How to grow Marijuana
courtesy of the Jolly Roger
MARIJUANA
Marijuana is a deciduous plant which grows from seeds.
The fibrous section of the plant was (has been replaced by synthetics)
used to make rope. The flowering tops, leaves, seeds, and resin
of the plant is used by just about everyone to get HIGH.
Normally, the vegetable parts of the plant are smoked to
produce this "high," but thay can also be eaten. The
axtive ingredient in marijuana resin is THC (tetahydrocannabinol).
Marijuana contains from 1 - 4 per cent THC (4 per cent must be
considered GOOD dope).
Marijuana grows wild in many parts of the world, and is
cultivated in Mexico, Vietnam, Africa, Nepal, India, South America,
etc.,etc. The marijuana sold in the United States comes primarily
from, yes, the United States.
It is estimated that at least 50 per cent of the grass
on the streets in America is homegrown. The next largest bunch
comes across the borders from Mexico, with smaller amounts filtering
in from Panama, occasionally South America, and occasionally,
Africa.
Hashish is the pure resin of the marijuana plant, which
is scraped from the flowering tops of the plant and lumped together.
Ganja is the ground-up tops of the finest plants. (It is also
the name given to any sort of marijuana in Jamaica.)
Marijuana will deteriorate in about two years if exposed
to light, air or heat. It should always be stored in cool places.
Grass prices in the United States are a direct reflection
of the laws of supply and demand (and you thought that high school
economics would never be useful). A series of large border busts,
a short growing season, a bad crop, any number of things can
drive the price of marijuana up. Demand still seems to be on
the increase in the U.S., so prices seldom fall below last year's
level.
Each year a small seasonal drought occurs, as last year's
supply runs low, and next year's crop is not up yet. Prices usually
rase about 20 - 75 per cent during this time and then fall back
to "normal." Unquestionably, a large shortage of grass
causes a percentage of smokers to turn to harder drugs instead.
For this reason, no grass control program can ever be beneficial
or "successful."
GROW IT!
There is one surefire way of avoiding high prices and the
grass DT's: Grow your own. This is not as difficult as some "authorities"
on the subject would make you believe. Marijuana is a weed, and
a fairly vivacious one at that, and it will grow almost in spite
of you.
OUTDOORS
Contrary to propular belief, grass grows well in many place
on the North American continent. It will flourish even if the
temperature does not raise above 75 degrees.
The plants do need a minimum of eight hours of sunlight
per day and should be planted in late April/early May, BUT DEFINITELY,
after the last frost of the year.
Growing an outdoor, or "au naturel", crop has
been the favored method over the years, because grass seems to
grow better without as much attention when in its natural habitat.
Of course, an outdoors setting requires special precautions
not encountered with an indoors crop; you must be able to avoid
detection, both from law enforcement freaks and common freaks,
both of whom will take your weed and probably use it. Of course,
one will also arrest you. You must also have access to the area
to prepare the soil and harvest the crop. There are two schools
of thought about starting the seeds. One says you should start
the seedlings for about ten days in an indoor starter box (see
the indoor section) and then transplant. The other theory is
that you should just start them in the correct location. Fewer
plants will come up with this method, but there is no shock of
transplant to kill some of the seedlings halfway through.
The soil should be preprepared for the little devils by
turning it over a couple of times and adding about one cup of
hydrated lime per square yard of soil and a little bit (not too
much, now) of good water soluble nitrogen fertilizer. The soil
should now be watered several times and left to sit about one
week.
The plants should be planted at least three feet apart,
getting too greedy and stacking them too close will result in
stunted plants. The plants like some water during their growing
season, BUT not too much. This is especially true around the
roots, as too much water will rot the root system.
Grass grows well in corn or hops, and these plants will
help provide some camouflage. It does not grow well with rye,
spinach, or pepperweed. It is probally a good idea to plant in
many small, broken patches, as people tend to notice patterns.
GENERAL GROWING INFO
Both the male and he female plant produce THC resin, although
the male is not as strong as the female. In a good crop, the
male will still be plenty smokable and should not be thrown away
under any circumstances. Marijuana can reach a hight of twenty
feet (or would you rather wish on a star) and obtain a diameter
of 4 1/2 inches. If normal, it has a sex ratio of about 1:1,
but this can be altered in several ways.
