As I work in my flower room today, I feel reflective. Maybe Radiohead has something to do with it. “Everything in Its Right Place” from Kid A can be faintly heard from the sidewalk, quickly fading into the white noise of the freeway down the street. But inside my house, it’s all-consuming. It drives my thoughts on how and what to teach a new grower and takes me back to the days when I first started growing, not long after this album was released 23 years ago.

Welcome to Homegrown: From My Basement To Yours

Hey folks! Welcome to my second go-around of Homegrown: From My Basement To Yours. I’d like to thank the fine team at FNM for having me back, as well as those of you who read my first column and reached out with words of support. You are very much appreciated.

However, if you happened to miss the first installment, don’t fret. It was mostly my rambling on about my personal cannabis story and how you happen to find my thoughts on the pages of this fine magazine. If you’d like to catch up, it’s in the Legacy edition and is still readily available online or in print.

Indica or Sativa?

This column is about the reason we are all brought here together - the plant. Call it weed, dope, pot, herb, grass, whatever you’d like. I don’t personally call it marijuana because of the dubious nature of the term’s history, its racist connotations, and the way the term was used to demonize the plant by special interests. But, that story will have to wait because today, I’m here to write about the history of “Cannabis Sativa,” which has been the accepted classification of our favorite plant for about 270 years now.

In the eighteenth century, a Swede named Carl Linnaeus was pivotal in establishing binomial nomenclature. Carl named this beautiful plant cannabis sativa. But the word sativa merely meant that it was cultivated. There were cucumis sativus (cucumbers), Avena sativa (oats), Allium sativum (garlic), and so forth. And the cannabis that Linnaeus classified at the time was largely what we would call industrial hemp.

About 30 years after this classification was established, a French gentleman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck returned to Europe with a variety of cannabis that he called Indica, well, because he found it in India, where it had been used for its medicinal and psychoactive properties. The story continues for a couple of hundred years, but ultimately our understanding of what a sativa is and what an indica is are not rooted in much of anything.

Now, I’m not trying to change the everyday usage of words, and I’m not here to give you a biology lesson, I just want you to understand that every variety is the result of how the plant has adapted to its environment and how it has crossbred with other varieties. Its phytochemistry, its nutrient needs, how it grows and how much it stretches, how long it takes to flower… are just factors of its personal history. As a new cultivator, it doesn’t matter too much how it is classified. There is one exception, and I’ll fill you in below.

There has been a push in recent times to classify the plant by broadleaf and narrow-leaf, which may be more relevant to the cultivator. But it doesn’t dictate a particular set of needs for the plant, nor address its unique makeup of cannabinoids, terpenes, etc. - the variety’s unique chemical composition of secondary metabolites, also known as its photochemistry.

My advice is to pick varieties of cannabis that suit your consumption tastes and won’t be too difficult to grow in your space. Probably the most common problem that most new growers will encounter is the plant getting too tall for their indoor space.

As you become more experienced, you’ll learn more about genetic selection and methods for controlling that height (or stretch, as we call it) during the plant’s cycle. We’ll get into genetic selection, clones vs. seeds, where to get them, and a few things you want to pay attention to during that process in my upcoming columns.

The Cycle of Life

Cannabis is an annual. It starts as a seedling in the spring and grows vegetatively throughout the season. In the late summer, it begins to flower. Those flowers generally mature within two months, but some varieties are known to take as long as four months, depending on their own personal history. And if nature works as intended, together the male and female plants produce seeds to then again sprout in the spring, continuing the cycle of life.

Almost all cannabis is known as a photoperiodic plant, and specifically, a short-day plant. Without getting too deep in the weeds, the flowering cycle is initiated by a shift in the balance of plant proteins as the days get shorter. In the spring and summer, the plant receives enough daylight to maintain a balance which keeps the plant in a vegetative state.

The plant will continue to grow new stalks, fan leaves, and internodes - the tiny new branches that start every few inches along the main stalk as it grows. Think of each one of these as a future flower site. The plant will continue in a vegetative state as long as this balance of proteins is maintained, so the plant can get quite large. I’ve seen outdoor plants reach twenty feet tall by the end of their life cycle.

As the days start to get shorter, the balance of those hormones in the plant begins to shift. The first response in the plant is what we call stretch. Stems elongate rapidly, and the plant will get much taller and wider. Eventually, the buildup of hormones in the plant triggers flower production, as the stretch slows and eventually stops.

As the flowers begin to mature, the male plant concentrates on producing sacs full of pollen. The female begins what we call calyx stacking. It produces calyces upon calyces, each developing a couple of pistils called stigma. Those stigma start white and generally turn to an orange color as the plant matures. When the male plant’s pollen sacs mature, they open, and the wind carries pollen to the female flowers. When this pollination happens, the female starts producing seeds.

Here’s the magic…

If there are no males to pollinate them, the females will continue to produce more flower and more resin in hopes of capturing pollen. Eventually, those flowers mature, and ultimately the plant begins a death cycle, or senescence. It concentrates its last efforts on preserving those flower sites. And just before that cycle is complete, when those flower sites have reached the desired maturity, we harvest and dry them.

What is an Autoflower?

As written above, most cannabis responds to the duration of daylight, or the photoperiod. The one exception would be those varieties that have been crossed with what is called cannabis ruderalis. Ruderalis is a variety of cannabis originating in regions without ample light to properly regulate this process, and the plant has adapted. It will start to flower automatically once it reaches a certain maturity, regardless of how many hours of daylight the plant is processing.

These varieties are known as autoflowers and are actually worth considering for the new grower. They are simpler to grow and generally smaller, in my experience. They have a reputation for being less potent and yielding less, but breeders have brought the genetics a long way. The biggest drawback is that they are on that journey towards senescence, regardless of the light cycle, so you can’t clone and continue that line. Each seed is essentially a unique one-and-done plant, so enjoy it.

How We Mimic Nature

For the vast majority of genetics, thankfully that cycle is easy enough to reproduce indoors under artificial light. Growers will sometimes play with the duration of those cycles, but generally, if you expose the plant to eighteen hours of light, with six hours of darkness (18/6), it will stay in a vegetative state - from seedling or clone until you determine that the plant is the right size and is ready to flower. With the simple change of a timer, plants are switched to a 12/12 cycle, with the lights only on for 12 hours per day. That cycle will initiate and maintain the plant’s reproductive phase.

Whew! And there you have it! I hope you feel both inspired and empowered with a basic understanding of the life cycle of this beautiful plant to continue with me in the next issue. We will be taking an in-depth look at things to consider when selecting a space for your indoor grow and also some of the basic equipment you need to get started.

And I hope you enjoyed the little bit of history about cannabis. The future of this plant is up to us. Until next time…