Category Archives: Reefer growing madness

By Mikal Jakubal

It's just a few brown leaves...

After yesterday’s tarantula in the trim scene photo, I thought I’d share these much more gruesome (to growers) images of pot-farm terror. Powdery mildew, mold and stretching buds are three end-of-season demons that rival thieves and law enforcement as the stuff of grower nightmares and B-grade slasher movie plots. Well, if anyone made B-grade slasher movies about growing weed.

The photo at right is Botrytis bud mold or stem mold. It kills the plant as it grows, feeding on the dead plant matter like the giant space amoeba in that old movie THE BLOB. I freakin’ loved that movie as a kid!

Mold first shows as brown leaves on the outside of the bud. This entire bud, including all the way to the bottom of the photo (above), is trashed. Compost. Once you cut into something like this, you find the stems rotten well beyond the surface indicators. If you catch it when you see one teeny, tiny brown leaflet, you can often save most of the bud. Within one or two more days at most, this entire bud would have been brown. It happens faster than the bite of a zombie leaves you undead.

Powdery mildew. No, that is not frosty with hash crystals, it's fungus.

Powdery mildew is caused by another, parasitic, fungus that feeds on the living plant juices like a vampire and spreads by wind-blown spores to infect other healthy leaves and plants. A wooden stake wouldn’t do much, but potassium bicarbonate or hydrogen peroxide foliar spray helps.

The plant pictured above was left untreated for far, far too long. Once it gets this bad, it is very hard to eliminate, especially this close to harvest.

Like one of those beanie caps with the little propeller on top.

This bud (right) was left on the plant well past optimal harvest time. Note how the tip has elongated into a central stalk circled by leaflets and calyxes. It’s the marijuana-plant equivalent of being put on the rack.

Growers call this “stretching” or “helicoptering” because of the way the leaflets protrude in alternating pairs like the blades of a helicopter. I’m a volunteer firefighter/EMT, so I usually consider helicopters a blessing, but they get a bad rap in this town.

Once this bud is harvested and dried, that tip will be cut off, leaving a little snipped off stump-end on the tip of the bud instead of a nice, round, groomed top. This sort of stretching takes place throughout the entire bud structure, decreasing the density and increasing difficulty in trimming. I’m told that leaving them on the plant this long also makes the smoke more “stoney” as opposed to giving a more “up” high had it been harvested earlier. (Opinions on this anyone?)

Leaving a bud on the plant this long also increases the risk of mold, as evidenced by the stretch-out tip on the moldy bud in the first photo.

Happy Day Of The Undead!

(Caution, open this post carefully to avoid upsetting contents.)

Ah, so this is what the “trick” part of “trick or treat” means when you don’t give candy to the little goblins at the door. I thought it meant they’d egg your house or cover the trees in your yard with toilet paper. Must be the local Wiccan kids responsible for this one.

This hirsute fella wandered into a local trim scene today, seen here in a cardboard trimming tray. It’s Halloween and all, but the trimmer who first saw him was not amused, On the bright side, it could’ve been a werewolf or walking skeleton. Or a DEA agent.

And on a lighter Halloween note, some trim scene humor seasonal decoration.

The native tarantulas in Northern California are in the genus Aphonopelma—as if you really care about anything other than getting the damn thing out of the house—but I don’t know which species this is. They are rarely seen except in the fall when the males go out wandering in search of females, who usually live hidden in burrows. Last fall, I found two of these on the walls inside my house, which is the only time I’ve ever seen them. I don’t know why they thought they’d find mates here.

According to the California Poison Control System, the bites are painful (their fangs are HUGE), but don’t usually result in systemic poisoning symptoms. So, while not dangerous like a black widow, they’re just…creepy. Like the ones in my house, this one pictured today was captured and released way back in the property.

Of course, there are plenty more where that came from.
And they’re headed.
Your.
Way.

Bwaaaaaaahhhhhaaaaa haaaaaa haaaaa!

A friend who lives down the road and grows a small medical marijuana garden just called to tell me that last night at around 8pm, someone cut the lock on her gate. She assumes that they drove in, saw that the other resident was there in his cabin with the lights on and left. Oddly enough, the lock was just dummy-hooked. They didn’t have to cut it, but could have just unhooked it had they messed with it for a couple seconds. This indicates they came prepared to cut a lock, so there was clearly ill-intent.

