Jah Made the Herb for Man

With the terror alert on maximum crimson, and in a world where sports drinks and suntan lotion are considered potentially lethal weapons, it’s time to bring it closer to home…to take stock of our own back yards, and to have a gander at the world around us.

Now the environmental types out there like to criticize the practice of clear cut logging…but many of these same people are busy little bees at this time of year, putting in hard hours to raise BC’s second cash crop of the forest. I often admire the sophistication and sly cunning of the hemp farmer. He is a crafty creature, moving undetected through the back roads, and through the cutblocks in which I work.

Of course, not everyone out there is sophisticated or smart, some to put it bluntly (oh and I’m sure they’d get a chuckle out of the word bluntly) are as dumb as a sack of hammers.

I once ran into a young gentleman with a very good plan. His crops were spread out along the edges of the openings, so that no obvious concentrations of that fine crop could be detected by the men in the black helicopters (seriously, you should check out the sky over Texada Island in September). He had a pickup with a 100 gallon tank in the bed, a quiet pump, and a few hundred feet of hose. In this manner he could drive around and bring water to his crops. He had nice plants, and a clean looking operation. Unfortunately, he had that chronic pot smoker habit of spacing out. He parked his truck in the middle of the road, blocking my way. I had to honk to get him to come out and move it so I could get home. Now, you look mighty suspicious with a truck, a huge water tank, and some hose. The next day I went and took a look.

Then, there was the guy who was walking through a cutblock with a full bail of sunshine mix (that’s pro mix #4 for you gardening types…extra perlite). He had the audacity (and I must add that this particular cutblock was on private timberlands) to ask me what I was doing there. Me…the guy with the hard hat and the high vis vest.

It’s always fun finding the plantations…lucky for them I don’t smoke the ganja, because it’s always tempting to nip a bud or two. You can always tell where it’s being grown. Subtle disturbances in the landscape (and later in the fall the tell tale aroma). You rarely stumble upon it.

I like to screw with peoples heads, without destroying there enterprise ( a mans got to earn a living) but to play with their paranoid minds is fun. Sometimes I hip chain around all the plants, leaving a bizarre pattern of survey string like a demented spider. Once I hung falling boundary ribbon around the crop. This particular time (Thursday afternoon) I hung a note saying that the area will be re-planted in the fall (which it will). I figure it will give the guy the opportunity to move his operation before the planters smoke it all up.

I put this last picture in my survey report as the representative photo of the stratum. I also entered in a 1% cover of Cannabis sativa into the competing brush description (although I’ve never really seen pot compete with conifer seedlings…you would have to grow a whole shwack bud to harm a tree). Mostly, it’s a harmless industry. Good for them I say. Unless they leave a lot of trash behind. One fellow I work with came home with 20 full sized garbage cans. He gave me one. I put my trash curb side in it every Monday morning. You think that the people in the cannabis culture would be into recycling…but I guess that would be stereotyping.