# I'm thinking of giving this a try!



## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

Well, now. It seems we have a potential cash crop growing wild all over the property. Down in our ravine, which is a total of 7 acres by itself, we have almost thigh high hemp plants EVERYWHERE! They are also all over the top pasture and finding there way into my veggie gardens. I've been pulling them out, (putting them into the compost, don't worry Forerunner), of the garden spaces like crazy. 
Well, I found this article this morning, and just might give it a go come this winter. I'll be trying the snow retting, as to be honest, it looks like the least amount of hassle!:gaptooth:
http://www.scacommunity.com/blog/arts-a-sciences/96.html
Apparently the cattle won't eat the stuff, but horses will. So we may be looking into getting a few four legged "weeders" for next spring. :hobbyhors


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## SvenskaFlicka (Nov 2, 2011)

Ooh, I'd be careful. That's known in Nebraska as ditchweed, and it's probably actually wild marijuana, not true hemp. The local authorities might not look too kindly on cultivation of it if they find out. 

However, if you're just saving the stalks, and composting the leaves, I should think you'd be safe.


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## SvenskaFlicka (Nov 2, 2011)

Oops, double post.


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

SvenskaFlicka said:


> Ooh, I'd be careful. That's known in Nebraska as ditchweed, and it's probably actually wild marijuana, not true hemp. The local authorities might not look too kindly on cultivation of it if they find out.
> 
> However, if you're just saving the stalks, and composting the leaves, I should think you'd be safe.


Well now.
I just called one of the neighbors and your right! It is "ditchweed". Awesome.:runforhills: 
Do you think it'll process the same? If not I have no idea how in the world we are going to get rid of all of it. I mean seriously, I must have pulled out almost 10 pounds of the stuff yesterday and thrown it in the compost, and barely made a dent in it. The neighbor said your supposed to spray it with Round-up, but I happen to be one of those anti Round-up people.. crap. Now I'm having an arguement with myself over how to get rid of the stuff.
Thanks so much Sven for giving me something else to worry over:stars: do I spray and go against my better judgement, or do I pull it and hope no one sees, or do I ignore it and get a couple horses in here to try and eat it down along with the rest of that piece that we are letting have a rest due to over grazing...shhhhhhh, I think I hear the feds!:runforhills:


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## Taylor R. (Apr 3, 2013)

Could it be mowed down with a brush hog or something? I realize it'll just be back that way, but it might be a safer way to deal with it. My dad had it growing almost a half acre back from the road, and since he's also not a round-up fan (I have made a good impression on him ) he just kept mowing it down.


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## SvenskaFlicka (Nov 2, 2011)

Could you get a tractor and shredder into the area it's growing in before it goes to seed and mow it all down? That way it might self-mulch and improve the soil a bit too? :shrug: In my experience, horses and cows don't care much for it. Goats will eat it, though.
I think you could process some of it like you would hemp, but you'll have shorter fiber length. I think it would be fun to try.  

I honestly didn't want to make you that worried. And honestly, as long as you don't look like you're purposely cultivating it, the authorities won't care. It grows everywhere in Nebraska, lol.


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

I like the idea of the shredder, we have talked about reseeding that pasture,, this might be a good alternative along with that.
WIHH, do you think that stuff will kill the grass? Mind you, this stuff is really taking over in there, so there probably isn't as much grass as we would like to think..
I'm really not that paranoid Sven:kiss:, but I do have a son that would be most happy if he realized it was back there, and that is a hassle I don't need!:catfight: LOL!


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## Forerunner (Mar 23, 2007)

HercsMa.....that stuff does make good compost......full of trace minerals, obviously.

If I had it to contend with, I'd compost it with abandon and tell the "authorities", if they showed up, just what I was doing, and why, and that I expected to be left to handle the "problem" after my own fashion, making the best use of the resource as I dispose of it properly, thanks much. 

I also wouldn't hesitate to dry the stalks for the fiber........

_The Father of Creation_ put our plants here, every one with multiple purposes, and I don't appreciate the lack of appreciation shown by some for the wise use of any one of them....... :flame:


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

You make a very valid point FR.
Ok, well I actually spoke to a county sherrif that just happened to be sitting on the side of the highway shooting radar as I drove by. I think I actually freaked him out just a bit when I pulled over next to him.

Anyway, he said I can go ahead and just either pull it for compost, and fiber, or spray, or whatever. That the only way I get introuble is if I happen to be spotted hanging the stuff up to dry. 
So, back to your regular posting, I'm going to go ahead and try to harvest the stalks for fiber, and just compost the rest of the plant. :clap:


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## Forerunner (Mar 23, 2007)

I love a good rebel story, just before bedtime. :thumb:


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

:happy:


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## SvenskaFlicka (Nov 2, 2011)

Yay! Good to hear you got it figured out. When in doubt, talk to the authorities.


