Episode Transcript

The sound quality of this episode made transcription process difficult. 

Trevor: Kirk. We're back.

Kirk: Hey welcome back Trevor.

Trevor: Welcome back Kirk. And we always seem to get to do this at the beginning. So for a change of pace. Kirk, I'm Trevor Shewfelt. I'm the pharmacist. 

Kirk: Yeah and I'm Kirk Nyquist, the registered nurse. Welcome to Reefer Medness - The Podcast. We're doing our intro up front because we have a really cool episode for you. We tour, Greencraft Cannabis's brand spanking new Grow Op warehouse. Greenhouse. Green building. Yes, yes. All that. We'll go right into our. We're right into the episode.

Trevor: Sounds good. We pulled into the very nice, beautiful new Greencraft Cannabis building. We met Mr. Greening. Who, Kirk, how many times have we talked to him so far on the podcast?

Kirk: We have interviewed Eric twice. This is his third. Episode 55, where we met him and he was talking about this innovative building he was going to build. And then in Episode 81, we met him and we had a tour of the building, but it wasn't quite finished yet. And this tour, we got to follow a cannabis plant through the process of being trimmed, vegetated, flowered, processed, bagged. No, hung and dried, bagged and gone. And the research in between. 

Trevor: Yes. And like in any good grow op, the first thing we did was step into some very attractive white Tyvek suits which, you know, very slimming. I recommend them to everybody. And yeah, so let's, before we go into the interview, let's just give people a sense of what, where we're going. We started in something that, you, we call the mother room. And then from there we went to, I guess we're calling it the nursery. I keep calling it the Reject Room, but that's not not quite right. Then we went somewhere where they were. You call it a vegroom?

Kirk: The vegroom? Yup.

Trevor: Okay, then the go ahead.

Kirk: No, no, no. You're giving the tour? It's a good tour. I was there.

Trevor: And then.

Kirk: You are doing well, I feel like I'm back there.

Trevor: Good Good, and then the excitement part. We went in the place where it was sunset and literally orange glow in there, which was just a little spooky because it kind of all the colors were drowned out and the lights literally went out on us because that it was time to be sunset. And then honestly, I'm losing track. Where did we go after the the the flower room? The sunset room.

Kirk: Once we got out of the flower room and found our way out. We went back into the atrium and went into the, I believe, the water room.

Trevor: Where we did all the the fertilizer.

Kirk: The fertilizer. Well, the nutrients.

Trevor: Nutrients, nutrients.

Kirk: Nutrients. We did spend some time in the drying room, but there was nothing drying. But, it was a hollow thing. We did do some, I did some social media back, on Instagram. So people interested in pictures. Pictures go back to what? March. March 25th. And so, so you can sort of see where we were in the mother room, and, it's the first time I've ever seen a cannabis plant that basically looked like a tree. 

Trevor: Yes, so we should absolutely start there. So this is our  theater-of-the-mind. And we'll we'll say ahead of time, we are not we have much to learn about properly micing people in places with lots of background noise, like a grow, growing place. So we'll do a little bit of theater-of-the-mind. We'll get a little few clips put in in there and out there. We got a lot of we got a lot of audio that wasn't that didn't work out so well. But you know, we're still learning with this podcast thing. But I think you'll enjoy this tour. But Kirk, I put my hand around what looked like a small tree and what the hell was that? It was like 12ft tall, and I couldn't wrap my hand all the way around it.

Kirk: Yeah, it was a it was a cannabis palm tree. And this is this is where they take their clones from. So, basically, I'm assuming and we've talked to a few growers and I would say most growers grow by clones. We do get into later in this, in this, episode, we'll talk a little bit about how Eric does sprout seeds, but when they're growing, they're they're cash crops, they're growing from clones. And so they've cut these trees. And he was saying that some of those mothers go back to the don't ask, don't tell, part of the of the whole licensing.  When you go to, Health Canada, get licensed as a commercial grower, you're allowed to bring your genetics in one time only, where they don't ask where you got it from. And after that point, every time you bring new genetics in, there has to be almost a blockchain trace on it, I guess eh.

Trevor: Yeah. No, but like you said, it, it goes, don't ask, don't tell for people have missed when we talked to other growers. You've got this one time window where things can come in. We're not, it's still Health Canada. We're not saying there is no paperwork, but much less paperwork required for this to come into your facility for this one time.

Kirk: Well, you have to document what you brought in, but they don't ask where you got it from, right? and then and then once you've got it, then, then of course, it's being being monitored. But some of these mothers, go back to, God, years, I mean, the, the decades, I mean, these guys have been growing a long time. So. And they brought their genetics with them. Now we should just go into it and again, apologize for the sound. There's a lot of white noise here. We're going to hope that Rene can pluck some sound out. So this is us in the mother room.

The Mother room. Let's do it. The mother room.

Eric Greening: Perfect. We got plants in absolutely every phase of growthg right now. Little seedlings. We got seeds sprouting. We got mother plants, veg plants, flower plants. We're full.

Kirk: Right on the mother room. Oh, look. Oh, tropics looks like a fig tree.

Eric Greening: Some of these are our seed plants. So, few of these are original seed plants we did phentype search on them. So out of 36 Greencraft Kush seeds, we are down to a  single Greencraft Kush plant. So. We have cauld them over and over. Now we have two 600 plant crops here of this plant going through production right now. So some of our older mother plants, some of the Danny actually brought to this facility under our Ten two when we brought in our genetics at the beginning of our growth. Kush mothers we just started a few weeks ago. They're taking off pretty good. So basically this is just pure genetic storage. All our seed plant stay in here for months and months and years. A lot of people, they just keep reproducing off for our crops.

Kirk: So this is basically tree.

Trevor: I was just going to say I, you know, more about the actual plant than me but I think like that looks like a small tree like it is a three times the size of my thumb yeah.

Eric Greening: You're flowering plants get to thumb size and bigger. Yeah. So probably 6 or 7 months old now that right there.

Kirk: Okay. Yeah. So now the goal here is to prevent it from flowering right.

Eric Greening: Correct.

Kirk: So it's always in a bad state.

Eric Greening: Correct.

Kirk: So when you take your clones like I've seen clones that are actually sit in wire, I've never seen clones actually on a, on a tree.

Eric Greening: So each one of these is a clone here. right there. one clone, two clones.  Every growing shoot is a clone for you so there is another one. So this branch here has 50 plants on. This tree will be holding five 600 clones right now.

Kirk: How do you how do you prevent it from flowering.

Eric Greening: Daily light hours. So a cannabis plant will not flower under anything over 12 hours of light.

Kirk: So as soon as you put it to eight hours its starts to flower.

Eric Greening: These are on light for 18 hours a day.

Kirk: Okay. 

Eric Greening: A lot of guys will run their veg  24 hours a day.

Kirk: Okay,.

Eric Greening: So there's no chance of flower am the way and the they go. We like to give them a little rest. More natural. They do have a time period, but it's only a short six hour night period. So this would be equivalent to that 12 hour night period they induce flowering and they just go. Nothing you can stop at that point basically.

Kirk: Okay. Are you taking pictures?

Trevor: I can take pictures. Yeah, yeah, let me do that since you are recording.

Kirk: So do this a Kush, so this is a kush indeca plant.

Eric Greening: Yeah. It's seventy thirty. Is this one here in Greencraft kush 70% indeca.

Kirk: Okay.

Eric Greening: Baba Bush is a real heavy indeca. That's one that we've got a crop off already. And that's the crop that we have flowering in our flower five that we will have a look at today.

Kirk: This one here, Baba Kush. Okay, so all of those ones in what looks like milk cartons those are baba kush.

Eric Greening: That whole shrub is baba bush. We will put them in Pots, will grow 12 plants. Big bushes like this. And we want to harvest a thousand clones. We just go ahead and cut 1,000 clones.

Kirk: And this is a. I'm. So what you call this not a.

Eric Greening: Mother plant.

Kirk: The mother plant. But it's not. It's not 100% indica.

Eric Greening: No, no, we do have a strain, a couple of hundred percent indica strains will be producing. So pretty heavy.

Kirk: And this one.

Eric Greening: That is one of our new ones. 9 pound hammer. We're calling it Nine Kilogram Hammer the Canadain version.

Kirk: Okay.

Eric Greening: So basically out of, I think 25 seeds we're down to three. So we have seed #11, seed #20 and seed #9.

Kirk: Okay.

Eric Greening: we are sending for testing right now. The rest of the plants were really nice but those three stood out. So basically we're and make our decision now. We're looking like Nine Kilograms 20. Seed 20 is going into production.

Kirk: Wow.

Eric Greening: So same thing. Now that we have that mother picked we make a rough production mothers which are in the next room. The veg room.  We grow them big, something like this until we have a thousand clones and the crops on the way.

Trevor: So next on the tour is we're calling it the Nursery now. Now, the reason I called it The Reject Room and it's not quite right, but when they when they get their clones. What what was the number 1000 ish clones.

Kirk: 1000 clones. Yeah.

