MATT CASEY: A reefer is another word for a marijuana cigarette. "Reefer Madness" is an old anti-pot movie turned into a cult classic by legalization advocates trying to change public opinion. Reefer Growing Madness is a podcast that tracks the life cycle of legally grown marijuana from clone to smoke.
You’re listening to Chapter 4 the Harvest Episode of Reefer Growing Madness, a production of KJZZ’s Hear Arizona podcast unit. I’m your host Matt Casey. If you’re new to marijuana, then don’t miss the Primer episode to better understand the slew of related slang and scientific terms… A warning, dear listener, that you’re going to hear some swearing and cursing at times. Yet government funded research says there’s a positive link between profanity and honesty.
Four Zpectrum plants looked ripe for picking by the end of Chapter 3, the Fall Equinox Episode. A curing process includes, drying, trimming and packaging before marijuana is sent to a dispensary for sale. A pot farm as big as Alien Labs produces an enormous amount of odor, which is still taboo even though weed is legal. The perfume plants release during harvest is unavoidable, and perhaps the most pungent.
[REEFER MAN: CAB CALLOWAY]
Just over three months after six tiny Zpectrum clones were plugged into rockwool cubes, the four surviving plants are ready to be harvested. Actually, the entire flower room they’re in is being culled today. Th e job takes a crew of at least 10, says Assistant General Manager Alexander Lawrence.
ALEXANDER LAWRENCE: Team’s just coming from break right now. They’re chopping the BK Satellite. It’s got the hallway reeking all the way over to the Mom Room. It’s the furthest flower room away and it’s reeking all the way around the corner. It’s pretty cool. MC: Sweet, I can’t wait to smell it. AL: Let’s check it out.
BK Satellite is one of a half dozen strains that grew in this room with the Zpectrum. The crew started work early this morning. Lawrence summarizes the harvest process.
LAWRENCE: We have the cutters in the room cutting the plants. The runner running the plants over, weighing the plants. And then we have the rest of the team on breakdown in the hallway.
Staff are waiting for Lawrence and I next to the Zpectrum plants. But the room is so full of marijuana that we have to shuffle sideways to squeeze between the wall and the canopy.
CASEY: Trying not to…
LAWRENCE: Disrupt the ladies right?
CASEY: That’s right man. I’m gonna have to lose some weight to get through here.
Any buds knocked off a plant get thrown away as a loss. But by harvest, these buds look so big and heavy that a tiny shake of a branch might knock one off. Avoiding this is the top job for staff called cutters. They use scissors to untangle the net, the plants and neighbors, then power up with shears to cut the stocks. A morning of this has their clothes glittering with T-H-C and trichomes.
AMBIE SCISSORS SNIP
The more buds on a plant, the more delicate of a chore this becomes. The best of the Zpectrum plants looks very promising for a good yield.
LAWRENCE: The node spacing is really tight so there are just buds all over it, all up and down it.
The challenge grows even more difficult and labor intensive during the breakdown phase. Lawrence dons gloves and a hairnet as he gently picks apart snarls of branches and netting.
LAWRENCE: This part you can easily rip buds out if you just start yanking it out, buds will start flying. So you got to do a little at a time.
The net’s purpose has been to act as a trellis for creating an even canopy throughout the room. When first installed, it was a grower’s best friend. Now it’s their worst foe.
LAWRENCE: It all starts with one little chop. (Scissors snipping)
Breaking down a plant means preparing individual branches to hang on a drying rack in a d rying room. Lawrence calls breakdown the bottleneck of harvesting because of the time and care needed.
LAWRENCE: Always about finding that point of tension. (SNIP)
Zpectrum’s parents -- Rainbow Sherbert No 11 and Z -- are tangly and floppy strains. Lawrence says those traits are in their offspring. Still, the buds have a purple hue, smelling of fruit and gasoline.
LAWRENCE: Lot of sections. Lot of different little sections. Starts getting easier after you do those first couple. It just kind of comes out like layers. Like peeling an onion.
