Overgrow The Government

Posted in light of Tamarack's anti-farming bigotry. Serious medicine requires serious farmers.

It's time for you to grow marijuana

By Ray Boyd - Monday, May 2 2005

Don't hesitate. Cultivate.

The concept called "peak oil" warns us that petroleum is finite and increasingly expensive. Unfortunately, petroleum forms the basis for our food supply network. In many locales, it's already very difficult to find affordable organic nuts, grains, fruits and vegetables. As we move further into the 21st century, global warming, drought, and petroleum shortages are likely to make it even harder to get healthy, natural foods.

The solution? Learn to be a farmer.

The best way to learn to be a farmer? Grow marijuana.

Potty training

Learning to grow marijuana is the best way to learn to grow anything.

When the plant was legal (it was legal until 1937), it was grown as a field crop and a feral crop. Farmers and agricultural colleges studied it, but not very much. Growers took cannabis for granted. They didn't understand its diverse uses like we now do; they didn't push cannabis for its highest production output. When the US government criminalized cannabis, it was a minor fiber and birdseed crop, far less important than tobacco and cotton.

Now, marijuana is illegal, so it's worth lots of money as a safe intoxicant, sacrament, and medicine. People who never would've tried to grow anything are growing marijuana.

Marijuana is a shamanistic plant. It's a teacher. It has male and female flowers, hundreds of variations, hundreds of uses, and is amenable to being changed by breeding and environmental manipulation.

Cultivating cannabis teaches botany, chemistry, ecology, agriculture. If you learn to grow pot well, you learn to grow almost anything well. The gardening skills you learn are transferable and empowering.
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When energy crisis, drought, and food shortages arrive, you will be ahead of people who never grew anything. Way ahead.

Overgrow, defined

The Marc Emery concept of "Overgrow the Government" is not just a catchy slogan. It's not just wordplay on "overthrow the government."

Instead, Emery's overgrow proposal is elegantly effective, and universally applicable to almost everyone reading this article. Here's why:

Marijuana is a mind-altering drug that creates new perceptions and realities. An inevitable byproduct of cannabis thinking is a tendency to question authority and imposed social structures.

Marijuana makes people feel good but doesn't kill them or hook them as do legal drugs like alcohol, pharmaceuticals, and tobacco. When people experience marijuana's gentle pleasures, they realize the government is telling lies about marijuana. They realize something they might not have realized before: that the government unjustly prohibits things that are blessings. They realize the government is corrupt, and needs to be changed. These realizations spur righteous anger, leading to rebellion.

Rebellion unfulfilled is a rat gnawing at the soul. People who see pot as a blessing and the government's war on pot as a curse want to fight the government's war on marijuana. They want to take action against prohibition.

Taking action against marijuana prohibition means different things to different people. For some, it only means voting against drug war politicians. For others, it means participating in politics as a marijuana proponent. Filing lawsuits, staging protests, arguing for marijuana in public meetings and the media- all these are useful actions. However, there are other actions that fight prohibition in a unique, powerful way. One of these is to use marijuana. Another is to grow and distribute it. Ultimately, the growing and providing of marijuana are the most effective ways of overcoming prohibition.

Thus we have come full circle, back to Emery's compelling "overgrow" philosophy: the best way to end prohibition is overgrow it. Prohibition seeks to kill as many marijuana plants as possible and prevent everyone from using marijuana. If people are to use marijuana, marijuana must be grown and distributed. The marijuana grower/distributor is a revolutionary, defying the government by providing the world with a forbidden plant that enlightens and heals.

It's up to you

Can you grow marijuana? Perhaps you've read horror stories about growers getting busted, and decided not to grow. Or you live at home with your parents or in a tiny apartment with no privacy. It seems right to be paranoid, eh?

Whatever your excuse is, I offer the following challenge: you can grow marijuana right now, and if you don't choose to grow it, you are allowing the government to run your life, steal your freedom, and harm a plant you love.

Again, consider this challenge: you can and should grow marijuana, and if you refuse to do so, you are letting fear and weakness dominate your mind and heart. That's not meant to be judgmental or make you feel bad- it's meant to inspire you to stand up for your rights.

Look how cheap and easy it is to grow pot. Here are the most basic necessities you need:
# marijuana seeds and/or clones
# a minimum three foot diameter, five foot high grow space, indoors or outdoors, upon which you and/or the sun can shine strong, direct light at least five hours per day for approximately 12-16 weeks, which is the total start to finish growing time for most cannabis varieties grown from seed.
# Plants need five hours a day minimum of strong, direct natural or artificial light out of a total of 18 hours light a day during the plant's initial growth phase.
# During the flowering phase of growing marijuana, the plant needs five hours of strong light per day out of a total 12 hours of light every 24 hours.
# Plants need about six gallons of rich soil each. They need a gallon of water every two days. Ideal growing temperatures are 68 to 82 degrees F.
# You'll need an hour per day to tend your plants.
# Total cost of this most basic outdoor growing regimen averages less than $200 US. If you grow indoors, it costs an average of $350 to set up a secret closet garden.

