Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Cannabis

I'm trying my hand at growing weed. It's legal in New York now, so it's a good time to start.

It's a bit late in the season to start, but if one of the plants survives, maybe I'll have some weed by the time it gets cold outside.

The plants started as five seeds that I bought online, $10 each.

I put them in a cup of water for a couple of days. When they began to sprout, I planted each in a plastic cup of potting soil.

That platform is a bunch of chopsticks superglued together.

Two of the plants never "opened up" to produce leaves, and so died. I put the surviving three out back on a stool to grow in partial shade until they were mature enough to transplant into larger pots.

Today I bought $50 in potting soil, more than enough to fill three 5 gallon plastic buckets, and replanted into the buckets. First they spent a little while in the shower, draining water through the soil and out the holes that I drilled in the bottom of the buckets.

Then I lugged the filled buckets up five flights of stairs to the roof. I recently replaced my old broken futon with a new couch, and so I had many slats of wood to work with (well, Ikea "wood"), which allowed me to set up this raised pallet to support the plants and allow them to drain.

It's supposed to rain for the next three days, so that'll be an opportunity to see how the buckets fare and drain. It also means that I won't immediately have to start lugging gallons of water up the stairs to the roof every day to water the plants.

Here's the new couch.

I'll update this post when the plants have grown more.

Costs

Here's a table of what I've spent, so far, on this project:

Update: They All Died

Yep, all three plants are dead. Here are some pictures that I took shortly before the end.

Where did the third one go? I found a bird feather in one of the buckets, so I have my suspicions.

There was no saving the other two plants. The issue, I think, is that those buckets are too big for such small plants. When it rains, the soil holds water that the plants can't take up, and they "drown."

So, better luck next year? No, let's try to grow indoors! Check out part two.