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.
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
CASEY: You’re listening to Chapter 2 the Summer Solstice Episode of Reefer Growing Madness, a production of KJZZ’s Hear Arizona podcast unit. I’m your host Matt Casey. Don’t miss the primer to help understand all the slang and scientific terms related to marijuana. And the prologue has a brief history of pot criminalization and legalization in Arizona.
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.
The six tiny Zpectrum plants had grown roots by the end of Chapter 1: The Clone Episode. But they still had a couple days to survive outside of a humidity-control dome before they could go into their own pots. Next, the plants will spend a couple weeks in the vegetative room at Alien Labs. Think of it as mimicking the height of summer in terms of the daylight-to-darkness ratio. The lead farmer has academic credentials which qualify him for agriculture jobs. But he had to move cross-country for a chance to scratch and claw his way into the marijuana industry.
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
It’s been two weeks since a half-dozen Zpectrum clones were cut from a mother plant during a whole day of making copies at the huge indoor pot farm, Alien Labs. Remember that Zpectrum came from crossing two other strains that share names with sweets: sherbert and a confection called Z in Arizona. General Manager Bruno Gagliardi explains the market flow as walks me back to the grow room.
BRUNO GAGLIARDI: We really expect this kind of candy trend that we are seeing continue. So if we can put out stuff that’s going to be innovative and just new in that space. That’s really going to attract all of the people looking for those flavors. That’s going to be really exciting to see where we can take it.
CASEY: A work crew leaves the room for break after an early morning spent transplanting. Their assignment is to finish two full rooms today. For a marijuana clone to be worthy of getting its own one-gallon pot, the plant needs well-established roots.
GAGLIARDI: Here we have the babies that are going to be moving into their final home.
CASEY: Roots look good?
GAGLIARDI: Good. Healthy. Ready.
CASEY: Right after being cut, the six Zpectrum clones were put into cubes called rockwool, which is molten rock spun into fiber. Gagliardi puts on a hair net, gloves and starts transplanting.
(To Gagliardi) So you just put the whole plug in there?
GAGLIARDI: There you go? Make sure she has good surface area contact with the substrate. And then later on the team is going to water her in.
CASEY: The clones are now plants. Their new home is a substrate called coconut coir made of fiber from the outer husk of a coconut, which Gagliardi explains is great for holding air and water.
GAGLIARDI: I really love this part. The reason I got into doing this was definitely to be with the plants. It’s kind of what I dedicated my life to. That’s what I often tell people. That’s the truth.
GAGLIARDI: He says there’s an unforeseen consequence of advancing in the marijuana industry and earning a chance to live out his teenage dream.
GAGLIARDI: You end up in a position where you’re kind of a little bit further away from the plant than what I had originally imagined.
CASEY: Gagliardi grew up bouncing around to places where nobody saw him as a native. He lived in Brazil and Georgia pre-earliest memories. Those were in Kentucky. Then more time in Brazil after his parents split up. And on to Florida, California and at least for now, Goodyear, Arizona.
GAGLIARDI: Watch the birds and roof. Gotta do something about those pigeons.
CASEY: What are you smoking? BG: Silver Spoon.
CASEY: Oh a Sativa?
GAGLIARDI: I really like this one. Tastes incredible. Takes just like Super Silver Haze from back in the day from what I remember. But the flower is just so much prettier. Smokes so smoothly. It’s a really good one.
CASEY: The experience Gagliardi has now smoking marijuana is much different from when he gave his life to the plant. This was around the same time he set another life course on health and fitness.
GAGLIARDI: Really, ever since I was maybe like 16, I really started taking a big interest in it. I was actually pretty overweight at the time.
CASEY: Not anymore. Overheard in the Newsroom the day he visited the station? "That dude looks like he does a lot of crossfit," and "Wow he smells like marijuana."
Fully embracing passions are a theme in Gagliardi’s life — family, exercise, tattooing, weed. He found a seed during a teenage smoke session and realized that the plant grabbing more and more of his curiosity starts from one. Next he bought a grow light, a basic hydroponic system and started playing around in his bedroom.
