is a big thing. Around these parts I have a reputation for having the best marijuana. And when I go to other places like L.A. and I look at the quality of their herb—I’ve been to twenty or thirty shops—they all got really good herb, but the herb that I produce is right there if not superior. I’ve given a clone to some growers down there and they tried to grow it in a massive, twenty-light operation and it turned out okay. But it didn’t have the resin production that I get.”
“Why’s that?”
“I think you have to grow in a manageable facility—for one person or two people. Once you start getting into massive facilities with multiple people with multiple ideas of how to grow, you get conflicting ways of doing things. Even if you have a specific style on what you think is the way to do it, you’re telling this person what to do and they might have a different idea and they’re doing it reluctantly because they believe something else.”
He paused for a second, then continued.
“It’s not to say that my way is the right way. It’s just to say that if you’re going to do it, be passionate about it. If you think you’re doing it the right way, keep going and perfect your style. It’s just like cooking or anything else. There’s a million different ways to grow and they’re all right. But the way I define a good grower is that he’s happy with what he’s producing. If you’re growing a good garden and you’re happy with it, you’re doing it right. If you’re not happy with your garden, if it’s not producing enough or you’re not getting the quality you want, then you might want to take some advice.”
“But what if you create a system? Like a factory?”
He shook his head. “If you’re doing it yourself and you know what you’re looking for it’s going to be better. If you’re depending on a bunch of people to do it, it’s going to be inferior, which is what the big boys do. You have to grow with love.”
“With love?”
Crockett patted his chest. “Always with love.”
It reminded me of what Jon Foster of Grey Area said: The best herb is handmade—artisanal cannabis grown by people who sweat the small stuff.
Chapter Thirteen
Organoleptic in Berkeley
If dankness is subjective—and it seems to me that it is—how can we define it? One person’s awesomely dank might be another’s totally schwag. Everyone’s taste is different and, like the wise man said, there’s no accounting for it. Some people prefer pinot noir to merlot, bourbon to scotch, lager over pilsner. I choose vanilla over chocolate every time, a fact that baffles my wife.
In the wine world—and let’s be perfectly honest and say that no one is more snobby or pretentious than gastronomes and oenophiles—connoisseurs have developed a system for evaluating the relative merits of fermented grape juice. Robert Parker, the famous wine critic and editor of The Wine Advocate, uses a one-hundred-point rating system to define the relative dankness of wines. If he awards a vintage a high number—anything over ninety points is “outstanding”—the value of that wine skyrockets and previously unknown vintners become discovered. Some of them even become famous. It’s kind of like Star Search for booze.
Parker went so far as to have his nose insured for a million dollars, a fact I find a little strange. Does he get the payout if his olfactory glands stop functioning or does his nose have to be lopped off in an accident? Or was it some kind of publicity stunt? Is he just hyping his nose? If I was going to insure one of my protuberant body parts for a million bucks, it wouldn’t be my nose. But then my schnozzle is not the sensitive instrument that Parker claims to possess. I can’t tell the difference between a ninety-two-point-rated 2004 and an eighty-eight-point 2005 in a vertical tasting. Perhaps it’s because I don’t like to spit the wine out after I taste it. What’s the point of that? That’s like Bill Clinton not inhaling.
At the end of the day, whether it’s wine, food, or cannabis, anything that is judged by using taste, touch, or smell is going to be subjective. Scientists can tell us why something tastes a certain way, how it stimulates the circumvallate papillae, but they can’t make us like it.
I wondered if it was possible to develop a similar point system for cannabis. That led me to Berkeley, California, where the people at the Berkeley Patients Group are wrestling with this very question. They’ve begun a project to try to identify the essential qualities of high-grade cannabis by using organoleptic criteria. Organoleptic assessments use the senses—sight, taste, touch, and smell—to determine the character and quality of a product. It’s the exact same way Robert Parker judges wine, and the USDA meat and poultry inspectors ensure the food we eat is safe.
The I-5 freeway begins in Tijuana and ends in Vancouver, British Columbia, linking the entire west coast of North America with more than thirteen hundred miles of concrete. Sure, it sounds impressive, but the section connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco is a deadly dull drive. It’s like drawing a straight line for five hours, the tedium occasionally punctuated by the stench of feed lots and giant billboards that warn “Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving.”
