Kyle Kushman's FIRST SOBER Podcast

Parker: My name is Parker Curtis with Homegrown Cannabis Co. I’ve been a home grower for about 12 years now. We do videos all the time, showing new growers how to grow, and we’re out here in Las Vegas at MJ Biz Con 2024. I’m excited to be here at the Grow, Eat at Home podcast with Kyle Kushman.

Kyle: Well, well, look who we have here. If it isn’t good old Parker Curtis, back again from the Homegrown Cannabis Co—the amazing, well-known, one-and-only, world-famous original Homegrown Cannabis Co. How have you been?

Parker: I’ve been all right. Nice to see you out here. It’s my third year at MJ Biz Con.

Kyle: Oh, is it? First time driving out, though?

Parker: Oh, did you drive out?

Parker: Yeah, yeah.

Kyle: Did you come across the dam?

Parker: No, no. Just straight up the 15, and I think it was the 215 we came out on. But we loaded up the car with all this camera equipment and set up yesterday.I’m really tired. 

Kyle: This is a huge place, a huge facility. You could fit a couple of football fields inside here. And the businesses range from… I swear there’s a carpet salesman back there, and there’s a car dealership over there now. Not really, but it’s like everything—from security doors to safes. You know, I saw a vendor over there selling just the door—

Parker:  The insulated doors for shipping containers.

Kyle: You can turn a room into a safe.

Parker: Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s a bunch of cool stuff here, but it seems like a lot of it’s geared towards industrial growers. You know, you’ve got these extraction machines that look like they’re $50,000 or $100,000. We’re over here on Equity Row, but there’s a whole other side with all the cultivation stuff. And, you know, even walking over, it’s like half a mile or something.

Kyle: I was telling Matt earlier, my first time here was about a decade ago. I think I might have been a speaker. Back then, they had machines that would roll, like, 50 joints at a time. And now they have machines that will roll 500 joints at a time.

Parker: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of thought and money going into creating new things in the space. Everywhere you turn… I showed you that machine. It’s kind of like that wall you have going, but it’s stainless steel, 12 feet tall, with these big barrel drums. You put these little clones on it… Yeah. And, you know, every time you turn around, there’s a new piece of equipment. They’re always innovating and changing things around.

Kyle: Well, that’s nice, honestly, because for the first 20 years of my growing, nothing new came out. It was nothing. You had to think of everything yourself and DIY it, which was really cool. And, you know, it’s kind of funny because you and I, we sit here as the home-growing gurus, and like you said, just about everything here is geared for commercial or even larger operations—like industrial.

Parker: Some of these trimming machines and stuff, I couldn’t even fit in my living room if I tried. When you look at the money going into this industry and all the interest. Yeah, we’ve been setting up with all these people here, and they’re building booths that look like tiny homes or cabins and stuff. Everywhere you turn, there are all these new little gadgets and stuff. Most home growers start with a Home Depot bucket and some dirt from the backyard. But out here, if you want to spend money and get some new equipment, there’s plenty to buy. It’s interesting to see, but it’s a little out of my price range.

Kyle:  It’s funny, too. Years ago, when I first started doing this, It was big, but there were maybe a couple of hundred people. You felt like you almost knew everybody. Every person in the industry had been to the cups, had read High Times Magazine. There are a lot of new faces now. I don’t know a tenth of the people here. Yeah, and you’ve got vendors that have been around for a long time. Right, you see the neon and the pretty booths, 

Parker: You’ve got the usual suspects. Just walking the halls, I bumped into a few people I’ve seen over the last couple of years. Jumping into these events is overwhelming at start, but after a few years, you start seeing friends and people you’ve hung out with before. And these after-parties, too—we’ve got a couple lined up. You’ll need to save your strength.

Kyle: You know, I can do all-day work, but I can’t do all-day work and have fun at night.

Parker: Well, we need to get a couple of joints in here soon, right?

Kyle: Don’t give it away! I was going to have a contest for people to figure out what’s different about me. Whoever can figure out what it is… This is literally the first time I’ve ever done a podcast sober. And, I really can't there really isn't any reason why. I just was just too lazy.

