We’ve been promising a Grow 001 recap for a while now, so here it is, straight from the source. The following comes from Colin Jones, our Chief Cultivation Officer, who kept several thousand plants alive through a Minnesota winter and lived to tell about it.
— The Trawa crew
By: Colin Jones, Chief Cultivation Officer
Our first grow. The one where we found out whether any of this was actually going to work.
Seed to cure
We filled the first pots on October 5th, 2025. The first seeds went in four days later, on the 9th: Zesty Parm, HiFlyer, and Froot by the Foot leading the way. From there, it was as simple as planting a few thousand more seeds, a few months of watching, feeding, worrying, and eventually harvesting and curing our way to the finish line.
For a first grow, the timeline went about as smoothly as a first grow can go. We got there!
The strain that surprised me: Zesty Parm
I didn’t know what to think about a variety called “Zesty Parm”. I’d never even heard of cheesy terpenes before. Early on it came up piney and citrusy and I figured the whole “cheese” thing wasn’t gonna happen.
Then one day I’m walking past and catch this whiff of parm, romano, straight-up blue cheese. Real as anything. Okay. Point taken.
It surprised me a second time at harvest. Zesty is supposed to be a 75-day plant, and we ended up pulling it at around 95 days, three weeks late. Most varieties start looking rough about ten days past their window. Zesty seemed to love the extra time. It just kept getting denser and more purple.
The third surprise came later, from a dispensary. One of our workers, Emma, also works the counter at a shop, and she told us Zesty Parm is genuinely cheesy and a bestseller. Alex confirmed it’s been moving fast on shelves under the erba brand. So the wild cheese smelling plant I was just a little afraid of turned out to be a star. I’ll take it. Maybe sprinkle it on my pasta…
The biggest challenge: Too much of a good thing
Our biggest problem was, honestly, a good problem. We had an embarrassment of riches. The first crop came in bigger than our drying room could handle all at once. We physically couldn’t dry it all on the schedule the plants wanted.
So I had to slow the plants down and stretch out their lifespans to space out the harvest. There’s a concept in agronomy called Growing Degree Days: pull back both heat and light and a plant’s clock slows down. So that’s what I did, playing with temperature and lighting to buy us the time we needed.
Bonus: cooling things down brought out some beautiful purple color. Sometimes the fix looks better than the original plan.
A few numbers I’m proud of
- It still brings me joy that we’re keeping 8,000 plants alive at once, up from 6,000, harvesting roughly 1,500 at a time, then processing and bagging all of it.
- 3.6 grams. We had a single bud that, even after a tight, careful trim, weighed in at 3.6g on its own, a little more than an eighth of an ounce. One bud.
- 25.55%. The THC concentration we measured on our HiFlyer, and that’s from a winter grow. Genuinely did not expect that number in January.
- 16,197. Our highest plant tag in the state tracking system so far, which means grow 001, combined with grow 002 (more below), included over 16,000 plants in less than 9 months. We’ll need even more soon.
And we’ve got nearly 18,000 plants headed outside this season which will more than double the total number of plants we’ve ever grown. More on that soon.
What we’re changing for Grow 002
Water and buffering, mostly. Last year, we trickled a low-dose fertilizer right next to the new seedlings, which carries a real risk. This year, we’re buffering the pots with our fertigation mix.
My favorite moment
Two, actually, and they bookend the whole thing.
The first was right after we seeded them, when they actually came up. They lived! They’re alive was pretty much the only thought in my head. And then they kept growing, and they looked great, and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The second was at the very end, when the last of them were hanging in the drying room. I’d spent the entire grow quietly terrified that they’d all just keel over, heater dies, powdery mildew breaks out, humidity spikes, a meteor lands on them and somehow it’s my fault. Standing in that drying room, seeing it actually finished, was the first time I let myself take a beat and recognize just what we had accomplished.
Grow 001 is in the books. On to the next.
— Colin
Warning: Cannabis products are not for use by anyone under the age of 21. Cannabis use may cause drowsiness, affect focus, reaction time, and decision-making. These products are not evaluated or approved by the FDA. Pregnant people should avoid cannabis due to the risk of low birth weight, premature birth, stillbirth, and harm to fetal brain development.
