 So I'm Julie and I'm super excited to be here because I am not a scientist But I am a nerd and I Totally have nerded out on this topic for the past two years And I'm super excited to share it with you in this open and public way Because as a child growing up in the 80s the first thing I learned about drugs was Drugs are bad. Just say no and I was very against Consuming any kind of drug including marijuana For decades. In fact, my mother started growing marijuana in the backyard when I was in my 20s And I was furious. I was like mom. You can't be growing drugs That's that's just terrible. That's like you're a loser. So I was really influenced by the just say no campaign of the 80s and I really did think that I would be a loser if I use this so part of my talk here today with you all is Getting rid of my my cannabis shame and acknowledging that it is actually a wonderful plant But that is up to everybody to make their own decision. I'm not a pusher. I'm just a nerd Okay, so we're gonna go over some big sciencey words here including things like cannabinoids trichomes Pistol it and stamina it dioecious vegetative propagation environmental stress photo period is Cinemia and botrytis. These are some of the things we'll cover. So you'll get your science in along with your stony goodness All right, so first your question is can I grow it legally and the answer is a resounding yes You can if you have a medical marijuana card You are allowed to buy plants from any dispensary that sells them and these guys are lovable Oakland cops have been mandated by the 2004 measure Z to make adult cannabis crimes of use and Possession the lowest priority So I have a funny story to tell you about this. I've lived in Oakland for three years now and There's a lot of crime in Oakland as I'm sure you well know and the neighborhood that I lived in had plenty of it In fact the first year I lived there my neighbor got robbed at gunpoint in his driveway Which is also my driveway. So a few months ago My friends had texted me early in the morning Julie. Julie. Are you okay? There's all these cops in front of your house and I had 23 cannabis plants in the backyard So out I go and sure enough there are four cops in front of my house. They were there about a shooting Okay, somebody had fired a gun on my block in the middle of the night and that's why they were all there and As far as me They totally did not care that I was That they could probably smell the plants They could see the ones on the patio because the patio has the best son in the front of the house So there were a couple out there, too Nobody came back. Nobody did anything. So that is measures the inaction for you I will say this try to be a good neighbor, you know, don't be a dick Like if you're growing your plants, you know, keep them in your yard Don't have them all like hanging out. Don't blow smoke in your neighbors, you know Windows just be a good neighbor and nobody cares. The first question is can I grow this plant? What do plants need light carbon dioxide water and good soil and nutrients? I think I can provide all those things to a plant. I'm pretty smart But let's drill down here for a minute and let's think about Your particular environment my backyard environment in Oakland has these considerations The backyard is shady There's it's unsecured. There's not actually a lock to my backyard It has no soil, but brick and concrete patios and there's a hot redwood deck So cannabis is a plant that's grown all over the world in all sorts of climates In many different types of strains So my advice to you is pick the strains that grow well in this environment And that is going to be something you'll ask at the dispensary what grows well in Oakland Now I didn't do that, but I tried to solve the problems another way Here's my patio garden in mid-August and as you can see I've these are about three of the 23 plants I had in the backyard star dog Blue dream and the biggest one on the right there is something I grew from a seed So I don't actually know what kind it is I found a few seeds in my bud last year and I sprouted them and it turned out to be the most vigorous plant in the garden so you can see I have them in grow pots and They're on carts, so I trundled them back and forth following the Sun and The ones that were on the carts in the biggest pots are the ones that got the biggest Let's see so Now let's go to sciencey words time Let's get Carl This is a hybrid this is across Bluegrass and Chucky bluegrass featherbed bench and northern California, Sena Mia Amazing stuff about this is that you can play 36 holes on it in the afternoon Take it home and just get stoned it a bit Jesus belt that night on this stuff Okay, so that was from the 1980 film caddy shack and indeed somebody said it over there that it means without seeds and Here's some botany for you. I know you're waiting for the botany part Only female plants produce seeds But only have pollinated by a male plant and seeds mean less potent cannabis. Does anybody know why? Anybody anybody anybody all right. I'll tell you why so when a tiny little grain of pollen hits the female plant She stops producing delicious resin, which is what we all get high off of and she starts producing the