Trevor: Yeah. And but that only turns into about 600 plants. They're going to grow for sale.

Kirk: Right.

Trevor: So. So you got 400 ish that weren't good enough for whatever reason. Wrong height, wrong color, wrong leaf shape. What? Whatever they reject them on. But they were the room we were in. We're calling the nursery because there are still little plants. Little guys.

Kirk: We called them seedlings.

Trevor: Thank you. But they were keeping them. Because what if something happened to one of the the the perfect 600? You'd still have a few sort of spares to to swap them out with.

Kirk: Now, what are you growing in? It looks like a sponge. Rockwool. Okay.

Kirk: Small rockwool cube. This one is rooting pretty nicely there. I think this was a great clone, but we have better clones in the other room.  Yeah. Like there's nothing wrong with any of these whatsoever. This one's a little bit smaller than the rest we picked it still rooted well. So basically out of 1000 picked 600 of the best and take them on their journey type thing.  Different conditions in every room too. Whereas you can feel it's pretty warm, pretty humid in this room as a nursery.

Trevor: Again, the non-grower, but if if these are all eventually perfectly good, but they're going to be destroyed, are we just keeping them in case something happens to the next batch. Yeah, we transplanted them yesterday. So we will let these sit, we'll still keep them alive for maybe 4 or 5 more days just in case we lose 1 or 2 clones now we have plenty to replace. It's usually 50% extra of your veg crop you taking clones just to have a good selection of your final Final clones into the flower room.

Kirk: So they go. We went from the what I'm calling the nursery, the seedling room or the cloning room. I guess they're cloning.

Trevor: Cloning. I like that.

Kirk: Yeah, I'm coining it today. We walk into the vegroom and the vegroom is in, is in daylight, and, it's at an 18 hour clock. 18 hour and six hours of night. And we walk in and there's, I guess what, maybe maybe two feet, I guess, half a meter.

Trevor: Aa healthy tomato plant.

Kirk: A very healthy tomato plant. Maybe a meter tall. But in the in the back wall. And I'm trying to think maybe it was the north wall. There was another pallet, of big mothers, of other genetics that they had. So we saw a lot of genetics, a lot of different cannabis plants in that, in that factory, I guess. Grow op.

Trevor: Yeah, I know, and, and I'm not trying to rush us through the vegroom. But just for those who haven't done this. So veg means we are we're trying to basically just get them to grow, you know, get big. Right. So that's the whole 18 hours of sunshine, six hours of of not sunshine. This is make the plant grow big. We're not trying to create flowers or buds yet right.

Kirk: No. Yeah. You're you're in the middle of summer. So you're trying to replicate July, right? When there's a lot of sun in the sky, and the plant grows and it grows tall sativa plants tend to grow very, very tall at this point, whereas indica plants tend to be a little shorter and a little bushier. But when you're, when you're growing in a, in a building, of course you're replicating, you're replicating this and I believe, I believe, they're growing in the veg state is to get that plant healthy. And that's when, again, they're doing some pruning. Not a lot during a little pruning. And they're going to keep the best plants and they'll move them over into the flower room. But we should, we should, we should pull some parts out of the vegroom. And this is us. This is us in the vegroom.

Eric Greening: These plants have been here for two and a half weeks or so.

Kirk: Okay.

Kirk: And then we throw them on cards and send them all over to one of the two flower rooms where they're there for the last Nine weeks and they don't move again.

Kirk: So this is the vegroom?

Eric Greening: yup.

Kirk: And what? What is that collection of?

Eric Greening: That's a collection. So has more seed plants. That's one of our big mothers. So that's like another tree. Basically, that's where to turn these seed plants into. We just keep bringing them down and make a nice short shrub to keep it alive. Seed plants. We have, some new mother plants starting there, and then that's more production mother there.

Kirk: So. So this also is a 24 hour room.

Eric Greening: 18 hour. We give these ones a little bit of a break at night.

Kirk: Okay. All right.

Eric Greening: We can root our clones in nine days on 24 hours of light where if we give them a little break, you'd be more like 12 to 15 days.

Kirk: Yeah, okay.

Eric Greening: We run in kind of like a hybrid scrog in her flower room.

Kirk: Okay. So these now these actually stay here or do you physically move them.

Eric Greening: Physically move them in two and a half weeks these are 620 of our Greencraft Kush plants. So those production plants they're the Greencraft Kush production moms. we had 900 cuttings off them bring 620 to this room. We will throw away 20 more, 600 in the final room. And so as we're doing as we're testing other strains. So those orange stakes up there, those are plants that are retesting from our first crop. So from 30 seeds we grew, we picked one. There was four more that we're really good to. So we're going to give them another cash crop through here.

Kirk: Okay, now, because you guys are growing by clones, the assumption is all of these are female.

Eric Greening: That is guaranteed.

Kirk: Guaranteed female. Okay. 

Eric Greening: If the mother.

Kirk: If the mother was right. Right. Okay.

Eric Greening: And it's an exact, exact genetic copy of the mother. So it'll be the exact same flower. Exact same characteristics of the mother everytime. so that is our first crop of mother, production mothers, for our Nine Pound Hammer. We have 48 plants there we are going to grow for another month, by the time a month comes we will be ready to cut the 48 and that will be another production run .

Kirk: Those ones separated?

Eric Greening: Yeah. That'sanother starting our fourth strain now. Nine pound hammer is what its called in the States. Well known down there everyone's got it trademarked. So we're going to go Nine Kilogram Hammer.

Kirk: Oh. That's good. Yeah, yeah. And the lighting system you're using are?.

Eric Greening: CMH.

Kirk: So they're sodium or.

Eric Greening: Metal halide.

Kirk: Okay. Yeah.

Eric Greening: High pressure sodium in the flower room.

Kirk: Okay. So you'r,  not using or you're not using, LED light?

Eric Greening: Nope? No.

Kirk: And why is that?

Eric Greening: They're not, honest truth. They're not quite there yet. They're very expensive. And they, give it another 3 or 4 years. They're going to be on par with the power that we put out of these things. Cost wise and yield doesn't really add up to growing LEDs now. A lot of guys like him, the master and I have been growing under these lights our whole life story, you know, this is what we do.

Kirk: It's also very cool in here.

Eric Greening: It is? Yeah. It was 23 degrees.

Kirk: Cooler.

Eric Greening: Yeah, a lot cooler than that room. You'll notice it more. Yeah, yeah. We have absolute full control of every parameter that we have to set for our plants, or nine parameters we got to watch. We can control everything right down to the final details. So. Which is important. Yes, yes. Things can get away from you real quick. Yeah. You better to go to the flower room before the lights turn off in there.

Kirk: So at one point you can hear.

Trevor: So now, we're moving into the room that has the weirdest light I've maybe ever seen. It was just. It was like going into an alien world. Why was the light so weird and yellow in there, Kirk?

Kirk: Well, well, I was going to say you. You could hear Eric saying. We better get to the flower room before the lights go off.

Trevor: Before the light, which literally happened to us. Spoiler. The lights went out.

Kirk: So we go from basically a white light room that's bright white light, and we go into the next room and, we're into yellow, orange, red, autumn light. And this is the flower room. So now the plants are told by the light that it's time to flower. Because. Because the whole purpose of life is to replicate itself. I mean, humans want to replicate ourselves, plants want to replicate ourselves. So the cannabis plant has said, okay, I'm done reaching for the sun. It's now time to replicate. So when the sun starts going down and you get less sun in the sky, the flowers will start to come. So in a building like that, they'll go 12, 12, 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of daylight in an autumn, late summer, autumn light.

Trevor: It was just weird orange glow and to the point that everything look the same color. You know, we looked at these plants later and they had beautiful purples and all these colors, but in that weird light, everything, nothing looked green. Everything was just weird shades of yellow and orange. It was. It was a little bit like stepping onto an alien world.

Kirk: Very, very difficult to take good pictures. And again, at some point in the conversation, Eric says that you can't get good pictures. And, and it's true. You're right. It's it's just this perpetual overexaggerated autumn sunshine.

Trevor: Sunset too. Reminded me of a sunset.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, yeah, around 6:00 in the evening on, on a September. September evening. Yeah, it was cool. And we're in there and. Yeah. Sure enough. Of course, our eyes are adjusting and bam, lights go off. It's like, oh, yeah.

Trevor: oh we're in the dark. the dark. We're in this enormous room with these enormous tables full of plants, in the dark. So it's literally pull out your phone flashlight and see if Eric can go find the light switch.

Kirk: Yeah, well, he put the lights on very briefly for us so we could look at the flowers. And that's when you say you saw the purples and and you saw the different colors of a cannabis plant. And, and he had he has his strain growing 600 of them. But he also had other varietals growing, strains, cultivars going from other companies that he's experimenting with or helping with. And you so you sit beside these flowers and what was he a week away from harvesting?

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. He was they were going to do a big havest. That was just before Easter, long weekend. We were there and they were going to spend like the whole Easter long weekend harvesting.

