The OP mentioned seeds – some 15 years ago I noticed a gallon jar 3/4 full of marijuana seeds at a medium-level dealers house. I asked him why he kept them. He said that he sold seeds for the same price as pot for smoking. I told him I though that was weird – who would pay for something we tried so assiduously to get rid of before we could smoke? His reply was “Pot farmers, stupid”!
Doh!
Please don’t confuse Native Marijuana with “Jimson Weed”. Every now and then some curious kids will experiment with Jimson Weed and it can result in blindness. They are two seperate plants, not at all related.
In Illinois, Marijuana is classified as a noxious weed along with Ragweed. This means that it must be destroyed when found. I had to learn this in order to get my spraying license.
Yes, this is purely political. MJ can’t do a thing unless one goes to extraordinary lengths to use it as a drug.
The plants can’t get a foothold just anywhere.
If the cops find one they’ll pull it or poison it. If a smoker finds one they’ll take the whole thing or just the buds, which contain all the seeds. And if someone else sees one, they won’t even notice it.
I’m sure it grows in abundance in places people don’t usually go. Hence, why you don’t see them.
Don’t compare marijuana and kudzu. Kudzu is one of the fastest growing plants in the world, and it has a hardy root system. It was originally brought here to be used to prevent soil errosion. Now we couldn’t get rid of it if we tried.
Details, details…
-Sam
Are you sure about that? I thought ‘Ditchweed’ was low potency maryjane running wild, or at least it used to, mostly having escaped cultivation during the Hemp For Victory campaign during WWII.
As for the general question of the post, as recently as the
1970’s a National Geographic article on the ecology of the
prairies said that there was wild marijuana growing in some of the undeveloped areas. Maybe it’s not there anymore, what with the march of progress and the War on Drugs.
Finally, I’d definitely avoid jimsonweed, whatever you call it. It contains belladonna-type alkaloids which are very toxic. In sum it’s a lot more dangerous than pot.
IN 60’s the idea was to graft a pot plant onto a hops plant & then smoke the hops.
Still, maybe someone can send me a few bales of that roadside pot so I can test it?
You know, I never thought about ‘wild pot,’ even though, here on the Treasure Coast, there have been major fields busted, not to mention major bales washed ashore, major boats stopped and the occasional pot plane down in the Everglades.
Some years ago, a home near a Boy Scout Camp, set on a river, back in the wilds, was busted because curious Scouts discovered major pot growing beyond the border fence in the Palmettos. (Not the brightest place to plant Pot - next to a Boy Scout Camp.) I visited the area months afterwards, saw the stumps, the remains of the alarm system, the small guard shack – but no seedlings, Just lots of little fertilizer balls and palmettos.
As a young man, I prowled the back woods and swamps of the area and never found any wild pot.
However, I did find great masses of the Brazilian Pepper plant, an import which grows like Kudzu all across the State. (It’s a tree with tiny, red poisonous berries.) So, if John Law is so good at eradicating wild pot, why can’t they get rid of the Pepper tree?
I mean, in the 60s and 70s, we had so much pot coming ashore at night that Florida supplied the rest of the States during crackdowns. Kids used to frequently find ‘sea pot’ washed ashore for free. (Bales which had been dumped overboard by smugglers, that broke and masses of pot washed ashore. Kids would grab up the soggy masses, take it home, dry it out and smoke it.)
I would expect that pot would be growing around here like weeds. Especially in this tropical climate.
We’ve noticed an increase in “volunteer” marijuana in our flower beds over the past couple of years. The first time we noticed it, we got all excited, pulled the sucker out of the ground, put it in the back of the pickup and took it to a local expert.
He said it was the wrong stuff. I don’t recall exactly what he said – something about male and female plants, we we didn’t have the right one. Shoot! It smelled right!
Then we thought about what we were doing – driving around town on a Sunday afternoon with a very large, albeit ineffective, marijuana plant in our possession. We took it out in the country and dumped it in a ditch. On the way back to town (I guess we were attuned by then), we noticed tons of the stuff.
It’s back this year. Lots more this time, in several spots around the house. We’re going to wait until fall, when it’s legal to burn outdoors again, and put it on the burn pile. Stand downwind and breathe deeply.
Wonder if we should pull it up and let it dry out first.
Don’t toss marijuana. It’s great in salads and you don’t get high if you don’t burn it oer bake it. but make DAMN sure you don’t have Jimsonweed by mistake. If you aren’t sure make a salad and serve it at the church box lunch. If the guy who got the lunch dies, it is the wrong stuff. On the other hand, if you have a murderous bent, grind up a few peach pits and use them as a condiment on Rhubarb greens.
Some of you might want to check out this site.
http://www.cantiva.com/
“A Common Misconception”
“Hemp is often confused with the marijuana plant. Both come from the plant family Cannabis sativa l., but from very different varieties. The fiber-bearing plant has been bred for thousands of years for its long, fine fibers. Concisely, the fiber plant has no drug value and the drug plant has no fiber value.”
If you got extra seeds just throw them in a city yard or where you work. Great fun to watch it growing.
Our Rennaisance Festival is held each year in Shakopee, Minnesota in the late summer and fall. We noticed while driving down the exit road from that event that we were driving through a marijuana forest. 8 - 10-foot tall plants all over the place. So, what the hell? We ripped up a bunch of the plants and crammed the trunk full. Later, after clipping off the good parts, we tried the process where you put a pound of butter in a pressure cooker with the leaves and buds. Cooked the hell out of it, and let it cool. The butter rises to the top (it’s green now). Then used that butter to make brownies.
It worked.
After thinking about my last post, it may not have been such a good idea. Alot of ditchweed gets sprayed with Paraquat (and who knows what else) to kill it. Making brownies from the stuff my have undesirable effects.
Mods: Feel free to delete my post.
When my parents moved into their house about 20 years ago, an old farm in a secluded valley in a rural area of the northeast U.S., sure enough they found the stuff growing wild, along the banks of a stream which wound through the valley. Being formerly city folk (and college students during the 60’s) they knew exactly what it was and set about exterminating it, lest the law get on their case.
Marijuana is certainly capable of spreading itself by seed. My parents tell the story of their neighbor over the hill, who found an odd plant growing in his garden…clearly a result of a seed which had spread from their property. Being simple folk, it didn’t look like a weed, so he watered it and tended it. Soon it grew a few feet high, and began to sag under its own weight, and he staked it upright. He grew more and more impressed as the plant grew bigger, and he fertilized it and took good care of it. With all the rich fertilizer, it grew to a little over head height and he had to support it with a trellis. It was then, when he was proudly showing off the plant to a neighbor, that someone pointed out exactly what it was. Being a God-fearing, law-abiding man, he couldn’t keep growing it, and he was afraid to chop it up lest the seeds spread. So he (you probably saw this coming)…burned it. My parents swear this is true, but as Cecil has said, even if it isn’t, it’s a good story.
Several years ago when I was in the Army, I was once on an exercise in the remote corners of Ft. Riley, Kansas … to make a long story short, down in a river gully we found a bushy field of wild marijuana with buds almost as long as my forearm.
My grandfather once told me that he and his friends would often collect jimson weed aka (“rabbit weed”) for smoking, and that it made him “high as a Georgia pine”.