Greetings!
I'm Pete Clarke, the guy behind the Lazyscrog.
As we emerge from Stealth Mode, I thought it would be a good idea to share a bit about myself, and how this whole Lazyscrog adventure started.
Contrary what some people think, Lazyscrog is not part of any major corporation. I'm just a bloke, living on benefits, who happened to invent something quite cool.
And it just so happens that the apparatus I came up with to get the Lazyscrog out of the grow tent and into our gardens could be a bit of a game changer in the field of sustainable agriculture.
Now that my IP is secure, I am currently trying to bootstrap my company into existence. And this clumsy blog post is one of the very first steps on that process.
Anyway, I suppose now is as good a time as any to do this:
*record scratch, freeze frame*
Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.
Way back in the before-times, way before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19, I used to be a project manager. Not in agritech, but in Business Travel Technology, managing mind-numbingly-boring global software implementation projects.
And way, way back before then, following a turbulent childhood and time spent in care, I left school at fifteen, without a qualification my name.
Despite these choppy beginnings, over the course of the next two decades, I managed to carve out a career in the field of corporate travel management, that saw me rise from sorting envelopes in the messenger’s office of a small West End travel firm, to delivering strategic advice in the boardrooms of some of the biggest companies in the world.
In 2008, though, whilst splitting my time between London and Paris, my life took a dramatic change. My brother had become sick, and it soon became apparent that it was serious enough to require full time care and supervision.
Of course I didn’t hesitate. I put my career on hold to take care of my brother.
Then, in early 2020, as a strange new disease began sweeping the globe, I was presented with a problem:
How to secure the supply of vital medication for my brother.
Most of the stuff he needed came from the doctor. The stuff that didn’t, we got from a family friend. Supply had never been a problem. If it was needed, it had always been there.
But the world had changed. For the first time in years, we could no longer be certain of our supply.
By the time the UK finally went into lockdown, I already had my light, seeds, and a very small grow tent. All I had to do was decide upon a growing medium.
With limited space, efficiency was the priority. Whatever would provide the largest yield per square foot would be critical.
Despite my lack of growing experience, I quickly decided that Deep Water Culture Hydroponics was the way forward.
The day after my DWC equipment arrived, I discovered SCROG. Immediately, I was hooked. Here was a way to dramatically increase the yield of a single cannabis plant.
Instead of having to grow three or four plants at a time, with all the legal peril that entailed, I could grow just one plant. Per year.
Oh, hang on a minute.
From my research, I knew that DWC reservoirs had to be cleaned at least once during a grow. If neglected, the resulting build-up of excess mineral salts could seriously impede plant growth. So, quite what one might do with an enormous plant, attached to a bucket lid and a 4ft x 4ft screen, whilst exposing its roots to the air while you cleaned the inside of the bucket was, well, anybody’s guess.
Okay, I thought, there must be some kind of solution. Hours later, the only thing my Google Fu had uncovered was a whole bunch of other reasons why scrogging was viewed as incompatible with DWC.
I took to the forums, to see what seasoned growers had to say. Mostly, it was, "Choose another medium if you want a successful scrog."
But I really did not want to do that. Besides the fact that I'd already sprung for a bucket and air pump, the concept of SCROG was so attractive, especially if able to harness the growth potential of DWC. There had to be a mechanism to combine the two methods.
And if there wasn’t, well, I'd build one myself.
And so, with a crude imagining of what a solution might look like rattling around inside my skull, I decided to go for it.
Comments