For the infamous 4/20 day, MIASEEN was invited to The Yucca Foundry warehouse to get a tour of the facility and uncover what happens behind closed doors at a marijuana production house.
While Yucca's Head Cultivator Sevag walked us from room to room, he constantly dropped knowledge bombs on us about the herbological inner workings of growing weed. There were so many intricate facts we learned at Yucca that we had to compile seven of them into an article with some clips from our tour.
Little did we know that any which strand of weed has a male and female version of it, even baby versions, which we'll get to later.
Watch this clip from our Yucca tour with Sev where he reveals what makes the plant male or female, and which one becomes that nug that folks smoke. Did you guess it write?
Sevag took us from flowering room to flowering room, which are massive climate-controlled rooms that hold hundreds to thousands of marijuana plants. Depending on the room you find yourself in, the marijuana will be at a certain progressive stage in its weeks-long harvesting life.
And then even more refined, depending on what strand of kush is being grown, you'll walk into room that is set at a different temperature and different humidity. The team uses their facility to simulate the plants being outdoors, cultivating conditions that help them flourish while keeping their uniqueness.
One of the ways Yucca and othe marijuana production houses simulate the "real world" is their lighting. Each room we entered had ceilings stacked with light to imitate sunlight, and what was fascinating to us was how the differences in light, specifically the light's hue, impacted how the strand properly grew. The amount of this light it receives a day heavily impacts the flowering process, as it simulates a longer or shorter day.
Sev explains with a specific example.
We've all heard a lyric in a song or a proclamation from a weed-enthusiast friend that purple weed is the best. Not sure what that means?
Remember, marijuana is a weed plant that grows real flowers on them. Just like any other flower, its pigmentation can flourish in different ways depending on its DNA. Various strands of weed can grow a purple shade that can be seen clearly before it is grinded up to smoke.
But don't get your hopes up: Sev tells us this doesn't make the weed any better. The fad has grown with a life on it's own, but there is more to what makes weed with higher THC concentration.
Marijuana is part of the circle of life, quite literally.
In order to keep the plants growing for new harvest, the growing staff at Yucca can create baby plants from the female plants, a technique called "cycling".
Sev explains more to us.
At the beginning of our tour, Sevag and the team took us into a towering room filled with enormous tanks, designated valves, and long-running pipes. The room was monstrous and uber important to what Yucca's process to growing marijuana: it sends water and feeder out to every piece of soul in the warehouse.
In this well-organized machine, Sev oversees the staff as they nail the right precise measurements that ensure each weed plant is grown to perfection.
Sev breaks down how this all works.
Yucca's facility is no joke.
Each flowering room was so incredibly expansive we couldn't help but wonder how much it held. Sev telling us "1,300" blew our minds, until he showed how plants are separated into square soil boxes and backed tightly together on wheeled irrigation beds, where small tubes feed into each base, all which come from the irrigation room mentioned earlier. The wheeled plant beds stretch nearly the entire width of the room, leaving just enough room for staff to walk down. The wheels making it easy to move the beds side-to-side in order to tend to the crops in the middle of the room.
These rooms are so huge that we didn't notice a worker on a ladder trimming plans in between beds until we had been in the room for at least 10 minutes.