GAGLIARDI: When I first kind of came up with this thought, I thought I wanted to be the best grower in the world. But little do I know that it is so much deeper and more complex than that that is just kind of like a weird goal.
CASEY: Dedication meant going to college in search of a career he could use with marijuana while he grew it clandestinely.
GAGLIARDI: And, you know, through that, just started becoming, in a way, just obsessed with the plant and with growing and getting better and understanding things.
CASEY: And it became this persistent journey that I've never really strayed from.
Aptitude in chemistry, biology and math made him realize a degree featuring those skills could one day be valuable to a legitimate weed company. So Gagliardi chose horticultural sciences, and graduated in 2014 — the year legal pot programs in Colorado and Washington went live. Pretty soon, the whole West Coast was green. The problem was that Gagliardi and the woman he just married lived on the Atlantic Coast.
GAGLIARDI: Well, it was very, very difficult, though, because no one really wanted to hire someone from Florida to come grow in California
CASEY: His hand was forced by a job accident, that led to a drug test, that led to an ultimatum for staying employed, which he refused. With few ties to Florida, he and his wife moved West. It would still take another year to break into the marijuana industry. He’d come to practice Jiu Jitsu and started a cannabis-sports-supplement business. But the feds confiscated his gear. Desperation set in when he was eliminated as a candidate for managing a weed greenhouse.
GAGLIARDI: So then, you know, I had to kind of just reach out and essentially say I was willing to take whatever position they had available. I would do whatever it took.
CASEY: This got him an entry-level cultivation tech job just months before the first of his children — twins, actually — would be born.
GAGLIARDI: And I was living in LA. So it was about a two and a half hour drive there, three hour drive home. I was making minimum at the time, so I think it's like $14 an hour. And had to do that for about a year or so until things started finally changing.
CASEY: Gagliardi’s background in plant science makes him suspicious to some legacy growers who rely on a collective of wisdom based on trial, error and shared secrets. But he values their perspective from having learned in much the same way: growing pot at home. And he saw cocky agriculture experts be humbled publicly when ideas they learned in school failed at the pot farm. So Gagliardi’s approach is to reserve judgment until seeing the outcome of experiments testing hypotheses of the collective wisdom, versus what an academic might think.
GAGLIARDI: But it was very, very interesting to see how things worked out. And it wasn't always necessarily in one direction or the other. You know, there was definitely a lot of learning. And nowadays we see this like, you know, beautiful union of the two.
CASEY: The merger of his pot passion and career means burning a reefer in the backyard technically counts as work research. Gagliardi’s tolerance lets him distinguish between the effects that make strains lean sativa, indica or hybrid.
GAGLIARDI: It’s not even so much about, ‘Are you getting high?’ No. It’s the fact that I’m here, smoking something. It’s relaxing me. It’s this ritual.
CASEY: An ideal session is not with the pre-roll he’s almost done smoking. The best experience is to be deliberate, sit down, use his senses to choose a few nugs and grind them.
GAGLIARDI: Put on a little bit of music and go through the process. Setting up the joint. Sometimes you put some hash in there. Sometimes you don’t. You got to really kind of experience that you want in that moment.
CASEY: Rolling Js on a weeknight is not usually possible because his roles inside the house are of course dad and chef.
The hiss of a pressure cooker is on the greatest-hits-of-the-kitchen soundtrack for anyone who spent part of their childhood in Brazil, Gagliardi and his wife Bruna tell me.
GAGLIARDI: It feels really good being able to, you know, give my kids kind of this experience of Mom and Dad being together and doing everything together.
CHILD: Papa, where’s my rock collection?
CASEY: Gagliardi cooks chicken and rice for dinner while the kids take turns doing homework with Mom. Their family has grown to five since leaving Florida. The nightly routine now means the couple doesn’t get a chance to catch up until the end of the day.
BRUNA GAGLIARDI: Bedtime. I see him in bed (laughs).
CASEY: Gym time is more family time as Gagliardi says he tries to be a role model for his kids on health and fitness. Exercise, especially martial arts, keeps him grounded.
