CYPRESS HILL: Dr. Green Thumb's Grow Tips
DUMMIES GUIDE TO GROWING

Cannabis has one of the strongest life-forces on the planet and it will outgrow almost anything, provided it has the basic elements of light, nutrition and air circulation.

The benefits of home cultivation include saving money, providing a safe product, and keeping you and your money free of contact with criminal organizations. Launching a grow operation is a very serious undertaking. The stakes are very high should you get caught. Cultivation is less dangerous if you are a single person who lives alone—and if you grow a very small crop and tell no one about it.

Never have more than 100 plants, clones or seeds in your possession at any one time. This forces your case into Federal court, where penalties can be severe. Never keep weapons, scales, baggies or evidence of packaging and/or sale. Have a medical defense in place should you get caught. If you can’t document a legitimate medical need, consider donating half your crop to a person with cancer or AIDS who can testify in your defense at a trial.

Since smaller is better, start with only one to three plants. If you have a secure back yard not visible to any neighbors, consider planting a vegetable/flower garden and using it as a cover. Staked cannabis trained to grow like a like a vine on the ground is extremely difficult to detect from the air, especially if it is located inside a legal garden. (Don’t consider this option unless your back yard is completely fenced and secure.) If you live near a large park or wildlands, scout the remote areas to see if there are any south-facing slopes on streams or rivers.

A safer, but more expensive alternative, is a closet or grow box located somewhere in your home. Ideally, this would be disguised or located behind a secret door. If not, the door or opening should be padlocked at all times.

The most important element is seed stock. Get seeds from the best quality marijuana possible. Sometimes you can get lucky and get seeds from a great bag of weed. Or you can try to get seeds from an established seed company. Never ship seeds or any grow product to your actual address where the garden will be located. Never order grow supplies over the phone or on the Internet. Visit large garden centers and always pay in cash.

Loose lips are the most frequent source of problems for cultivators. Some growers are ratted out by ex-lovers or ex-spouses. Others are ripped off because they told the wrong person about the garden. The best advice is to tell no one.

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Higher Learning

"November 4, 2002 issue of TIME magazine"

Can it kill you?

NO ONE HAS EVER DIED OF THC POISONING, mostly because a 160-lb. person would have to smoke roughly 900 joints in a sitting to reach a lethal dose. (No doubt some have tried.) But that doesn't mean pot can't contribute to serious health problems and even death-both indirectly (driving while stoned, for instance) and directly (by affecting circulation, for example). A paper published last year in the journal Aniology found 10 odd cases in France of heavy herbe smokers who developed ischemia (an insufficient blood supply) in their limbs, leading in four cases to amputations. It's not clear that marijuana caused the decreased blood flow, but the vascular problems did worsen during periods of heavy use. Another 2001 paper, in Circulation, found a nearly fivefold increase in the risk for heart attack in the first hour after smoking marijuana-though statistically that means smoking pot is about as dangerous for a fit person as exercise.

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Green Light for Safety

"HEADS #11 pg63" Gardeners who wish to examine their plants at night need to be concerned not only about safety, but about changing their plant's photo period. As 12 complete hours of darkness is imperative for proper flowering, even the dim light of a flashlight can return the plant to the vegetative state. Most of a flashlight's light is in the yellow, orange and red spectra. Even fluorescent ones emit some red light. The solution is to place a green filter over the light source, as plants are not sensitive to this color. If you are gardening out in the woods at night, a green flashlight is an essential tool. It gives you sight, but is unobtrusive (not noticed), hard to see from a distance, and blends into the background. A green filter can easily be made from a stage-light filter, or, more conveniently, from four or five layers of green plastic from an appropriately sized pop bottle. Choose a size that slides over the flashlight top, but is not too loose. cut the bottle about four inches from the bottom with the extra green pieces in it over the flashlight and tape it on.

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