As this year rushes to its end, I just wanted to put down some thoughts as to mistakes made this year along with ways to do things better in 2022.
This year we had two huge harvests, that required us to bring in extra help for uppotting, sometimes watering and definitely harvesting. Running 12 or 18 large plants at the same time is too much work and really stressed the capabilities of our grow area, and after seeing how hard this was, we are not going to do that any more. Secondly, it takes longer to get to the point of gain in these huge grows, where we have been patiently waiting for the plants to fill up 7 and 10 gallon containers for 100 days of veg or more, and every time we have finally gotten to the point of harvest, we and our patients have been desperate for product, forcing us to somewhat hurry the drying and curing process in order to get it out to everyone.
Secondly, here in Missouri, running at the 18 plants in bloom, 18 plants in veg licensing on the medical growers permit, is very expensive. In addition to the original $125 to get my own medical card, it then requires additional grower cards for 3 individuals, including myself, again at $125 apiece. Doing the math shows that licensing alone is costing me $500 per year to keep this legal.
Surely there is a better way, especially considering that we only achieved the full 18/18 plants once during this entire 2 years of operation. We debated on this for a while and realized that we can make this a much more efficient operation, by reducing its size by quite a bit.
After this current end of the year double run of LSD and then Amnesia/Bushmans is harvested, we will restart in the spring with a new and lighter concept. We are not going to activate the other 2 caregiver permits when they expire and will not officially be providing support for other patients. The operation will then be limited by my cultivator permit only for the foreseeable future. If we need to, we can and will reinstate the other two licenses, but I think we can save at least $250 just in licensing fees, without hurting over all production, by just being smarter with this operation.
So with one license, we will be limited to 6 plants vegging and 6 plants blooming. I am thinking a shorter growing schedule and smaller, 5 gallon containers will be just fine. We are going to regiment this entire operation to a strict timeline, and we will be running an operation with a small mini harvest each and every month after April when things are in full production.
The plan is to start 3 plants (or clones) each month. Each of these plants will be vegged for 2 months. At the end of the 2 months of veg, they will go into bloom for 8 weeks. Each time 3 plants are harvested, 3 more will be ready to go into the bloom room. Each harvest of 3 plants in 5 gallon containers should easily give us 3 oz of product, for a total of 9oz each month. Eight months of this till the end of the year will net us about 70 oz of product for the year. I think this should do us. If not, in 2023 we will activate a second license and go for 6 new plants each month.
On paper, this seems like a good plan and will be a more steady distribution of the workload without any crazy 5 day crunches of harvests that totally take over the house and all of our lives, since I can handle a 5g 3 plant harvest in my sleep. This will also allow us to put new strains in the rotation every month to provide much more variety than we did this year by running only 2 or 3 major strains in these large grows.
It took us a while to get here and we needed first to see what we and our grow areas were capable of, how much work actual production turned out to be, and how much product we actually needed to produce in order to keep up with things.
By the end of the year I will close out this journal, as it was intended to be a 2 year perpetual that would get us to this point of re-evaluation and adjustment. The next Veg journal will be very active, changing with every month's addition to the rotation, and always 1 or 2 months ahead of what is happening in the bloom room. This will also allow me many more opportunities to test seeds that are made available and to use up some of the quality seeds that are given to me, while not worrying too much if one of them ends up being less than great, at least another batch is only a month away! And, since my grow rooms are presently necessitating a break during the coldest part of the winter, that seems to be a natural place to end a perpetual journal of this type, so the 2022 Veg Journal will only have a 1 year duration.
So as we close out this 2020-2021 Veg journal, I want to thank those who followed along this last 2 years along with my hopes that you were not only entertained, but also learned something. I enjoyed having your support and you being here, so thank you one and all for following along. I hope this year is ending well for you and that you too have big plans for this upcoming year. Around here we say Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah as well as Blessed Yule. May your holidays be happy and your blessings bountiful as we head into the new year.
Happy Growing to all, from the crew here at Emmie's Gardens, Emilya, Ms. J, Pops and at the moment, 11 dogs.