Kirk: Right. And the buds, the buds were probably the size of my palm. And you could see that crystal. You know what we're not talking about is when when we walk in that building, of course, there's this, there's the odor, the the aroma of cannabis everywhere. Of course you can't, you can't, you know, you go into the you go into the mother room and it smells like greenery. It smells lush. You go into the vegroom, it smells like a jungle. It smells like, you know, it's it's fresh. It's a nice feeling. It's warm and it's got some humidity in there. You open up the door to the flower room and bam! This rich, I love, I love the smell, but this richness of fresh cannabis. It's just everywhere.

Trevor: Trepene heaven.

Kirk: Amazing, amazing. Yeah. So, yeah, we spent some time in the flower room and, and, got some shots. I think we got some shots while we're in there. some pictures.

Trevor: Got some pretty pictures when we got out of the orange light into, quote unquote, regular light. White light.

Kirk: Yeah. And so this is so this is us. This is us in the, in the flower room. And I think I think we'll pull out the part where the lights go out because it was kind of like, oh, the lights.

Trevor: Oh my God,.

the lights do go out, Oh, yeah. And you can smell okay. Oh my goodness.

Eric Greening: The smell in this room now.

Kirk: Oh and look at this yellow light now.

Eric Greening: Yeah. You notice that right away.

Kirk: Yeah. It's a really yellow light again. So a different a different light.

Eric Greening: More like fall right greater yellow in the fall, so that's what they need to finish off the flower. So we got Death Baba Kush the main lot. And we have five different strains from the nursery we are testing here right now.

Kirk: Wow. You got there. Help me out. The trichomes are just starting to come here like you got there. So they're they're orange, but, that's the hair. So that's so that's showing you that they're just getting close to harvest time. Right. So now we're looking for the crystals to form.

Eric Greening: Correct. Yeah.

Kirk: Okay. So they'll, they'll form it next few days for. And then now the leaves are also starting to get a little yellow.

Eric Greening: They are sucking their nutrients out of the leaves. This is Death Baba Kush.

Kirk: This is going to be a strain that's specialized to Greencraft.

Eric Greening: Yes. Yeah. We've actually this is another legacy strain that Danny's been growing for a bunch of years.

Eric Greening: Okay, yeah yeah. You can see them coming up here right. Yeah.

Eric Greening: They'll finish quicker in the middle.

Kirk: Wow. Now not all strains like the same timing.

Eric Greening: No. Different nutrients. Different temperature. Different timing. Different lights you name it.

Kirk: And you've wired that into the system. But except the lights I guess.

Eric Greening: Basically you tune to the rest of the plants. Since we're just testing these, they get what the rest of them get. If they work, they work. As you can see, they got nutrient deficiencies in some of them.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was going to ask you.

Eric Greening: We would have come in here and adjusted for this if it was a whole room of it.  Being a test plant, we're not. We're just kind of like sorry buddy, if you don't fit in with the with the rest group.

Kirk: But having said that, it's it's pretty Impressive.

Eric Greening: It is still a good test.

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Trevor: Just because I see them hanging everywhere, what kind of sensors do we have.

Eric Greening: Temperature. Humidity.

Trevor: Okay, is it different than on the sides.

Eric Greening: This is just a quick, quicker view. Yeah. Temperature, humidity. These ones you can just read from the side. Those ones read on our on our monitoring system.  This room is usually sitting around 28°C, but since we're in the fall, we're turning the temperatures down every day. Every night it goes down at 16 Celsius at night.

Kirk: So okay, so there's a gradual change. Yeah. Okay. I was reading about that. How you can actually program your light to actually slowly and the plant will react and thinking, well, I don't know, I'm growing in soil because I want I want it to be forgiving.

Eric Greening: There's a lot of science on like straight on light, straight off light having no detrimental effect. This is just more natural. So basically our lights here on the morning, they spend 15 minutes ramping up from 60% up to 110. So it's like the sun's coming up. End of the day same thing it takes a half hour to get back down sun goes down.

Kirk: So, okay. So you so you're even adjusting the quality of light. Yeah. Wow.

Eric Greening: And then in the morning the temperature starts rising and plateaus and.

Trevor: is this getting brighter,.

Eric Greening: gets brighter like the sun's above them, then darker, when the lights going away.

Trevor: like, I mean just now. its getting brighter.

Eric Greening: It's getting dimmer right now.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric Greening: getting ready to shut down. Yeah. These would have been way brighter an hour ago.

Kirk:  So you've got, you got how many strains in here, then.

Eric Greening: Main strain and then five tester strains.

Kirk: Okay.

Eric Greening: Yeah. The more we test, the less we have have to sell. That's the problem with doing a Phenotype search and take a whole table thats a whole 30 kgs so we basically trying to keep our testing to minimum, so it is the biggest production lot possible.

Kirk: It's interesting you're allowing the flowers to grow down here.

Eric Greening: We're not. Those will come off. That will go to trim. They just cropped up since we pruned them last.

Kirk: Okay. And what do you do with the trim. Pre-rolls?

Eric Greening: Goes to an extractor?

Kirk: So you guys are making extraction, so.

Eric Greening: No, it just gets sold.

Kirk: As.

 ten to $0.15 a gram to an extractor they run it through the machine do whatever they want.

Kirk: Whatever they're want. Okay. So that's everything here is is sellable. What do you do with the compost? What do you do with the stems.

Eric Greening: We burn it out back okay. we have a burn, a ground grannery that pull out and burn out. All this stuff is garbage. Then you have the sugar leaves,  All these leaves are sellable. The trichomes are growing.

Kirk: oh oh.

Trevor: Kirk, we're in the dark.

Kirk: The lights just went off. Yeah. Oops.

Eric Greening: So now that's just work life. Basically, that's the end of their day period. So for now the lights go on in 12 hours. It hurts the eyes. And when you're working down in the far end of the room, that'll get you trapped sometimes.

Kirk: So now, like, I was going to ask you about the shake. The leaves that thrown away, but the sugar leaves are saved.

Eric Greening: We wait to do the final flower trim and get them all put in a big bag and $0.15 a gram, if you're lucky. But as useable to somebody and sellable

Kirk: Well, that's what I was going to ask, because some people make bubble hash out of that.

Eric Greening: Totally. absolutely. It's full of trichomes. Yeah, yeah. It's useable stuff.

Kirk: Yeah, but. But the other leaves, they just get burned.

Eric Greening: Yeah. Get burned out back. We're one of the only producers thats allowed to burn our waste because we are an agricultural producer.  If our neighbors get to burn their crop residue, we're able to burn our crop residues.

Kirk: Is that because you're rural?

Trevor: If we were in downtown Calgary.

Eric Greening: Never, basically those guys have a giant dumpster on their site. They bring on a bag of leaves, they dump it, and they have to dump lime, sawdust, sand. Make it inert. Next time they dump leaves,  lime, sawdust sand then, you know, a 10,000 pound container that you have to haul  away every month and pay for that so.

Kirk: Well, but but in, in the brewing industry, the waste goes to pig farmers. Why can't this waste go to a composter?

Eric Greening: So there might be some THC left in some of the leaves. There really isn't. Its stems and leaves. We're not going to throw away THC.

Kirk: Well, I know, but again, I think it shows ignorance of Health Canada to realize this. There's nothing wrong with this stuff. I mean,.

Eric Greening: I have another grower that I know, rural southern Manitoba. They operate on a pig farm. They put it in the manure and compost they are not allowed to feed it to pigs they're allowed to compost it, make it inert permit. It goes into a giant pile of pig shit. Yeah.

Kirk: Yeah. But grains that have been converted. It's ignorance.

Eric Greening: There's a lot of Health Canada rules that are ridiculous. Yeah, they are working. I gotta say, over the last couple of years of what they're, they're getting it,.

Kirk: They're getting.

Eric Greening: slowly opening up, changing this changing that.

Kirk: Where the review of the Cannabis Act is now letting pharmacist in on the game.

Trevor: Recommending. Not there yet.  Hopefully soon.

Kirk: pitter patter dude.

Eric Greening: What we're looking forward to with the new changes is hopefully that duty being dropped to 10% of values instead of this flat one gram per dollar a gram that is what the producers are waiting for. That's been a trouble for a lot of guys by the time you sell a gram. You're giving a dollar to the government every time. There's not a heck of a lot left on it.

Trevor: Really early in the podcast, we talked to an economist and he said he said, yes, politically you could never do this. But if you really want to get rid of the black market. Don't just let the guys like you do it for free. Actually, give them an incentive. Give them, you know, and then the legal price would now be lower than the black market. Politically, you can't do that. But economically it makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

Eric Greening: Some drag you down like a black and gray market. So the gray market is the big one now. That the buy online, shipped to your door from BC. There's a million guys doing it. that ones hurting everyone.

Kirk: This is a modified scrog , right. Because you're not.

Eric Greening: Pretty much.

Kirk: your not wrapping stuff. Because with my with mine I will physically wrap this. Yeah. So that it's so they will it will throw flowers off the sides.