Parker: Well, you didn't bring weed on the plane.

Kyle: I didn’t feel like packing it. I’m like, I feel like I’m almost bringing sand to the beach. I know I’m going to know plenty of people here with weed, and I just… yeah, just got up at 2:30 in the morning and said, “Ahh”,

 Parker: You just walk out those doors right there, and there’s plenty of joints going around.

Kyle: Exactly, exactly.

Parker: Nice, nice. Well, yeah, we got a little bit. We’re staying at this spot a little bit off of the strip, but, you know, 

Kyle: I heard we got a nice BnB, you know?

Parker: Yeah, the strip gets a little crazy. I’ve only been out here a couple of times, and it’s a bit much for me. So we get off the strip, and it’s a bit more quiet out there. It’s nice.

Kyle: I got advice for anybody coming to Vegas: three days is enough. Don’t come to Vegas for a week. Three days is enough.

[Off-screen]: One day is enough.

Kyle: I’m telling you, man. I once spent a week in Vegas, and I think by day three or four, I was ready to go home.

Parker: Yeah, well, the last time we came—like this time—we just got this nice, sleek backdrop. But before, we had this big old booth. I ended up having to pack it up by myself, and, you know, whole ordeal. So, you know, taking in a few trips with cameras and all this stuff—this is a way easier trip already. So, we got to save our strength, though. We’ve got a few more days of this.

Kyle: Just one, two days.

Parker: Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll be out here.

Kyle: And, yeah, you know, just for those of you who have never been here, it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of things going on. Basically, the whole town is geared towards MJ Biz Con.

Parker: Yeah, it smells like marijuana around here.

Kyle: There’s nightlife of all types, and it’s definitely a young person’s game.

Parker: Yeah, yeah. So you’ve got to get back to water your plants on your little tower, right?

Kyle: My little tower? I have four gardens going right now.

Kyle: Well, no, you’ve got the tents and all that, but your vertical, your vertical setup.

Kyle: I’ve got two verti-farms. So I have my verti-farm with my weed in it, and I have my verti-farm with my lettuce in it. The verti-farms are really cool because they’re really maintenance-free.

Parker: So, your flowering—how do you keep those dark? Do you roll them off to a side room?

Kyle: Actually, for Thanksgiving, the kids came home and needed the spare bedroom. So, I rolled it into my closet. I rolled it out of our spare bedroom and into my closet. I just have it in the spare bedroom. At night, I close the door, you know, and just—

Parker: And you? I think I read on one of your posts, you switched from the organics to the synthetics on that?

Kyle: Yeah, I’m taking a lot of heat from everybody, but it’s just not meant to be organic.

Parker: Well, there’s—like I was telling you, I used to run a general hydroponics 60-site AeroFlo. It’s an aeroponic system with sprayers in there, so running anything but salt-based nutrients… you’re really not going to get—you’re going to have problems with clogging of sprayers and some of the pump systems and stuff. So, I mean, you walk around here and see all the different styles that you’re able to produce cannabis with. 

Kyle: You know, I’m always going to be an organic guy—

Parker: Except for the time with verti-farm.

Kyle: I really smoke organic weed. I’m not going to smoke that inorganic weed. But the thing is, 90% or more of all the weed smoked on the face of the earth is inorganic. It’s only the lucky people and the special people that really go out of their way to smoke or grow organic. Without harshing on all those people, I’m sure I’ll find somebody to enjoy that weed.

Parker: Well, some people, for the production value, will do the salt-based for their large-scale production and then grow their personal stash with organics and stuff. Anybody that’s smoked organics—you talk to them, and the taste, the smell, it’s hard to match with that. You may not get the turnaround. You may not get the yield. But as far as enjoyment. Like we talked about with alcohol—not all alcohol consumption is meant to get you drunk. Some of it is part of the experience—tasting the nuances in some of the vintages you’re consuming. For the real connoisseur, I totally understand why you’d want to produce some organic.