GAGLIARDI: It's good to have that outlet for me to go and burn some energy, you know, it's not really something I see as kind of like an optional thing anymore.
CASEY: The adults speak to the children in Portuguese, but the kids answer in English mostly, now that they’re in school. They used to think dad went to work in outer space every day because of the imagery on Alien Labs T-shirts he wears to the office. Now they know he’s a farmer, though not of what. He doesn’t try to hide from them the marijuana he cultivates and consumes because he doesn’t feel like he’s doing anything wrong.
GAGLIARDI: When they ask questions, I'll be honest, I'll be straightforward. You know, this is what adults have the option to do. This is something that I choose to do. It's something that for me is something I enjoy, is work. It pays the bills. You know, it's what dad does.
CASEY: He’s a manager at a pot farm where everyone was very welcoming to nosy strangers making weekly, early morning visits toting a microphone with a windscreen my industry calls a dead cat. For reals. Look it up.
The Zpectrum plants have been in their pots for only a few days. Assistant General Manager Alexander Lawrence leads me to the Alien Labs vegetative room, where what are expected to be stout plants are stretching upward. He’s excited about the green coloring and thickness of the new growth.
ALEXANDER LAWRENCE: These are the clone leaves, the original clone leaves, and these clones are located at the top of the clone when we make the clone. And the newest growth is now more than half the plant away.
CASEY: He can also see the parents reflected in their children.
LAWRENCE: It is very reminiscent of both of them. I can see the RS-11 kind of ridges in the leaves. However, the structure of the Z is very present.
CASEY: But now there are five Zpectrum plants instead of six.
[SONG PLAYS: CHOPIN'S "FUNERAL MARCH"]
CASEY: Lawrence explains why one didn’t make it, despite being given the space advantage to not have to compete for light.
LAWRENCE: I think it was just poorly rooted. We tried a smaller rockwool cube for these, just to try it out. And maybe that was why it wasn’t stuck properly. It had discoloration in the leaves. The leaves were all going dark. So we just pulled it. It had some roots but it was just barely — it wasn't going to make the cut.
CASEY: Soon, crews will tip or top all of the marijuana in this room. That means pruning off the high layer of growth to catalyze side branches into main branches to produce more flowers that will become the cash product. Think of the practice as giving the plants Medusa heads.
LAWRENCE: It can, and cannot increase your yield. If you do it too early or do it too low, you can kind of stunt your plants out.
CASEY: A week later, Lawrence finds some water, light or fertilizer damage on a few of the lower leaves, which could have been caused by a number of things. But Lawrence also finds new growth that he calls gorgeous. So he gives the Zpectrum plants an eight out of 10 for overall health.
LAWRENCE: There’s only so many feeding opportunities until it gets moved into flower that you have to actually do it right. So if you make one mistake…
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
CASEY: Next time on Reefer Growing Madness, the Zpectrum plants are scheduled to move into a new room. Think of it sort of like the equinox in terms of light. And we’ll get to know Alien Labs brand founder Ted Lidie. Now my project partner Tim Agne has a preview of the photo and video online for the Summer Solstice Episode ….
TIM AGNE: I’m just looking through some of the photos from those couple of visits as far as the plants. One kind of recurring theme of these videos and things I’m shooting is very close-up photos of just (Lawrence's) hands, trying to point out what’s going on with the leaves in these kind of minute details. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to show all of that in a meaningful way, but it sure was cool to see.
I knew that it was kind of a special thing for Bruno to be able to sit down and work with the plants like that. Bruno is a guy who has this sort of simmering intensity about him so much of the time. But in that moment where he got to sit down with the plants, that almost melts away. And that to me was kind of this softer side of Bruno.
CASEY: Reefer Growing Madness was produced and hosted by me, Matt Casey. Tim Agne is our digital editor. Assistant News Director Lindsey C. Riley is our project editor. To see photos and other media from this episode, be sure to check out our website: rgm.kjzz.org. Thanks for listening.
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
