I’m curious to get some feedback from @mastergrowers @growopowners and @GrowOpEmployees on how you move plants through growth stages (clone to flower to package).
We’ve been revisiting our product’s operational flow and received some feedback from other growers about how they generally move the “production line” along.
When you move plants from a) clone to vegetative, b) from vegetative to flowering, and c) flowering to harvested, do you track and move everything by original planting groups/batches OR do you transition plants to new stages in smaller batches/new groupings as they grow at different rates?
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In large facilities growing from clone, a propagation area feeds all the vegetative spaces. Generally many growers will dedicate 1/4 to 1/3 of the overall cultivation footprint toward vegetative endeavors. Since smaller vegetative plants can fit in smaller pots and you can fit many plants into a small area (you can fit about 120 1 gal round pots into a standard 4x8 tray), you will often find many strains sharing space in small aresa. This is just about space saving design and maximizing the light available to the plants. Depending on the varietal, I usually veg for 4-5 weeks with one transplant from a 2 gal square to the final 7 or 10 gal pot. Transplant shock takes time for a plant to overcome so I try to minimize the overall number of transplants in the life cycle of the plant.
As the plants near their teenage and are larger, you will begin to see many growers breaking apart homogeneous groups of plants into their own space for flowering. I love using RFID technology to track those plants and their physical location within the facility. It makes life so much easier.
So there’s my two cents. Everybody does things differently. How might other growers here on the forum answer this question?
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So, in a hypothetical situation, if you had 100 clones of a single strain on a single tray, you’d progress those 100 to vegetative at the same time in a perfect world. However, no two plants are identical in exact growth.
So would you wait for the slow-growers to catch up to the rest of the planting group before moving them to a veg room or tagging and considering them Vegetative?
Same situation then applies to moving that grouping (do you consider them a grouping at the Vegetative state or is it strictly by plant and not plant batch?) from Vegetative to Flowering.
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Yes, that is correct; and, as a bonus, because you are growing from propagated material, all the plants should grow nearly identically. Proper training and pruning can make their canopy neat and even. The plants should all grow in a uniform fashion and thus can be moved together in a batch - for instance, if I take 100 Blue Dream clones on the first of the month, the hope would be that by the 30th of the month, those 100 plants will have been transplanted once and grown to the ideal height to induce flowering. I will move that whole batch of 100 Blue Dream plants into a flowering room and dial back the lighting schedule to the 12/12. The whole batch of clones should be about the same in growth pattern and finish at exactly the same time and they can be harvested all at once…and the cycle continues FOR-EV-ER.
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Interesting. That helps me understand this process much better. Initially, we had taken approach known as the Harvest Batch, with the assumption that farmers are creating those plant groupings and would be interested in tracking that set of plants from start to finish.
This way you could figure out your actual yields (not just grams/kW at the Flowering stage or Total Harvest Yield based on the number of survivors), in terms of a more drilled-down approach.
Your last comment supports our assumption, but I’m still curious if any other @mastergrowers follow this production batch model or if they have a different approach altogether.
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Good day Mathew, Lee Wasson here with Catalyst Cannabis Co. out of Anchorage Alaska. Per state requirements we use Metrc but it is not adequate for my needs as a grower. It is simple enough but not flexible enough, for instance I would love to have a container size column, I often have close to 1000 plants of various sizes in different stages of growth in my vegetative room but of the same strain so say i need to move 50 out of 200 Ninja OG that are in large pots from veg into a flower room it is damn near impossible to isolate those 50 in Metrc so I have to send someone in to write down numbers and then go into Metrc and find those numbers. if i knew which 50 were in large pots vs the other 150 in smaller pots then the move would be much simpler.
We would love to Beta test your software while giving you weekly updates on the good, bad and ugly. We currently flower under 55,000 watts and have a retail store with another retail in design to be operational by first of year. We should be looking to expand cultivation around spring next year. As i said Metrc is a state requirement so any software we use out of convenience would need to link to Metrc. As an end user, I would be happy to help anyway I can.
Good luck to you sir, Lee
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I often have stray plants from initial clone batches that don’t get grouped with the main body. I take extra plants but instead of tossing the extras we sell some, and I have shelving that jets out two feet from my two biggest rooms that goes around the room on thee walls. This is where I put other cuts that didn’t make the initial cut. My floor plants in those two rooms are in 7 or 10 gallon pots and the shelving plants are in either 5.5" squares at 10-12" tall or 1 and 2 gallon round pots. When it comes to software simplicity and flexibility are key, along with being able to export and import to other software programs such as Metrc and Excel.
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Lee,
Your exact use case situation is the reason I was interested in how people manage between the METRC “Plant Batch” concept and a real-world production/growing facility. With METRC in mind, the constraints of METRCs chain-of-custody tracking and rigidity of data entry are some of the main reasons we started developing supergrower.
Sidenote: Your facility sounds awesome.
With the information you’ve provided, I’d like to see what we can work out with any sort of arrangement. I’d like to introduce you to my CEO and PIC @supergrower_dana. Our overall goals are to making compliance easier and make reporting on the business customizable and easy to do. Are you available today for a phone call with either myself or Dana? Feel free to send me a direct message and we can set it up.
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