The Growers Guide to Cannabis
The Growers Guide to Cannabis -
Whilst we have nothing but admiration for the bold defiance of the Feed the Birds group in the UK & similar activism throughout Germany, its not always the case that we want to brag about our growing. Overt planting of cannabis in public places emphasizes the point that our favorite plant is just that, a plant: but when it comes to our own back yard most of us need to be a little more discrete.
There are two approaches to safely growing marijuana outdoors: one is the guerrilla grow, the other is to take the stealth approach of disguise and dissembling.
SECRETS OF SUCCESSFUL STEALTH GROWING CANNABIS OUTDOORS:
There are 3 elements to this:
1. Blend yourself in ..
THIS INFORMATION IS FOR INDOOR & OUTDOOR GROWS:
- It may seem irrelevant but actually how you look and more importantly how you behave is important. If you are producing on any scale then just don’t stand out. That favorite “Free the Weed” T-shirt needs to go in the back of the cupboard, and don’t leave the house with joint blazing
- Building good relationships with your neighbours can be critical: its part of human nature to avoid confrontation with those we like, so if you are always pleasant and friendly, its much less likely that the old lady next door will actively go out of her way to grass you up for that odd looking plant she spotted from her bathroom window.
- Next: the reason we got busted: opening your mouth about it. Lets face it, we’re not very good at keeping quiet about what we’re doing – we’ve spent several years developing a website full of our experiences doing it. The end result? Someone we helped out turned out to be a little unhinged and with a grudge to bear (not against us, but like I said, he’s not mentally all there) informed the local police.
- I know its said all the time, but really it is worth repeating. Its loose lips that sink ships, and a good percentage of busts are the results of ex-friends and ex-lovers. Unless they need to know, don’t tell them.
- And it goes without saying, the margins may be lower, but don’t deal from your doorstep. If you do need to sell your weed, do so in one lump to one buyer.
2. Choose your spot
Remember they grow big and tall naturally – and unless you prune/top them they may outgrow their “secret place”. 
Think ahead and plan accordingly!
Mask the shape of your cannabis plants by careful pruning: topping produces a much shorter, bushier looking plant which when planted in a mix of different leaf shapes makes it much less distinctive than a traditional tall grown single stem beauty. Knuckling changes the shape of a loose shrub into a more sturdier bush. Some growers hide their plants between a trellis of tomato plants and even go so far as to hang fake tomatoes from them to confuse the eye!
3. Its all in the nose.
Hey! Guess what, cannabis is a smelly plant. Its why we love her, and I know for many of us scent appeal factors high in our impression of how “good” a smoke is. But while it adds to the enjoyment, it doesn’t actually effect the smoke, and if a stealth grow is what you need, there are some strains that are more discrete than others. Avoid those varieties which are particularly fragrant through veg and flower (e.g. Skunk & Cheese strains). Here are some examples of low odour cannabis:
- Durban Poison
- Northern Lights
- Greenhouse Seeds NL5 Haze Mist
- Cream Caramel
- Moby Dick
- Chocolope
- Black Domina
- Blueberry
- Jack Herer
Mix up the smells coming from your garden by interplanting with other particularly fragrant shrubs which bloom from August into September. Honeysuckle and Jasmin have a heady musky smell well into the evenings, and lilacs and lavenders will fill the daytime with perfume. A tinge of bud blended with a pot-pourri of garden flowers is easily overlooked or dismissed.
Autoflowers are great because they are small, can easily be grown in pots – which makes them maneuverable around the garden and even into the house at night if its early/late in the season – and because they will be finishing long before most people think of the season for harvesting. The latter makes them less likely to be stolen or found by police in late summer “round ups”. Because they only produce small yields plant sequentially throughout the year to provide yourself with smoke and if the worst happens, you will only be facing charges of producing a few hundred grams (say 4 ounces) as opposed to a year’s supply of smoke (say a few pounds).
Frisian Duck: the ultimate stealth cannabis for an outdoor grow?
In fact there’s one new strain recently launched by Dutch Passion called Frisian Duck which takes disguise to another level. If you’ve grown a lot of cannabis plants, you will know that sometimes its possible to get a genetic mutant with mangled mishapen leaves. Instead of discarding this gene, the ever-excellent DP crew have stabilised it, interbred it with their outdoor bestseller Frisian Dew to produce the quirkily named Frisian Duck. Aside from the smell, it is the shape of the leaves which is most distinctive about the cannabis plant (hence we all use a leaf as indicative of pro-cannabis use: remember that “Free the Weed Tshirt” we told you to hide in number 1?). The ducksfeet leaf shape of this strain make even the experienced grower take a double look, and as horticulturists of many years, our first reaction was: “I can’t quite place that plant”. Its taken them years to develop, but Frisian Duck is the answer to many nervous growers dreams.
Because of the Frisian Dew element, buds are generally purple-tinged, and she will thrive quite happily in northern Europe and northern US. Flower formation 
and resulting smoke are quite normal, with slightly higher than average yield, a natural Christmas tree shape, and unpruned heights reaching up to 2m. Smoke is said to be a sativa mental high with a pine taste.
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