Lloyd Johnson: The Beginner's Guide to Growing Marijuana

Pot. Cannabis. Weed.

No matter what you call it, everybody is talking about marijuana. For years it’s been a political debate, a medical debate, and a legal debate, but now that it’s being legalized throughout the country at an unprecedented rate, all you really want to think about is how to grow it!

But, if you’re just starting out, there’s a lot to think about before you can get your garden growing:

• Where can you get marijuana seeds?

• Should you grow indoors or out?

• What equipment do you need?

• How should you store your harvest?

• How much will it cost?

Unlike other books that bog you down in every nuance of marijuana gardening, The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Marijuana teaches you the basics in an easy-to-read, accessible format guaranteed to help your garden flourish! Throughout, you’ll find quick “Money Smart” tips that tell you how to get the most from your money and “Keep It Simple” sections that tell you how to get the best crop possible for the least amount of effort. You’ll also find illustrations that clearly show you the difference between various types of plants, how to tell a male marijuana plant from a female, and what a plant looks like when it’s ready to be harvested.

And you don’t have to till under your entire backyard to get a good crop. Here you’ll learn small space and container gardening techniques that will let you successfully grow what you need in your basement; on your deck; or in a discreet, raised bed in your backyard.

So no matter where or what you decide you grow or how much money you decide to invest, it’s time to learn how to grow marijuana from the ground up!

Cannabis hemp is one of the most useful, beautiful, and botanically interesting plants that humans grow and use. It is hardy; grows on an annual and sustainable basis; actually improves agricultural soils; requires very little chemical assistance in order to grow bountifully and pest-free; and generously provides cultivators with fuel, fiber, medicine, food, and recreational pleasure. Cannabis can grow outdoors in every part of the United States and, fortunately, is being legalized in many places in the United States.

Cannabis, frequently referred to as marijuana, is an exceptionally beautiful tall herb. Even amongst botanists, cannabis confounds one set description. Most today agree that the plant’s genus is Cannabis and at least three distinct species ( sativa , indica , and ruderalis ) exist. According to an alternative classification, however, the genus has only one highly variable species, Cannabis sativa , with two subspecies, indica and ruderalis .

Cannabis as an ornamental plant alone is striking: the elegant leaf structures and sheer size of the plant are impressive. The aromatic qualities of the flowers are intense and very distinctive; sativas are more likely to have a pleasing sweet, flower-like scent, while indicas can be so musky and strong that the common term for their scent is “skunk.”

For clarity, the herb referred to herein will generally be pure sativa, a pure indica, or a hybrid cross of the two. Ruderalis has very little tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content, but flowers in a very short cycle; its only possible use is in the hands of a skilled breeder to introduce the short cycle trait to a line. Hemp is also considered to be cannabis, but it is produced for fuel and fiber and lacks high THC content, and is therefore differentiated from the medical or recreational types and their propagation.

Musicians and artists have known for centuries that ingesting cannabis can unleash their creative sides. Physicians knew and respected its medicinal qualities, and people in general (sensation-seeking creatures that we are) have always appreciated its properties as an intoxicant.

Due to the wonderful variety of strains within species, cannabis breeders today can work to emphasize desirable characteristics for whatever use they wish. These characteristics can vary depending on a user’s needs. New greenhouse technologies allow indoor growers to fix hybrid strains in five generations of twelve weeks each. In other words, cannabis qualities can be manipulated now on a greatly accelerated timeframe, allowing hybridizers to move ever quicker toward their ideal strain. Hybridizing sativas and indicas can produce many variations on the observable effects of cannabis. Typically, breeders of medical cannabis tend to weight the genetics toward indicas, while breeders of high-end recreational cannabis aim for the more psychoactive properties.

Growers breed and grow for very specific purposes in the twenty-first century. In general, indicas are more medical in their effects: They relax muscle spasms, induce restful sleep, stimulate appetite, and tend to create a calm, relaxed state of mind that users sometimes refer to as being “stoned.” Sativas are more cerebral, or psychoactive, and produce what is commonly known as a “high” that has more potential for connecting with the user’s creative energies. Sativas are also used medically, but the more common medical use for sativas is generally for conditions such as depression and anxiety.

A good cross of sativa and indica can create a strain that can change the lives of patients with a chronic illness. For example, exchanging an opiate like morphine for a hybrid cannabis strain that relieves muscle spasms and eases depression will generally make for a much happier quality of life. One benefit of the adaptable nature of cannabis is that a propagator can work with a patient’s feedback and linebreed a strain that is very specific to the individual patient’s symptom relief.

Some patients have what they call “daytime” strains that provide pain relief but allow the patient to remain alert and functional, and then a “nighttime” strain that is more relaxing and helps with sleep. All cannabis is not alike; a certain amount of experimentation and dialogue between propagator and patient are usually required to match the right cannabis to the patient’s needs.

All this experimentation and the patient’s control over types and dosages may sound risky, and it’s true that cannabis is a drug. But animal tests have proven that extremely high doses of the active ingredients in cannabis (cannabinoids) are needed to have lethal effect. The ratio of the amount of cannabinoids necessary to intoxicate versus the amount required to make a dose lethal is 1 to 40,000. To achieve a lethal overdose, you would have to consume 40,000 times more cannabis than you needed to achieve intoxication. To help put this in perspective, note that the ratio for alcohol varies between 1 to 4 and 1 to 10.

You’ve probably heard the initials THC in discussions of cannabis and its relationship to psychoactive properties. THC is a shorthand way to say delta 9-trans-tetrahydrocannabinol . It is regarded as the main psychotomimetic, or intoxicating, ingredient of cannabis. It occurs in all cannabis to some degree, in concentrations that vary from trace amounts in commercial hemp to 30 percent in very potent recreational strains. THC and other cannabinoids are produced significantly in only one place on the cannabis plant: inside the heads of the trichomes, or the resin glands found on the flowers and the small leaves near the flowers called sugar leaves. The sugar leaf is so named because it usually has enough trichomes to sparkle like sugar crystals, and affects users who ingest it, either by smoking or eating the prepared leaf.