GROW YOUR OWN! By Rhea Graham
Have you successfully grown tomatoes in the past? If so, chances are you can successfully grow Cannabis as well. It truly does grow like a weed. If you’ve already started your seeds you are in good shape; if you haven’t, you’ll likely want to start with a clone this year if you are growing outdoors. Obviously, seeds can be started anytime for indoor grows.
Clones can be procured from your growing buddy so long as they give them to you, or from the dispensary where they are sold for around $25 to patients and $30 in the recreational market. If you’ve been around a minute, you see that the prices on clones have nearly doubled.
Cannabis really is an easy plant to grow outdoors, but there are nuisances such as mites, cabbage moths and rippers. Each has their own precautions and treatment. Two of the three are avoided by not telling people about your garden, and the cabbage moths are “terpene dependent” meaning some strains they love and others they don’t bother.
Mites can be introduced when someone has been to a growsite that has them; they get on your clothes and hitchhike to the next growsite. Sometimes when you buy a clone you don’t see any mites on it, but there can be eggs on the backsides of the leaves that are practically invisible. When getting clones, you ALWAYS quarantine them to ensure they are not infested. Some people spray with “Safer Soap” (available in stores) others make an organic mixture of various essential oils, others mix dish soap, cooking oil and water and spray, then rinse. Pests have to be dealt with or your Cannabis will be low quality, you may even end up throwing it out.
Growing outdoors allows ‘nature to take care of nature’ meaning the mites and aphids get eaten by the praying mantis and on it goes. You know what bugs do after they eat, right? That’s why “we wash our weed” before we cook it at Albany’s Canna Kitchen & Research (and believe you should, too!)