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## standles (Apr 12, 2013)

Burn it ans stand downwind after you get it started good :hysterical:


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

:hysterical:ound::hysterical:
I'll admit, it was a thought for a few minutes!:hysterical::hysterical:


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## MullersLaneFarm (Jul 23, 2004)

I'm trying to imagine the horses & goats after eating it ... are they going to get the munchies and just eat more??

After we bought our place & started cleaning it up, we found a good stand of the stuff. Called the country sheriff on how to properly, legally dispose of it. They said they didn't care and probably burning would be the best way ....



> that of snow retting. For this you cut down your plants and collect them so that they do not start retting,


heheheh, how are you going to accomplish the above without 


> he only way I get introuble is if I happen to be spotted hanging the stuff up to dry.


I guess, you just don't let anyone see you!


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## Marchwind (May 10, 2002)

Here is what Google said about "Ditch Weed"

Cannabis ruderalis
Cannabis ruderalis is a putative species of Cannabis originating in central Russia. It flowers earlier than C. indica or C. sativa, does not grow as tall, and can withstand much harsher climates than either of them. Wikipedia
Scientific name: Cannabis ruderalis
Rank: Species
Higher classification: Hemp

So, it is Hemp. The US used to be one of the top producers of Hemp back in the 20'-30's. Colorado planted its first official Hemp crop that is legal. Now a days Canada is a top producer.


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## MullersLaneFarm (Jul 23, 2004)

Ditchweed is the common expression of any wild growing cannabis ... regardless of the THC content


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

Hemp used to be the major crop here, too.

But, umm, nobody is going to hassle people about wild weed growing anywhere (ditchweed). It's junk, no THC in it, it's completely useless as far as smoking it, and cops could care less about it. It will get taller than a few feet tho, and it will bloom, but the mature buds are small and look nothing like smoking pot, on which the buds are huge and full of resin. 

So go ahead and let it grow and harvest it for fiber if you want. In case you didn't know, people smoke the mature buds, and the leaves are useless, they are discarded.

I've got the stuff all over, and how it got out back by the woodchuck burrows is beyond me, it usually just grows around my garden. I ignore it. Once a neighbor commented to me I was supposed to pull it up, and I just said I don't have time to worry about stuff that's useless, and everybody else just laughs about it. 

If it's back in a ravine on your land that doesn't have public access, how would any one know you even have it?


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## lathermaker (May 7, 2010)

Horses won't eat it. They would stomp it to the ground looking for something else edible though....


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## frazzlehead (Aug 23, 2005)

All I know is that Canada is one of the top producers ... of BOTH kinds of hemp! 

I've been to BC, after all ...

But seriously, one of the students at Fibre Week did his level 6 project on growing and spinning hemp. It's a really interesting book. If I run into him, I'll ask if he'd mind sharing what he learned if you want. He's a real character, he really makes me laugh and he's SO talented!


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## hercsmama (Jan 15, 2004)

:thumb:Frazzle that would be great!
Dh and I spoke about it last night, he's going to build me the platform for snow retting. I do need to see about this "Oil" that they discuss in the article. I'm wondering if it's something I can make, or if it is better to find a source to purchase it.....


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

I lived in the "Emerald Triangle" for 24 years, WIHH, where it's legal and people grow it all over in the open, plus some people do massive indoor grows. You get legal permits and stuff for it. It's hard to not know about it all. It's everywhere and the knowledge about it isn't a secret. You can verify my info all over the web with a simple Google search.

The Emerald Triangle originally included the North Coast counties, Humbolt, Mendocino, and Trinity, which are very large remote, very mountainous and mostly empty BLM forest land. All the hippies from the 60's moved north to the North Coast of CA, and lower Oregon, so it's THE place for artists, free thinkers, intentional communities, liberal philosophy and politics, and now it is a major wine region, and tourist mecca, as well. But it is a poor region overall. Today the Triangle also includes Lake County, where I lived, where the Feds do more raids and arrests than any other county in the USA. Lake Co still has dangerous Mexican cartels growing there in the wilderness areas, and everybody wants them to get busted, they are really bad people. 

A pound of high quality, legal, NorCal pot sells for anywhere from $2,000 to $6,000. That is not the usual inflated and totally erroneous "per joint" valuations by cops in the press or on tv, that is the wholesale value by the pound.

Mendocino County, in which I have many friends for many years, passed laws defunding marijuana enforcement, so the cops can't even use a pencil to write stuff down about it. The local economies are dependent on marijuana income to residents because there are very few jobs left, with logging all but gone. Many people would go hungry and homeless. Local governments would go bankrupt from lack of revenues. I'm not kidding. Really.

