Tend them the way you would any other garden. They should reach a height of about six feet by the end of the summer and be ready to harvest.
If you don’t have access to a field, you can grow good stuff right in your own closet or garage using artificial lighting. Transplant the plants into larger wooden boxes or flower boxes. Be sure and cover the bottom of each box with a few inches of pebbles or broken pottery before you add the soil. This will insure proper drainage. Fertilize the soil according to the instructions on the box and punch out holes in much the same way you would do if you were growing outside. After the young plants have been transplanted and watered thoroughly, you will have to rig up a lighting system. Use blue light bulbs, which are available at hardware stores for the first thirty days. These insure a shorter, sturdier stalk.
Leave the lights on 24 hours a day and place them about a foot above the tops of the plants. If the plants begin to feel brittle or turn yellow at the edges, then the temperature is too hot. Use less illumination or raise the height of the lamp if this occurs.
After the first thirty days, change to red bulbs and cut down the lighting time to 16 hours a day. After a week, reduce the time to 14 hours and then on the third week to 12 hours. Maintain this lighting period until the plants flower. The female plants have a larger and heavier flower structure and the males are somewhat skimpy. The female plant produces the stronger grass and the choicest parts are the top leaves including the flowers.
Inside or outside, the plants will be best if allowed to reach maturity, although they are smokeable at any point along the way. When you want to harvest the crop, wet the soil and pull out the entire plant. If you want to separate the top leaves from the rest, you can do so and make two qualities of grass. In any event, let the plants dry in the sun for two weeks until they are thoroughly dried out. If you want to hurry the drying process, you can do it in an oven using a very low heat for about twenty minutes. After you’ve completed the drying, you can “cure” the grass by putting the plants in plastic bags and sprinkling drops of wine, rum or plain booze on them. This greatly increases the potency.
There are two other ways that we know work to increase the potency of grass you grow or buy. One consists of digging a hole and burying a stash of grass wrapped in a plastic bag. A few months in the ground will produce a mouldy grass that is far fuckin’ out. A quick method is to get a hunk of dry ice, put it in a metal container or box with a tight lid (taping the lid airtight helps), and sprinkling the grass on top. Allow it to sit tightly covered for about three days until all the dry ice evaporates.
12. ASSORTED FREEBIES
LAUNDRY
Wait in a laundromat. Tell someone with a light load that you’ll watch the machine for them if you can stick your clothes in with theirs.
PETS
Your local ASPCA will give you a free dog, cat, bird or other pet. Have them inspect and inoculate the animal which they will do free of charge. You can get free or very cheap medical care for your pet at a school for veterinary medicine.
Underground newspapers often carry a free-pets column in the back pages.
Snakes can be caught in any wooded area and they make great pets. You can collect insects pretty easy. Ants are unbelievable to watch. You can make a simple 3/4 inch wide glass case about a foot high, fill it with sand and start an ant colony. A library book will tell you how to care for them.
Every year the National Park Service gives away surplus elks in order to keep the herds under its jurisdiction from outgrowing the amount of available land for grazing. Write to: Superintendent, Yellowstone National Park, Yellowstone, Wyoming 83020. You must be prepared to pay the freight charges for shipping the animal and guarantee that you can provide enough grazing land to keep the big fellow happy.
Under the same arrangement the government will send you a Free Buffalo. Write to: Office of Information, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 20420. So many people have written them recently demanding their Free Buffalo, that they called a press conference to publicly attack the Yippies for creating chaos in the government. Don’t take any buffalo shit from these petty bureaucrats, demand the real thing. Demand your Free Buffalo.
You can get a free 16mm movie about parakeets called “More Fun with Parakeets,” by writing to: R.T. French Co., 9068 Mustard St., Rochester, New York 14609. This great film won an Academy Award for best picture of 1793.
POSTERS
Beautiful wall posters are available by writing to the National Tourist Agencies of various countries. Most are located between 42nd and 59th Streets on Fifth Ave.
in New York City. You can find their addresses in the New York Yellow Pages under both National Tourist Agencies and Travel Agencies. There are over fifty of them. Prepare a form letter saying you are a high school geography teacher and would like some posters of the country to decorate your classroom. In a month you will be flooded with them. Airline companies also have colorful wall posters they send out free.
SECURITY
For this trick you need some money to begin with. Deposit it in a bank and return in a few weeks telling them you lost your bank book. They give you a card to fill out and sign and in a week you will receive another book. Now withdraw your money, leaving you with original money and a bank book showing a balance.
You can use this as identification to prevent vagrancy busts when traveling, as collateral for bail, or for opening a charge account at a store.
Another trick is to buy some American Travelers Checks. Wait a week and report your checks lost. They’ll give you new ones to replace the missing ones. You spend your new checks and keep the ones you reported lost as security. This security is great for international travel especially at border crossings. If you want, you can spend the Travelers Checks by giving them to a friend to forge your name. Before you call the office to report the loss, call the police station and say you were mugged and your wallet was stolen. The agency always asks if you have reported the lost checks to the police, so you can safely answer yes. Never do this for more than five hundred dollars and never more than once with any one company.
POSTAGE
When mailing to the same city, address the envelope or package to yourself and put the name of the person you are sending it to where the return address generally goes. Mail it without postage and it will be “returned” to