seeds So here's another good sciencey word for you dioecious means having Male and female organs on separate plants a lot of plants are money She's meaning they put the stamens and the pistols on the same flower and this Can anybody recognize that this is a male plant? Yes. Do I see some nodding? It's because of these Flowers they are called flowers and when they open they will pour pollen into the wind and ruin your garden so you have to make sure if you're growing plants from seed to identify and destroy all the males Sorry guys, but let's take gender politics out of it Shall we and just call them by their botanical names? The female is pistol late because she has these little hairs called pistols and the male is Staminate because he has his reproductive organ are called statements And in the garden, there's no place for a Staminate plants. We just don't want them. We don't need them and If you find them you must kill them sad fact even if one little grain of pollen finds its way into the sticky fragrant female pistol You get seeds not since a Mia, right? You want since a Mia not seeds Okay, here's a thread from the internet about how to get more females Now this is a problem you will run into frequently on your grow bad advice from the internet And you will not know how bad it is until you've had some experience So be my advice to you when you're growing is read books Do not go online because you'll get this guy. I don't know if you can read it. He says Hey, I left you a message in another thread about giving yourself a better female to male ratio And I'm not sure you got it. So I'm gonna tell you again birth control pill Dissolve in 1.5 liters of water Put seeds in the bottle and the next morning treat them as you would any other seed the seeds taken the estrogen from the pill Yeah, right Keep in mind people who write on cannabis forums are usually stoned So be very very careful about any advice from the internet. This is a good piece of advice for you It's called photo periodism and it's very important for your Bay Area cool summers Cannabis is one of the plants similar to Poinsettia or chrysanthemum that flowers when The nights get longer and the days get shorter. This is called photo periodism the plant reacts To the length of the day and for all of us We're gonna be growing outdoors because it's legal and it's ecological and it's environmentally friendly to grow outdoors So you must be aware of photo periodism now Most of you are gonna get your plants from a dispensary like I did and This brings us to the topic of vegetative propagation Otherwise known in the cannabis world as cloning. Did you know that you can take a clone of any plant? Yes, you can take a cutting From any plant and you give it a little rooting hormone and you put it in a nice friendly medium And you can grow the exact same plant. Isn't that amazing? You can't do that with puppies I mean, I think that's amazing. So I was so excited about this that I ran around the neighborhood And I tried cloning some neighborhood plants and lo and behold here are some of my plants that I cloned this was somebody's tree growing in their front yard and I took a little three inch piece of it and This is a rose geranium And I also took a little piece of its stem and I cloned them and now they are successfully thriving in my yard So I had a lot of confidence see and I thought well if I can clone plants I'm sure I can take care of clones and I was really excited to get my plants and I forgot about photoperiodism and what I did was in March I got my plants and This is a lesson on what not to do do not be impatient and get your plants early and do not grow them Where you think they will be nice and undisturbed in the basement and I'll tell you why even though I have lights and I have a fan Blowing on my little baby clones They were in the basement to try to grow up big for two months from March mid-March to mid-April to mid-May and What is a basement environment like compared to what a cannabis likes? It's damp. It's cool and it's dark the perfect storm for Mildew and mildew is what going to be the bane of your existence. It certainly was the bane of my existence Mildew attacks Canada's plants. So what you want to do is get your clones around May Grow them up for no more than one or two weeks in your house under bright lights and as soon as you hit June 1st You put them outside Okay, because you got to respect photoperiodism if you put the little babies outside And it's too long of nights This is what you're gonna get Early flowering. Ah, this is another rookie mistake that I made it not only me But a lot of growers in the Bay Area make this mistake because we think oh the days are long in June I can put my plants outside But do you guys remember this June and the and the May it was kind of gloomy It was a gloomy and dark and foggy So my little clones that had been in the dark basement got outside in the world and thought that winter was coming Even though it was summer because of the gloomy days and they started flowering So now I have ten clones in the backyard little baby plants That are flowering and I'm like, what do I do? Do I throw them away and buy new clothes and start over? well, I Decided to hedge my bets