> Also growing it is super easy. If you can grow tomatoes then you are already overqualified.
That's a little overstated. It's easy to grow very low quality weed. Growing something capable of being on a shelf to be sold is very much a skill that takes time, even for someone with a green thumb; the girls get too stressed very easily, and attract pests like you wouldn't believe.
Pretty sure tomatoes attract more pests. Also people grow these in the forest on small sunny patches and they do just fine. It's literally a "weed", it grows like crazy. But yes, it won't be premium quality, just some average weed.
No, it's extremely easy to grow high quality weed too. It cannot be overstated how easy of a crop it is. The (mildly) difficult and labor-intensive part is the post-processing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39482755
B) I was a small grower who worked contributed a small bit to the regulatory infrastructure for Colorado's legalization and communicated with many growers of many crop sizes.
It's not extremely easy.
Additionally trimming isn't difficult in that it takes skill, it's difficult in that it's a lot of mind numbing work. Consistently growing is difficult as a skill.
The whole discussion kind of reminds me of the beer brewing industry, where techies think because they had a couple garage brews that went well (and don't consider the ones that didn't), they think they are a replacement for a brewery. And weed is even worse; you're looking at an hour a day for a small batch, and you can't miss a day. And the girls are way worse at telling you what went wrong, whereas you can generally tell exactly what went wrong with beer from the off flavors.
Stress is good for canabis plant, however, I agree with you that growing quality pest free weed requires daily attention.
I have grown extremely strong weed before the Canadian legalization and the method I used to maximize thc production consists of constantly stressing the plant. It was a combination of topping¹, super-cropping² and stem splitting³.
1- During the vegetative phase cut the top of the plant, wait a few weeks and repeat.
It really just depends on your seeds. Yes there is fancy shit you can do, but good seeds + light + water is literally all you need to grow perfectly fine weed.
The trickier stuff is in curing it, but even that is pretty straightforward.
That may be true, but it is still much more convenient and anonymous to just give someone you trust some money, especially if you live in an apartment, or have small children. I would be extremely hesitant to grow cannabis on our balcony. I am 100% sure neither my landlord, nor my neighbors would approve.
> I would be extremely hesitant to grow cannabis on our balcony.
Why is that? Just buy a small body, auto flowering seed, some fresh soil and water it every couple days and wait. You won't have a gigantic harvest but that's basically all you have to do and you will have more weed than you know what to do with. When grown, cut it, hang it upside down and wait until it's dry.
Anonymity. My neighbors, my parents, my wife's parents, the parents of children that visit my child, everybody passing our balcony on the street, and essentially every visitor to our apartment would assume that we consume drugs regularly. This is something I could not have cared less about when I was in my early twenties and living in a building full of students. But it is not something you want to be associated with if you have children in kindergarten or school and if you have to face other parents or teachers from your neighborhood on a daily basis. If I would start to consume cannabis, I would prefer to do it in private.
Common misconception. You generally want to grow cannabis in a "grow box" of some kind, because you need decent control over the light the plant receives (there's distinct vegetative/flowering phases for cannabis plants). In that case your enclosed box can ventilate through a carbon filter, which by most reports (see the countless threads on r/microgrowery for example) cuts the odors down to nothing, even late in the flowering phase.
You can do it outside as well, but typically a box is the best with regulated lighting, temperature and humidity.
I’m not sure I believe the carbon filter reduces the smell to nothing, in my experience it still stinks while running through an internal AND external carbon filter.
The smoking also produces strong odors, which (as a neighbor) I do not approve of, so I'm not sure if adding the odors from growing and processing to that will make the situation much worse?
Many are switching to vaping these days, which produces far less odour, and what little there is dissipates quickly. Vapour also doesn't stick to fabrics, walls etc like smoke does - it's just superior to smoking in every way.
> [Vaping is] just superior to smoking in every way.
Is there higher risk of infection transmission? I'm sure those reports a few years ago of serious lung infections from tainted vape oils are biasing my thinking here, but it also makes some sense that a high-temperature flame on a dry medium wouldn't transmit nearly as many microorganisms as a lower temperature vaporization of a wet medium.
That usually came from some additive for the desired viscosity of the vaping liquid, leading to popcorn lungs. Only black market things, didn't happen to legally aqquired stuff where it was legal at the times.
If someone smokes a joint near your window, that smell will probably be gone in half an hour. If there is a plant that's just sitting there, it'll be more subtle, but it's not going anywhere.
That said – many people like the smell of Hopfentee (Hop tea), which is pretty similar.
Right, it does have a strong odor. But if you have a balcony then it's easy even in an apartment. Without a balcony it is a kinda difficult as you need some carbon filtering set up.
Weed can easily be adulterated (e.g. by spraying with synthetic cannabinoids), but generally it's trivial to find a supplier who doesn't do that. But also true of MDMA and ketamine.
Also growing it is super easy. If you can grow tomatoes then you are already overqualified.