The male plant dies in the 12th week of growing, the female
will live another 3 - 5 weeks to produce her younguns. Females
can weigh twice as much as males when they are mature.
Marijuana soil should compact when you squeeze it, but
should also break apart with a small pressure and absorb water
well. A nice test for either indoor or outdoor growing is to
add a bunch of worms to the soil, if they live and hang aroung,
it is good soil, but if they don't, well, change it. Worms also
help keep the soil loose enough for the plants to grow well.
SEEDS
To get good grass, you should start with the right seeds.
A nice starting point is to save the seeds form the best batch
you have consumed. The seeds should be virile, that is, they
should not be grey and shiriveled up, but green, meaty, and healthy
appearing. A nice test is to drop the seeds on a hot frying pan.
If they "CRACK," they are probably good for planting
purposes.
The seeds should be soaked in distilled water overnight
before planting. BE SURE to plant in the ground with the pointy
end UP. Plant about 1/2" deep. Healthy seeds will sprout
in about five days.
SPROUTING
The best all around sprouting method is probably to make
a sprouting box (as sold in nurseries) with a slated bottom or
use paper cups with holes punched in the bottoms. The sprouting
soil should be a mixture of humus, soil, and five sand with a
bit of organic fertilizer and water mixed in about one week before
planting.
When ready to transplant, you must be sure and leave a
ball of soil around the roots of each plant. This whole ball
is dropped into a baseball-sized hold in the permanent soil.
If you are growing/transplanting indoors, you should use
a green safe light (purchased at nurseries) during the transplanting
operation. If you are transplanting outdoors, you should time
it about two hours befor sunset to avoid damage to the plant.
Always wear cotton gloves when handling the young plants.
After the plants are set in the hole, you should water
them. It is also a good idea to use a commercial transplant chemical
(also purchased at nurseries) to help then overcome the shock.
INDOOR GROWING
Indoor growing has many advantages, besides the apparent
fact that it is much harder to have your crop "found,"
you can control the ambient conditions just exactly as you want
them and get a guaranteed "good" plant.
Plants grown indoors will not appear the same as their
outdoor cousins. They will be scrawnier appearing with a weak
stems and may even require you to tie them to a growing post
to remain upright, BUT THEY WILL HAVE AS MUCH OR MORE RESIN!
If growing in a room, you should put tar paper on the floors
and then buy sterilized bags of soil form a nursery. You will
need about one cubic foot of soil for eavh plant.
The plants will need about 150 ml. of water per plant/per
week. They will also need fresh air, so the room must be ventilated.
(however, the fresh air should contain NO TOBACCO smoke.)
At least eight hours of light a day must be provided. As
you increase the light, the plants grow faster and show more
females/less males. Sixteen hours of light per day seems to be
the best combination, beyond this makes little or no appreciable
difference in the plant quality. Another idea is to interrupt
the night cycle with about one hour of light. This gives you
more females.
The walls of your growing room should be painted white
or covered with aluminum foil to reflect the light.
The lights themselves can be either bulbs of fluorescent.
Figure about 75 watts per plant or one plant per two feet of
flouresent tube.
The fluorescents are the best, but do not use "cool
white" types. The light sources should be an average of
twenty inches from the plant and NEVER closer than 14 inches.
They may be mounted on a rack and moved every few days as the
plants grow.
The very best light sources are those made by Sylvania
and others especially for growing plants (such as the "gro
lux" types).
HARVESTING AND DRYING
The male plants will be taller and have about five green
or yellow sepals, which will split open to fertilize the female
plant with pollen.
The female plant is shorter and has a small pistillate
flower, which really doesn't look like a flower at all but rather
a small bunch of leaves in a cluster.
If you don't want any seeds, just good dope, you should
pick the males before they shed their pollen as the female will
use some of her resin to make the seeds.
After another three to five weeks, after the males are
gone, the females will begin to wither and die (from loneliness?),
this is the time to pick. In some nefarious Middle Eastren countries,
farmers reportedly put their beehives next to fiels of marijuana.
The little devils collect the grass pollen for their honey, which
is supposed to contain a fair dosage of THC.
