Our Grow Cabinets were built on three philosophies:
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Anyone who consumes cannabis should grow their own.
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Growing should not be hidden in a basement or closet, it should be integrated beautifully into one’s living space.
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Cannabis should not be grown by an app on your computer or phone; one should get their hands dirty.
These guiding principles help navigate our journey to create simple, beautiful and functional tools that help cannabis consumers both grow and enjoy the harvest.
Grass & Grain Co. was built around a decade long love-affair with cannabis. The story involves sweat, tears...and our parent's backyard.
Pictured here was our first experience growing marijuana, and as you can see, it was outdoors, and it made us very happy. We learned a lot from this first grow: the beauty and excitement of growing, the simplicity of it, but also the many issues of growing outdoors. In short, we discovered how difficult it is to control. Not shown here: the day we lost half a plant to a wind storm, the multiple flowers we lost to mould and pests, the difficulty sustaining the size, and the weeks it took to harvest and trim this massive bush. The entire experience from seed to harvest lasted nearly six months (May – October), and in Canada, that is our only possible growing season of the year. We ended up with a lot of one strain of good, not great, marijuana. Here's what we did NOT think about: weed only stays good for about 6-months (we couldn't consume all of it fast enough), we like to smoke different strains depending on the setting (we were stuck with one strain), and lastly, we didn’t want to wait another full year to start growing again! So, we did what any responsible cannabis consumer would do: we gave a lot of weed away to friends and family, we made a lot of infusions (butter, oils, etc.), and we started researching how to grow indoors.
Researching indoor cannabis cultivation these days can be summed up in one word: OVERWHELMING. We spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours researching different websites, books, forums, chatrooms, brands, reviews, etc. After months of nonstop research one thing became clear: there was a very common thread among this plethora of incredibly complex and conflicting information…it’s called WEED for a reason, don’t overcomplicate it.
To grow cannabis successfully, three basic needs must be met:
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Light: Adequate light source
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Food: Growing medium / water / nutrients
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Environment: Air movement / climate
As long as these three base needs are satisfied, one can grow great cannabis. With this in mind, the next step was to decide where we were going to grow. In a room, a tent, a box, a bucket? Once again, there were hundreds of options, but two stood out as the most readily available on the market: Cheap canvas grow tents that are built to be hidden, and a handful of new age grow-boxes driven by technology and controlled by an app on your computer or phone.
The former didn’t work for us – we lived in a stylish condo downtown and a large black tent in our living room would have really messed with our feng shui – and while the tech-driven grow boxes were pretty cool, we didn’t have $2,000+ to drop on a self-watering mini-fridge. Not to mention we enjoyed the experience of growing cannabis – we didn’t want an app to grow our plant, we wanted to. We wanted a simple, beautiful, functional, and affordable growing chamber.
There was only one option left: build our own.
Thus, the idea of Grass & Grain was born, and over the next several months we designed the first prototype, learned how to weld, learned some basic carpentry, and eventually built VERSION ONE out of scrap metal and wood in our parent’s garage.
And, well, we grew some weed. We grew some really damn good weed. It was easy, half the time as outdoor, looked great at home, and the final product was much better. So we grew some more. We told some friends about it. They wanted one. They told their friends. Their friends wanted one…and the business was born.
Over the next year, we worked tirelessly perfecting every aspect of the Grass & Grain growing cabinets. Countless hours of back and forth with factories to produce the frame, the components, sourcing supplies etc. We built samples, we screwed up, we built more. Too loud, too bright, too big, too small. We’re perfectionists, and each tweak brought us closer to where we are now: here’s a couple of boxes from VERSION TWO
All the while we were perfecting the growing program. We tried different mediums, different nutrients, different fans, different lights, different vents, different pots. We grew A LOT of weed in search of a consistently successful and simple growing program.
Luckily, we really enjoy growing.
It’s been a long journey on the pursuit of the perfect growing cabinet and program. We’re not there yet, we don’t believe in absolute perfection, but we do believe in constant and consistent improvements in that pursuit. At this point in the adventure, we are finally ready to bring Grass & Grain Co. to the world.
We have a small, working showroom in Toronto, Ontario where all our cabinets are built by hand to order. Anyone is welcome to come in and see the products and speak with us. We love talking cannabis.
We believe cannabis is good for the health and happiness of the world.
Spencer Gooderham, Founder