because I'm kind of Experimental that way I bought ten more clones and I kept the ones that I had and sure enough There's that word photoperiodism again the plant returned to vegetative growth and What was fascinating about this is that after a few weeks of being under full bright light of the Sun? All of the plants started swirling one leaf and That meant okay. I'm gonna stop flowering now. I have a few more months to grow I'm gonna get nice and big and strong and they return to vegetative growth So that's that's kind of a good thing although I stick by my advice to you Which is if you put your clones out too soon and they start flowering Get new clones because they will be better They will grow better and produce better and reward all your hard work better The truth is that all these clones that Don't get to pass in a minute. They were all stunted So the thing that you're gonna be very afraid of is not thieves is not cops is not drug dealers You are gonna do battle man versus nature on a small scale and This little guy is going to be your most feared enemy the caterpillar Because what happens is during the night or maybe during the day? Various shitty little butterflies come to your plants and these shitty little butterflies lay one egg on a leaf here and there And you can barely see them. They look like little white pinpricks and that little egg is gonna Explode with this tiny little caterpillar who will make his way into the middle of your nice beautiful bud and he's gonna eat and poop and eat and poop and his poop attracts Mold so this picture is a little bit hard to see he's got his face turned away from the camera But here he is in the middle of a nice sticky bud and these black things You got it his poop and the poop attracts Is it makes a perfect growing environment for the second bane of your existence after mildew and after caterpillars the third bane of your existence? Mold but Tritus is a very very common mold that attacks cannabis pretty much all the time But it also attacks everything else including like strawberries Here we see it's also known as bud rot and Here we see a one of my sour diesel plants with this big beautiful long Cola of flowers with the gray mold starting right in the middle and I bet you if I opened up that bud I'd find a caterpillar inside There are now this is something that since you're gonna consume what you what you grow Hopefully because selling it is still illegal. You can consume it, but you can't sell it You want to make sure that you use only biological organic controls? You can't spray pesticides and luckily for us. There is a little microorganism called BT Bacillus therogenesis Which is a little microorganism that when the caterpillar eats it? Get sick and die. Okay, but let's move on to Trichomes the happy stuff the stuff that you all want to know about what is a trichome? Well a trichome is a plant pube Seriously plants and animals that are covered with trichomes are said to be pubescent and it comes from the Greek word for hair Now this a lots of plants have trichomes This is a cape sundew eating a fly with its sticky trichomes and this is a squash Covered with fine hairs, and they think the trichomes on plants are for resisting disease or Or pests or animals that would like to eat it But the trichomes on cannabis as You can see this in one of my buds covered covered covered with sticky trichomes. They're tiny tiny little glands That create a little bulbous top full of resin and inside this resin the cannabis plant makes a camp with lots of different chemicals called cannabinoids and Inside our bodies is the endo cannabinoid system that Reacts to the plant cannabinoids. That's just amazing that a plant that we've cultivated for thousands of years for this purpose Alters our brain chemistry and not just our brain chemistry, but all over our bodies This is a picture of trichomes multiplied a gazillion times more or less By an electron microscope and you can see here are the resin heads that fill up and they're on little stocks and You will learn all about the colors of trichomes Because that is how you know when to harvest your weed When the trichome heads are cloudy That means they're ripening and when they turn amber That means they're degrading and so as you study, you know this stuff I can't get into all of it obviously you'll learn about trichomes and how to best pick the right time to harvest your weed All right, so I'd like to leave you some final words Here's a jar of stuff. I recently dried up and there's a lot of it I wish I could share it with you, but Rick told me no So I would say please go ahead get your medical marijuana card and Go and get some clones around April or May from the dispensary and grow them in with your tomatoes and your pansies And just have fun with it. It's a fabulous wonderful plant and please support Legalization and responsible adult use of this plant that has been legal and well-loved for thousands and thousands of years And it's only been four decades in in Western history that it's been Under prohibition and isn't that a shame and now we're gonna come into another era Slowly where this plant will once again that get the recognition it deserves and please call it cannabis Thank you