The Anarchist Cookbook (17 page)

etc. The marijuana sold in the United States comes primarily from, yes, the United States.

It is estimated that at least 50% of the grass on the streets in America is homegrown.

The next largest bunch comes across the borders from Mexico, with smaller amounts

filtering in from Panama, occasionally South America, and occasionally, Africa. Hashish is

the pure resin of the marijuana plant, which is scraped from the flowering tops of the

plant and lumped together. Ganja is the ground-up tops of the finest plants. (It is also the

name given to any sort of marijuana in Jamaica.) Marijuana will deteriorate in about two

years if exposed to light, air or heat. It should always be stored in cool places. Grass

prices in the United States are a direct reflection of the laws of supply and demand (and

you thought that high school economics would never be useful). A series of large border

busts, a short growing season, a bad crop, any number of things can drive the price of

marijuana up. Demand still seems to be on the increase in the US, so prices seldom fall

below last year's level. Each year a small seasonal drought occurs, as last year's supply

runs low, and next year's crop is not up yet. Prices usually rise about 20%-75% during this

time and then fall back to "normal." Unquestionably, a large shortage of grass causes a

percentage of smokers to turn to harder drugs instead. For this reason, no grass control

program can ever be beneficial or "successful."

GROW IT!

There is one surefire way of avoiding high prices and the grass DT's: Grow your own. This

is not as difficult as some "authorities" on the subject would make you believe. Marijuana

is a weed, and a fairly vivacious one at that, and it will grow almost in spite of you.

OUTDOORS

Contrary to popular belief, grass grows well in many place on the North American

continent. It will flourish even if the temperature does not raise above 75ø. The plants do

need a minimum of eight hours of sunlight per day and should be planted in late April/early

May, BUT DEFINITELY, after the last frost of the year. Growing an outdoor, or "au

naturel", crop has been the favored method over the years, because grass seems to grow

better without as much attention when in its natural habitat. Of course, an outdoors

setting requires special precautions not encountered with an indoors crop; you must be

able to avoid detection, both from law enforcement freaks and common freaks, both of

whom will take your weed and probably use it. Of course, one will also arrest you. You must

also have access to the area to prepare the soil and harvest the crop. There are two

schools of thought about starting the seeds. One says you should start the seedlings for

about ten days in an indoor starter box (see the indoor section) and then transplant. The

other theory is that you should just start them in the correct location. Fewer plants will

come up with this method, but there is no shock of transplant to kill some of the seedlings

halfway through. The soil should be prepared for the little devils by turning it over a

couple of times and adding about one cup of hydrated lime per square yard of soil and a

little bit (not too much, now) of good water soluble nitrogen fertilizer. The soil should now

be watered several times and left to sit about one week. The plants should be planted at

least three feet apart, getting too greedy and stacking them too close will result in

stunted plants. The plants like some water during their growing season, BUT not too much.

This is especially true around the roots, as too much water will rot the root system. Grass

grows well in corn or hops, and these plants will help provide some camouflage. It does not

grow well with rye, spinach, or pepperweed. It is probably a good idea to plant in many

small, broken patches, as people tend to notice patterns.

GENERAL GROWING INFO

Both the male and he female plant produce THC resin, although the male is not as strong as

the female. In a good crop, the male will still be plenty smokable and should not be thrown

away under any circumstances. Marijuana can reach a height of twenty feet (or would you

rather wish on a star) and obtain a diameter of 4« inches. If normal, it has a sex ratio of

about 1:1, but this can be altered in several ways. The male plant dies in the 12th week of

growing, the female will live another 3-5 weeks to produce her younguns. Females can

weigh twice as much as males when they are mature. Marijuana soil should compact when

you squeeze it, but should also break apart with a small pressure and absorb water well. A

nice test for either indoor or outdoor growing is to add a bunch of worms to the soil, if

they live and hang around, it is good soil, but if they don't, well, change it. Worms also help

keep the soil loose enough for the plants to grow well.

SEEDS

To get good grass, you should start with the right seeds. A nice starting point is to save

the seeds form the best batch you have consumed. The seeds should be virile, that is, they

should not be gray and shriveled up, but green, meaty, and healthy appearing. A nice test is

to drop the seeds on a hot frying pan. If they "CRACK," they are probably good for

planting purposes. The seeds should be soaked in distilled water overnight before planting.

BE SURE to plant in the ground with the pointy end UP. Plant about «" deep. Healthy seeds

will sprout in about five days.

SPROUTING

The best all around sprouting method is probably to make a sprouting box (as sold in

nurseries) with a slated bottom or use paper cups with holes punched in the bottoms. The

sprouting soil should be a mixture of humus, soil, and five sand with a bit of organic

fertilizer and water mixed in about one week before planting. When ready to transplant,

you must be sure and leave a ball of soil around the roots of each plant. This whole ball is

dropped into a baseball-sized hold in the permanent soil. If you are growing/transplanting

indoors, you should use a green safe light (purchased at nurseries) during the transplanting

operation. If you are transplanting outdoors, you should time it about two hours before

sunset to avoid damage to the plant. Always wear cotton gloves when handling the young

plants. After the plants are set in the hole, you should water them. It is also a good idea to

use a commercial transplant chemical (also purchased at nurseries) to help then overcome

the shock.

