Growing Weed in the Garden , livre ebook

ABRAMS BOOKS - Silver Johanna Silver

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235 pages

English

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The definitive and first-ever guide dedicated exclusively to growing weed in your home garden From the former garden editor of Sunset magazine, Johanna Silver, Growing Weed in the Garden brings cannabis out of the dark, into the sunlight. This groundbreaking, comprehensive guide to incorporating weed into your garden leads you from seed or plant selection to harvest. Filled with gorgeous photographs of beautiful gardens, as well as step-by-step photography that shows how to dry, cure, and store cannabis, make tinctures and oils, and roll the perfect joint, this book provides all the information you need to grow and enjoy cannabis. For both the stoned and sober, the new and seasoned gardener, Growing Weed in the Garden is the definitive guide to doing just that.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	24 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683358084
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1166€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Dedicated
to
high school
Johanna
Contents
Preface Full Transparency
Introduction Why Grow Pot?
Chapter 1 A Ridiculously Condensed History Weed s Wild Journey Around the Globe
Chapter 2 The Plant
Chapter 3 Grower Profiles
Chapter 4 Seeds Choosing, Getting, and Starting
Chapter 5 Clones What They Are, Plus Pitfalls and Opportunities
Chapter 6 Growing Weed
Chapter 7 Harvesting, Drying, Curing, and Trimming
Chapter 8 The Finished Product
Resources
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
About the Author and Photographer
Index
A cannabis seedling at the very start of its journey.
Preface Full Transparency
I need to come clean to you. I am not a stoner. Though I spent the last two years of high school smoking pot at Robinson Park in Denver, Colorado, during lunch hour, that phase of life has passed. I m barely a user. My brother in New York City, a weed lover if there ever was one, keeps my usage from falling off the map entirely when we get together.
That I d ever write about cannabis was completely unexpected. I d gotten laid off as garden editor of Sunset magazine in late 2017, and I had every intention to keep writing about plants. Included on my short list of contacts was Kitty Morgan, who had served as editor in chief of Sunset during a stretch of my decade there. She had landed as the assistant managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle . Kitty is fierce, creative, and a fantastic editor. I told her I d love to write for her again, assuming the assignment would be something in my wheelhouse-backyard design, edible gardening, or container refreshes.
Instead, she told me she wanted me to grow weed in my backyard and document it as a gardener. I don t even know where to get seeds, I told her. That s your opening line! she exclaimed.
Proposition 64, which made recreational cannabis use legal in California, was weeks away from going into effect, and the Chronicle , along with all other media, was confronted with how to tackle the subject in this new world.
My early googling quickly revealed that cannabis is dioecious, meaning there are separate male and female plants. This means not only do you have to learn how to sex plants, a phrase that was enough to pique my interest, but also that a worthwhile crop relies on having no male plants in the garden. Do you know how rare dioecious crops are? Let me tell you: rare. Kiwi, asparagus, and spinach are all dioecious, but there is no other summer annual that fits the bill. Can you imagine starting your tomato seeds, having to learn to tell the difference between male and female plants, and then having to kill half of them? The nerdy gardener in me was hooked on that unique factor alone.
The plot thickens. At the time of writing, pot is projected to be a $5 billion industry in California alone, just behind dairy ($6 billion), almonds ($5.5 billion), and ahead of grapes ($5 billion). Yet it s never gone through a modern-day breeding program to select for things like disease resistance or seed stability. Again, mind blown. And its medicinal value-though heralded as being helpful for everything from pain to cancer-is barely understood. There is nothing else in the world so widely grown but so little understood and yet-to-be-studied.
As the project unfolded and I wrote for the Chronicle , I came to know a handful of farmers in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties (aka the Emerald Triangle-the region that produces the majority of the weed grown in the United States) and met families greatly impacted by the fact that this plant was illegal for the last one hundred years. It was at this point that I stopped regarding this project as a hilarious adventure and started taking it a bit more seriously. We re talking about people s stories, people s livelihoods, people s crafts. How this plant is written about and valued in our culture matters.
I ordered every cannabis book ever written as a supplement to my own research. What quickly became apparent is that they are written primarily for indoor growers. They read like electrician handbooks, not gardening manuals. Any nod to outdoor cultivation is mostly about security concerns-what breed of dog barks loudest, what type of tape to line the soles of your shoes with to hide your tracks, and what type of fence is most private. Though I ve grown to appreciate that these security concerns are a real issue for people growing in clandestine settings, those conditions didn t match my own.

