Story and Photos by Iffy Weed.
A word we use every day in our hobby
to describe this plant we love to grow. However, to me the word weed conjures up a nuisance plant that springs up between the cracks of my patio. Dig it, spray it, nuke it - it keeps coming back!
In stark comparison, compare how we pamper our
‘WEED’.
The investment in time & money alone can quickly get beyond reason, quite apart from the emotional investment and the grey hairs we collect along the way.
So you’ve decided to build a growroom and join in the fun? Then expect to give up;
• Time with the wife & children.
•Any other hobby/pastime.
Expect to spend:
Many hours of planning, drawing & research.
$$$/£££’s worth of building supplies, including;
boarding, timber, thermal materials, plumbing, wiring, ducting, sealant, reflective sheeting, screws, hooks &
brackets etc etc.
Hours of building, cutting, screwing, cursing, unscrewing & starting again (after cleaning up the blood).
And now for the equipment! Choose from the dizzying array of shiny and colourful items on offer online, Ebay et-al, as it’s time to dig deep and buy the basic hydroponic kit.
Growing tables, containers, pipework, plant pots, specialised growing media & exotic soil mixes. High Intensity Discharge lights and associated ballasts, Metal Halide/Compact Fluorescent/LED, or indeed a mix of all these! Air cooled reflectors and associated fans & ducting. Exhaust fans & charcoal filters, input fans & oscillating fans. Timers & control equipment for the same. Water chiller, Air Con unit. Water pumps &
air pumps, thermometers, hygrometers, EC Wand, PH Tester & associated calibrating fluids. Measuring jugs, syringes & pipettes. Protective clothing & cleaning equipment, the list is literally endless and we haven’t got to the real ‘money spinner’ yet;
Nutrients.
You’re going to want to capitalise on your substantial investment thus far and purchase the best food for your plants! Again the list is endless and mind-boggling!
Organic or Non-organic? One part, two part or three part nutrients? What additives will I need? - now you’re about to open Pandora’s Box!
Additives.
You can treat your precious plants to a myriad of differing additives from;
carbohydrates to fungus, silica to bacteria, acid to alkali, seaweed to aspirin and so on... and on.
Pest & Disease control.
Another plethora of treatments & additives are
offered for anything from Botrytis (root rot) to Brown Slime. Mites, aphids, fungus gnats and all manner of creepy crawlies are attracted to your plants to either munch on the lush leaves, or to bury their progeny in your roots. You may eschew a chemical solution and choose a different route, to invest in even more creepy crawlies for your garden. You can choose from a whole range of ‘off the shelf’ predator insects. Specialised, targeted and purposely bred species of insects that you introduce to your garden so that they can do what they do - feed on your infestation.
What about your next grow?
You’re going to need a tent for your mother if you plan to grow clones. And associated fans, filters & ducting.
You will also need a heated propagator to bring on your cuttings - oh and some lighting, a fan... you get the picture?!
We dont grow weed.
We grow a highly specialised plant, bred specifically for certain properties & medicinal benefits. An ancient plant that has undergone recent decades of selection
& cross breeding. More selection, back crossing and
then even more selection. The list of strains & hybrids on offer from seed banks around the world now are dazzling to say the least. Millions are spent annually on research & devlopment in equipment, nutrients &
additives for this hallowed, even revered plant. We grow it in sealed, often sterile rooms that look more like laboratories than gardening sheds. Our blessed plants reside on cozy, custom made beds, relaxing in fine company. Breathing an exotic mixture of gasses and slurping on the very finest liquid food a plant has ever experienced, oh and at just the right temperature!
Bathed in a glorious spectrum of warm light, cossetted, pruned, washed and simply lavished with love.
I think its time we stopped referring to Marijuana as a weed and called it something else. Something that reflects her global adoration and cultivation.
A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.
I’ll leave it to others to come up with that name, maybe she’ll always be called - weed, I hope not as somehow it just doesn’t do her justice.
Gorilla Glue from Unclefishstick
Food for thought...
by ZeppelinRules
It’s always been a dream of mine to have an article grace the pages of a bonafide and respectable publication
such as The International Cannagraphic. I’ve been writing for various web sites since I was 15 years old. Now, as I look back, most of that was little more than preaching to the choir. Over the past few days, however, I’ve been racking my brain for a topic worthy of almost everyone’s favorite psychedelic refuge. I want to write something that’s not a typical attempt to dispel the myths about marijuana and it’s side effects.
It’s no feeble task, but one topic stands out in my mind.
Ducksfoot from Donald Mallard.
My introduction to marijuana was most likely the same as yours. It concerned a classroom, a lecture from a friendly neighborhood police officer, and a very plainspoken pamphlet disseminating the evils of the plant. Needless to say there were no facts and no sources, quite simply you became a lethargic and reclusive looser. Back then it was on our shoulders to weigh the pros and cons. Strangely enough, they never told us about the pros. Even to this day the spin on the argument is that it’s a stack of cons versus simply
‘fitting in’. The problem is that those who oppose it simply cannot grasp the wide array of things that this plant has to offer; they’ve never learned to appreciate such things. Yet before we go and accuse these people of ‘missing the point’ we also have to acknowledge that many people who partake in this hobby, even regularly, are equally as guilty.
