72 plants

I live in Michigan, the 13th state to legalize medical marijuana. I am building a place for caregivers/patients to grow their medical marijuana legally. The maximum number of plants each patient can have is 12 and the max number of patients one caregiver can have is 6, including himself.

I live in Michigan, the 13th state to legalize medical marijuana. I am building a place for caregivers/patients to grow their medical marijuana legally. The maximum number of plants each patient can have is 12 and the max number of patients one caregiver can have is 6, including himself. My question to you is, how big should each grow room be with the maximum number of plants per caregiver being 72. How much power should each room have? Does each room need its own water source?

AJax Pr1me,

You are allowed to grow a total of 72 plants but there is no limit as to how large a plant can be, so it would be in your interest to produce the largest plants possible. Let's start from the trial plants, the ones that you will grow out from seeds or clones you have obtained. You will choose the initial varieties from these plants. Take clones from these plants that will also be grown out, then after evaluating the results select the ones you want to use. Grow out all the clones except for the plants you have selected as mothers, which are kept in vegetative.

Figure that your plants will be in vegetative cycle for about 10 weeks and then in flowering for about eight, a total of 18 weeks. All of the plants in vegetative can be kept in a single room. Keep the flowering plants in a separate room.

Dividing 72 by 18 results in 4, the number of plants that are to be started each week for the full regimen. Each week four large clones are cut from the selected plants to begin their 18-week journey. Once they have rooted they are placed in planting mix or large individual module hydroponic containers. They will remain in the vegetative room for a total of 10 weeks. During this time they will be given enough room and large enough rooting space to support a plant that will grow to a diameter of approximately one meter. The height is not as important as the width.

The plants will start out occupying a canopy space of 925 cm2, but by the time they leave the space they will be occupying about 8,400 cm2. So, you can figure that each plan uses an average of about 9325 cm2.

After about 10 weeks its time for the four plants to go into the flowering room, where they will spend the next 8 weeks or so under 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of light. They will each occupy a space of about 1.5 m2. They are most conveniently lit using a single 1,000-watt lamp for each plant. If the largest lamp available is 600 watts use three lights over two plants.

These are going to be big plants, so the light should be kept high above them. There is a misconception that light energy dissipates with distance. The reality is that as the light beam spreads with distance its beam becomes less intense, but it delivers the same amount of energy. If the reflectors and their placement are designed to deliver the light to the plant canopy rather than disperse it to the walls or unoccupied space, the plants receive light from many directions, so less vegetation is in shadow. The other advantage of having the lights elevated from the plants is that there is less chance of foliage burn from heat and the plants get a more even light distribution. If the light were just a foot or two above the top of the plant the top canopy would receive far more light than the lower parts of the plant. When the light comes at a greater distance from different directions as a result of the wide beam from each lamp, the whole plant is more evenly illuminated.