How I Got Roots Five Days Faster With MIICROBIAL MASS PRO

By: Wesley Allen

As Head of Cultivation at Ritual Green, my primary responsibility is to grow a great product.  Everything starts there, but there are also certain imperatives to consider when it comes to large-scale cultivation.  It is relatively easy to grow at a small scale, but in order to succeed as a licensed producer in a competitive business landscape, I have to run my facility efficiently day after day, month after month, and year after year.  This is why we are hyper-focused on maximizing the consistency of our crops while minimizing our costs.  We have built our systems and processes from the ground up to allow us to achieve these goals.  And most importantly, we have an amazing team of highly skilled growers who know how to crush it and always deliver their best.

From the beginning, we have benefitted from the simple, effective, and predictable results of running a “sterile” cultivation system.  Our plants are grown in rock wool cubes and fed a precise mixture of synthetic nutrients through drip irrigation.  This approach allows us to really take control of conditions within the root zone and steer our crops to the desired outcomes.  In general, we avoid organic inputs in order to remove any unnecessary sources of variability and minimize biofilm buildup in our tanks and water lines.

There is, however, one organic product that I have come to rely on as a major contributor to our success.  MIICROBIAL MASS PRO is a clean microbe product that is uniquely suited to our growing style.  When we first brought it in, we used it as a way to improve our results during propagation and cloning.  First, we introduced it to our mothers and immediately saw a dramatic improvement in rates of growth and overall health.  Then we started presoaking our rock wool cubes in MIICROBIAL MASS PRO during cloning.  The combination of these two changes reduced the rooting time of our clones from 11 days to 6 days.  We also significantly increased the percentage of cuttings that successfully rooted, and reduced the number of weak clones that had to be culled out.  The simple addition of this one product represented a major improvement in the efficiency of our cloning stage and significantly reduced our overall costs during propagation.

Once the clones are ready for vegetative growth, my entire focus is on the consistency of the crop.  We produce monocrop sea-of-green grow rooms which allows us to tailor conditions to each strain and bring out the ultimate expression of our genetics.  But growing successfully in this style requires a high level of uniformity among the plants.  I need to see an even canopy in every room, and each plant needs to be the same height and have the same structure.  This will mean that every plant will receive the same amount of light, and every plant will have the same water and nutrient requirements, allowing us to efficiently manage production across the facility.  By running MIICROBIAL MASS PRO, I am able to eliminate transplant shock and go into every crop with a room full of good, strong, healthy plants with no runts or stragglers.  This provides a solid foundation for a strong, uniform flowering cycle, and allows us to consistently hit our goals for both yield and potency, crop after crop.

When growing commercially at scale, there are a million small decisions that can lead to success or failure.  By focusing on consistent, repeatable results, our awesome team is putting in the work and establishing us as a leader in the industry.  I can’t wait to find out what the future has in store for us!

 

Wesley Allen is Head Grower at Ritual Green in Windsor, Nova Scotia.