A GROWROOM TOUR OF SPAIN

By Jorge Cervantes

The HIGH TIMES film crew and I tripped around Spain last year to shoot some of my favorite gardens for Jorge Cervantes’ Ultimate Grow DVD #2. This insider’s trip to Spanish growrooms, greenhouses and backyard and guerrilla gardens was so interesting and fun that we decided to share a few exclusive details about 10 of the 30 gardens (that’s all the space we have) that we visited for the shoot.

A little background on cannabis growing in Spain will help you understand the importance of Spanish cannabis cultivation for North America and why it has taken off here. Spanish law allows people to grow at home for their own personal consumption, as long as it doesn’t bother the neighbors. (But no buying or selling—that’s where the punishment applies.) The law is applied haphazardly, with some areas, such as Catalonia and Basque country, more liberal (although even within these areas, some communities are more stringent). Madrid, Valencia, Salamanca and the south of Extremadura continue to be conservative, while South Andalusia and other areas are somewhere in the middle. All of the gardens we visited were intended for personal use. Often an organization will sponsor a growroom or a large outdoor garden; each member of the organization signs up and claims three personal plants, so that if, say, the organization has 100 members, it’s allowed to grow 300 plants. The plants are all cultivated in a common area by one or two growers and distributed to the membership at harvest.

Spain boasts much of the same types of geography and climate as North America. Except for the American Deep South and tropical everglades, the San Diego “macadamia nut belt” and the Northeast (during the winter), you can apply the same climate information from Spain directly to climates in North America, since there is very little difference in both regions. Spain has the Mediterranean coast, which is very similar to California and Southern Oregon, while the Atlantic Cantabrian coast is very similar to Washington and much of the East Coast. Spain’s grassy plains, rolling hills and forests can easily be likened to the Great Plains, the hills of the Midwest and the forests of North America.

This garden belongs to a good friend who has been a medical grower for many years. The generations-old family garden near the Mediterranean has been transformed over the last decade. The plot lay fallow for some years after being overgrown. This industrious grower, along with the owner of Good House Seeds, transformed the depleted earth with organic matter into fertile soil. To achieve this end, he planted cannabis—the roots penetrate the soil deeply, breaking it up and bringing buried nutrients to the surface. Every year, they added more and more organic matter in the form of cow and chicken manure and all the compost they could generate on the site. They also bought a rototiller.

For the last 10 years, I have watched this dedicated team of growers transform the soil. The soil is key to strong, healthy, problem-free growth and a heavy harvest.

Although the garden still produces many tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, eggplants, figs, etc., it also yields a great crop of cannabis! I love this garden so much that I put a photo of it on the back cover of Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible. Here it is!

These folks love the plant; they are among the best growers I know. First and foremost, they care deeply about their plants and nurture them every minute. The first garden is in the backyard, behind a greenhouse: It consists of only four plants that they couldn’t fit into the greenhouse, which is 14 by 20 feet, with open sides. The plastic covering on the greenhouse serves to keep raindrops from collecting within the buds and to shield the garden from the neighbors. A little bit of plastic in a wet climate makes the difference between a good and a bad harvest.

The other garden they have is located on the south-facing rooftop terrace, which gets sun all day long. When it rains, they simply roll down the plastic roof to cover the garden. (The whole process takes about 90 seconds.) The walled terrace with a retractable plastic roof is indispensable in this moist micro-climate. One year, they grew a single Jack Herer plant that filled half the balcony!