INDOOR GROWING

Indoor growing has many advantages, besides the apparent fact that it is much harder to

have your crop "found," you can control the ambient conditions just exactly as you want

them and get a guaranteed "good" plant. Plants grown indoors will not appear the same as

their outdoor cousins. They will be scrawnier appearing with a weak stems and may even

require you to tie them to a growing post to remain upright, BUT THEY WILL HAVE AS

MUCH OR MORE RESIN! If growing in a room, you should put tar paper on the floors and

then buy sterilized bags of soil form a nursery. You will need about one cubic foot of soil

for each plant. The plants will need about 150 mL. of water per plant/per week. They will

also need fresh air, so the room must be ventilated. (However, the fresh air should contain

NO TOBACCO smoke.) At least eight hours of light a day must be provided. As you

increase the light, the plants grow faster and show more females/less males. Sixteen

hours of light per day seems to be the best combination, beyond this makes little or no

appreciable difference in the plant quality. Another idea is to interrupt the night cycle

with about one hour of light. This gives you more females. The walls of your growing room

should be painted white or covered with aluminum foil to reflect the light. The lights

themselves can be either bulbs of fluorescent. Figure about 75 watts per plant or one

plant per two feet of fluorescent tube. The fluorescents are the best, but do not use "cool

white" types. The light sources should be an average of twenty inches from the plant and

NEVER closer than 14 inches. They may be mounted on a rack and moved every few days as

the plants grow. The very best light sources are those made by Sylvania and others

especially for growing plants (such as the "gro lux" types).

HARVESTING AND DRYING

The male plants will be taller and have about five green or yellow sepals, which will split

open to fertilize the female plant with pollen. The female plant is shorter and has a small

pistillate flower, which really doesn't look like a flower at all but rather a small bunch of

leaves in a cluster. If you don't want any seeds, just good dope, you should pick the males

before they shed their pollen as the female will use some of her resin to make the seeds.

After another three to five weeks, after the males are gone, the females will begin to

wither and die (from loneliness?), this is the time to pick. In some nefarious Middle

Eastern countries, farmers reportedly put their beehives next to fields of marijuana. The

little devils collect the grass pollen for their honey, which is supposed to contain a fair

dosage of THC. The honey is then enjoyed by conventional methods or made into ambrosia.

If you want seeds - let the males shed his pollen then pick him. Let the female go another

month and pick her. To cure the plants, they must be dried. On large crops, this is

accomplished by constructing a drying box or drying room. You must have a heat source

(such as an electric heater) which will make the box/room each 130ø. The box/room must

be ventilated to carry off the water-vapor-laden air and replace it with fresh. A good box

can be constructed from an orange crate with fiberglass insulated walls, vents in the tops,

and screen shelves to hold the leaves. There must be a baffle between the leaves and the

heat source. A quick cure for smaller amounts is to: cut the plant at the soil level and wrap

it in a cloth so as not to loose any leaves. Take out any seeds by hand and store. Place all

the leaves on a cookie sheet or aluminum foil and put them in the middle shelf of the oven,

which is set on "broil." In a few seconds, the leaves will smoke and curl up, stir them

around and give another ten seconds before you take them out.

TO INCREASE THE GOOD STUFF

There are several tricks to increase the number of females, or the THC content of plants:

You can make the plants mature in 36 days if you are in a hurry, by cutting back on the

light to about 14 hours, but the plants will not be as big. You should gradually shorten the

light cycle until you reach fourteen hours. You can stop any watering as the plants begin to

bake the resin rise to the flowers. This will increase the resin a bit. You can use a sunlamp

on the plants as they begin to develop flower stalks. You can snip off the flower, right at

the spot where it joins the plant, and a new flower will form in a couple of weeks. This can

be repeated two or three times to get several times more flowers than usual.

If the plants are sprayed with Ethrel early in their growing stage, they will produce almost

all female plants. This usually speeds up the flowering also, it may happen in as little as two

weeks. You can employ a growth changer called colchicine. This is a bit hard to get and

expensive. (Should be ordered through a lab of some sort and costs about $35 a gram.) To

use the colchicine, you should prepare your presoaking solution of distilled water with

about 0.10 per cent colchicine. This will cause many of the seeds to die and not germinate,

but the ones that do come up will be polyploid plants. This is the accepted difference

between such strains as "gold" and normal grass, and yours will DEFINITELY be

superweed. The problem here is that colchicine is a poison in larger quantities and may be

poisonous in the first generation of plants. Bill Frake, author of CONNOISSEUR'S

HANDBOOK OF MARIJUANA runs a very complete colchicine treatment down and warns

against smoking the first generation plants (all succeeding generations will also be

polyploid) because of this poisonous quality. However, the Medical Index shows colchicine

being given in very small quantities to people for treatment if various ailments. Although

these quantities are small, they would appear to be larger than any you could receive form

smoking a seed-treated plant. It would be a good idea to buy a copy of CONNOISSEUR'S,

if you are planning to attempt this, and read Mr. Drake's complete instructions. Another

still-experimental process to increase the resin it to pinch off the leaf tips as soon as they

appear from the time the plant is in the seedling stage on through its entire life-span. This

produces a distorted, wrecked-looking plant which would be very difficult to recognize as

marijuana. Of course, there is less substance to this plant, but such wrecked creatures

have been known to produce so much resin that it crystallizes a strong hash all over the

surface of the plant - might be wise to try it on a plant or two and see what happens.