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How did you get into Cannabis growing?

Easy7

Active member
Veteran
Thought of it when a teen. Did the usual fails. Then one day an agri student I Worked with and befriended went to Amsterdamn. He brought back seeds and traded some F2 seeded bud with me. Took a lot longer to know the plant and how to grow her. Started buying gear like a light. Spent more than enough time reading forums.
 

Swamp Thang

Well-known member
Veteran
Penalties for smoking weed in my neck of the woods are draconian, and before I started growing DEEP in my local swamp that is only accessible by canoe, I used to have to drive drive 50 miles round trip to buy some of the nastiest, weakest, moldiest, seediest, most foul tasting schwag weed you ever saw.

Then on the way home from scoring that horrid dirt-weed that barely got me high, I had to worry about getting searched by cops , and then maybe getting deep-sixed in some squalid jail cell, with crazed murderers and robbers for company.

A few too many years of that high-stakes gamble, and I decided to grow my own, back in 2000. Haven't looked back since. Laws are still ridiculously harsh for weed possession, but now I grow in the swamp, dry in the swamp, store my stash in the swamp, and of course get good and high in the swamp, with not one trace of cannabis ever finding its way into my car or home.

And so it came to pass, that I inducted myself into the hallowed ranks of the weed growing brethren, cultivating my tasty buds year in year out without interruption or worries about getting busted. Last year in this forum, I learnt about the process of anaerobic fermentation of weed, as practiced in Malawi, and that really was a revolution. Check out Tangwena's thread in the harvesting forum, if this is of interest.
 

Swamp Thang

Well-known member
Veteran
I starting growing because I have an auto immune disease, so I simply cannot risk buying because most commercial grows use pesticide. Growing my own provides me the opportunity to have total control of what is added.

Reminds me of some really delicious-smelling buds that were gifted me back in 2016, in SoCal. Fired it up, and wound up with THE most horrible feeling of being poisoned by some unknown chemical that wreaked havoc on my body temperature regulation and made me feel extremely nauseous.

I have been toking for many years, so I knew instantly that I had ingested some seriously toxic pesticide, fungicide, or insidious mold preventative CHEMICAL. I will NEVER try commercially grown weed again, no matter how delicious it smells.

That frightening experience was a real eye-opener, and for a while after toking on those tainted buds that day, I was close to phoning 911 for medical attention. Never again. Now I grow my own 100% organic stash for personal use only, and I will not smoke anything else, no matter the temptation.
 

Jellyfish

Invertebrata Inebriata
Veteran
winner@420giveaway
Reminds me of some really delicious-smelling buds that were gifted me back in 2016, in SoCal. Fired it up, and wound up with THE most horrible feeling of being poisoned by some unknown chemical that wreaked havoc on my body temperature regulation and made me feel extremely nauseous.

I have been toking for many years, so I knew instantly that I had ingested some seriously toxic pesticide, fungicide, or insidious mold preventative CHEMICAL. I will NEVER try commercially grown weed again, no matter how delicious it smells.

That frightening experience was a real eye-opener, and for a while after toking on those tainted buds that day, I was close to phoning 911 for medical attention. Never again. Now I grow my own 100% organic stash for personal use only, and I will not smoke anything else, no matter the temptation.

Same experience for me in Denver last month. The list of ingredients that ARE NOT cannabis is a mile long on their packaging. All the stuff I smoked in Denver tasted like it had been sprayed with pesticides, because of course, IT HAD.

So I'm home and very happy to smoke my homegrown that has ZERO pesticides on it.

I know I'll get crucified for saying this, but I liked things better when cannabis was illegal. Because the government fucks up everything.
 

JustSumTomatoes

Indicas make dreams happen
When I was a kid I always had some sort of little science experiment running and this included various types of plants, one of my favorites from back then that I still grow is Venus fly traps. As I got older I had no interest in smoking weed but was very fascinated by the idea that there was a plant that you were not allowed to grow.

