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Canada’s saddest grow-op: My humiliating adventures in growing marijuana
When Ian Brown was tasked with cultivating some home-grown pot, he did what any eager, if inept, gardener would do: he borrowed a state-of-the-art weed machine and hoped for the best. But as he discovered, growing good cannabis is way harder than it looks.
Story by Ian Brown
Photography by Timothy Moore
Published May 19, 2019https://www.theglobeandmail.com
Before we move on to the truly humiliating material in this story – and because it is a gardening story, in which a puny human tries to best unfeeling nature, you know it’s not going to end well – perhaps I could explain why I tried to grow cannabis in the first place.
It wasn’t my idea, but that of one of my editors. His name is unimportant. All right, it was Sinclair Stewart. We were sitting in a bar in one of those so-hip-no-one-has-heard-of-it-yet neighbourhoods where bars are the size of eight telephone booths, not that anyone there is old enough to remember those. The bars have ironic names such as Bus Stop and Brenda’s Favourite T-Shirt. We were dreaming up fresh ways to write about cannabis, which Canada planned to legalize that very fall, and discussing how the anti-establishment roots of cannabis had been co-opted by Bay Street financiers.
Ian Brown takes a moment for himself after relocating and refilling the Grobo automated grow box.
The following September, I happened upon the Grobo, a marijuana-growing device. It seemed to solve a lot of problems. I am an eager if inept gardener, but growing pot is complicated. It was winter, for starters. Growing it indoors in my house was never going to happen, because of the smell and the stigma.
The Grobo, on the other hand, was a data-based, tech-driven, algorithmic answer to the mercurial unkemptness of Nature herself: a self-contained metal unit that did the dirty work for you. It looked like a stereo speaker, and was depicted on the Grobo website sitting demurely in the sleek living room of what was obviously a high-rise. It grew hydroponic cannabis of any variety one plant at a time, from seed (nowadays clones work, too), and was managed via an app on a cellphone. For an inexperienced blackthumb, it seemed perfect.
The Grobo factory was in Waterloo, Ont. I set out immediately to pick up a unit and meet the godlike machine’s inventors, two twentysomething engineers named Bjorn Dawson and Chris Thiele. They had come to the cannabis business via other enthusiasms: the former because he was a “bad grower” looking for a computerized way to grow tomatoes indoors in the winter, the latter because he was obsessed with LED lights. Mr. Dawson was the CEO and mechanical designer of the device; Mr. Thiele wrote the software.
They were obviously engineers: tall, young, faintly earnest. Their horticulturist, Stephen Campbell, on the other hand, was older and looked like the somewhat alarming guy who camps next to you at Burning Man. He wore his hair in a fully waxed Mohawk. A former philosophy major, he’d been growing cannabis for 20 years under Canada’s medical-marijuana rules since discovering that avascular necrosis was consuming his bones. He tried opioids, lost 80 pounds and felt like Superman, only to have the problem get worse. Then he tried cannabis. He never looked back.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cannabis/article-canadas-saddest-grow-op-my-humiliating-adventures-in-growing/
Cannabis
Canada’s saddest grow-op: My humiliating adventures in growing marijuana
When Ian Brown was tasked with cultivating some home-grown pot, he did what any eager, if inept, gardener would do: he borrowed a state-of-the-art weed machine and hoped for the best. But as he discovered, growing good cannabis is way harder than it looks.
Story by Ian Brown
Photography by Timothy Moore
Published May 19, 2019https://www.theglobeandmail.com
Before we move on to the truly humiliating material in this story – and because it is a gardening story, in which a puny human tries to best unfeeling nature, you know it’s not going to end well – perhaps I could explain why I tried to grow cannabis in the first place.
It wasn’t my idea, but that of one of my editors. His name is unimportant. All right, it was Sinclair Stewart. We were sitting in a bar in one of those so-hip-no-one-has-heard-of-it-yet neighbourhoods where bars are the size of eight telephone booths, not that anyone there is old enough to remember those. The bars have ironic names such as Bus Stop and Brenda’s Favourite T-Shirt. We were dreaming up fresh ways to write about cannabis, which Canada planned to legalize that very fall, and discussing how the anti-establishment roots of cannabis had been co-opted by Bay Street financiers.
Ian Brown takes a moment for himself after relocating and refilling the Grobo automated grow box.
The following September, I happened upon the Grobo, a marijuana-growing device. It seemed to solve a lot of problems. I am an eager if inept gardener, but growing pot is complicated. It was winter, for starters. Growing it indoors in my house was never going to happen, because of the smell and the stigma.
The Grobo, on the other hand, was a data-based, tech-driven, algorithmic answer to the mercurial unkemptness of Nature herself: a self-contained metal unit that did the dirty work for you. It looked like a stereo speaker, and was depicted on the Grobo website sitting demurely in the sleek living room of what was obviously a high-rise. It grew hydroponic cannabis of any variety one plant at a time, from seed (nowadays clones work, too), and was managed via an app on a cellphone. For an inexperienced blackthumb, it seemed perfect.
The Grobo factory was in Waterloo, Ont. I set out immediately to pick up a unit and meet the godlike machine’s inventors, two twentysomething engineers named Bjorn Dawson and Chris Thiele. They had come to the cannabis business via other enthusiasms: the former because he was a “bad grower” looking for a computerized way to grow tomatoes indoors in the winter, the latter because he was obsessed with LED lights. Mr. Dawson was the CEO and mechanical designer of the device; Mr. Thiele wrote the software.
They were obviously engineers: tall, young, faintly earnest. Their horticulturist, Stephen Campbell, on the other hand, was older and looked like the somewhat alarming guy who camps next to you at Burning Man. He wore his hair in a fully waxed Mohawk. A former philosophy major, he’d been growing cannabis for 20 years under Canada’s medical-marijuana rules since discovering that avascular necrosis was consuming his bones. He tried opioids, lost 80 pounds and felt like Superman, only to have the problem get worse. Then he tried cannabis. He never looked back.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cannabis/article-canadas-saddest-grow-op-my-humiliating-adventures-in-growing/