Harvest is always a relief for Lawrence. His work starts in a notebook weeks before clones are even cut. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been growing. For a farmer, there’s no escaping the element of the unknown. Air conditioning might break. Or a pipe could burst at 1 a-m… Not today, as Buzz Lightyear would say. The plan for the Zpectrum plants has come to fruition. Just in time is General Manager Bruno Gagliardi.
BRUNO GAGLIARDI: How’s the weight feeling?
LAWRENCE: Pretty good for the size, the distribution. It makes sense for the proportion of the plant. It feels good for the size of the plant.
Gagliardi grabs P-P-E and starts working with Lawrence. I ask when they will decide whether this weed meets quality standards for making it to market. Gagliardi answers that the size and quality of the buds are on point. He takes an extended whiff and describes it as sweet.
GAGLIARDI: So everything from the purples to the greens. It ripens up nicely so you get the little bit of touch of orange from the pistils that drop back nicely into the bud. Nice trichome density.
The curing process remains. The buds still have to be dried, removed from branches, trimmed and packaged. These steps mean touching a product that the happiest customers think has hardly been held.
GAGLIARDI: And then even just the smell and a lot of the other characteristics really get muted if you over handle it.
Funny he should mention smell because Gagliardi and Lawrence grow very pungent weed. It’s not the same odor as burned marijuana, but unmistakable nonetheless. The scent radiating in Alien Labs sticks to everything. Like the sun during summer in Phoenix, there is no escape.
GAGLIARDI: (laughs) I just assume that I smell like weed most days.
Gagliardi has long been at ease with the reality of growing and consuming pot. At his regular spot, the gym….
GAGLIARDI: I've very frequently heard people leaving the locker room commenting on how strong the locker room smells. And that is, you know, yours truly.
It prevents claustrophobia when he travels.
GAGLIARDI: I definitely get different looks. The airport tends to be the most fun. People really avoid me at the airport
Why do they run? Because legal or not, the smell of marijuana, more common now than ever, remains taboo.
GAGLIARDI: You can definitely tell when people are looking at you in a very judgmental way. There's places where I noticed that much more than others, right? You know, if I'm out with my kids, if I'm going to a school event or picking them up, those types of places I'm definitely gonna get a little bit more looks than I would if I'm just maybe out and about by myself,
LAWRENCE: All my stuff reeks. Like my wallet, like, if I pull out my debit card like it just reeks. I don't understand why my wallet stinks so bad. It stays in my locker. Don't get it.
Alexander Lawrence can feel uncomfortable smelling like weed because some still consider it like having red paint on your hands.
LAWRENCE: That's what gets you in trouble. It's a dead giveaway. It's the number one thing you got to worry about.
Even 48 hours away from the farm doesn’t rid him of the pungency.
LAWRENCE: I'll take a shower on a Sunday, and I still smell weed like coming off of me, and it's like, it's just in my pores.
For my project partner and I, the scent of pot is not safe for work. Just like how it's a bad idea to show up to a news conference smelling of tequila. Over the months, Tim Agne and I tried many ways to shake the smell of Alien Labs. We’re calling this next segment Airing Out, which is guest produced by the extraordinarily talented and kind, Tiara Vian. Think of it as trying to reach your sense of smell with audio.
CASEY: Okay, Tim, we just got done harvesting with Alien Labs. I reek.
AGNE: Well, this is the moment where, for me, I'm a little desensitized to the smell, because you get in there, it's very strong, like even going to the lobby. And I've noticed this every time. It's almost like this, this wave of like pineapple when you first get in there, I get, I get different sort of citrus smells throughout that facility. There's a spot that smells like orange juice to me, but then on the way out the lobby, has no odor anymore. It's just, you know, it just smells like nothing, like a neutral smell. And so that's how I know that I've sort of become desensitized to that smell,
CASEY: Yeah, and it's been challenging because we got to make sure we don't take that smell back to the office. So right now, let's try, like an old stoner trick, man, let's, let's get in your car and roll down all the windows and see if we can air ourselves out.
