ML - Aspen Peak

2014 - Issue 1 - Summer

Aspen Peak - Niche Media - Aspen living at its peak

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walkway outside his below-ground dispensary as a pair of cops eat lunch at a deli on the other side of the aisle. As we talk, Silverpeak employees study blueprints of new planned spaces and navigate the construction zones in empty rooms that soon will be part of one big dispensary. Before the addition of recreational, Silverpeak had five employees. Post-expansion, and with the new greenhouse, Lewis anticipates needing 40. The newbies will view Adam Phillips, 26, as an old- timer. Phillips has been working at Silverpeak for two years, starting out as an IT consultant, but quickly pivoting to the Redstone grow house, about an hour from the dispensary. Here, in a small house, which, from the outside, looks like any other little rural home, Silverpeak grows nearly 500 plants at a time in Sri Lankan coconut fiber, from spindly little seedlings to big bushes heavy with resin-dense buds that broad- cast plenty of sweet-skunk aroma. It takes approximately 20 weeks to turn a seedling into so many ounces of bud for sale in downtown Aspen. One room contains the nine "mother plants," which supply all of the cuttings that eventually turn into harvested bud. One room is for plants in the vegetative state, meaning they are filling out and quickly turn half-a-million dollars' worth of growing marijuana into worthless stuff. T he human element will remain vital in the Basalt greenhouse, slated to open late this summer, but technology will play a larger role. The new facility plans to use tissue cultures, instead of mothers, to grow new plants. Tissue-cultured strains of Sour Diesel aren't part of the plan for Pitkin County's other two recre- ational dispensaries, but both Stash and Doctor's Garden are growing plenty of weed. And with the pivot to recreational, they will have to move more and more plants—business is booming. "I've had days that were better than months. That is pretty consistent," says Doctor's Garden owner James Leonard. His was a medical dispen- sary before turning recreational. State law allowed medical facilities that wanted to open a recre- ational store to jump to the front of the application line and pay a reduced fee. The packed rooms in Doctor's Garden aren't just the result of potheads having a new place to shop. "I've walked 30 people through the process of hitting a pipe; I didn't anticipate that," says stretching up, but not ready to sprout buds. Another three, called flowering rooms, hold plants that are fat with buds and on their way to harvest. The plants get moved to different rooms because differ- ent life stages demand varying levels of CO 2 , which has a fertilizing effect on most plants. Plants that are just a few weeks away from harvest receive much less CO 2 ; at this stage, excess CO 2 dimin- ishes the volume of resin in the buds, and resin is key to THC content. Computers control the f low of fertilizers and water to the plants as well as inventory—every plant has two tags, a yellow (for medical) or blue (for retail sale) for the state, and a white one for Silverpeak's own records. But without pot experts fussing over the plants and equipment every day, things could fall apart quickly. When the leaves "start turning yellow and getting crinkly you know to add more food. The bud is cannibalizing the weed," says Phillips, an intense former IT security expert from Ohio who radiates science-geek intelli- gence. Later, Phillips uses a computer to display predator eggs on pot leaves, which is "a good thing," he says, "because they eat spider mites." And spider mites, among other pests, can BELOW FROM LEFT: A variety of cannabis strains, such as Purple Rhino, Bubba Kush, and Jilly Bean, are offered at Silverpeak Apothecary; a poster at the dispensary. 168 ASPENPEAK-MAGAZINE.COM 164-169_AP_F_MJ_V3_SUM_FALL_14.indd 168 5/6/14 3:40 PM

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