The honey is then enjoyed by conventional methods or made
into ambrosia. If you want seeds - let the males shed his pollen
then pick him. Let the female go another month and pick her.
To cure the plants, they must be dried. On large crops,
this is accomplished by constructing a drying box or drying room.
You must have a heat source (such as an electric heater)
which will make the box/room each 130 degrees. The box/room must
be ventilated to carry off the water-vapor-laden air and replace
it with fresh.
A good box can be constructed from an orange crate with
fiberglass insulated walls, vents in the tops, and screen shelves
to hold the leaves. There must be a baffle between the leaves
and the heat source.
A quick cure for smaller amounts is to: cut the plant at
the soil level and wrap it in a cloth so as not to loose any
leavs. Take out any seeds by hand and store. Place all the leaves
on a cookie sheet or aluminum foil and put them in the middle
sheld of the oven, which is set on "broil." In a few
seconds, the leaves will smoke and curl up, stir them around
and give another ten seconds before you take them out.
TO INCREASE THE GOOD STUFF
There are several tricks to increase the number of females,
or the THC content of plants:
You can make the plants mature in 36 days if you are in
a hurry, by cutting back on the light to about 14 hours, but
the plants will not be as big. You should gradually shorten the
light cycle until you reach fourteen hours.
You can stop any watering as the plants begin to bake the
resin rise to the flowers. This will increse the resin a bit.
You can use a sunlamp on the plants as they begin to develop
flower stalks. You can snip off the flower, right at the spot
where it joins the plant, and a new flower will form in a couple
of weeks.
This can be repeated two or three times to get several
times more flowers than usual.
If the plants are sprayed with Ethrel early in their growing
stage, they will produce almost all female plants. This usually
speeds up the flowering also, it may happen in as little as two
weeks.
You can employ a growth changer called colchicine. This
is a bit hard to get and expensive. (Should be ordered through
a lab of some sort and costs about $35 a gram.)
To use the colchicine, you should prepare your presoaking
solution of distilled water with about 0.10 per cent colchicine.
This will cause many of the seeds to die and not germinate, but
the ones that do come up will be polyploid plants. This is the
accepted difference between such strains as "gold"
and normal grass, and yours will DEFINITELY be superweed.
The problem here is that colchicine is a posion in larger
quanities and may be poisonous in the first generation of plants.
Bill Frake, author of CONNOISSEUR'S HANDBOOK OF MARIJUANA runs
a very complete colchicine treatment down and warns against smoking
the first generation plants (all succeeding generations will
also be polyploid) bacause of this poisonous quality.
However, the Medical Index shows colchicine being given
in very small quantities to people for treatment if various ailments.
Although these quantities are small, they would appear to be
larger than any you could recive form smoaking a seed-treated
plant.
It would be a good idea to buy a copy of CONNOISSEUR'S,
if you are planning to attempt this, and read Mr. Drake's complete
instructions.
Another still-experimental process to increase the resin
it to pinch off the leaf tips as soon as they appear from the
time the plant is in the seedling stage on through its entire
life-span. This produces a distorted, wrecked-looking plant which
would be very difficuly to recognize as marijuana. Of course,
there is less substance to this plant, but such wrecked creatures
have been known to produve so much resin that it crystallizes
a strong hash all over the surface of the plant - might be wise
to try it on a plant or two and see what happens.
PLANT PROBLEM CHART
Always check the overall enviromental conditions prior
to passing judgment - soil aroung 7 pH or slightly less - plenty
of water, light, fresh air, loose soil, no water standing in
pools.
SYMPTOM PROBABLY PROBLEM/CURE
Larger leaves turning yellow - Nitrogen dificiency - add
smaller leaves still green. nitrate of soda or organic fertilizer.
Older leaves will curl at edges, Phosphorsus dificiency
- turn dark, possibaly with a purple add commercial phosphate.
cast.
Mature leaves develop a yellowish Magnesium dificiency
- cast to least veinal areas. add commercial fertilizer with
a magnesium content.
Mature leaves turn yellow and then Potassium dificiency
- become spotted with edge areas add muriate of potash. turning
dark grey.
Cracked stems, no healthy support Boron dificiency - add
tissue. any plant food containing boron.
Small wrinkled leaves with Zinc dificiency - add yelloish
vein systems. commercial plant food containing zinc.