AGNE: And this is what I've been doing most days, is I will hop on the i 10, and even doing, you know, 65, 70 miles an hour with the windows down pretty much the whole way home, a little tough now that it's colder.
CASEY: Yeah, man, I remember back in the day, not that I was ever around anybody who smoked marijuana. But you know, if you smoked out in a car, they called it clam baking. I think.
AGNE: I think the guys I knew always called it hot boxing,
Now, what happens to me every week is that I get into the car and the smell transfers from me kind of into the car. So it's not just me, it's not just my clothes, but my car will smell for a day or so.
CASEY: Dude, I go home, get changed, totally different clothes. I don't have hair, so it doesn't get into my hair, but you know where it gets stuck every time, guaranteed, and I can't get it out no matter how hard I try. My microphone sock.
Loop 202, south. Let's air this guy out.
AGNE: Windows going down. Outside taps a brisk 52 degrees this morning,
CASEY: Which is like a 60, 70 degree difference from what we're used to. So it feels a lot colder driving down the freeway with the windows down as a brave act.
I don't know, man, you think we're airing ourselves out. You think this is working?
AGNE: I think it's gonna work okay. It's gonna help. But when I get home, I'm gonna spray a little Febreze in here, then I'm gonna open up the hatch and put a box fan of the trunk and just blow it out for a couple hours, and my whole garage is gonna smell. Two car garage. Will you know when I walk back out, it's gonna be like, Whoa. But after that my car, I'll be okay. In about a day, it'll be all right,
CASEY: All of this from spending 20 minutes to about an hour in that indoor farm.
AGNE: Yeah, it is. It is just surprising how sticky
CASEY: I’m going to miss it. I’m gonna miss the smell.
AGNE: I kind of am too it's a little it's not unpleasant. Might be too cold today, if I get all the way home, we're putting those down.
CASEY: It's pretty chilly, buddy. I mean, for people from Arizona, if it drops below 70, I get cold. Do
you think we still smell? Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure. Let me go home, do a little laundry, air out the car, like I said, with the with the box fan and the Febreze, and it'll, it'll pretty well take care of it.
Yeah, laundry definitely seems to be in order.
About 10 days later, back inside Alien Labs, I’m supposed to watch the mostly-dried buds be removed from the branches. But the job had to be done early to prevent crop damage, likely due to the Sonoran Desert’s power to zap humidity. Alexander Lawrence leads me upstairs.
LAWRENCE: After the weed gets bucked and shucked, (it) gets stored up here in a controlled vault basically. And everyday the bins get burped and stuff. It’s part of the cure process.
Yes, he said bins, plural, each full of marijuana. And yes, the containers are burped, kinda like a baby. A quality control staffer finds the Zpectrum bin and puts it on a table for Lawrence.
LAWRENCE: Take the lid off. Here it is. All four plants. Oh yeah, it’s definitely dry. I’m afraid to even put my hands in here. Definitely dried really fast. But this is kind of the process of burping. You kind of just sift it through. But honestly it felt so dry down there I don’t even think it needs to rotated.
How wet the weed is when it goes into the bin determines whether it takes 30 or 5 minutes of gentle rotations to release stagnant air and replace it with fresh. This batch of Zpectrum is the latter.
LAWRENCE: It’s pretty crispy. You could definitely break off trichomes and break the buds apart really easily. But yeah buds came out relatively frosty looking.
The scents are fruit and gasoline, but Lawrence says a longer cure is needed to draw out the full odor. The room we’re in has stacks of black bins with yellow lids all waiting to be burped. The quality control staffer says there are 400-plus pounds in here. The Zpectrum accounts for…
LAWRENCE: After it’s trimmed it might be like… might like a pound and three quarters or maybe two flat. If it’s 2.57 here, you lose about 40 percent.
Even the low end of his estimate is still a solid yield for just four plants… so what’s up with calling it burping? This comes from the use of mason jars. The quality control staffer has a row of them on a table. His name is John.
CASEY: Would you mind showing me your jars? JOHN: Of course, yeah. So this one’s a Zangria here. (mason jar pops) That’s what he meant by the burping.