When I was a teenager I went around asking for seeds from people's bags and managed to come up with some. I used the tried and true method for all the other plant seeds I grew, the paper towel method. The seeds germinated within a few days and off I went to the woods to plant them. I visited them for a few days and found them eaten by either bugs or animals. A few years later I started smoking and tried growing by the window outside my room only for the plant to have been trampled by someone or something.

I spent years smoking and buying from dealers but knew I would do it at some point. Several years ago I did my first guerrilla grow and had a successful harvest. Man what a great feeling to walk out of the woods with your first harvest after dreaming of it for so long! Smoking pot isn't addictive but growing it sure is!
 

CaptnCrunch

Member
It's been 40 years since I've grown any, but started a few gifted seeds a couple months ago. I'm just curious if I can grow something acceptable to vape instead of buying.
 

Illuminate

Keyboard Warrior
Veteran
My step father planted bag seed in a planter in the yard, i found them and was like 'is that weeds?' Then i found Og.com and got a cab built and a hid lamp. People still talk about how good the weed was from that first indoor grow. Pure NLD bagseed circa early 00's / 90's. This was 03/04, never looked back...
 

mowood3479

Active member
Veteran
My dad died, and I needed a way to keep the bank from taking the family farm. Had some family in the biz (cousins)who helped me get going n so I set out making sure the bank could never take my families land.
After that I kept going cause growing is the best.. and being self sufficient is imo a good thing to strive for.
 

TychoMonolyth

Boreal Curing
Living on a farm next to a small town in Ontario in 1972.

Got our ass kicked by my best friend's brother for stealing a weed plant from him when we were 15. He was a patched HA biker and grew weed for the club. He didn't get pissed because we stole it, he was pissed (furious) because we dragged the plant through puddles and mud to get it home. He made us wash, dry and trim it. Then he gave me a few seeds and instructions on how to grow it. Grew my first seedlings along side his the next spring. That's where I got the egg in the hole thing. I never did it though.

By the time I was in grade 10 I was driving a 68 Chevelle SS and went through 1 set of Mickey Thompsons and 5 sets of "bargain slicks" in one summer, and a shit ton of unnecessary noise tickets. lol. Then I got busted (of sorts). I had a job at a service station so that's how I accounted for my vehicle (the biker's gas station). I stopped growing when I was 18 and started again a couple years ago (40 years later).

Everything was seeded back then. Big leaves were pulled off, buds were never trimmed and hung to dry. Curing was in grocery store paper bags (double bagged), then stored in garbage bags. If I had lots, it went back into paper bags inside garbage bags and into a chest freezer (in the feed barn). If the weed started getting dry, I'd put the bags in the feed bins (Omolene horse feed) and they'd rehydrate with a nice sweet smell of molasses.

Things have changed. Everything is trimmed and manicured and makes me laugh my ass off. Weed is weed ffs, and a perfect trim isn't gonna give you a better trip. Yields are huge. 5 good plants produces the same as a dozen back then. Colas are much bigger, but they stink just as much. I don't know if weed is stronger though. It always gave me body quakes and made me paranoid as shit. That's why I stopped smoking it. There was always only one variety for me but I remember friends say someone had sensimillia, or acapulco gold, or thai stick. Hash was way more popular then, but I never had problems getting rid of weed.

I think I'll try the egg in the hole thing on a few plants this year. Just for old time sake.
 

Jon 55

New member
ICMag Donor
Because of Greed

Because of Greed

I got into it out of necessity. Back when the prices jumped from $20.00 a oz to $100.00 a oz. I just refused to pay up for the dealers greed for the same pot that I was getting for the old price.It was cheaper and even better to grow my own and even make a little on the side from my friends who got high too. All was for the better than what was before.




Jon :tumbleweed::tumbleweed:
 

scrogrow

Active member
Quite heavy smoking led to a lack of funds and by then I was up all night cramming monster research sessions

Now I've cut my teeth on a plant or 12, I don't know why I still do it, but, I know I just can't sleep without the hummm of fans
 

Phaeton

Speed of Dark
Veteran
In 2001 I was researching ways to make a reliable oil extract. The bud available was too inconsistent to get answers from so I grew my own clone in order to have raw material I could test methods on.