All roads in Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity Counties lead to weed-you just have to know where to look (and it s probably a good idea to secure your invitation first).
I simply wanted to grow a few plants in my garden. Because I could. Easy-to-understand, jargon-free information was hard to find. I ve written this book for anyone remotely curious about growing cannabis casually. I wasn t able to relay even a fraction of what I learned about the process of growing weed in my pieces for the newspaper, and that left me feeling like I had much more to share-specifically, accessible information for every step of the process, from cultivar selection to finished product. I also wanted to share profiles of some growers who each deepened my appreciation for the plant and proved that there s no one type of cannabis fan. I know the hunger for information is out there, and here you ll find it in full detail and accompanied by beautiful outdoor photography. I m not interested in maximizing yields. I m not buying expensive lights or odor-masking filters. I m certainly not going to be buying any chemicals, which I ve never done for anything I ve grown (except houseplants-I will own up to using Miracle-Gro on houseplants). I include the simplest, most effective techniques that involve the least amount of equipment.
Here s the thing about learning to grow weed: If you learn from a pot- centric person, you re going to pick up a strange language. Prohibition forced breeding and growing underground-and indoors. You ll hear about clones and strains and vegetative states . That lingo a) makes the whole thing seem complicated, and b) doesn t translate well to any other plant you might want to grow ( clones are otherwise called cuttings, strains is the wrong word for cultivars, and vegetative state just means growing).
Weed is unlike anything I ve ever grown. Not because it s so complicated, but because it s fun-the smells are out of this world, it s sticky as can be, and it grows faster than all get-out. It s not the hardest thing you can grow. Spoiler alert: It s called weed for a reason.
I m not a perfectionist. I m not a control freak. I believe that gardening-weed or basil or tomatoes or peonies-should add richness to your life, not stress. I want this book to empower you and also to relax you, as I hope all gardening does. As my boss at the first farm I ever worked at told me over and over, Plants want to grow. Have a little faith. You ve got this.

One can t deny the visual appeal of cannabis leaves.
This project breathed life into me at a time when I didn t know what was next. I poured my heart and soul into it, as did my photographer, Rachel Weill. A wise woman once told me that you can always tell if a book was written by someone having fun. I sure as hell hope you have as much fun reading and using this one as we had making it.
Here s to bringing the conversation about cannabis out of the dark and into the light. Natural sunlight, preferably. Enjoy!

With plenty of sunshine, weed babies grow quickly.
Dense clusters of female flowers form after the summer solstice. Unpollinated female flowers are your end goal when you grow weed.
Introduction Why Grow Pot?
A love of getting high would be the obvious reason for growing weed in the garden. But what if you re so totally not a stoner and yet you are still oddly compelled to try your hand at growing weed?
You are not alone. You d be surprised how many people grow weed for a reason other than their own consumption, be it an addiction to gardening or a desire to gift the harvest. Some farmers never touch the product, but inherited the livelihood from previous generations. Of course, I meet plenty of people who grow specifically to enjoy their harvest, too. But those reasons are just as varied, from treating chronic pain to channeling creativity to preferring a few hits over a few drinks to unwind.
If you are a user, dedicated or casual, there is ample reason to grow your own stash. As you know from farmers markets or your own backyard plot of tomatoes, growing your own allows you to grow precisely the cultivar you want, harvest at peak freshness, control all inputs, and in the case of cannabis, benefit from some serious cost savings.
In a pre-legalization landscape, your only option was to grow indoors or assume great risk outdoors. Indoor grows take an immense amount of dedication and precision. Lights, fans, and chemicals are all nonnegotiable components of an indoor garden. I don t know about you, but a few plants in a tent with a bunch of fake light sure doesn t feel like a garden to me. In a world where prohibition is rapidly becoming a thing of the past, indoor grows aren t necessary. You can now grow plants outside-where plants want to grow! It doesn t have to be an expensive hobby that takes over a room in your house and increases your utility bill. You can grow it the lazy way, letting sunlight, fresh air, compost, and drip irrigation do most of the work.
Putting consumption aside entirely, there s reason to grow a plant just for the sake of the cultivating experience. As a gardener, I ve enjoyed growing all sorts of crops that I don t necessarily find delicious. I hate eggplant but include them in the garden every year because I love watching the bulbous fruit turn glossy as it ripens. And I love experimenting with all of the different cultivars from around the world. I ve grown skinny foot-long purple ones from Japan, lime-green golf-ball-size ones from Thailan