During the COVID pandemic, some people picked up hobbies like breadmaking, knitting and puzzle solving. Others, like my father, decided that at the ripe age of 56, it was the perfect time to start growing weed on our patio.
What followed was a crash course in backyard cultivation.
As a family we were trained to constantly worry about the “plants,” conducting seaweed fertilizer checks, fighting off the depredations of corn earworms with increasingly desperate soapy concoctions and trimming buds while watching Sunday Night Football with pops. By the next morning, my fingers would be stuck together and reeked of weed.
Then there was the drying stage. Freshly trimmed buds could be found hanging from a clothesline strung through my brother’s room; the house began smelling increasingly like a dispensary and the ritual of “burping” the weed jars seemed to permanently embed the smell of cannabis into the carpet.
I had friends who were learning how to play chess with their fathers. Meanwhile, I was operating as Lead Trimmer No. 2 in the Reese household.
There is a right way to grow cannabis. My family, however, seemed to specialize in the wrong way.
We had no grow room, no fancy equipment and certainly no agricultural background. We had plant rollers, twist ties, Les Schwab tires, two increasingly battered plants and my dad’s willingness to Google whatever problem appeared that week.
What surprised me the most was how intensive growing cannabis actually is. There was nothing particularly carefree about it. The plants required constant attention, troubleshooting and a surprising amount of family labor. What had started as my dad’s pandemic hobby quickly became a household operation, complete with assigned duties, pest-control strategies and protecting the plants from the California wind.
By harvest season, I had learned enough cannabis vocabulary to make my high school self deeply concerned about who I had become. I knew what bud rot looked like: discolored leaves, mushy or slimy bud, wispy white or grey mold growing in the core of a cola, a tightly packed cluster of buds.
I knew how to dry trim, using micro scissors to snip away any leaves around the bud. I knew that “burping” a jar meant opening the jar of weed for a short time to let out trapped moisture and stale air during the curing process. I knew that cannabis plants, despite being plants, were not particularly good at taking care of themselves.
Maybe that was the real lesson of my father’s pandemic green thumb. Growing weed sounds like a relaxing hobby when you imagine watering a plant and watching it grow. In reality, it is a lot closer to running a tiny agricultural operation, one where your family members become unpaid employees and you have to explain to the neighbors we aren’t hotboxing the neighborhood.
Who knows where this hobby may take you. For my father, it ended with a lot of cursing. But for Utah Lange, co-owner of Lofty Growers, a small-batch cannabis cultivation farm in Eugene, it launched his business. Lange started with backyard cannabis horticulture and now has a “grower-owned” company.
“The hardest part of home cultivation is failure,” Lange says. “You have to fail to prevail.”
Lange recommends starting small, getting organic matter soil, checking in with the Organic Material Review Institute for any pest management solutions and reading as many books as you can.
For anyone inspired by my father’s example or Lange’s words of encouragement, Eugene has plenty of resources for aspiring home growers. Sorority House by Chalice Weed Dispensary, Amazon Organics, The People’s Wellness Center and Moss Crossing all sell clones — exact genetic copies of a healthy parent plant. Clones are often sold rather than a seed since they guarantee a female plant, which only produces usable bud. Emerald Valley Gardens, the oldest grow shop in Eugene, has soils, nutrients and grow equipment for indoor and outdoor cultivation for beginners. Just be prepared to recruit your family.
Sorority House by Chalice Weed Dispensary is at 588 East 11th Avenue, 541-600-8185; The People’s Wellness Center is at 71 Centennial Loop Suite B, 541-505-8100; Moss Crossing is at 2751 Friendly Street, 541-636-3724; and Amazon Organics is at 3443 Hilyard Street, 541-636-4100. Find Lofty Growers on Instagram @loftygrowers and LoftyGrowers.com. Emerald Valley Gardens is at 88680 McVay Highway, and EVGardens.com.