Some years after finding easy method (hexane soak for 45 seconds followed by vacuum distilling) I still grow gourmet bud because I can.

Never did get bored.
 

White Beard

Active member
Love this thread!!! Memory lane x 100...so many great tales, nice to have the insight into ‘others of my kind’.


“The story you’re about to read is true; the details have been scrambled enough to give the crumb-catchers brain-burn, and to protect the weary...”



Bothered all my friends in 10th grade looking for some: one guy sold me a “nickel” that turned out to be black tea and cigarette tobacco and we weren’t friends anymore; another guy sold me a “nickel” that turned out to be chamomile flowers, same result. Then a real friend’s brother left him with some real herb before heading back to college; he called me over, we smoked some, and...nothing.

Tried again my next time over, ended up lying on the floor listening to After Bathing at Baxter’s, and I was on board. Inserted myself as a weekend warrior in the local street scene that was starting up, and became practiced at scoring from strangers in barely hidden corners before I was 16.

That was catch and miss until I graduated, headed for hippie heaven. Got involved with a couple of religious crews out west & gave up not only weed, but cactus and acid as well for most of the next ten years.

Next thing on the Viewmaster, I made a new friend, and he smoked. A lot. For the next 30+ years, he sourced me, we stayed pretty stoned, became BFFs, and I learned a new trade (software design)

Flashback to a brief run of college, and a seed I got from somewhere. For like 15 years at that point, I’d been picking up every book I found about cannabis, psychedelics, etc before they all disappeared from the stores and libraries in the great Nixon purge. One of those was “The Cultivators’ Handbook of Marijuana”, and like all such things, I pretty much memorized it and still studied it. Then that seed came along.

That was after my brief-but-sufficient Miami Vice period, no idea about the seed, but I decided I could grow it, I’d been doing landscape and gardening buttwork most of my life, so really...why not?

I planted it in plain dirt, using a 1 gallon cardboard ice cream bucket from Baskin Robbins. I put it on a chair in a closet in my bedroom, under a 12” fluorescent desk lamp, watered it, and prayed it would work.

It did work, sort of - and it showed me just how little I knew. The seed sprouted, and grew. I wasn’t tracking any of it, but eventually it got to be 12, 14” and it flowered. It was a girl. Still in that ice cream tub, still on the seat of that chair in that mildewed old closet. Unknown eons later, I decided it MUST be done, and I cut it down and dried it in the oven on some tin-foil. Smoking it was exactly like smoking dried grass, “even the flowers”. Not even a headache. The end.

But what I DID get out of it was a love for the plant that I never expected. I would sit on the floor, staring at it, feeling like it was reading me, sensing me, trying to communicate with me, and I found I wanted very much to know what it was trying to say, I wanted to hold up my end of the conversation. It was like a song I couldn’t hear, but knew was there.

Back to the story-present, Reagan was in office, but now I had weed, and that was good. I kept looking for information, in thrift shops, book donation bins, used bookstores. Totally paranoid of being caught being interested, I mapped out in my head all the qwikimarts that had high times, and I’d go to one this month, another the next month, no pattern, no stopping...then...I found Sensimilla Tips.

I stopped buying HT, started buying ST, started saving my seeds, not just keeping them around. Got my first ever my-own-apartment, but before I could figure out how to grow there, my girlfriend moved in and we got pregnant.


Flash forward another 10: I can’t stand it anymore, I move to CO. No weed (yes, in CO, but at the time I looked like a retired cop), 19 months. Finally too sick to stay, I moved back to the wetlands. Yay, weed again, and my friends.... Went looking for my first house, found it, bought it, but then I was married to the wrong person again. By the time she’d cleaned me out I was in the advanced stages of designing the refit for my house as a growspace and...it’s 2008. My retirement dissolves, with my investments, but I refit my career before the bank takes the house, and I go back to work.


