> 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'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.