Never Too Old to Grow: Decades of Growing Cannabis, and Still Learning

Why Even Experienced Cannabis Growers Keep Learning (Lessons from a 74-Year-Old Cultivator)

After many decades of growing cannabis I am still learning about this awesome plant! No matter how old you are…the plant still teaches….

I have just had my birthday and am 74. I grew my first two strains back in 1968, I was 16 years old, and got my hands on some Santa Marta Columbia Gold, and some Panama Red. I grew the plants out in the middle of nowhere right next to a reservoir in the semi arid climate of Southern Oregon USA. Not only was that country dry, but where I grew the plants was 4500 feet above sea level…not a conducive climate for maturing a tropical Sativa…and we were pretty much clueless on how they flowered anyway. Got a sore throat…and likley just imagined I was high…

Fast Forward to Today, After Decades of Growing Cannabis

And countless gardens, and plants….I am still learning! 58 years of cannabis gardens and the plant is still teaching me.

I spend over a decade as The Ghost, a guerrilla grower known to only a handful of people. I operated in the shadows, and at night. I have stepped on a sleeping bear in the darkness, I have hidden as someone walked just 2 feet away from me, I have had helicopters hover just 50 feet over my head….undetected….and I grew many thousands of plants in those years.

The Plant Always Teaches

Even with all those years of growing cannabis I am still learning, the plant is still teaching me things. You can teach an old dog new tricks!

So here are a few things I have learned in this years hugelkultur bed cannabis grow up at Stony Oasis Farms…my off-grid mountainous sanctuary nestled in the foothills of the Simcoe Mountains in central Washington State.

• Never Top a Large Photoperiod Cannabis Plant Just Once at 2 Feet: Topping a full-season photo plant low down forces all the weight into two massive main trunks. This creates a high-stress “Y” split with a weak central knuckle that easily splits or snaps under heavy bud weight or high winds. I had topped most of this years plants once as they were getting too tall, then expected them to shoot for the sky…but I was wrong…the richness of the soil made them all bush out and produce massive plants…several of which split that knuckle.
• Excess Nitrogen Triggers Overgrown Bushiness: Heavy nitrogen loads turn the lower canopy into a dense, leafy jungle right at the base. It blocks airflow and forces you to spend extra time supporting and tying up heavy, crowded branches. In the future I will not be as generous with the high nitrogen amendments in my hugelkultur beds…although it does make for impressive plants!
• Too Much Nitrogen Delays Flowering: Over-feeding nitrogen keeps the plant pumping vegetative growth long past when it should transition into bloom, pushing back your harvest window when you’re racing against the autumn weather. This would be an issue even when growing sincimillia…your buds will not be as big, and will likely have that ‘hay’ smell when drying. For seed production I always feed nitrogen throughout the plants life, but this was simply too much…too rich.
• Plants Growing This Big, This Fast, Do Need Support: I planned on showing how tough my genetics/plants can be and grow these with no support at all. That was a mistake, these plants grew so big, so fast that their stems did not have the time to really toughen up, to get strong enough to support all that growth. This was especially the case for the lower branches of the plants. I finally built a small waddle fence in front of the plants to help support some of those huge lower branches that were breaking, and I ran a couple rope behind the plants on T-posts to give them some support from the brutal winds that come from the southwest.

With all that teaching going on you might think this grow might have been a failure…but def was not. The plants held up well to all those stresses, and produced their seed. I think I will get some good fully mature viable seed from all the plants…but will not know for sure till I process them.

I took only half the main larger flowers and left the rest, as these plants may live on for s few more weeks, and when you remove half of them the remaining half is super charged because of the mass of nutrients being supplied by their huge root system. And those small buds you left suddenly are fighting for that top spot on the plant. I have seen small pop-corn buds become serious nugs in that few weeks.

Here is what was left after that initial harvest…

And the seeded buds I took away…

Coclusion

I will be processing the seeds, so how that goes, then plan on offering these seeds in a seed pack for an awesome price. I my ability to sell you guys seeds comes to an end…I want to do my part to stock up your seed vault…so you have great cannabis seeds for many years to come.

How is your harvest going? I would love to see…leave me a comment with an image of what you got going on…