Eric Greening: I used to have a fish tank, an aquarium with a nice lid on it. Okay. And I rooted in my filter.  Running water. And threw the plant sideways along the top of a tank. A small flower growing up into the light and fertilize the fish and the plants. The lights on the tank anyway. And you grow them out that tall. You had a nice flat plant.

Kirk: Growing like with fish below. Oh, man. That's cool.

Eric Greening: That's the fertilizer for the plant was the fish water. Fish waste.  Kind of neat. Yeah.  You could do amazing things with these plants. We could be spreading one of our first runs we had larger plants, like one plant in the space of six. And we didn't just write them all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is a quick way to get quick production. Just smashed through in one plant for size. This is a Runshere here another nice one. This is one of our test streams as well.

Kirk: Look at the hair. The flowers on that.

Eric Greening: There it's growing golf balls even at the bottom of the plant.

Kirk: Put your fist up to it.

Eric Greening: It'll actually take better pictures now with the work lights on instead of grow lights on.

Kirk: I'm trying to get a jungle shot here.

Trevor: I think I can see all the little trichomes with my camera.

Eric Greening: Yeah, yeah, a zoom pic you can see all crystal big time.

Kirk: Oh, wow. Yeah. Well done.

Eric Greening: Yeah, there's some nice ones. You know what I'll show you that guerilla Grape at the back, too. So this is one we're probably going to run for at some point in the next six months we will say Okay, guys, 600 clones.  We won't have to worry about our cloning. Running through the building makes a good cash. It's a popular strain of. This is call guerilla Grape.

Kirk: guerilla Grape. We're walking down the down the aisle of this Grow room now. It's just. I mean, it's an incredible, incredible smell. Aromas. Wonderful. All these flowers. This is lovely.

Eric Greening: This is guerilla Grape. these three right here

Kirk: guerilla Grape. Again, look at the size of those.

Eric Greening: Baba Kush will probably weigh more per gram.  Baba Kush longer growing

Eric Greening: very dense. I guess, you don't want me to squeeze it. Can I feel it? No, Yeah.

Trevor: Look at the colours on this one. all the oranges.

Kirk: Well, that's the thing that I find amazing about the Cannabis plant. The number of times I've gone into grow rooms where you can physically see the different strains. The leaves are different, like there's a physical difference in the plant.

Eric Greening: Yeah, just the bud structure from death Baba to a guerilla Grape.

Kirk: So how many guerilla greens are here?

Eric Greening: Just three.

Kirk: So these are just three.

Eric Greening: Three of each strain.

Kirk: Oh, yeah. Okay, I can see what you're talking about. These these two flowers are different.

Eric Greening: These are usually all leaves are burned up. they are actually crunchy now even. They've been on water, they're slowly pulling everything in and leaves fall off everything else once they run of of jam they start tipping over. 

Kirk: So how long? How long did you say you're flushing them?

Eric Greening: Two weeks.

Kirk: Two weeks of just straight water.

Eric Greening: 10-14 days Yeah.

And you're harvesting when? When is this?

Eric Greening: This should be down. Well, it's going to be fun. Either Friday we start or Monday.

Kirk: Okay. Yeah. Like like this coming Monday. Do you have enough people trimming for you?

Eric Greening: End of the week. Next week. we have another whole week here.

Kirk: So would be Easter Monday. 

Trevor: you have an Easter gig

Eric Greening: Long weekend. My sister's here. We got family in; get it done. Yeah, we bring an extra 1, 2, 3 more part time. There's four of us here. There's probably eight of us harvesting, and we can get it done in two days or so.

Kirk: And where do you, I guess we're going to the dry room next eh.

Eric Greening: yeah we are going to dry room right away.

Trevor: It does smelll fantastic in here.

Kirk: Yeah, it smells fantastic. I love that. I like the fans, the movement of air. You've got you've got apparatus.

Eric Greening: Those temperature control if want to say that they destratify the room and then use this here in our horizontal breeze over the leaves.

Kirk: Right through the leaves. I have a in my grow room my fans above and it blows into it. And it sort of just keeps the air moving in. Yeah.

Eric Greening: They're not used to wind above. So it can come along from the side to get a over the stamata and keep refreshing the air.  But if you're in a tent it is damn near impossible.

Kirk: Well, I've got I've got the exit van up top, so I'm just thinking now I should put the other fan down below. Yeah, let's go that way. Yeah,.

Eric Greening: CO2 is sitting low anyway, it will help it move up.

Kirk: Well I've got, I've got of course in the basement. The CO2 always falls right. So I've got some holes on like the vents in the bottom of the tent. Right. But the goal is to get there is to get the circulation up and out of the house.

Eric Greening: So are you adding CO2 at all?

Kirk: No, no, I'm not that far into. I mean, I'm drawing in soil because I want it forgiving. I don't have the time to treat with chemicals.

Eric Greening: You should be running 400 this room runs 1200 ppm all day, every day. Yeah. Yeah. That's why you get this big buds.

Trevor: Yeah. Next how about if you were someone spending all day all day in that much CO2 are you getting tired faster.

Eric Greening: No you are okay.  If you're in an office building you're working 5000-8000 ppm all day long. It's all right. It's over. I think 3000 it's not good for humans, but it's .

Kirk: But there's still 21% oxygen in this room,.

Eric Greening: Totally.

Trevor: So we're talking parts per million. But interesting what he said you know three-400 is quote unquote normal. We'll be up to 1200. You know, in the pharmacy call it an office building. I might be up over 3000, which might not be ideal for a human being.

Kirk: Yeah, just keep taking your vitamin D dude.

Eric Greening: Days when we're in here  pruning we get free CO2. We get six months into your pruning. You see our CO2 meter just stop for a while.

Trevor: Or you can actually see from the humans.

Eric Greening: we count the amount of shots. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We actually kind of judge how we're doing by cutting our amount of CO2 shots in our system puts into it every day. So, you know, we're getting to wet. We're not breathing as well. We can tell our plants aren't using much CO2. Okay. Something's going on. It's going to make a an adjustment. Every 3 or 4 days we're adjusting our watering, our temperature, our nutrients, our lights our, you name it, we're adjusting something. Basically my master assistant comes every morning and walk these rooms with ten different Instruments to get. List of results I guess. We sit down pour over the data. What are we doing? Change anything? No, leave it; do the same thing over and over.

Kirk: So how many harvests have you had?

Eric Greening: This is the fourth.

Kirk: Fourth Harvest.

Eric Greening: Fifth over there. Six is the veg room we were just in.

Kirk: And so that is the assumption then you're in the marketplace now.

Eric Greening: We're selling bulks or flowers in the marketplace. no under our own brand yet. 

Kirk: Can you say who selling or do you know.

Eric Greening: We can't really say.  It'll be packed under a few different brands its basically once it leaves here bulk. It's up to the other producers to do what they want. We could find out, I know the first batch went to Alberta.  That'll be available in the Alberta  market under a cheese name. 

Kirk: Cheese name. What do you mean.

Eric Greening: What we call it legacy cheese. Its just from our legacy master grower's garden. They're going to call it Rugby comfy UK cheese or whenever they want on it. We're doing another person here right now.  Its legacy cheese for us. They bring it back to UK cheese because people know it.

Kirk: And why cheese?

Eric Greening: Cheese Strain. Its a Strain.

Trevor: Just like kush is a strain.

Kirk: Right Okay.

Eric Greening: It's been growing for over 20 years in our masters garden. So this strain has been around and smoking it for 20 some years. It's been loved ever since we got into the legal market, basically for our genetic bring in the building. And now we have it in legal market.

Kirk: I just. I just love the pictures, man.

Eric Greening: We spent hours in these rooms.

Kirk: I bet, yeah.

Eric Greening: I still never have any post on Facebook or Instagram.  It something I have to work on so bad.

Trevor: Well, we will put some up for you.

Eric Greening: Its insane in this friggin way? So. It's tough to get shit done.

Trevor: All right. Should go see the dry room?

Eric Greening: We can calm down now. There's a rush to get into this room.

Kirk: Yeah. It's just such a sweet smell in here.

Eric Greening: You can feel a temperature drop?  We're go down to sixteen right away.

Kirk: Okay. Because it's nighttime. All right. Good night, girls.

Eric Greening: You bet. Want to jump right into the next one.

Trevor: Sure.

Kirk: Let's do it.

Eric Greening: These ones are only two weeks old. So we just dropped out of this room.

Kirk: Oh, so that's okay. We're in the second flower room. Okay. What? What time of day is it in here?

Eric Greening: It is the first ten minutes in the morning. So the lights are going to be getting brighter here.

Kirk: So that that room, the lights go off in this room. I just got on. That gives you opportunity to work the rooms.

Eric Greening: Totally.

Kirk: Oh. Makes sense.

Eric Greening: And a less load on the building. Instead of having all these thousand watt lights on at once, we've flip them so there off sometimes.

Kirk: Oh, that makes a lot of sense.

Eric Greening: For heat recovery as well as our Hvac system. We want to have one room at all times.

Kirk: So. And what what what strain is this?