It's well worth it

If you don't have your own secure indoor or outdoor space in which to plant marijuana, find somebody else's outdoor place and put in a few plants that you can safely get to for watering and other maintenance chores.

If you live near golf courses, estates, deserts, lakes, rivers, forests, parks, vacant lots, and similarly green areas, those are nice places for clandestine, off-site pot growing.

Sure, you might lose your plants to pests, varmints, rip-offs, or police. If you grow from seed, you'll spend less than $200 and a few hours of labor on the project. You can afford to lose that. You can afford that investment risk. If you grow plants well and they make it to harvest, you can yield an average of one to six ounces of dried bud per plant. How much is that worth?

You get more than homegrown bud, however. You get farming knowledge. When the economic grid collapses and people are literally starving for fresh fruits and veggies, you'll be using botany experience gained growing marijuana to grow your own food, fiber, medicine.

When you grow cannabis, you learn how to take care of a non-human life form. You learn about plant sexuality. You learn about watering, fertilizing, trimming, pest control, and goal orientation. You learn about self-sufficiency. There are few feelings so kind as the reward of sharing a joint or bowl of your personally grown herb with friends.

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, right now is your outdoor growing season. In most areas, you could have been growing outdoors starting mid-March. From now until June 22, your plants will increase in height. During late June and July they will add girth and foliage. In August and September they will flower and ripen so you can harvest by October.

No matter where you live, if you have a closet, an empty refrigerator, a small room, an outhouse, a basement, a garage, an abandoned mini-van ? anywhere that has electricity, space, and privacy ? you can grow pot.

You can grow one plant, or 1,000, depending on your infrastructure and goals. The bottom line is that everyone can grow marijuana if they really want to. And if everyone grows marijuana, prohibition will die.

Let me say it again: You CAN grow marijuana, right now, no matter where you are, no matter how little gardening experience you have.

But what about getting busted?

Nearly a million people are arrested for marijuana in the US each year. Most of those arrests are for possession, distribution or transportation of cannabis. A small percentage of total cannabis arrests are for growing, but hundreds of thousands of other people grow pot and are not arrested. The vast majority of growers never get caught.

If you're smart and careful, you likely won't get caught. Even if you get caught, you fight the charges. You do what you have to do to repair the damage that prohibition does to your life. You take the consequences as a badge of courage, just like civil rights protestors do when they get smashed in the face by police batons, when they get arrested for protesting against war, racism, injustice. Taking the chance of being hurt while fighting for freedom is a sign of maturity, strength, and conscience.

After all, growing pot is a revolutionary act. Somebody has to have the guts to stand up to the government. If you don't do it, who will?

Tips for beginners
# Contact Marc Emery Direct Seed Sales (www.emeryseeds.com) and tell them where you want to grow, your level of growing experience, and your budget.
# Buy seeds immediately, and plant them.
# Visit the www.cannabisculture.com grow forums at
# www.cannabisculture.com/forums/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=wwwprimer and ask for advice.
# Buy marijuana cultivation books from Emery's BCMP bookstore.
# Pay safe attention to your plants.
# The more seeds you plant the more chance you have for success.
# Plant different batches of different seeds in different locations.
# Make sure you can recognize the difference between male and female plants; unless you want to breed your own seeds, get rid of the males so your female plants get phat and resiny without being impregnated by male pollen.
# Don't harvest until your buds are sticky and a few bud hairs and resin glands have started to turn brown.
# Cure and dry your buds for at least seven days in a 75 degree F, well-aerated, dark room.
# If you think you're being observed by police while taking care of your plants, watch the watchers, and determine if you really are being observed.
# In some areas, natural rainfall is enough to get your plants through summer and autumn.
# If you're growing indoors, make sure you provide ventilation, odor control, light control, and adequate nutrients.
# You don't have to use high intensity ballast lamps. You can use full-spectrum fluorescents and suck down a lot less electricity.
# Trim your plant's top stems before plants are one month old; this increases diameter and yield per plant.
# Grow lots of seedlings in peat pots and give them to your friends. Encourage everyone to grow cannabis.
# Plant seedlings where there are automatic watering systems.
# Don't use poisons on your crop.
# If you're growing indoors, buy the book "Closet Cultivator."
# Read the article about the hydroponic gardening industry in issue 56 of Cannabis Culture. Study the cultivation section of Cannabis Culture.

Growing marijuana is fun, courageous, and profitable. It's simple to order seeds from Marc Emery, plant them, and help them grow. A few weeks later, you'll be laughing and celebrating your harvest, proud of yourself for helping overgrow the government.

Remember:

"Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you're a man, you take it."
- Malcolm X, 1965