Absolutely right!
I’m no kid. I missed Woodstock, but made it to Watkins glen, and only got popped for hitchhiking. Would’ve gone to prison for the hash in my wallet, lol.
Bro science, literally from the top down has plagued weed culture forever. Almost any university lab gets federal money. They lose it if they research forbidden substances like federal class one weed. So no legit, open research happened since the 1930s or something.
Enter stockholder companies interested in selling anything to make a buck, and exploding customer base as states legalize, and it’s cray cray out there.
Back to the local, rather than global, I try to control what I can, but keep it as simple and FUN as I can. I’m not trying to make oxygen on mars. I’m trying to have all the weed I want, never sweat running out or chasing down a dealer again.
I’ve got the spider farmer sf1000 light, and 27x27x60 tent. It’s a pretty good set up for a package deal. But it’s not real big. I debated going bigger, but I’m in a small apartment.
What I’ve done so far is build a drying box and pull air through it as input air to the tent, which scrubs odors as tent output is filtered.
I’ve begun doing a staggered grow, starting the next crop among the flower. I’m liking that a lot because it cuts crop to crop turn around time (and of course harvest times) by around three weeks. Growing autos, that’s a lot.
Next steps will likely be building a more permanent drying box, perhaps as a “sidecar” attached to the tent, and of course the ventilation system.
I could get by a while with my cobbled together experiment, but the dry box is only reinforced cardboard. It’s gonna get soggy like it does.
I’ll share what I’ve learned about supply and demand. For a single person, having a long history of intermittent availability and the resulting scarcity mindset, there can never be enough, yet the adult in my head says “ahem. Really?”
In the 27x27 inch layout, over time I’ve used one, two, or three 5gal pots, two 7gal pots, and now three 3gal pots. With three 3 gallon pots, I have room to sprout seedlings in small pots to transplant also. I almost have room to start seedlings in three gallon pots alongside my maturing bud, but it’d be really tight. So I gotta become a transplant pro.
My drying box is both too small and too big, along with being temporary material But it started life as two cardboard boxes I happened to have, so I can’t complain.
So broad brush, blue sky, let’s design a small system?
I’m starting with the assumption that I’m growing autos, strain really doesn’t matter.
I want permanent, not flimsy. A tent is a nod to cost, but is marginal for permanence, of which every zipper sound reminds me. A cardboard box was a prototype, not worth trying to keep long term.
I want room for three babies and three big plants. I want dedicated, permanent drying space. Using staggered, overlapping grow, a nine week cycle from one harvest to the next means twelve week old plants every nine weeks. That’s a plant every three weeks. If a plant only yields a dry, cured ounce, that’s an Oz every three weeks. If you smoke more than that, you’re gonna need a bigger tent. 
Three, 3 gallon pots work very nicely in a 2x2, and kinda forces intelligently using the light. But there isn’t much leftover room.
A 2x4 tent eats more room, but still doesn’t buy controlled zones for different needs.
I’m thinking a three chamber, fully controlled, seedling/flower/ dry all in one, using one in-line variable speed fan, probably two but at least one clip on fan, one carbon filter, and dedicated low wattage light for the seedling chamber. Put the inline fan up top, outside, and draw inlet air variably, through either the seedling box, dry box, or both.
What I have now:
What I want