Eric Greening: This is Greencraft kush. This is our signature strain is freaking amazing. I absolutely love this stuff. Two little testers in here. Three purple kush of ours and three Mac plants from Lifecycle Mechanics nursery, and then three of our purple Kush we're giving another flower test.  And then 598 Greencraft Kush Plants.

Kirk: So how long have these plants been here now?

Eric Greening: Two weeks. Just over two weeks today.

Kirk: They're not vegging  now. They're flowering.

Eric Greening: They're Flowering. They still do vegetatively grow for about the first three weeks in here. You can't quite see, oh here they go they're just starting in a baby flower now. In another week end of next week, we'll be showing a lot more flower activity up there. They came in here with this light for about two weeks.

Kirk: And they came in from the other room.

Eric Greening: Yeah. we grew them on that bench table and wait for the clones  get to be about a foot - 16 inches..

Kirk: So with my grow op in my house. Then I'm going to have to do the same thing. I'm going to move into the veg state that that's about 16in, and then I flower.

Eric Greening: And depending on light if there, very low light will stretch sometimes double what you put into, you have a 30 inch plant we have pretty high power light in here so they will grow a quater and start to flower. 

Kirk: Well, that's when you start scrogging right there. In my experience, yeah. In that first couple of weeks, you're wrapping it around like I'm going to I'm going to have by the time I'm done, I'm going to have about 6 to 7 plants and then some like ten. If I do it right, my tent is just.

Eric Greening: Perfectly flat across? These are good to get another layer of mesh here. Okay. So basically day 21 we're coming in defoliate again. we'll pull off all these dying leaves at the bottom, defoliate from the bottom up. but on another layer of mesh, day 41, week mainly 40 from the top again. Just pull off all the dead leaves that are not use anymore. And then basically put that second level of mesh,we just poke everything through into its own on little space.

Kirk: The smells is a little difference in the here.

Eric Greening:  No flower smell in here yet.

Trevor: different aroma.

Kirk: But it's more green. It's more forest like.

Eric Greening: Totally. Yeah, yeah, it's just like grass growing that's it. We try to make our clones the same height. So the clones get stuck in the middle, they are shorter the look smaller. So you end up having some different heights. But. All our smaller plants in the middle of the room is the most powerful area, when all the lights get concentrated in the middle.

Trevor: do you actually move them around here.

Eric Greening: No when we when we plan for them, we just out the smaller ones. The middle. We've got like an oval microclimate in the middle of each room. This just gets a lot hotter and a lot, a lot more power basically everything. Just collects on top of each other so you get a lot of power in the middle backs a little bit less on the outside but we got pretty balanced now.

Kirk: But still, but there's still a lot of lights on.

Eric Greening: The outdoor lights outside rows is are running 110%. Middle rows are like 78%. We never crank, we're never fully cranked in these rooms too much light forms basically.

Kirk: That's what I'm getting a kick of is the science. Now, when you look at this kind of stuff, do you eventually get rid of one of these?

Eric Greening: Yeah, yeah. Give this leaf, like it's still doing its work right now. Yeah. It's starting to color up a bit when it starts looking like this guy. Darker. Starting to get the nutrients pulled out of it., we pull.

Kirk: like this one here, these ones.

Eric Greening: This is, three, two and a half weeks ago, we ran out of calimag, Calcium, magnesium, we did not notice for a day. And there's our calcium magnesium at that phase of the grow.  a deficiency popped up.

Kirk: Interesting.

Eric Greening: Two days only. Put our calimag back in. We're back to not being deficient in calicum magnesium.

Kirk: Very forgiving. 

Eric Greening: Well, this stuff is. If we screw up inour nutrients and rockwool. You're in trouble.  so, like two days max? Maybe like 3 or 4 days is unlimited trouble. There's no buffer in Rockwool or aeroponics.

Kirk: Hence why I grow soil.

Eric Greening: Yeah. It's, you guys have to be right on it .

Kirk: I've got. Yeah, I've got a friend of mine, my my mentor, the one trying to get into rockwool or coconut. And I just

Eric Greening: coconuts not bad  bad. It's got a lot of a buffer in it compared to this.

Kirk: I'm just throwing in. Pro pro max.

Eric Greening: Promix. Danny grows fully living organic soil for the last 3 or 4 years now, he absolutely loves it. his flowers taste great..

Kirk: I was using compost from my garden, but I got bug infested. Yeah.

Eric Greening: We have bugs. We haven't added to this room yet. Beneficial insects yes we have Hypoaspis mites and nematodes in our grow media right now. And then we add, Super Maris mites and Californas mites to the canopy. And then we have flying aureus predators that fly around the room and eat any kind of bad bug in here.

Trevor: To literally put bugs in the room as biological pest control.

Eric Greening: You betcha. Yep.

Kirk: And when you harvest the flower, the bugs leave.

Eric Greening: the poor things die. So a nine week period in here. We put him in here in week two. They come in here on Monday. We put all of our bugs out. They can eat anything that's bad. If they don't find anything bad, they die off and see you later. They don't crawl up on the flowers and flowers too resiny. So you can see them. They'll work that way up. They start getting resin in these. Go back down and work the leaves.

Kirk: Very cool.

Eric Greening: We can't use pesticides of any kind. Oh, yeah. We can't come in here and spray. If a guy can come in here with a commercial raid or conk or anything like that, and just do a couple of shots in here and kill everything you would be fine and the plants would be fine. But no pesticides whatsoever allowed with health canada cannabisa. Natural products only.

Trevor: Is that just you, or is that all health canada?

Eric Greening: Every Health Canada,.

Trevor: Whether its going for for medicinal or rec, no pesticides at all.

Eric Greening: Ever. Biological only. So we do have we have spores and fungus and we put in a little fight and little fight bugs. there's acids, H2o2. There's a bunch of stuff out there you can use, but no actual real, powerful pesticides. Yeah, everything takes a while.

Trevor: So, like you said, we're surrounded by farmers who are using pesticides on everything. Like, every all around us. but not here

Eric Greening: Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, it's going with all the food you eat, but not the food we smoke. It's when it's lit a pesticide can have a different effect than when you eat it. So that's why they say if its being burnt in cannabis there's no tests on it to see if it's going to be safe when you inhale it.

Trevor: On the rec. side I don't care so much. But yeah, especially on the medicinal side. For giving this to a sick cancer patient. Yes, I am happy there's no peticides. 

Eric Greening: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. 100% clear of any no molds, no  mewdew, no heavy metals, no nothing in this flower. It's all tested before it gets out into the market. Yeah. So this is just next week. We'll defolate, put on another mesh and it basically sits for three weeks. Check it all the time. do another defoliate and it looked like that room. And it just starts slowly dying off at the end of the year. And we're done water and clean the room. Grab those ones and send them in again. We try to have only a 2 or 3 day empty rooms type thing it's the time to tidy up clear shit out.

Kirk: So that room will be empty on the long weekend and filled.

Eric Greening: With those plants that are in the veg room. we will have a week in that room to clean up. This is basically our first crop going to market under our brand.

Kirk: This is going to come under your brand. 

Eric Greening: yeah yeah, its the high THC. Like the legacy plants we're growing right now. They're good. There's nothing wrong them whatsoever. But they're not this type thing. So our first Greencraft branded stuff? Yes. this will be super power stuff.

Trevor: Too strong for old farts like me, which is fine.

Eric Greening: Know your limit, right? Yeah, yeah.

Kirk: Well, yeah. You are. Are you a one puff guy or two puff guy.

Eric Greening: totally exactly. Yeah or a three joint guy there are all kinds.

Kirk: Yeah yeah, yeah. And we hope to corner the whole market.

Eric Greening: Totally. Absolutely. Yeah.

Kirk: That's lovely. And big fan leaves on these ones?

Eric Greening: Yeah, totally. Yeah. We ran a bit of it already. It, wasn't as good. We're gonna give it one more test if it's not up to snuff that mama plant and everything just goes. We'll start again. We have 110 other strains, so if something is not up to snuff.

Kirk: 110 strains. Wow.  And that's just what.

Eric Greening: all in seed form

Kirk: Oh in seed form. So with Health Canada oh 110 of those have to be registered.

Eric Greening: Are now registered with Greencraft Cannabis.

Kirk: And then every time you grow you have to go through that.

Eric Greening: yup, each one. From seed to sell its controlled all the way through..

Kirk: So now that you've made your declaration, how can you add to it.

Eric Greening: Only through another licensed producer? So like these Mac clones that we got came from another licensed producer, who is a nursery and they're licensed producers. Yes, we could trade with each other, sell between each other or whatever you want to work it, I think. So basically this is we run their genetics to see if they work good. If we like what they're doing, then we work together and they send us a load after the load is what they want to do type thing.

Kirk: We, we interviewed a bunch of growers in Alberta a few episodes back, and we, what they said to us is a period of don't ask, don't tell. So your master growers cheese is the Health Canada saying, we're not asking. Don't tell you about that strain.

Trevor: You have only that one magical period, one magic period to bring stuff in.

