From The Beach To The Mountains
Was gifted a lb from the surfer when I moved way back up in the mountains, where I could look off the deck and not see another house. I transitioned from urban warfare to mountain serenity. I'm lucky enough to get a large family house with several acres. There's a large garden area, wonder what I could use that for?
Strategically placed behind the Silver Queen corn and the Kentucky Blue pole beans I plant another type of bean, Jamaican. Fertilized just like everything else, with 10-10-10 fertilizer and lime, the plants require less effort than potatoes. They look just like the cover photo on the Grower's Guide. Unlike the garage efforts with the Grow-lux, these are massive. Now this is fucking independence!
With the Reagan War On Drugs in the early 80's, planes and helicopters began to be used. Working in a small county hospital is quite different from an urban trauma center. A lot more floor work and less ICU and ER, so you get to know the family of your patients. When I heard one of them, a pilot, say how easy it is to identify "pot" from the air, "looks like dark, green circles all lined up", I immediately knew I had to change tactics. As usual, the answer was in the Grower's Guide - page 131. I would train the girls to grow sideways instead of up, so they wouldn't look like circles. I moved them from the garden area to a south facing hillside and trained them by tying them to locust and pine saplings. I never grew more than I needed and best of all, I was now self-reliant with cannabis.
A divorce and subsequent child custody issues put a halt to all gardening activities.
When it's finally over, I'm in an empty house and she had the kids in a city apartment with all our stuff. Everything I own fits into a RX-7. Come springtime, I decide not to start any cannabis because I know Ms. Vindictive will rat me out. Sure enough, I'm working in the garden and a helicopter starts circling above. I keep hoeing as it gets lower, so low that I finally had to acknowledge their presence. I wave and tip my hat to them. Glad I didn't have anything growing or my ass would have been in prison. Time to grow back inside.
I acquired a 1000 watt metal halide light, closed off a 10 square foot closet and ventilated it with a 450 CFM exhaust fan. Good thing I had a lot of seeds because I made a lot of mistakes. Discovered with young seedlings it doesn't matter if the temp stays between 60F and 70F during the winter, if the relative humidity is 10%, they will sprout nicely but fail to thrive. Outdoor bred Jamaican and Columbian cannabis takes a lot of taming and training to make the transition indoors but contrary to popular belief, it can be done. What I needed was a Type II/Indica to shorten the size and increase the yield.
When I burned out in RT from seeing too many dead kids, I learned to be a headhunter in the field of data processing. I worked with mainframe operating systems programmers, real assembly language bit-twisters. They told me about a discussion forum where intelligent people congregated in a "virtual" way to discuss technical issues, Usenet. Most people became aware of Usenet in college or through intellectual curiosity. There were groups for every type of interest, VTAM/NCP, DOS/VSE, etc. I also noticed a group called alt.drugs and it had some very interesting looking headers (subject titles). "Synthesizing LSD" immediately caught my eye, so I pulled all the headers in that newsgroup (ng). I was astounded, there were PhD chemists discussing the theoretical benefits of two different types of LSD synthesis.
This is when I first came into contact with Owsley Stanley.