Young leaves become deformed, Molybedum dificiency - possibaly
yellowing. use any plant food with a bit of molydbenum in it.
EXTRA SECTION:
BAD WEED/GOOD WEED
Can you turn bad weed into good weed? Surprisingly enough,
the answer to this oft-asked inquiry is, yes!
Like most other things in life, the amount of good you
are going to do relates directly to how much effort you are going
to put into it.
There are no instant, supermarket products which you can
spray on Kansas catnip and have wonderweed, but there are a number
of simplified, inexpensive processes (Gee, Mr. Wizard!) thich
will enhance mediocre grass somewhat, ant there are a couple
of fairly involved processes which will do up even almost-parsley
weed into something worth writing home about.
EASES
1. Place the dope in a container which allows air to enter
in a restricted fashion (such as a can with nail holes punched
in its lid) and add a bunch of dry ice, and the place the whold
shebang in the freezer for a few days. This process will add
a certain amount of potency to the product, however, this only
works with dry ice, if you use normal, everyday freezer ice,
you will end up with a soggy mess...
2. Take a quantity of grass and dampen it, place in a baggie
or another socially acceptable container, and store it in a dark,
dampish place for a couple of weeks (burying it also seems to
work). The grass will develop a mold which tastes a bit harsh,
a and burns a tiny bit funny, but does increase the potency.
3. Expose the grass to the high intensity light of a sunlamp
for a full day or so. Personally, I don't feel that this is worth
the effort, but if you just spent $400 of your friend's money
for this brick of super-Colombian, right-from-the-President's-personal-stash,
and it turns out to be Missouri weed, and you're packing your
bags to leave town before the people arrive for their shares,
well, you might at least try it. Can't hurt.
4. Take the undisirable portions of our stash (stems, seeds,
weak weed, worms, etc.) and place them in a covered pot, with
enough rubbing alchol to cover everything.
Now CAREFULLY boil the mixture on an ELECTRIC stove or
lab burner. DO NOT USE GAS - the alchol is too flammable. After
45 minutes of heat, remove the pot and strain the solids out,
SAVING THE ALCOHOL.
Now, repeat the process with the same residuals, but fresh
alchol. When the second boil is over, remove the solids again,
combine the two quantities of alcohol and reboil until you have
a syrupy mixture.
Now, this syrupy mixture will contain much of the THC formerly
hidden in the stems and such. One simply takes this syrup the
throughly combines it with the grass that one wishes to improve
upon.
SPECIAL SECTION ON RELATED SUBJECT MARYGIN:
Marygin is an anagram of the words marijuana and gin, as
in Eli Whitney. It is a plastic tumbler which acts much like
a commercial cottin gin.
One takes about one ounce of an harb and breaks it up.
This is then placed in the Marygin and the protuding knod is
roatated. This action turns the internal wheel, which separates
the grass from the debris (seeds, stems).
It does not pulverize the grass as screens have a habit
of doing and is easily washable.
Marygin is available from:
P.O. Box 5827
Tuscon, Arizona 85703
$5.00
GRASS
Edmund Scientific Company
555 Edscorp Building
Barrington, New Jersy 08007
Free Catalog is a wonder of good things for the potential
grass grower. They have an electric thermostat greenhouse for
starting plants for a mere $14.95.
Soil test kits for PH - $2.40
Al test - $9.95
Soil thermometer - $2.75
Lights which approzimate the true color balance of the
sun and are probably the most beneficial types available: 40
watt, 48 inch - 4 for $15.75.
Indoor sun bulb, 75 or 150 watt - $5.75.
And, they have a natural growth regualtor for plants (Gibberellin)
which can change height, speed growth, and maturity, promote
blossoming, etc. Each plant reacts differently to treatment with
Gibberellin...there's no fun like experimenting - $2.00
SUGGESTED READING
THE CONNOISSEUR'S HANDBOOK OF MARIJUANA, Bill Drake
Straight Arrow Publishing - $3.50
625 Third Street
San Francisco, California
FLASH
P.O.Box 16098
San Fransicso, California 94116
Stocks a series of pamphlets on grass, dope manufacture, cooking.
Includes the Mary Jane Superweed series.
Uncle
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