The Bonsai Wheel

This “Bonsai Wheel” growing machine was purchased in 2005, and has been operating continuously ever since. The grower, whom we’ll call Charas, said the manufacturer has gone out of business and this model is no longer made. However, the structure was based on the “Omega Wheel”, which is widely available (www.omegagarden.com). The Bonsai Wheel stands four feet high by six feet long, and is located in a basement kitchen in Surrey BC, a satellite suburb of the Greater Vancouver area. Charas began growing purely for profit but as his personal financial situation improved it became more of a hobby. He finds peace in tending the garden, watching the plants develop and mature.

Charas has been using the Bonsai Wheel for two years, and has an additional year of indoor soil growing experience. He said the plants finish faster in the wheel than in soil, maturing in six weeks of flowering instead of the usual eight. The most mature plants in these photos are at five weeks (35 days, specifically) in their cycle, with seven to ten days left until harvest. (With another two to three weeks, the plants would finish properly and provide Charas with the optimum “peak harvest”. -CC) The wheel can hold a maximum capacity of 360 4x4 growing cubes, but there were only 200 plants in the wheel when these photos were taken. The strains are King Louie, Happy Face and Cocobunga. The King Louie makes up 95 percent of the plants in this room, but Charas’ customers said it tastes bad so he won’t grow it again. Everyone prefers

All plants in the room are grown from cuttings, not seed. Charas creates clones under a 130-watt compact fluorescent lamp on an 18/6 cycle, and keeps the cuttings on steps to train them to grow in the Bonsai Wheel. When the rooted cuttings are two to four weeks old, Charas places them into the wheel and sets two 1000-watt High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights on a 12/12 regime. The two HPS 1000-watt lights are cooled with air brought in via dryer hose from outside the room; the air vents in and out throughout the rest of the house, but does not go outside. In the room there is a fan to keep the air moving and a large charcoal filter to kill odours. There is a cooler to store water, which comes from the tap at an excellent pH of 6.9 and then passes through an automotive radiator and fan to be cooled down.

For nutrients, Charas uses “Zeta Grow” for the vegetation cycle and “Synergy Series” power pack for the finishing stage, as well as “Bee One”. The roots in each row of plants sit immersed in a few inches of nutrients and water (nutrient solution) in an open reservoir at the base of the wheel. The wheel rotation is continuous, so every row of roots sits in the nutrient solution. It takes one hour to rotate entirely, soaking 20 rows for three minutes each. Charas keeps three things in mind with this style of growing: keep the reservoir full and up to date; don’t over-fertilize the plants; and better to provide no food at all than too much.

Charas uses a dehumidifier to deter mold. Spider mites are the only real problem that he has encountered; he uses a light dose of “End-All” if the infected plants are young clones or small plants and mature plants receive a slightly weaker-than-recommended solution. (The way to stop mites in their tracks is to bring the ambient temperature down. At 70ºF in the garden, mites stop reproducing. If it can be made to drop to 60-65ºF in the dark cycle, and no more than 73ºF with lights on, then mite growth would be curtailed entirely. -CC)

Charas began manicuring with the process of hanging the plants and letting them dry before removing the bigger leaves. Now he trims the leaves when the plants are freshly harvested and cuts off the buds to dry them on mosquito-net screens in the basement near the furnace, where it is warm and dry. (Connoisseur growers use the former method of drying whole plants for days before trimming because the leaf matter protects the trichomes and lessens damage to the bud. Commerical growers prefer the faster manicuring method of roughly cutting away every bit of fresh leaf and tossing moist cotton-ball-like green nugs onto screens to dry for a day or two.
Supply must move fast to meet demand! -CC) If the buds dry too fast Charas will put them in a Tupperware container or brown paper bag and store in a cool place for a day or two – this will pull out any excess moisture from within – then put the buds back on a screen to finish. Charas calls this process “sweetening” the buds. He spends two to three days drying, and then another day for sweetening. “If the bud dries too fast,” Charas wisely notes, “the outside will be dry and inside wet, then the quality isn’t great”.

The wheel produces two pounds in 45 days with 200 to 360 plants (though Charas said he once harvested three pounds), which means it generates approximately four pounds of cannabis every three months equalling $8,000 (US$7,000) worth of market-ready cannabis – that amounts to $32,000 (US$28,000) per year. The approximate prices for cannabis in metro Vancouver (of which Surrey is part) are: $2,000 Canadian dollars (US$1650) for one pound (sixteen ounces/454 grams); $200 to $250 (US$175 to $200) for an ounce; $125 (US$110) for half an ounce; and $30 to $35 (US$25 to $30) for an eighth (3.5 grams).

Power consumption is 24-kilowatt-hours (kWh) daily with 12 hours of “lights-on”. Over a two-month billing cycle this electricity consumption is a modest $97.35 (US$86) at 6.65 cents a kilowatt-hour (the 2007 residential electrical rate in BC is 24 kWh x $00.0665 x 61 days billing cycle). Having 2,000 watts of output 12 hours daily is not high enough to draw suspicion from the very intrusive fire and utilities agents that municipalities are sending out to “high-usage” customers, trying to find grow-ops. These de facto warrantless searches, carried out by what amount to deputized civil servants, is an increasingly common way for BC police to harass cannabis gardeners out of communities.

Charas says that he chose to purchase the Bonsai Wheel because it was cheaper than the others on the market – although he concedes that you get what you pay for. It cost $3,500 ($3,100 US) for the locally made Bonsai Wheel in 2005, whereas an original Omega Wheel cost $6,750 ($6,000 US). Charas admits that it might have been wiser to purchase a brand-name Omega Wheel rather than the “home-made” wheel system because after two years of continual use, the wheel has gone from being perfectly round to slightly elliptical. As a result, about six rows can get too much immersion in nutrient solution, and other rows too little. Charas explained, “If the cubes dip in too much they absorb excessive amounts of water, which isn’t good for the plants. If the dip is too shallow, the cubes dry out and die. I regularly monitor my plants to make sure they are doing well despite this minor problem.”

Charas won’t be changing his style of growing anytime soon. “This particular wheel is not structurally strong enough to last the test of time, but I would definitely stay with this wheel growing method. The light output can be increased in other growing techniques, but this wheel shortens the finishing cycle so I believe it is ultimately faster. I like the shape of the finished buds, as they come out better from the wheel system than from soil. I find that soil-grown sativa strains look light and fluffy (naturally), but in the wheel they come out tight and compact, which gets me a better price in the market. Using the Bonsai Wheel has been a really fun way to grow and I’m still very pleased with
the results.”