When it comes to cannabis cultivation, you can rarely see a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution. There are crucial characteristics to take into account, not only with regards to the specific variety a grower is growing but also how the external climate influences the environment inside the cultivation facility. The latter is particularly important to consider when a grower decides to go for a greenhouse. Admittedly, indoor grows too have to take into account the external climate when dialing in the cultivation environment. Yet, location-specific weather mainly affects greenhouses, especially when it comes to natural sunlight. With that, of course, comes more heat, more plant transpiration, and so forth. Thus, growers need to set up their facility in such a way that the greenhouse is still capable of harnessing natural resources like sunlight indeed, while the growing environment remains stable and optimal for a plant to grow healthy.
Greenhouse airflow in Desert Hot Springs
Exactly because of the necessity to customize the cultivation depending on the grower and the location, GoodBrands, a Desert Hot Spring-based cannabis greenhouse, got in contact with Conley’s when they had to set up their greenhouse.
Chad Spooner, director of facilities at GoodBrands
In such an area, one of the things that needed to be addressed from the get-go. “Something I came up here with Conley’s was moving the air through the greenhouse,” says Chad Spooner, director of facilities at GoodBrands. “Your pattern fans, they do great: we are in monsoon season right now in Desert Hot Springs, and we have clouds hovering over the mountains and it flooded yesterday.” It surely does not come as surprising that some special adjustments needed to be made to ensure plants would thrive in the facility. “The trick to that with us is something we came up with Conley’s, sitting down with them and having them explain what their existing structure is capable of doing, and then pushing that envelope to what we needed to do is something that they helped us to do.”
So, what did Chad and GoodBrands do in their Desert Hot Springs grow facility? “We added extra HAF fans. During monsoon and very humid days like today, your pattern fan systems are not going to work as efficiently as they are going to during those dry summer days, which are ideal for pattern fans. So, the idea here is to increase our HAF, which we doubled, and now we are pushing double the amount of air and moving that across our garden, which is allowing us to create much more airflow over our plants.”
Flowering bays
Goodbrands also utilizes Conley’s moving tables and gutters. “Conley’s gutters work great,” Jeff Homolya, vice president of cultivation at GoodBrands, explains. “They are very sturdy, very reliable. We do a drain-to-weight system here. So, the water runs down to them and when we’re done using them, they clean up real nice and easy.”
Jeff Homolya, vice president of cultivation at GoodBrands
In the flowering bays of the greenhouse, Jeff continues to explain that they use blackout curtains. “They are reliable, we never got a problem with them. This place gets pitch black, and it grows great flowers at night.” But how large these flowering bays are? “We run roughly 1,600 plants,” he points out. “We get 400 pounds of yield per bay, and the flower comes out well in the mid-20 potency, very high quality."
For more information:
Conley's Greenhouse Manufacturing and Sales
sales@conleys.com
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