Marijuana is a deciduous plant which grows from seeds. The fibrous section of the plant was (has been replaced by synthetics) used to make rope. The flowering tops, leaves, seeds, and resin of the plant is used by just about everyone to get HIGH. Normally, the vegetable parts of the plant are smoked to produce this "high," but thay can also be eaten. The axtive ingredient in marijuana resin is THC (tetahydrocannabinol). Marijuana contains from 1 - 4 per cent THC (4 per cent must be considered GOOD dope). Marijuana grows wild in many parts of the world, and is cultivated in Mexice, Vietnam, Africa, Nepal, India, South America, etc.,etc. The marijuana sold in the United States comes primarily from, yes, the Uniited States. It is estimated that at least 50 per cent of the grass on the streets in America is homegrown. The next largest bunch comes actoss the borders from Mexico, with smaller amounts filtering in from Panama, occasionally South America, and occasinally, 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 U.S., 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 rase about 20 - 75 per cent 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 propular belief, grass grows well in many place on the North American continent. It will flourish even if the temperature does not raise above 75 degrees. 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 encoun- tered 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 preprepared 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 probally 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 hight of twenty feet (or would you rather wish on a star) and obtain a diameter of 4 1/2 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 aroung, 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 grey and shiriveled 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 1/2" 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 befor 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 150ml 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 flouresent 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 Eastren countries, farmers reportedly put their beehives next to fiels 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 130 degrees. 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 leavs. 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 sheld 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 increse 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 posion in larger quanities 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) bacause 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 recive form smoaking 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 difficuly to recognize as marijuana. Of course, there is less substance to this plant, but such wrecked creatures have been known to produve 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.

PLANT PROBLEM CHART

Always check the overall enviromental conditions prior to passing judgment - soil aroung 7 pH or slightly less - plenty of water, light, fresh air, loose soil, no water standing in pools.

SYMPTOM                                                        PROBABLY PROBLEM/CURE
        
Larger leaves turning yellow -      Nitrogen dificiency - add
smaller leaves still green.         nitrate of soda or
                                    organic fertilizer.
 
Older leaves will curl at edges,    Phosphorsus dificiency -
turn dark, possibaly with a purple  add commercial phosphate.
cast.
 
Mature leaves develop a yellowish   Magnesium dificiency -
cast to least veinal areas.         add commercial fertilizer
                                    with a magnesium content.
 
Mature leaves turn yellow and then  Potassium dificiency -
become spotted with edge areas      add muriate of potash.
turning dark grey.
 
Cracked stems, no healthy support   Boron dificiency - add
tissue.                             any plant food containing
                                    boron.
 
Small wrinkled leaves with          Zinc dificiency - add
yelloish vein systems.              commercial plant food
                                    containing zinc.
 
Young leaves become deformed,       Molybedum dificiency -
possibaly yellowing.                use any plant food with a
                                    bit of molydbenum in it.

BAD WEED/GOOD WEED

Can you turn bad weed into good weed? Surprisingly enough, the answer to this oft-asked inquiry is, yes! Like most other things in life, the amount of good you are going to do relates directly to how much effort you are going to put into it. There are no instant, supermarket products which you can spray on Kansas catnip and have wonderweed, but there are a number of simplified, inexpensive processes (Gee, Mr. Wizard!) thich will enhance mediocre grass somewhat, ant there are a couple of fairly involved processes which will do up even almost-parsley weed into something worth writing home about.

EASES

1. Place the dope in a container which allows air to enter in a restricted fashion (such as a can with nail holes punched in its lid) and add a bunch of dry ice, and the place the whold shebang in the freezer for a few days. This process will add a certain amount of potency to the product, however, this only works with dry ice, if you use normal, everyday freezer ice, you will end up with a soggy mess...

2. Take a quantity of grass and dampen it, place in a baggie or another socially acceptable container, and store it in a dark, dampish place for a couple of weeks (burying it also seems to work). The grass will develop a mold which tastes a bit harsh, a and burns a tiny bit funny, but does increase the potency.

3. Expose the grass to the high intensity light of a sunlamp for a full day or so. Personally, I don't feel that this is worth the effort, but if you just spent $400 of your friend's money for this brick of super-Colombian, right-from-the-President's-personal-stash, and it turns out to be Missouri weed, and you're packing your bags to leave town before the people arrive for their shares, well, you might at least try it. Can't hurt.

4. Take the undisirable portions of our stash (stems, seeds, weak weed, worms, etc.) and place them in a covered pot, with enough rubbing alchol to cover everything.

Now CAREFULLY boil the mixture on an ELECTRIC stove or lab burner. DO NOT USE GAS - the alchol is too flammable. After 45 minutes of heat, remove the pot and strain the solids out, SAVING THE ALCOHOL. Now, repeat the process with the same residuals, but fresh alchol. When the second boil is over, remove the solids again, combine the two quantities of alcohol and reboil until you have a syrupy mixture. Now, this syrupy mixture will contain much of the THC formerly hidden in the stems and such. One simply takes this syrup the throughly combines it with the grass that one wishes to improve upon.