In fact, the North Coast has a labor shortage during the harvest in October, hiring people to manicure the buds after they are cured.

Don't you guys know about Oaksterdam? Oakland CA in the Bay Area is known as Oaksterdam, the USA version of Amsterdam, because it was a whole culture, and home of the Oaksterdam University where they taught an entire college-type curriculum with diplomas in growing marijuana and professional jobs/working within the industry.

There are hydro stores on every street corner. The local Lake County hero, and well-known throughout NorCal, was Eddie Lepp who row-cropped 40 acres of good weed right along Hwy 29, in Upper Lake, Ca, in defiance. The Feds confiscated his harvest, and sent him to federal prison, and published their valuation of his crop at many millions of dollars in the news. But CA law says he has to be reimbursed for the value of the legal crop, that the crop can't be confiscated like that, so he was suing the Feds for the full amount in court in SF. And the jury in his federal court conviction said in the newspapers they would have acquitted him if the court hadn't withheld info from them about sentencing choices and critical info they said would have changed their minds.

I was at a big hydro store one time in Ukiah, getting a new ballast unit for my 1,000 watt HPS grow light,( I only grow veggie transplants with it from March to June in the cellar) and two guys came in and bought several thousand dollars of very large grow equipment, packed it into their pickup truck and took it home. That happens all the time.

With legalization, pot prices have drastically fallen on the West Coast and some growers are having trouble selling their crops at all, let alone for decent money. The only alternative is to ship the legally grown stuff to states that make it illegal, which keeps prices artificially high. In CA we had dispensaries that legally sold pot as smoke, cookies and brownies, butter, candy, and so forth, to people with prescriptions. Getting a prescription is easy.

Pot has been carefully bred for decades now, and there are many potent strains, just like tomato varieties, with names like White Widow, Blueberry, Bubblegum, Train Wreck, Lemon Diesel, and more. You can buy coffee table books with a hundred pages of large color photos of beautiful buds, noting the differences in strains. There are online databases of varieties. Some strains have legends about them, the one I know from locals, was the legend of Train Wreck. It was bred by 2 brothers, mostly sativa genes and a touch of indica, and they did an outdoor grow along the freight train tracks on the coast in Mendo. Just before harvest time, a Union Pacific freight train derailed just a few hundred yards from the garden, so the people had to do a rushed, early harvest to avoid detection. That's the correct legend of the name. This new strain turned out to be really fabulous, but is almost exclusively grown indoors today, and is now very rare, as it is only grown by a few people who use female clones and no seeds are ever generated. Marijuana female buds are worthless if allowed to pollinate with male plants and get seeds in them. 

Don't you guys know about 4:20? The code word began decades ago among students at the Marin High School, to mean it's time to go smoke a bowl. Today 4/20 at 4:20 is a major day/time of celebration around the world.

I am sure some of you here disapprove of legal pot, but in fact, legal alcohol and tobacco cause tremendously, vastly more harm to us by far, in illnesses, deaths and crime. Pot is not addictive, it does not cause hallucinations, it does not cause violent behavior or violent crime. People don't burglarize houses or kill or steal for it. That's the meth people. Pot smokers are too mellow and nice and generally don't do much. Marijuana doesn't destroy communities, families and individuals like Meth does. We are criminalizing a lot of non-violent, otherwise law-abiding people for nothing worthwhile, and our country has the highest rate of people in prison per capita than any other country in the world. Prison has become a for-profit private industry and will destroy us.

Here in NE Iowa, my biggest gripe is the stupid DARE stuff in the schools. Drug Awareness Resistance Education. Well, last year, the sherrif did a DARE session in the kindergarten class at the Monona school. So the next day a 5 yr old boy brought a joint to school and said he worried about his parents, because the DARE people made him beleive his parents would get sick and die. So, of course, the parents went to jail and lost their jobs, home, possessions, everything they had, and the boy was sent into the foster care system, which is abysmal. The town now is stuck with an abandonned house not being kept up, and no property tax money. I will bet you $1,000 that child will never trust police or adults again, after what he went thru because of that educational nonsense. I challenge anyone to tell me how this whole incident benefited anyone or the community. Plus we now have to pay for the incarceration and destroyed lives of these nonviolent, working people who did no harm to anyone. Also, our schools here, in towns of not more than 2,000 folks at most, proclaim the great trust they have between school staff and the students. But several times a year, the law enforcement agencies get together with school staff, to do a big drug sweep of the locked-down schools with dogs and all. Exactly how does that say they trust the students? They never ever find anything, so it's stupid. The meth people are the ones we need to focus our resources on. They are truly evil people.