John explains that research and development strains on their way to being grown for sale get the mason jar treatment.
JOHN: Just you know, (mason jar pops) again that burp. Always wanna kinda just release it just like how we do right there too so I can kind of give that a whiff. MC: Smells great.
A few days later, I meet another staffer named Keoni while she trims dark green leaves to expose the Zpectrum buds, which are organized by size into stainless steel bowls .
CASEY: What’s your impression?
KEONI: I love it. It’s absolutely beautiful. I smells great. Works really well. Its a easy trim. It always helps when its a easy trim.
CASEY: Define easy trim.
KEONI: Where it has really good structure. It’s nice and solid. It’s not too soft. It's not too loose. It doesn’t break down too easily. Just overall has nice weight to it.
Keoni’s job is considered entry level. But doing this same chore for any grower in need is also how Alexander Lawrence met the people who’ve employed him for the last decade plus. Keoni’s been here for about 18 months. She explains the trimming technique is about efficiency.
KEONI: So I’ve noticed that marijuana kind of grows in a spiral. So I like to trim sort of in that direction. So I liked to start on the bottom getting that thick stem. And then sort of like twirling it, spinning it in its direction it's growing.
Keoni is passionate about weed, its medicinal power and scientific unknowns. She wants to learn how to grow too. Her daily goal is to at least double the typical output of her peers.
CASEY: And then go home and stick your hands in an ice bath? KEONI: (laughs) Actually my hands don’t cramp up too bad. I like working with my hands so this is just…
My final visit to Alien Labs was on the day the Zpectrum went into jars. I joke that I’m out of excuses for having to come back. Then Bruno Gagliardi leads me to a room nearly filled up by an automated packager.
[Green Vault machine sound]
GAGLIARDI: It handles the weed very gently. And that’s the most important thing. When you are trying to pack the flower, you want to minimize as much damage to the trichomes. That visual appearance. The bag-appeal. Or jar-appeal in this case.
The machine has 16 hoppers and 8 scales. A staffer stands on a platform eyeballing the size of Zpectrum buds and dropping them into the different hoppers based on sensor prompts.
GAGLIARDI: Basically a lot of these ideas kind of got pulled in from traditional manufacturing and food processing, pharmaceutical processing. A lot of the people that were behind a lot of those technologies came in.
Each jar is filled with one-eighth of an ounce of Zpectrum. About two ounces of the harvest were of buds large and pretty enough to be packaged this way. Smaller nugs go into half-ounces or become pre-rolled reefers. The jars on a conveyor belt that you're about to hear get a lid and label and hold the best from what I watched grow for months… It was worth it.
[Zpectrum jars lidded and labeled.]
SONG: REEFER MAN: CAB CALLOWAY
Next time on Reefer Growing Madness, which will sadly be the last episode, at least for now … It’s time to buy and burn the Zpectrum. I’ll join the Alien Labs brand founder and his top local farmers for a trip to the dispensary and a special smoke session.
Now here’s my project partner Tim Agne with a preview of the photos and video available online for this episode.
AGNE: This was a process, the harvest was one of our more kinetic times, going into that flower room where there were so many people, so many things, moving around, guys, just going in and out, us trying to squeeze ourselves in there. So hopefully I get to show some of that. I don't think that I realized at the time just how much worse the odor was from the harvest. I know Zander going in was like It reeks in there, and once again, you quickly become desensitized to it. But for me, my car smelled for weeks afterwards. It took me a very long time, much, much longer than any of our other visits after that harvest, because there was just so much of it being stirred up in the air. One of my favorite photos that I got from the entire project, was once it got moved into the room where it was going to be drying, I just have a picture of Bruno taking one of the prettiest flowers from that whole plant, and just kind of holding it in his hand and just kind of showing it to us. That's what you'll see on the podcast, logo, that great big flower,
Reefer Growing Madness was produced and hosted by me, Matt Casey. Tim Agne is our digital editor. Lindsey C. Riley is our project editor.