Eric Greening: A few hours basically.  The day of licensing, once we're working through the day, licensing, basically we have that time to bring it in and then after that, that's it. We're done.

Kirk: So you had to spend months, weeks planning what was going to be your you're total stuff, your library. And so how many total genetic libraries do you have.

Eric Greening: This one genetic library. Basically we had five live strains that came in and then 108 or whatever in our fridge in storage.

Kirk: And those ones are the afterwards from other growers. Yeah. But what you brought in don't ask, don't tell a total of six?.

Eric Greening: oh no 108. That's 108 different strains of seeds.  Five strains of my genetics were brought in at the beginning.

Kirk: At the beginning. Five. Yeah, that's the that's the five. Don't ask, don't tell.

Eric Greening: All of it. every genetic we brought in  don't ask don't tell.  It's not so much. Don't ask don't tell us. We don't care where you got it from. we'll not going to tell us us. We just don't know if it's coming from Spain, Europe, Jim down the street or whoever.

Kirk: But as of as of 5:00, everything that comes in must be traceable. Interesting.  because everything has to start someplace.

Eric Greening: 3827 seeds counted 3827 weighed. They got a really good record.

Trevor: My tiny, little, Tiny contribution to that. I supplied the tiny little glass. 

Eric Greening: Okay. we have some seeds sprouting right now with all those bottles that we just emptied. All right. Yeah.

Kirk: Well, I got into some genetics a few years ago, and that's what I'm going as a friend. Don't ask, don't tell gave me some of his genetics. And they've been in my fridge for the last 2 or 3 years, so I was. Well they're growing now so I'm throwing some genetics. From my friends.

Eric Greening: If you store them properly, they could last indefinitely, you know? Ten years. 20 years. I've heard of people sprouting seeds 20 years old. Along their stored well.

Kirk: All of them did, like eat. Yeah, I got eight. I don't got two genetics. And I planted all 16 seeds. well be damned. I got sixteen seedling. and I don't I don't need sixteen seedling so I have to make some choices.

Eric Greening: Well, you could do what we did. Do a phenotype search and flower them all and then go back. So I go as mothers that we had in there we cloned four.  We finish those four. We never finished the mother plant. We have to let that sit. Well we knew what her offspring were, right. Then you make a decision on the mother plant.

Kirk: Yeah, I'm not keeping mothers yet. I don't have that ability. I don't have two growing areas. So I'm just going to grow. But so but yeah, your question is I want to grow six of the end. What I think I'm licensed for 12. So, I want to go to six at the end, because that's all I really need. but I got the 16. I got to wait to figure out which are females before I.

Eric Greening: So you're not even sexed yet.

Kirk: their seeds I haven't sexed then?

Eric Greening: I'd sex them right now.

Kirk: How do I do you sex them now?

Eric Greening: 12 and 12 a nd then once you start seeing male or female put back to veg for a while.

Kirk: Oh, can you do that? Yeah. And that. So you're  asking them to flower for you or the males somes

Eric Greening: Just show.

Kirk: Male males come first, right?

Eric Greening: Depends. Yeah. Quite often your males are going to be a lot taller, a lot bigger. They're trying to get to the top of the crop to let their pollen come down so taller, skinnier plants. But we've found out that taller, skinnier plants are females a lot of times too so until you flower them out and start showing. So you can flower all 12 if you want, and then just catch them and pull the males out.

Kirk: Well, that's what I was when I was growing. Well that's six containers. So one of these I was thinking of doing is just planting two per container and then if two females come up, well, and then then they share or just cut one down. Yeah.

Eric Greening: They should be able to share? Just keep giving a bigger blasts. Yeah. Yeah. It was a male or female. get that male out really really quick. With guarantee  females we still watch. There's hermaphrodit. all of the sudden they pop a little set of balls and the way, We've got trouble.

Trevor: So if you ever send your seeds or small plants off for genetic testing to decide male and female.

Eric Greening: No, we just flower them off here. Yeah. So, like our 9 pound hammer, it was, it wasn't a feminized strain so basically we clone them then at that big we sex them. Maybe put them at 12 and 12. As soon as they have roots we sex them. Up in the lab, just under a micoscope. You don't even need much for light. Yeah. Just to show which ones are male, get the males out of there and then you start rockwool type thing.

Kirk: So you throw them to 12 hours light. And they're sex. And then you throw them back 6 hour light are like and get okay. And you're not harming the plant.

Eric Greening: It's gonna slow down. It'll definitely slow down. I'll take another week to kick back the vegetable thing. Yeah.

Kirk: I guess my issue though is I need to have I need the harvest by the 1st June.

Eric Greening: I turn them on and just watch them. Yeah. Watch get the males out of there. All right. It goes to plants in the nursery. We can flowers those. you have one plant this big with one bud.

Kirk: Well, I've seen I've seen guys try to do that. They almost bonsai them. They grow. They grow one plant with one huge flower.

Eric Greening: A lot of commercial growers too. Don't grow plants at all, just a single kola all the way through.  But then, you go to the market and you got that one is that big. And not everyone likes a giant bud because it's half stem so people think. so by the time you break it up we're growing  eight really nice sized flowers instead of one giant flower type thing on each plant.

Kirk: I love the smell.

Eric Greening: there is a progression here.

Kirk: I'd say its fresh.

Eric Greening: I did a clean up in here on Friday.

Trevor: the last room smells closer to tomatoes.

Kirk: So we're going now into a more industrial area. Sort of. Well, this is where we came in. the irrigation room, the storage room. And. So where do you harvest? Where do you see your cutting?

Eric Greening: Right here.

Kirk: This is all the cutting room. Okay.

Eric Greening: Basically, you have all the carts, roll through here and we do a little trimming and then they drying room.

Kirk: The drying room. Okay.

Eric Greening: bring it right back out here.

Kirk: So how do you dry them? Do you dry them by just  you just cut the stem

Eric Greening: Ten plants per bar. Hanging upside down stock goes up ten per bar.

Kirk: But you just cut the stem and hang it.  So you don't cut the branches you cut the stem.

Eric Greening: We'll take a leaves. So whatever we don't defoliate, we'll have 20 plants here. a well trimmed plant, one person takes off 15 inch of leaf and hang it here

Kirk: Upside down.

Eric Greening: Three levels of fense the last levels about a foot off the ground type thing.

Kirk: Hey, this must be a phenomenal boost.

Eric Greening: and now an then we harvest as we go to the next level just keep raising them up.

Kirk: And how long do they stay in here?

Eric Greening: Two weeks, ten days and 14 days type thing. 60% humity 60°F 16C. For ten to 14 days and then going to bins for a three week cure. from the trim to the storage bin in a few hours and in they arew sealed air tight to cure. You watched them carefully. They get watched for about a week and a half, in a bin. and we know humity is okay then we seal up airtight.

Kirk: All in plastic? Okay, so today you're trimming them. Just the kola, just to flower. Packed down into a plastic container, sealed and they cure in there.

Eric Greening: Terp locked container so it's actually a brand called Grow Bags that are. It's almost like your tyvek on the outside of a building. They actually breathe a little bit. They're regulating the moisture. And basically they'll keep your inside flower 58 to 62% humidity and.

Kirk: Where are they.

Eric Greening: in the storage room. This is all the shake. we are storing shake in here right now. this goes to the extractors. Yeah.

Kirk: Well, yeah, that's going to be, that's that's sugar leaf.

Eric Greening: tricomes and Red hairs.

Kirk: So this is sugar leaf.

Eric Greening:  All sugar and red hair.

Kirk: So someone's going to make a.

Eric Greening: Super high tech stuff. Yeah. You could be really rolling joints out of that stuff. Oh yeah. But for us to we don't have extraction on site, eventually we will make bubble or something.

Kirk: Sticky.

Eric Greening: everything in this place is sticky.

Kirk: Yeah, yeah. Wow. I love that smell.

Eric Greening: That's the legacy cheese. This is the Greencraft  hush. Pink lamp shade. We had a whole run of pink plant and did all the pheno searches, and we dumped it.  It was all went into the garbage, it just wasn't wasn't good enough. we had a few seeds and had it before and loved it, but it just didn't turn out.

Trevor: Not its time.

Eric Greening: Yeah. Storage room.

Kirk: So this is our curing room.

Eric Greening: Yeah, this is just straight up storage. This is our vault, so we probably should not take pictures of this.

Kirk: Okay.

Eric Greening: I will show you guys quickly.

Kirk: So this this is all harvested and cured.

Eric Greening: Harvested and cured. This is a batch of death baba that's available right now for sale. That is a batch of cheese that we just sent for the testing on Friday. So basically, next Friday, we'll get a results back saying it's 100% safe and we will be able to sell that lot.

Kirk: And how many kilo bags of this.

Eric Greening:   2500g per bag.

Kirk: So two kilos.

Eric Greening: 2.5 Kilograms. Yeah.

Kirk: Wow. That's a lot of weed

Eric Greening: It is.

Kirk: It is. from my generation. Right? I mean, yeah. You know what I would, I would I understood, you know, you buy your dime bag, you buy your nickel bag, and now I'm in a room that's like $10,000 bill bags. Amazing.