Another 10, another marriage. Will not make that mistake again. As my body begins to give out, what I care about is growing and living the way I want. Finally. I look for an old bus, I look for an unused field to park it in. I’m still strong and healthy, and none of the things that have eaten away my life matter to me at all. I want to grow, I want peace. I want a complete lack of interruptions, to be left alone, to live as I want - to grow, to enjoy the few friends I still have left...and provide them with what medicine I can while I still have them.

I want to sit on a makeshift porch, smoke my own-grown medicine - yes, it’s truly medicine, now - cook, eat, sing to the squirrels, listen to the wind and the song of the Plant, make my own music...and that will be good.

To be continued....


As always, thank you for your patience. :tiphat:
 

hayday

Well-known member
Veteran
I found myself and wife homeless in 2004 and had to move from one island home to a city for work.We stepped up into a small bungalow in the big inner city.There were probably a lot of connects there but for a year we would go back to the island to get a bag of brick.

The guy that would cop for us would get his second pinch out of the sack as he would hand it to me.I know its a decent thing to give your dude a little something but this guy always took a quarter of the bag.

So the commute to the Isle and an obnoxious connect made my mind up.My nice ,overgrown back yard would be a great place for a plant or two. I planted a seed from the last bag I got from dude in early spring 2005 and got a very nice thin leaf ,7' tall stinky girl from it.

being in the middle of the city,paranoia really got the best of me and I cut early but not before doing some research and discovered this site and one other where I learned of photo periods ,indoor and cloning.

I made a vow to never buy street weed again. I did once and was rewarded with so shit so bad I gave it back to the guy. Been doing my thing ever since.Were back on the Island now,making the best of our time untill retirement...soon my friends,soon.
Making hay while the sun shines lol

Thank you IC mag, for everything
 

Hank Hemp

Active member
Veteran
It was fun growing indoors in the winter and I used my outdoor veggie garden skills too. I grew better herb than I could buy which is good. At a much lower cost. Win win win! Did I say it was fun?
 
I was 12 in 7th grade when my friend stole some weed from his brother.
remember no og's or gangsters at that time
was shitty I think had seeds I kept two since I learned the hard way they taste like crap and give you a headache lol
planted them in my parents veggie garden early in march or so was happy to see them sprout.
it got a foot or 2, like a pole no side branching and it started to get these balls on top.
yeahh my first flowers, I went into school one day told my friends the update and the science teacher over heard me and said that's a male its garbage I need a female, like wtf really I was bummed
my brothers friend told me to look in hightimes mag for help.

next was when another friend went to Hawaii brought home a dripping wet bud. I got sooooooooo high and was paranoid lol but lo and behold 1 seed popped out.
I had to tend the garden every night as a kid, it was bb with friends then garden
so that same year late may I planted it in the ground next to the peppers.
bam I 1ft tall and bushy In two weeks and i hit it with 10-6-4.
by august even with trimming it was 4 ft high by 5 ft wide lol
parents did not know what it was but I was running to the garden every day lol had everything pretty good(old school row garden green composting)I learned about photoperiods so I knew it was going to take some time.
I was 13 I could care less about the cops or anything
my little sisters bd party brought my cousin the cop over he seen it and laughed bit he thought it was my older brothers.he spilled the beans so me and my friend cut it down becuase we could not pull it out lol
any way there was a lot of shake weed for free at my school two weeks later it sucked but oh well
indoor it was after that
that's when I got my first buds and made my own seeds :)
 
It was 1988 and I decided that the seeds on my mother's tray under the couch were worthy of a little experiment. I was just a teen with curiosity and ambitious I was to see if I could actually grow pot. I started the seeds in solo cups in my bedroom windowsill to only wind up with my neighbors telling my mom (who then killed them).


The next time I attempted to grow my mother was more compassionate and actually bought me shoplights and other supplies. So I owe it all to my mom for allowing me to grow all throughout my teenage years 👌
 
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