Growing Medical Marijuana: Securely and Legally

by Dave DeWitt

Overview

A beginner's guide to growing weed at home, featuring straightforward advice for designing indoor and outdoor cannabis gardens, choosing seed varieties, buying equipment, planting, pot harvesting, storage, stash security, troubleshooting, and more.

This beginner’s guide to growing cannabis at home features straightforward advice for designing both indoor and outdoor marijuana gardens, from choosing and obtaining the most potent and prolific seed varieties to buying the right equipment and setting up your grow room. Steering clear of unnecessary scientific and technical jargon, Growing Medical Marijuana offers step-by-step instructions, 125 helpful photographs, and detailed illustrations to help you plant, harvest, and store your crop, whether you’re a novice pot gardener or an experienced grower who wants to go legit.

Outlining the ins and outs of marijuana cultivation in the states in which it’s legal, this guide also presents easy-to-master approaches to fertilizing, pruning, controlling pests, maximizing flower production, cloning, producing your own seeds, and more. And once your stash is trimmed, cured, and ready to enjoy, nearly thirty recipes—along with dosage instructions—provide a delicious alternative to smoking your healing herb.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781607744290
Publisher:	Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed
Publication date:	02/19/2013
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	180
File size:	25 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

 Dave DeWitt is a food historian and one of the world’s foremost experts on capsicums. He has authored more than forty books about food and horticulture, and is an adjunct associate professor in the College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences at New Mexico State University. Dave and his wife live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Read an Excerpt

Legal vs. Illegal Growing 
This gardening guide assumes that you will be growing where it is legal to do so by state law. People can cultivate in fourteen of the seventeen states where it is legal to possess marijuana (at this writing): Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. Home cultivation is not allowed in Delaware, New Jersey, or the District of Columbia, and a special license is required in New Mexico. In Arizona, patients can only cultivate if they lived twenty-five miles or more from a dispensary when they applied for their card. The various state laws and regulations change frequently, so you should stay informed by consulting the website of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) at norml.org. Remember that the amount of marijuana that you may possess or cultivate differs from state to state, so please check your state and local ordinances.

It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re growing marijuana to get high or get cured, or both. It’s my job to guide you as a gardener and help you produce the best possible legal crop, given the constantly changing policies about growing and using marijuana, while taking into consideration the remarkable advances in marijuana cultivation since I first grew it forty years ago. Feminized seed, miniature and autoflowering varieties, superior cloning techniques, and other improvements in growing methods now greatly enhance the marijuana gardening experience. It is my hope that gardeners can seamlessly introduce marijuana into their existing gardens and simply enjoy it as another plant that is beneficial to humankind. And remember, chile plants were once simply tolerated weeds that eventually became valuable crops. The same thing is happening to marijuana, and it’s about time!

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before planning your medical marijuana garden. What are your motivations and goals? Are you sure you’re growing legally? Do you have a secure location for the garden? Are you going to brag about it to your friends or sell part of the harvest to them? Your motivations and goals must be balanced against the possible consequences of the project you’re about to undertake. First, there is a relatively high cost of setup for an indoor growing operation that needs lighting, ventilation, sometimes reflectors, and other equipment. Second is the risk factor. With some states liberalizing their laws about this common weed that was first just tolerated and now quite celebrated, there’s a tendency to be lured into a false sense of security. To you and your friends, who may have indulged for years, growing marijuana is commonplace and the feeling that “everyone does it” is pervasive.

Resist that attitude and remember that the majority of people in this country still believe that marijuana, like liquor during Prohibition, is evil and should be banned. Also remember that marijuana is still illegal at the federal level, despite the laws of certain enlightened states, and that flaunting what you are doing is not wise, especially if you are selling part of your crop rather than merely growing it for your own use as medical marijuana. If, for example, someone turns you in to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for, say, interstate trafficking, your house and all your property could be seized. And you also would have a new, severely downsized place of residence without a garden.

Growing marijuana can be challenging because it is such a valuable crop, even in small quantities. Thieves are unlikely to infiltrate your property to steal tomatoes, but with a single marijuana plant worth upward of a thousand dollars retail, the scenario changes radically. I recommend taking exactly the same precautions that you would take to grow marijuana illegally because, despite the fact that you may be growing legally, if you’re not careful, marijuana is as easy to steal from an unsecured location as my cacti collection was from my front patio. That happened because I forgot to lock the gate, and someone backed a truck into my driveway and stole all the large specimens that I had collected for years. Renegade landscapers, perhaps? This is why security is one of the first chapters in this book. So before you plant the first seed, ask yourself if it’s worth it to risk your time, money, and possibly your household security to grow a few highly valuable plants. If you think it is worth it, then it’s time to start planning. To help you with your planning, let’s begin by looking at the organization of this growing guide.

Because I’m tracking the successes and problems of a novice grower, I’ve organized this guide in a roughly chronological order that follows a typical growing season. The season is arranged in the following stages: fundamentals and planning (chapters 1–4), growing (chapters 5–7), harvesting and storage (chapter 8), problems (chapter 9), and cooking (chapter 10). If you have gardening experience you can easily skip the parts of the book that you’re familiar with and go directly to what’s new to you. You can also use the index to focus on the information that is most important to you. I’m going to begin with a description of a plant that some people call a lifesaver and others call a weed.

Table of Contents

    Introduction: Meet Leo, Novice Marijuana Grower, Age 70       
 
1  Marijuana Renegade: That Ever-Adaptable Rank, Weedy Annual                     
 
2  Security: First and Foremost                                                 
 
3  Your Marijuana Oasis: Indoor, Outdoor, or Both                                 
 
4  Blueberry or Lemon? Recommended Varieties                                   
 
5  The Growing Begins  
    From Germination to Sprouted Seedling and Beyond             
 
6  A “Noted Weed” Triumphant: The Growing Season                  
 
7  Les Bonnes Fleurs de Marijuana: Or, the Good Flowers of Marijuana   
 
8   The Not-So-Grim Reaper: From Harvest to Storage               
 
9   Patience, Pestilence, and Panaceas: Dealing with Problems  
 
10 Cannabis Cooking: With Dosages and Recipes                                 
 
     Afterword                                                                            
     Resources                                                                          
     Bibliography                                                                                   
     Acknowledgments                                                               
     About the Author                                                                 
     Index                                                                                  

Editorial Reviews

"DeWitt has written a very practical and user-friendly guide for both the legally permitted home grower and for those who are interested in learning more about the cultivation of marijuana in a strictly academic sense."
— New York Botanical Garden's Plant Talk blog 

From the Publisher