Eric Greening: And those bags regularly, this room is kept pretty much 16 degrees and 60% rH yep.

Kirk: So they they these are curing bags that breathe. And then from this curing bag, they're that's how you transport them for packaging. In those bags.

Trevor: So if you're selling bulk if I was a bulk buyer I'd basically get one of these bags.

Eric Greening: Yeah. You get a box with.  You fit like 3 or 4 bags in the box. ship off purolator Yeah.

Kirk: Purolator and they go in.

Eric Greening: Yeah Puralator or Fedex are two of the ones. Only ones I allowed to ship cannabis.

Kirk: Okay. And there's nothing in the wrapping paper that suggests this is cannabis. It's very anonymous. 

Eric Greening: And completely airtight. Air sealed containers. We wrap our boxes with packing plastic and everything, and.

Kirk: They go on a pallet and off they go.

Eric Greening: and they ship all over Canada right. So. Yeah.

Kirk: Well we that's one of the things we discussed is that how, how much transportation your cannabis actually does before you get it.

Trevor: Yeah. We we talked to when we were in Alberta, it was growing in B.C. it shipped to Ontario to package. And then it comes back to be BC to be sold. How many trichomes fell off? How many you know.

Kirk: Yeah. And those days they were storing in plastic containers. I think there's more and more now are doing it in the, in the, sort of packaging. Right. Like tin foil.

Eric Greening: Mylar bags. Yeah. Yeah. Or glass jars from the more high end stuff type thing.

Kirk: Yeah. But again, glass is heavy and transportation fees.

Eric Greening: Shipping cost comes in. Yeah. Yeah. If you can process on site. Absolutely. Like, well, once we start processing here too, it'll be, you know, storage bag out here. Bring it out with package up and.

Kirk: You'll package it under your own brand. Yeah. Yeah.

Eric Greening: Straight into the stores after that.

Kirk: You know, I don't know if you if you want us not to share this part, but you were the original thought was you're going to sell directly to, you know, stores in Saskatchewan.

Eric Greening: Saskatchwan and Manitoba still our goal. Yeah.

Kirk: Okay. Yeah. And you didn't sell directly to the stores, not through LC.

Eric Greening: Yeah, yeah. Manitoba is still through the government, but they never take possession like we sell it to them. They list it on their website.

Trevor: Thats a virtual warehouse.

Eric Greening: totaly and we still ship from our site to every, every store. Yeah. Cool.

Kirk: So the local, the local Dauphine sort of stores. Yeah. We'll be able to get your local stuff. Now they can market it within the stores as.

Eric Greening: Locally  grown cannabis absolutely. Yeah.

Kirk: And being somebody who's read the Cannabis Act, there's nothing stopping some organization like you're is advertising on a podcast.

Eric Greening: Not advertising or promoting just just letting the public know what we're doing that.

Kirk: And that's what this is all about.

Eric Greening: So you never want to promote.

Kirk: Well but you can promote you can promote your brand as long as not promoting cannabis.

Eric Greening: Greencraft Cannabis would be a tough brand to promote without using cannabis.

Kirk: Well, but yeah. No, this is not a question. Do you have a medical? You do have medical sales. Yeah. You have medical sales as well. Well, we just see Greencraft medical cannabis.

Eric Greening: We're we're simply letting everyone know what we do, what we stand for or what we produce. We can do that all day as long as we're not Kirk and Trevor from podcasts say you should smoke.

Kirk: No, no, that's exactly. But we can't do that as professionals in the first place.

Eric Greening: I totally yeah.

Kirk: Oh, we can definitely discuss your business.

Eric Greening: Tell our story. Absolutely.

Kirk: And that's what we're doing to what, three episodes so far. This is very cool Eric. This is exciting.

Eric Greening: Yeah. What the hell? wrap everything up  and there's our seed storage in there in a  fridge.

Kirk: I'm just thinking about the first day you drove into my.

Eric Greening: Magical jars. 

Trevor: Those are literally some of the jars we got from the pharmacy. Yeah.

Eric Greening: And boxes.

Kirk: I just remember during. Was it pre-COVID or just during Covid, you drove into my yard and were sitting out in my driveway discussing this.

Eric Greening: Yeah. Yeah.

Trevor: That was definitely during Covid. Everyone afraid to meet indoors happy.

Eric Greening: Two and a half years ago I guess. Yeah. Yep. Yep. That's that. Yeah. Yeah, it's come a long way. It's a hell of a challenge, but it's we're getting there.

Kirk: Now, so I understand you're actually sleeping here now. You got a bed.

Eric Greening: I don't sleep. I don't have time. It's labor intensive. It's insane the amount of work you got to put in this place. Yeah. Paperwork wise, recording wise, there's a ton. And then just your everyday maintenance work and pruning work. You know, this week coming up won't be bad. We're transplanted. We're still growing a week after we're harvesting, and then we're transplanting again. Then we're cutting again. There's 2 or 3 weeks that are just going to yeah, you just make it through technique and get everything done on time.

Kirk: Was fantastic to see that you're in the market.  that's really cool.

Eric Greening: Totally. Yeah. Bulk sales is tougher because not everyone is, you know, other guys got to make money off too. So you're not getting the price you would for being package. buts its out and quick and we're not putting extra labor into packaging.

Kirk: Dauphinnow has tomatoes, weed and beer.

Eric Greening: Yeah yeah.

Kirk: All home grown.

Eric Greening: Yeah absolutely.

Trevor: So  BLT, a joint and a craft beer.

Kirk: Exactly. Now we just got to get a pork producer ivolved, and we can sell our own sandwiches.

Eric Greening: Totally.

Kirk: That's fantastic.

Eric Greening: Yes. It's getting there. We go up to the lab. I guess. I got some seeds sprouting, if you want to see those.

Kirk: Sure. I have a sneaky feeling this is going to be a two parter. This is going to be a long one. So. So we're still in now we're back in the Hroom. -

Eric Greening: Processing room. The main hub of the building.

Kirk: Yeah it's it's the hub. And all the other rooms go from the spokes from here. So.

Trevor: Okay Kirk.  Sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say we're leaving the flower room. But you had one more thought.

Kirk: No, no, I was just going to say the same thing. We're leaving the flower room. We're now in the atrium and sort of the hub. The hub of the building. In this area. This is where we entered the building. In this area, you can get to the clone, the mother room. From the mother room, you go to the nursery. From the nursery you go to the vegroom. vegroom. You go to the flower room. But from this room you can get to all of them. And. We're sitting there talking on the sound.

Actually a little better here because there's not as many fans going. Because that's that's the white noise in the background is the fans. There's a lot of air moving in those buildings. Right. And, this is a we have mentioned in past episodes, this building was specifically designed by Eric, contracted by Eric, and built by Eric and friends,.

Trevor: But more or less, yeah,.

Kirk: He's pretty much the pipe fitter. He was pretty much the carpenter. He was pretty much the plumber, right? He pretty much did most of it. And the building is specifically designed to grow cannabis.

Trevor: Yeah, it's this isnot a this is not a retrofit.

Kirk: Not at all. And he's in the middle of agricultural land. So he has a well which and so we'll, we'll be going into the, nutrients room where they basically use, well water, which is I guess the only expense of the well water is the pumping of it. Right? Yeah. Imagine I never asked him. He must have a field. He must have a septic field, because there's no, there's no, utilities out there except the electricity that he had to get piped in, but. So he's he's drawing well, water. He's purifying the well water by osmosis, reverse osmosis. He's got he's got, softener. Water softener. He filters it, he filters it. The zero puts it through a water softener. He puts it through, UV light, and he puts it through a reverse osmosis. So it's basically inert water. This water, there's no nutrients in this water.

Trevor: So now he has to add some in.

Kirk: Now he has to add some in.And he's got and I took pictures of this. This will be on the web page. He's got this wall of pipes and gadgets and switches and computers and dials and digital numbers and and probes and huge, I would say 500, 500 liter, plastic.

Trevor: Enormous.

Kirk: Types, huge, huge water things, maybe a thousand lead. I think they're 500l and one, two, three, four of them. And yeah, this is all the water. Yeah. In my room. If you could see me on the radio, I'm in the room drawing it with my hands here. Yeah. And in using that water he's got, he's got water piped in, to all the plants individually piped into all the plants.

Trevor: Well, the segue to, a few weeks before our tour, I met, Danny White at, at a wedding. Right. And Danny White turns. Happens to be the, the the head grower, the master grower, the the green thumb guy of of this whole operation. Its Dauphin and you forget how one step away you are from everybody. I, I worked with Danny's daughter for a decade, decade and a half, and it never really occurred to me that, you know, I was working with the master grower's daughter. So anyway, we chatted quite a bit at the wedding and yeah, he well, he's been growing forever. And you know, he the he's played around with every different type of grow yada yada. But he, he was just light up when he talk about things going on in this. We're calling it the water room or the nutrient room said it's the closest I've ever been to playing God. He's in. You know, if I want to turn up the pH a little bit, I turn up the pH, or if I want to turn down the calcium, I turn and he's got, you know, logs and logs and logs of what he did on what day. And he said, and the best part is, I'm pretty. You know, I predict ahead of time that if I make this one small adjustment that this will happen to, you know, let's say the THC level and it does. So you know, he's just it's just just like playing God, you know, how much light, how much nutrient, how how little nutrient, how much little how much water. So yeah. And everything everything is electronically controlled, computer controlled. But, Danny just was amazed with the amount of connection, or control he has of all the different inputs.