This sort of thing adds to the tension around here this time of year. Lots of strangers come into town either with harvest work lined up already or in the hope of finding work. Others come here to scam and steal. This was someone who had cased the place already. She should get some motion-activated alarms, at minimum. Or a dog. If that happened to me, where I knew someone had clearly intended to rip me off, it’s hard to say I would not be tempted to arm myself in case they came back. It’s creepy when it happens to someone you know. I hope she at least has a sharp machete by the door.

By Mikal Jakubal
“The ripoff moon. That’s what my grandpa used to call it…the ripoff moon.”

Ripoff moon

“Yes,” I mumbled under my breath to my friend standing next to me, “he should know.” The speaker was, after all, the notorious ripoff son of said grandpa, himself a notorious ripoff. A friend and I were talking with him in front of my place, across the street from the junkyard and jumbled cluster of squalid hovels where the family lives.

He was referring to the full moon of late September. While still several days away, it is already bright enough to permit movement at night without a flashlight. This is the most dangerous and risky time for growers. The entire year’s work is riding on the hope that the next two to five weeks will go well. While the marijuana crop is not at peak harvest quality, it is mature enough to be smokable, salable and, unfortunately, stealable. By next month, with harvest in full swing, each farm will be abuzz with workers busily cutting, hanging and trimming the marijuana. But now, it is still quiet, with most growers doing the guarding themselves.

Anywhere you find an abundance of illicit wealth you will find an abundance of thieves. Some are locals—such as the family across the street from me—who make their living ripping off others’ marijuana harvest. In other cases, low-lifes come here from elsewhere with the intent of reaping what others have grown. Thieves in pot country are considered the lowest of the low, the scummiest of the scum, probably even lower on the totem pole of social respect than snitches.

Most growers I know rely on the remoteness of their homesteads—security through obscurity—for protection against ripoffs. Many also have dogs and simple security systems such as motion-activated lights or alarms to alert them to intruders. All have fences to protect the marijuana and the rest of their garden from deer. One grower I know has a large greenhouse with chicken wire air-nailed and battened to the inside of the stud framing, adding an additional layer of difficulty to any attempted break-in.

Almost ready…

The real fear of most pot farmers I know is what is generically referred to as “armed home invasion,” where there is a forcible break-in involving weapons and a direct confrontation. In most cases, ripoffs will flee the garden if they think they have been seen. They are only there for an easy heist that isn’t worth the risk of a confrontation with an angry grower who may be armed or at least recognize them if they’re local. In an armed home invasion, the thieves are more determined, aggressive and unpredictable.

I haven’t seen any law enforcement statistics on this, but my overall impression is that these sort of violent conflicts have increased in the last half-dozen years. The actual numbers are also likely far higher than any official statistics, since many crimes go unreported due to the pirate nature of the industry. I should note that the fact that marijuana is becoming mainstream and tolerated might mean that the apparent increase is actually just an increase in reporting, now that busting hippies for a few plants is no longer a law-enforcement priority in Humboldt County or most of California.

Growers I know have responded to this perceived threat in a number of ways, mostly involving more security devices, fences, dogs and, unfortunately, guns. Many sleep in or near their pot patch this time of the year. While I have yet to talk to anyone who says that pot is worth killing anyone over or dying for, those who carry weapons usually phrase it as a matter of self-defense against an armed intruder. While they say they wouldn’t kill someone for ripping off their marijuana plants, they might shoot back—or shoot first—if the intruder points a gun at them.

A couple days ago, I talked to someone who lives down the same paved road I live on about his situation. He is not far off the road and only has a deer fence for protection. He has to leave to work elsewhere during the day. The patch is in his large vegetable garden, eighty feet from the house and too far to hear an intruder cutting plants while he is sleeping at night. He says he plans to put up motion-activated alarms soon [dude, do it now!], but in the meantime, he describes his situation like this:

“Every morning I get up and go down to the garden first thing to see if my marijuana is still there. Every evening when I get back from work I go down to see if it’s still there. So far it has been. Tomorrow it may all be gone. I could lose the entire year’s crop and the majority of my year’s income in a few minutes when my back is turned, but I can’t let it run my life. I have work to do in the day, I have to sleep at night and I don’t have anyone else here to guard it for me. You can’t be attached to an outcome in a situation like this. It’s like this every frickin’ year, so I’ve learned to accept that I might get nothing and then be grateful for whatever harvest I do get.”

While unarmed, my neighbor does keep a big, sharp machete by the door in case he has to go out at night and confront someone, noting, finally, “I always sleep a little easier once this full moon is past.”