Okay, now off my soapbox. And yes, I am a liberal progressive Democrat and I am a rebel at heart, always have been and I'm a product of the North Coast artistic liberal culture. I'm not a real big hippie type, I'm not quite mellow enough to fit in totally, but my friends there all are, they are older folks from the Summer of Love.



Wind in Her Hair said:


> I gotta ask- how is it y'all know so much about pot?
> 
> :angel:
> 
> ...


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

And Hercsmamma, you want to let the plants mature before you harvest them for fiber.


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## Forerunner (Mar 23, 2007)

Thank you for that incredibly revealing post, Lez.

The sum of it is a perfect illustration of why the micromanagement of a nation is the most unjust approach to it's governance.

People who are harming no one in their pursuit of happiness.......and whole communities made up of such peoples, should be left to make their own life choices....... a concept once embodied in the phrase, "_Liberty and Justice for All_".

I wish those free spirits the absolute best.


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

Okay friends, I hope my following post doesn't break too many rules here. Sorry if it does, you guys, but...

There is a lot of pot slang out there; I don't really know that much of it, TRULY, I'm 53 and not that hip anymore, my adult kids laugh at me a lot for still using old slang words like "that's really cool", but I do know the slang phrase "wake and bake", which means you wake up and, along with your first good cup of gourmet morning Joe, you torch a bongload to start the day out right. (This is _not recommended_ if you want to get anything done that day...) 

But I was curious about others defining it, and happened to go to the online Urban Dictionary, for it. There were actually quite a lot of examples of definitions. The fifth given example definition was obviously written by someone with brilliant wit, humor, and language skills, and he was prolly pretty stoned when he composed it. But ever since I first read it, I find it hysterically funny and laugh my entire tookas off at it. It's way better than the 'How much wood would a wood chuck chuck" thing. I'm pasting it in below:

WAKE AND BAKE:




Wake and bake is when you wake up after sleeping and immediately smoke marijuana. It immediately makes one feel an incredible high. Also known as......
"Whats a wake and bake?" said the freshman to the senior......." That's when I arise with red eyes...turn n burn, pillow and billow, roust and roast, resin toast, raise n toast, oj and roll a j, puffin muffin, pancake n bake, BIG BOWL A RAISIN BRAIN BIG BOWL O RESIN MAAAN!, BISQUICK AND QUICK HIT THIS ----, scope n dope, listerine and mr green, mach 3 turbo and pack thee herbo, armor n hammer baking soda and peroxide whitening toothpaste and SMOKE SOME WEED! Arise my sticky green villagers. Big meeting at the firepit, be brave my villagers! Some wont make it back...for today nugs will die, but for we as a village, the hour of weed is upon us, for today we PACK THE CHRON AT THE CRACK OF DAWN!"


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## IowaLez (Mar 6, 2006)

I apologize for making the conversation topic curve off course.

I should prolly say that I have NEVER been involved in growing, harvesting, gathering, selling, distributing, or transporting, marijuana by myself, me, in the marijuana industry, legal or not.

I have not seen any of my CA friends since I left 5 yrs ago, except one who made a trip to the East Coast on his motorcycle. I do get some local gossip news from a few friends I talk on the phone to once in a while, and I read the local newspapers online. But I am distant from stuff physically.

Things have changed in CA since I left, and the latest info I've had about legal stuff with the feds was watching the "Weed Country" tv reality show on cable. And the CNBC financial channel had 2 specials on the marijuana economy in CA.

It is little-known that CA is two states in reality. NorCal has nothing in common with SoCal, which is dominated by the singular artificial landscape of L.A.; NorCal is like Oregon in almost every way, except it is more ethnically diverse. NorCal has twice tried to secede from the larger state, unsuccessfully. You can drive the North Coast for 5 hours before you reach the Oregon border. NoCal hates SoCal because the south always wants to take all the North's water.

I am not anti-guns, nor anti-hunting, and I hate the Sierra Club with a passion. So don't think you and I can't get along with our differences in thought. CA is a very poorly run state, and it is just not a fun place to live in any more. I have no desire to be back there, I just wish the mellowness could be spread around and rational thought dominate things instead of zero tolerance Stalin-like actions by officials.

And my humor on this topic is just my juvenile attempts to be funny. I am absolutely horrible at regular jokes that have punchlines. My delivery of them is awful. But there are moments when I throw out gems of silliness when I'm writing. And you guys are helpless victims.


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## Marchwind (May 10, 2002)

Yup! What Lezlie said. I have several friends in Mendosino. Went to visit them many moons ago. While walking to town one day I was admiring gardens and then I looked and looked again. I turned to my friend and said, "Those are pot plants, aren't they?" They actually are beautiful plants very frilly and airy.

I feel the same way about the DARE program, one of the worst programs around. My sister calls it, DARE to turn in your parents.


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