Growing is a therapy; flowers are the medicine.

How many people have watched their grandparents or parents work the land and grow their own vegetables or fruit? How wonderful do they taste? How good does it feel to know that someone close to you and important in your life took control of the situation, put non-toxic food on the table, and supplied it to members of the family? The same feelings apply to cultivating one's own cannabis by one's own methods.

It is time to care about (and be directly responsible for) the production of flowers used for self-medication. It is time to stop blindly trusting one's health to big drug/pharmaceutical companies. It is time to invest in making one's own small terrace plants or small outdoor grow, thereby using the flowers to make a medicine which is simple to produce, lasts a long time and helps alleviate many different complaints. By being a good gardener, one becomes an aware person who takes a holistic approach to helping oneself and others.

Spring is upon us and summer is around the corner. Now is the time to do a little preparation to enable the growth of one's own medical marijuana. Even if you have never grown a seed, if you follow these basic steps and adapt them to your particular growing environment you will be well rewarded by the gifts of Mother Nature.

Growing plants or flowers is not for everyone, but through a desire to produce cannabis, many people who thought they could only kill plants have surprised themselves and their friends by growing, flowering, and harvesting a cannabis plant. This in itself makes cannabis growing rewarding but therapeutic.

Assume we would like to produce six straightforwardly maintained and easily moveable female plants harvestable in late September. We do not want the plants to get too tall since most terraces or balconies have their limits. We might not want certain visitors to know what we are doing. We need ten to fifteen, 6 litre pots. (Bigger pots require less maintenance as the plant matures so using 10 litre pots would be better.) Three-quarters fill each pot with a soil that is suitable for the cultivation of flowering shrubs. I recommend a coco fiber soil mix along with a two-part food. Soil from the garden would be fine, but sterilized coco fibre soil mix allows sufficient air to circulate at the roots of the plants, which usually results in a healthy flourishing plant, and one knows exactly what one is beginning with when buying bags with a controlled ph and EC. Garden soil differs greatly from garden to garden and harbours dormant weed seed, which sometimes outgrows the plant during early stages of cultivation. If a bag of coco soil comes in 60 litres and you want to fill 10 pots at 6 litres each you will need to buy one or two bags, just to have a little spare.

Picking a seed is the next important consideration. A strain that finishes by late September to early October and produces a good yielding flower grows easily in the Italian climate. The flower must not grow too tall and must be able to support itself. April to late October is our growing/flowering period. Since Italy has a Mediterranean climate, most strains will grow well, but not all strains will finish in time. As a general rule, use more indica predominant strains in the north and either sativa or indica dominant strains in the south. The greater the indica influence in the strain, the quicker it is likely to finish before being adversely affected by weather conditions.

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