Taking Care of the Plant So It Will Take Care of You

One thing that frustrated me in adpc was the most dominant posters tried to make it seem so difficult to grow top quality cannabis. They would drone on about ph, EC, CO2, and ScrOG so much a lot of lurkers would think it was too difficult to start growing their own. Why make it seem so difficult to grow a plant?

Now I could justify my opinion, first read in the Grower's Guide, that says about 90% of the potency of cannabis is hereditary but why bother? Inexperienced growers will always think the most expensive organic fertilizer known to man, in the most efficient and creative growing solution, with the very best method of topping, pruning, and ScrOGing will magically double their yield and triple their THC content, enabling them to create a super-strain named after them that will be spoke of in hushed voices, with reverence.

It doesn't work that way.

What works is getting the best available strain of cannabis seeds that make you feel the way you want to feel when you use cannabis. Then you work with that strain to optimize its potential, by providing an environment that enables the growing plant to thrive, develop and transform. It really isn't that difficult. The difficult thing is to develop a hybrid mating of varying strains of cannabis into something that is truly unique, yet standardized and reproducible. See the Strainhunters website forum and search for posts by NL Seattle Greg to understand what went into the creation of Northern Lights. It took fucking years, not a few grows of pollen slinging with the newest Cannabis Cup winner.

For the next several grows, I used principles learned from Vic High at the BCGA forum. Botany always bored me, trying to plow through Clark's book felt like going back to college. Vic used Clark’s principles but wrote in a way that was understandable and logical. Even though his forum was moderated, he did it in the most excellent way possible. Face it, people become unbelievably brave when they're behind a keyboard and easily transform into assholes. Objectively dealing with opinionated assholes is difficult, Vic did it with grace and dignity. I kept detailed notes on these early grows, it was time to do my first F3 to F2 backcross.

Those plants were ready to begin flowering when 9/11 occurred.

Priorities changed, detailed record keeping became impossible. I thought of a post by Owsley Stanley:

"This plant has given itself to us in a very special way. Nothing about the plant is other than a good, gentle thing. Growers have found that the plant seems to sense the sort of effects, the "high", that the grower likes to experience, and will strive to produce that for him (or her). It is common in the areas where it is grown to be able to identify the person from his/her smoke, regardless of the genetics of the seed."

You may think this is hippie bullshit and if I had not experienced it, I would too, I'm a skeptic by nature. A few words on the word hippie; you probably think everyone was the same like in San Francisco, flowers in their hair, saying groovy, peace and love, that sort of thing. It wasn't like that. There were biker hippies (see Hell's Angles), college student hippies (see SDS), anarchist hippies (see Weather Underground), and everything in-between.

Check out Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book from 1971 to see how groovy the IED instructions are.