Kirk: Yeah. And there's Eric. I don't think he slept a wink in two years. And everything's wired and everything's wired to his phone. And at one point in the conversation, he says, pH goes down my phone ding. Light goes out, my phone dings. If you know, if anything happens in this building, my my phone goes bing. And he's literally he's living is lit. I think at one point I asked him if he's if he's married to the building and he and he he didn't laugh. He's like, possibly.

Trevor: We we thought that was funny. I might be finding it little close to home.

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So this is. I guess this room was very noisy. We'll see how much we can pull up. But this is in the, nutrients room. Oh, I remember this room. The irrigation room. Oh, tubs and tubs wires and tubing. Is that being aerated.

Eric Greening: yup aerated and circulation.

Kirk: So these are all nutrients. Every every tub is a nutrient.

Eric Greening: This is room by room. Thats flower room four. Veg room 3, Also Veg Room three with the mother or the mother plant. And that's a flower room and mother room. And this is flowered  by pure water tank.

Kirk: Okay. Now water is obviously filtered or is it osmosis.

Eric Greening: Filtered to zero.

Kirk: Filtered to zero and carbon and carbon filtered also clorine removed and all that.

Eric Greening: You name it. Yeah.

Kirk: And is it is not well water in here.

Eric Greening: Yeah. thats well water.

Trevor: You equiped with a Fresh water well.

Eric Greening: Great water quality. Yeah yeah yeah. Goes seven filter, softener, RV UV and deionization.

Kirk: So there's no nutrients in that water whatever.

Eric Greening: So that's the problem with our calcium magnesium your town water you have to add calmag. But since we're going to zero water we are pumping calmag like crazy.

Kirk: Because I'm growing basically carbon filtered and down to one. I'm growing with that.

Eric Greening:  yeah, that would do fine.

Kirk: And then maybe I have some nutrients when I get when I get to the veg stage to the flower stage I might add nutrients to the water, but then, like you said, last three weeks is special.

Eric Greening: Yeah, we run a change every week, so we. Well, here's our our feed schedule. So here's what we're running. You know, like a 1.9 to 2.4 EC in deep flower goes down to 1316, 1911in  flush. We've been up to 2.6-2.7. because they love so much that every batch we mix is recorded, every nutrient is recorded, all their sheets the quality  sheets are recored.  We know everything going into the plants from day one.

Kirk: And that's for your that's for your understanding. not necessartly health canada.

Eric Greening: A little bit of both. Health Canada wants to see control of your lots and for us to fine tune everything.

Kirk: So when Health Canada does an inspection and they send a civil servant out to look at it and are  those guys educated to understand what you're doing. Are they just ticking boxes?

Eric Greening: Are they're educated. They're they're looking for everything. Yeah. Cleanliness safety or.

Kirk: But they don't know the science of.

Kirk: Not really.

Kirk:  They're just technicians ticking box.

Eric Greening: Yeah. Yeah. Make sure you're safe and legal basically. Right. Yeah. We're going through a CRA audit right now. The with CRA is also involved with inventory. So every 30 days is a full report to CRA and Health Canada.

Trevor: Oh good, why not do twice the work paper.

Eric Greening: Exactly. Yeah. And then they'll say okay give us all of N plus 80 more pages of the first six months of operations.

Kirk: Thank God for computers. Yeah.

Eric Greening: Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty easy. Just automatically as soon as it hits the sensor. it hits there, make another batch it picks up the mixture. Mixes in that tank.  Tests it. Makes  sure its exactly what want. Fill up that tank and keeps going on using scenors.

Kirk: So how many days?.

Eric Greening: We will go through one a day.

Kirk: One a day.

Eric Greening: Thats a 150 gallons mixture twice a day

Kirk: Thank God you got a well.

Eric Greening: Can you imagine if you're in downtown using city water. 1000s of gallions a day.

Kirk: And especially when you have to treat  that city water.

Eric Greening: Absolutely. Yeah.

Kirk: So just by being in the middle of an agricultural area, you have decreased your expenses on the front end. 

Eric Greening: Major with the water and the destruction in flower. The destruction of cannabis being done by inceration is aHuge saving. Our land tax are a lot lower being in agricultural land. There are benefits being out here.

Kirk: Startup expenses, but the actual running expenses are low.

Eric Greening: Lower than a other guys. Still got a lot of energies. everything is wired.  Anything going on with any of the nutients in here, my phone dings. if this does not work my phone dings,  temp goes out my phone dings.  Lights out goes out my phone dings away. The water drains my phone rings.

Kirk: so do you have a  marriage certificate for this building?

Eric Greening: It's official. Yeah. I don't have staff out on the weekend, so. I nail 14-16 hour days on the weekend to keep everything running . Weekdays I am finally back in my office and staff take care of everything. Yes. It's busy. Two half days off for Christmas. Two four hour deer hunting sessions in November. Other than that its about it.

Kirk: I have been complaining, picked up a contract that has me working full time. I'm working for a living and  boy is tough getting up at four in the morning.

Eric Greening: No shit are you up north again.

Kirk: No, no, I'm doing a southern contract in Minnidosa but is requires me to drive through the park. Right? and its like, I don't know. This is 20. This is 21 days. I've been doing this. Now it's like it's a nice contract. I'm enjoying it. But he's just getting up in the morning is tough.

Trevor: Retired guys. Yeah.

Kirk: retreading. I'm not retired.

Eric Greening: My Dad retired for like two weeks and went and got his license to drive bus, he drive bus when ever he can.

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah. Well now you do what you want to do, right? Yeah. That's where I'm at now. This is sort of what you've done, except that it turned out to be 18 hours days.

Eric Greening: I knew it was coming. Yeah, we'll get there. Give us another six months. Eight months. And things are settling in. yes this room is pretty important, but it's basically all on autodrives, so well, everything's pretty much all auto driver in this place once you're set up.

Kirk: Rock and roll.

Trevor: I was just going to say are the speakers clamoring as loud as possible in each grow room your going.

Eric Greening: They like raggie don't mind a little rap.

Kirk: I bet Grateful Dead. Reggae. Yeah. Well, I. I have toured many a brewery in life and distilleries, and now a cannabis plant. But I, you know, one of the things breweries love to do, there's nothing fresher than a beer right out of the fermenter, you know. And and I have I have sampled beer directly from a fermenter before it's been bottled. Right. So I don't know. I guess they'll catch up to beer eventually, right. They'll. Oh, they'll have to. I mean, this is still new and and I and I tend to be a little impatient with governments when they're being silly. I'd like them to speed it up so we can have farm gate, you know, and so that Eric can sell his, sell his product right out of the building. Now he is. When we were there, that that long weekend, they were harvesting Greencraft strain. Their their their legacy crops. So they were going to harvest under their own brand.

Trevor: Yeah. How about how about we won't mention any strains because we don't want to get it wrong. But if we if, if, if we've time this right, when this comes out, you might be able to literally go to a cannabis store and buy some Greencraft branded stuff.

Kirk: So it'll be branded Greencraft. And it's from a truly, truly superior microcraft cannabis shop. This was a remarkable tour and very gracious of Eric to show us around. Yeah, it was a remarkable tour and, and, I asked people to watch out for Dauphin  Manitoba's own Greencraft cannabis.

Trevor: Yeah, that was a great tour, Eric. Thank you very much. And like you said, if if we've time this right, maybe by the time this is done, or shortly thereafter, you can go to your local cannabis shop and buy something from Greencraft cannabis.

Kirk: I would like Rene to find the reggae cowboys. It's a band. I haven't I haven't heard them in years, and they just came to me. Eric was talking about when they're harvesting reggae has played in that building a lot. So I'm thinking play something from the reggae cowboys because we, you know, we're, you know, it's a little bit of a cowboy Manitoba cowboy.

Trevor: No, it's a good vibe. It's a good vibe.

Kirk: Thanks, Eric. And you're looking forward to the fourth tour. And when we can actually see some oh, when he actually sees some stuff hanging and curing, maybe, maybe we can help him. Maybe we can help him trim one day.

Trevor: Well, I think he I think he said that he, you know, he would consider, you know, hiring you as, as a volunteer trimmer. So, you know, maybe we'll have to take him up.

Kirk: Volunteer trimmer I could do that. All right Trevor, this was, this is a good one. It was a good tour. I hope the sound comes out. It was, it's very tough. Very tough. Transcript. To, transcribe and, let's see what kind of magic Rene has done.

Trevor: Absolutely. It was been a good one, everybody. And, we'll see everyone next up.