I arrived in Berkeley ahead of my scheduled appointment so I went down the street to a little place called Caffe Trieste to have a coffee.
NorCal, as the locals like to call it, is not SoCal. The denizens of the Bay Area seem a little mossy compared to sun-dazed Angelenos. Perhaps the difference comes down to the fact that the NorCal folk are a forest people and the tribes of SoCal are beach and desert dwellers.
NorCal natives have a strange lingo, They use the word “hella” as in “that is hella awesome news” or “this sashimi is hella tasty” and their tree hugger earnestness always makes me a little suspicious, like I’m not sure they really are doing a citywide composting program—maybe they’re faking it just to make people from the weird, plastic gasbag that is Los Angeles feel hella inferior. I wouldn’t put it past them.
Caffe Trieste was lively, every table occupied, and yet I didn’t see a single person with a laptop, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, or any other electronic device. Outwardly intellectual and defiantly atavistic, the NorCal natives were reading books made out of paper.
What they lacked in electronic gizmos they made up for with the ubiquitous yoga mat. There was one at almost every table. Some of them even had special yoga mat–carrying cases. I will admit that the customers of the coffeeshop did, in fact, appear flexible, sprightly even. There were women with Pre-Raphaelite hairdos chatting over tea, young stay-at-home dads with infants in strollers, and a surprising number of older gray-haired men wearing silly hats. There was a septuagenarian sporting a newsboy cap, a stocky man in a checked sports car cap, an erudite gent in a straw boater, and a guy in one of those Australian outback hats where the brim snaps on the side. I assumed they were professors from the nearby university. There’s nothing tenured academics like to do more than revel in their own eccentricities.
The Berkeley Patients Group is housed in a former pancake restaurant. It’s a peculiar structure, with colossal floor-to-ceiling windows that sweep out in a large semicircle on the street side of the building. It’s a style I call “early IHOP,” and it gives the architecture a vaguely sci-fi vibe—the same aesthetic that gave us Googie drive-ins and cars with giant tail fins. With the addition of a chain-link fence topped with sharp looping coils of razor wire, high-tech surveillance cameras, and armed guards in the parking lot, the dispensary took on an ominous look, like a heavily fortified former pancake restaurant.
Once past a guard in the parking lot and another checkpoint at the front desk, I was met by David Stogner, a friendly and gregarious young man sporting cool glasses and a seemingly non-ironic blazer—sort of a hipster version of Mr. Rogers.
True to BPG’s mission statement—“to provide the purest, most effective, and affordable medical cannabis along with integrated holistic health services”—Wednesday is free acupuncture day at BPG, and David introduced me to a couple of the acupuncturists who provided the treatments. Other days are devoted to cranial sacral therapy, massage, legal assistance, and a hospice program. All are provided free of charge. They even offer arts and crafts.
David smiled. “We try to offer fun activities for our patients.” Just like Mr. Rogers, it’s all about being a good neighbor—although, now that I think of it, if I had to weave a lanyard or make a macramé planter, a cannabis dispensary might be the best place to do it.
David and I were joined by Brad Senesac, the communications director—one of the few men I’ve ever met who can wear plaid pants and actually make them look cool—and Debby Goldsberry, the director of the operation. Brad has a scathing, sardonic sense of humor and is so energetic it wouldn’t surprise me if he just started running in place; he’s the perfect foil for Debby’s easygoing charm.
Unlike the stereotypes of stoners and potheads often portrayed in the mainstream media, these three are all reassuringly professional—there’s not a dreadlock or stitch of tie-dyed clothing in sight—and look as if they could just as easily be pediatricians or executives from a Silicon Valley startup. This is not to say that they haven’t rocked a tie-dyed T-shirt in the past.
In the world of cannabis activism, Debby Goldsberry is a rock star. Tall, with sun-kissed good looks and a quick smile, she radiates a forthright, Midwestern wholesomeness. It’s disarming, until she starts talking and I realize she’s a whip-smart policy wonk who’s not afraid to rattle off the legal intricacies and the zoning arcana of complex city and state ordinances. She’s like a walking, talking encyclopedia of cannabis activism.
Heart of Dankness Page 14