Fierce Planet

Hey Colorado! Grow Your Own.

Posted on November 15, 2013 by jnfr

I live in Colorado and last year the state passed Amendment 64, which legalized marijuana for recreational use. Unlike the law in Washington state, Colorado’s law allows private citizens to grow marijuana for their own use (not for resale).

There are limits on the number of plants you can grow (six) and how many can be in flower at once (three). The plants have to be out of public sight and in a locked space. You can share with friends only if the friends are over 21 years old, and you can give away no more than an ounce at a time, nor can you carry more than an ounce outside your home. Otherwise, you are free to grow what you can in the privacy of your home.

I immediately got some seeds and started my first home grow in years.

There are some tricks to growing marijuana, but not too many. If you can grow a decent tomato—and lots of us can—you can grow decent-to-great sinsemilla in your home. Sinsemilla (literally “without seeds”) refers to growing strong female buds in the absence of pollen to fertilize them. Their strength goes into creating and ripening all the medical and psychoactive chemicals that the marijuana plant provides.

I had great success. The picture above shows one of my buds from the first grow. In total I got about five ounces damp weight, which dried down to about two or three ounces. The process took about six months from seeds to cured buds.

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Best reads

Posted on September 3, 2013 by jnfr

This week, try these three.

Harold Myerson at the American Prospect, on a new labor alliance in California. L.A. Story, The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy: a new model for American liberalism?

From reporters at the Arkansas Times, working with InsideClimate News, The path of the Pegasus pipeline in Arkansas, Exxon’s pipeline cuts across the watersheds that provide drinking water for 770,000 Arkansans.

And James Fallows at the Atlantic presents an analysis of the situation in Syria, Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk. An in-depth, step-by-step account of how we got here and what might come next.

All are well worth your time.

Equality Day

Posted on August 26, 2013 by jnfr

On August 26, 1920, women were at last granted the right to vote. Today is Women’s Equality Day. The picture below is from 1918. In a time when voting rights are under constant attack, I hope we show the same courage as those who fought for our rights so many years ago.

Irin Carmon at MSNBC’s site has an interesting round-up from those days, predicting the evils that would befall if women were allowed to vote.

Shameful

Posted on August 19, 2013 by jnfr

That in the richest country on earth we refuse to feed poor, hungry children.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that SNAP benefits will be cut automatically in November of this year, as the additional funding that had been allocated to feeding people will not be renewed by this Congress.

The amount this saves is miniscule, as you can see in the graphic below. But these small amounts make a lot of difference in the lives and the nutrition of the families who need them. I know, because my mother raised us on welfare (AFDC it was, back then). What this says about us as a country (and particularly about the Republicans in Congress, who hate poor people passionately) is shameful.