Kyle: I don’t ever get a sore throat smoking organic weed all day. But when I smoke inorganic synthetic salt-based weed—whatever you want to call it—if I indulge, meaning I smoke as much as I want, I’m almost guaranteed a bit of a sore throat. If not a sore throat, just a bit of a rasp. Just a rasp. It could be really good inorganic weed, but if I smoke more than just a little bit—if I smoke it all day—you know, people give me weed a lot, and I try it. I always try it, you know?

Parker: Well, you were one of the judges for The Emerald Cup, right?

Kyle: No, I wasn’t a judge at The Emerald Cup. I did judge a cup over the summer, though, and it was all inorganic. I had to—actually, I called up, and I bowed out because I couldn’t smoke any of it. I could not enjoy it. How am I supposed to judge something if I can’t even enjoy it?

Parker: Well, you know, for me, I was doing organics out in the greenhouse, and with those automated systems, it’s really tough to integrate with that. When we do these little trips and stuff, even being out for a weekend—it’s tough because somebody has to be there to water it. For my greenhouse, it makes more sense to do soil and organics outdoors. But I ended up converting all that to my pressurized system with top-feed drain-to-waste. It’s a mineral-based nutrient, and I think I have a 200-gallon reservoir. That’s good for about four days. So, for trips like this, it’s nice to at least have a bit of a buffer. Maybe I can have a buddy come back and try to brave their way through my dogs to get back there. It’s not easy to figure out the style that works for you and your life. It takes a bit of trial and error.

Kyle: My way around it was just going larger and larger in pot size until I got to 25-gallon pots that were that wide and that tall.

Parker: I remember talking to you about this. In my first run, I was between 5- and 10-gallon pots. Then Smart Pots sent me a set of 45-gallon pots, and I thought, “Okay, if I have 45 gallons, I can saturate the soil and maybe get a few more days.” Those plants got gigantic, but they drank even more than my little plants. Yeah, I was out there sometimes at least once a day, sometimes twice a day, even with those 45-gallon pots. You’d think increasing the pot size would give you a few more days, but those things were thirsty girls.

Kyle: Really thirsty—because outside, you’ve got a lot of transpiration and evaporation. Inside, the other thing you can do is turn your light levels down and keep it a little cooler to slow their drinking.

Parker: And you just showed me your app with all the AC Infinity stuff hooked up. From your phone, you can control your humidifier, dehumidifier, check your temps, humidity levels, VPD, and tweak everything.

Kyle: I’ve just recently figured out how to use it to adjust my setup. When I wake up in the morning and it’s only 55°F in the house—that’s a good nighttime temperature—but instead of using a heater, I wrote a special instruction for the controller. It lets me turn the humidifier on constantly for the first hour and a half. The humidifier and dehumidifier fight against each other, and the humidifier heats up the room. In about an hour and a half, I get up to 82°F. Then the special instruction shuts it off and goes back to 62°F.

Parker: Who cares about the electricity, though?

Kyle: No, no, yeah.

Parker: You know, so I’m thinking about doing that in my greenhouse. I’ve got a Quest dehumidifier, and if you’ve ever run one of those, it puts off a lot of heat. Powdery mildew is always a problem outside, especially where I’m at—it seems to be high humidity during my growing season. I’m going to run that dehumidifier in my greenhouse to bring up the temperature because it’s that temperature differential that creates the vulnerability to powdery mildew. I’ll run it at night to bring up the temp and drop the humidity to combat that, and then it’ll shut off when the sun rises. That’s my plan for this season. The only thing I need to do is drop that plastic down on the sidewalls to try to, you know. At this point it’s mostly screened walls, so I’m kind of at the mercy of the ambient conditions. I’m planning to drop the plastic and cap the ends to create a bit more of a microclimate when I need it.

Parker: This is coming up on my fourth year growing outside, and compared to indoors, where I’ve been growing for about 12 years, outdoor growing 

Kyle: Outdoors is hard work. 

Parker: I should send you some of the pictures—I swear, every time I go out there, it’s a new bug I’ve never seen before. I’m like, “What the hell is this thing?” It looks like some little alien creature nestled in the greenhouse. 

