Soaring Above Sativas

I went to check out a massive grow room hidden away in remote British Columbia. A friend wanted me to turn his harvest trim into bubblehash. I knew there would be a lot of trim from this particular garden as there are several rooms. However, the one featured in this segment is special. Why? We’ll get to that in a moment!

First, let me describe the room. It’s a 25-foot by 16-foot space with 20-foot high ceilings. Thirty-five giant plants reach 10 to 12 feet tall. The strains are Krush, Hash Bud, Skunk 28, Skunk 100, and Champagne. This room is usually filled with sativa-dominant strains, but indica crosses are sometimes grown too. These plants are only two weeks into flowering, and will go ten more weeks before being harvested. The cannabis from this garden goes to the BC Compassion Society Outlet in Vancouver and sells for CDN$2,000-2,400
a pound.

The High Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights in the main room hang low enough from the 20-foot ceiling to give the plants everything they need from above. The growing medium is an all-organic nutrient soil mix the grower makes himself. He utilizes a lot of bat guano and fish emulsion during the plants’ most rapid growth period. Flies and thrips (tiny insects with long, narrow wings that infest and feed on a wide variety of weeds and crops) do offer some challenges, and this grower deals with them by using one of the safest and most useful forms of pest control to come along in years: predator

nematodes.
(Microscopic in size and wormlike in form, predatory nematodes attack and kill more than 250 different pests including fleas, thrips, fungus gnat larvae, and even insects as large as cutworms. Nearly every insect that spends any part of its life cycle in the soil is prey for predator
nematodes. –CC)

The real wonder of this garden room, however, is a zip line that enables you to actually fly among the tall cannabis plants. A zip line – also known as a zip wire or aerial runway, and usually found in gymnasiums and obstacle courses – is a pulley suspended on a cable and mounted on an incline, upon which the user can traverse from the top to the bottom of the inclined cable propelled by gravity.

The difference is that this zip line is motorized, so gravity isn’t a factor in where you can go! The grower installed a garage door track from Home Hardware, added two winches from Canadian Tire (one for up-and-down, one for back-and-forth), and worked in a 12-volt “1,500 pound-capable” motor. You can control which way you move – forward, backward, up or down – and how fast.

To reach the zip line and strap in, you climb up to a balcony-like second level in the room that overlooks the 10 to 12-foot plants. Once strapped into the zip line’s “seat”, you are able to move forward and fly above the grow room. You can even lower yourself and move among the plants, then rise up again to look down at them. This provides an awesome perspective of live cannabis plants that most people never get to see! For this particular “high-flying” experience, I brought along my mini pocket RooR bong and some of my finest Bubble Bag-made bubblehash to smoke. This zip line and the beautiful plants represent enthusiasm, experimentation, and having fun while growing cannabis. Bubble on!