This past summer I found myself working at a wilderness camp for children. For the most part it taught the sorts of skills that one would expect from such a place: canoeing, kayaking, hiking etc. There was also an emphasis on personal development, especially in relation to the surrounding wilderness. That’s
where I come in. For the second half of the summer I was the ‘spiritual guru’ of the camp. I was given free reign of an old chapel left from when the camp was still a Catholic endeavor, and also the responsibility of delivering a sort of sermon to the whole camp every night. The amazing thing, however, is that I found myself teaching these kids many of the same things that I had learned directly from marijuana.
The realizations that I had come to in many of my past experiences with the drug had found their way into my nightly speeches. It not only added insight, it also made it interesting. Furthermore, it forced me sit down and seriously consider how much marijuana has given me in the ways of insight and practical wisdom.
I quickly realized that I owe a quite a bit of who I am and how I’ve turned out to this much antagonized flower. Occasionally people will joke about the acute positive effects of marijuana, but little credit is given to the drug for the positive things that people have been able to do with the realizations and insights gained.
The late Carl Sagan, the world famous astronomer and exobiologist, claimed that he owed much to marijuana for its role in giving him some of his best ideas:
NL5 Haze by Payaso
“I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics.... I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.”
If marijuana is no more than a deleterious drug then humanity will have to simply ignore both of the Voyager Satellites, The Viking Lander Probes, the
knowledge that Jupiter’s moon Europa is covered with oceans, much of the current information regarding seasonal changes on Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn’s moon Titan, and the movie ‘Contact’. We can never know exactly which ideas to attribute to his highs but he made very clear that marijuana aided him with some of his best. From this one person alone it can be argued that cannabis has done a great deal for humankind.
Yet, one doesn’t need to work for NASA to be able to share the benefits of the drug with the world.
Anecdotal evidence from any responsible individual user can sometimes be enough to justify the hobby and outweigh the cons.
About a month ago I was approached at random by a customer at work. She explained that she was from out of town and discretely asked if I could help her find some marijuana. I quietly offered to smoke with
her if she came back when my shift was over. I then promptly resumed working and started thinking about how stereotypical my appearance must be for that to have just happened. What started as a bizarre introduction quickly turned into one of the most fruitful friendships I’ve yet had.
At the time I was struggling with some very existential questions concerning life, meaning, direction and
so on. That very first night we shared a joint and conversed for hours. The insights we shared, the
conversation we had, and the high itself brought to me a very interesting take on my whole ordeal.
I am now starting to look at the high as somewhat of a model or microcosm of life in general. Unarguably a high is a sensory experience, sometimes a very intense one at that. It enables you to experience and further enjoy the seemingly mundane things that we so often take for granted. It makes us fall in love with things as simple as the feeling of the shirt on ones back and the feeling of the air in ones lungs.
Looking at the bigger picture however - life, the five senses, and how everything ties together through consciousness - it can be argued that life itself is generally a sensory experience. One can in turn postulate that the meaning of life is simply to experience. Some may scoff at such an explanation as too simple, or even nihilistic, but I argue that it’s not. The task, then, is to refuse to take anything for granted. This includes even the simplest of patterns on the snow, the faintest smell in the air, even the very
rhythm of our footsteps. All can be experienced and appreciated, yet are usually overlooked and ignored.
Marijuana helps enormously with this type of thinking.
Granted, it’s most obvious during a high, but even when not under the influence I find myself admiring beauty where there once was none. I was once
completely incapable of appreciating visual art. I even thought something was wrong with me because of it.
I’ve since learned to fully appreciate and understand it, again with the help of cannabis.
I have never, in all my years of smoking, tried any drug other than cannabis and I really have no desire to at the moment. While it is a nice shot at the Gateway theory, I found that it left me with some questions about how marijuana compares to other psychedelics.
Why do so many people continue to ‘come home’ to cannabis? A close friend of mine once explained it to me like this: “While other drugs may be stronger and you may gain more insight in a single high, nothing compares to the collective wisdom gained from regular marijuana use.” Nothing.
Now regardless of how abstract and perhaps even silly the above ideas would seem to some people, they still hold a monumental amount of meaning for me. At my young age I feel as if I’ve found the meaning of life to a certain extent, or more aptly how to add meaning to my life. I now realize what I want to get out of it. It’s always been a desire of mine to ‘see the world’ but now I realize that ‘seeing the world’ has more to do with opening your eyes than anything. I’ll certainly
be moving in a more positive direction thanks to such wisdom, and I owe it largely to cannabis.
Now there will always be people who will vehemently oppose everything I’ve written here, especially the basic idea that marijuana can be a positive thing at all.
I’m also sure there are some people who would just as well dismiss it all as the rambling of a crazed lunatic with a joint in his mouth. To be honest I’m not too worried about such inevitable opinions because crazy or not, it works.
Sour Bubble by PureKnowledge.