Kyle: They fight each other—it’s like a little ant circus on the leaves. Sometimes you see them there, sometimes they’re [___], and sometimes they’re fighting. Bugs just move in and take over, man.

Parker: Well, I, you know, we did some of those videos with Matt Gates, and the only, like, I guess the end result of that is I’m going to actually end up buying bugs to fight the bugs that are, you know… so it’s like those predatory mites. I did that garden out front to kind of attract predatory species and stuff, but I guess they, um, you know, you could either go nuclear and try to do pesticides, either natural or chemical, but it seems like, you know, one of the popular routes is just buying more bugs to fight the other bugs.

[Off-screen]: Why was a career politician helping you with your garden? I don’t get that.

Parker: What? Matt Gates?

Kyle: Shut up!

Parker: Yeah, different, uh… yeah, different Gates. [Laughter]

Kyle: Well, I admire you because outdoors really does take a lot of work. And, uh, man, once the spring and summer kick in, you’re a busy, busy man.

Parker: Yeah, well, my film just tore on my greenhouse, so, um, I’m going to replace my greenhouse film, and I think I’m going to do a strip of the wiggle wire. And, uh, you know, but I’m, uh, you know, always trying to figure out little entry points to close off because it’s not one of those pre-built, uh, kits that you buy. It’s just, uh, something I slapped together from Home Depot stuff. So, you know, there’s always room for improvement with that. There’s always some maintenance, too.

Kyle: And then you always challenge yourself by doing about a dozen or more strains at a time.

Parker: Well, it’s, it’s… with Homegrown, they got all these new seeds they want me to throw out there. And, uh, you know, they’re all on one feeding schedule, so I’ll have some strains that are, like, ready to harvest while some look like they’re just getting into flower. So, some of those ones I have to pull before I can flush them all the way. And it is challenging, but we do get to show a lot of strains that we have and kind of showcase them. But, you know, for the grower, the closer you can get to monoculture, the easier it’ll be. But just like anything, you know, variety is the spice of life.

Kyle: Sure.

Parker: You know, you might have a strain that you love, but it’s, it’s always nice to smoke something else and, uh, smell another good strain. 

Kyle: I got a new one coming up now—I’ve got my Starberry crossed with Larry OG. Really fat, stubby leaves. I’m really excited.

Parker: Well, throw some clones down this way. We’ll get them rocking.

Kyle: Yeah, I screwed up. 

Parker: Do I have to win a lunch with you?

Kyle: You know, I started my, uh, I started my breeding project without taking clones, so I have to reveg.

Parker: There was, um… I was going to take clones from some of the seeds that we popped, but, um, I have some seeds still. But a few cultivars in there, I was like, “Ooh, this would have been a keeper if I had kept a clone.” But, you know, some of, I think we had, like, some Oreo Cakes and a few, like, this Black Cat Kush that we grew. That one, uh, it flowered in about half the time of some of the other strains. And I’m like, “Dang, I wish I had kept a clone of this.”

Kyle: I can’t believe I screwed up. But, you know, it’ll just take a little extra time to reveg it. I had too many things on my mind. I was, like, a couple of days into flowering, and I went, “Oh, [ __ ].”

Parker: So you have how many tents and your verticals? I’m surprised I can even get away for two days with all that going on. 

Kyle: I watered this morning before I left.

Parker: Okay, nice, nice. Well, yeah, it’s a big event here, but nice to have you out here. If you don’t want to take the plane back, you can always hitch a ride with us.

Kyle: Well, you know, the plane ride is all of 31 minutes. It’s kind of nice.

Parker: Yeah, I think I was at five hours because I drove up to this guy’s place and then out here. Yeah, it was, like, five hours in the car for me. 

Kyle: I usually like a car drive. But, uh, I’ll take the plane home this time.

[Off-screen]: All right, someone’s got to get all this equipment out.

Parker: Yeah, yeah. Hey, well, nice chat with you. And, uh, yeah, prepare yourself for another couple of days of this.

Kyle: Thank you, everybody, for joining us for another special episode live at MJ Biz Con.