'Tis the Season for Theft

I watched a tv show yesterday called "Storage Wars".  It's a canadian show about people who buy the contents of storage units after the owners default on the rent.  So often during the show, the potential buyers would look into that cluttered unit hoping it contained something valuable.

I see a correlation here, as I'm sure there are many individuals and groups out there who drive down the road and upon seeing a greenhouse, wonder the very same thing:

"Is there something valuable growing in there?  And how do I get my hands on that?"

Because I speak so openly about Cannabis, people like to tell me their "big fish" stories.  I know that 'gardening pride' feeling, as my one hot pepper plant yielded more than thirty peppers this year!

People tell me about their past grows, their current grows, and the grows they just happen to find. "Find" being the operative word here.  I giggled and growled inside a few months ago while a friend's husband boasted to me that he's really good at finding other people's outdoor crops.  'What do you mean you're good at 'finding' people's crops?' I wanted to ask.  Were they lost?  Were you part of a search party?

Nope.  He means he's good at thieving other peoples' medicine. What often amazes me, is that these very same people would never risk  stealing from a store or a bank.  Oh no.  But they'd steal months and months of work and worry from their neighbor and their fellow citizen.  Those plants didn't fall down from the sky you dick!  They didn't root themselves, water themselves just so you can come and cut them down like a thief in the night!  They were likely planted for a very good reason!  Whether that reason is illness or strife matters not.  Some people kill deer to fill their freezers with meat;  others grow plants to fill their medicine cabinets with medicine!  Would you steal a deer carcass from your neighbor's back yard?

There's a societal lesson here.  We're supposed to be a team!  We're supposed to have each other's backs. I get that times are tough.  But I also get that what goes around comes around.  Karma is real.  I'll even admit that in the past, I may not have felt this way.  I too have dreamed of finding a flowering goddess with red hairs galore. Would that not be a destiny of perfect timing?  If I ever had, I may have justified it with that cop-out: "if we don't take them someone else will".

Many of these thieves will appease any small sense of guilt by telling themselves that whomever owns the plants, should have been smarter.  Or maybe they're simply too busy doing the math in their shitty little heads to even consider why the person ever planted those ladies.

I know a guy right now who has some plants somewhere out there. He's growing them to make brownies for his terminally ill brother. Would you take his plants if you happened upon them?

I know a woman in Oregon who legally grows Cannabis bushes in her back yard to keep Leukemia away from her daughter.  Are those plants a lesson to be stolen and bragged about?

I know people who coddled sprouts to plants to bushes all spring and summer only to have them stolen. That's how many were going to pay their rent,  buy their food, live their lives, cure their ills.

Now what?

Many many years ago, this guy from my hometown bragged to me about he and his buddies finding a crop on the mountain. They went up at night, bags and snippers and shovels in hand.  He said the plants were THIS BIG!!  So big that they had to use a chainsaw to cut them down.  What a dick.  He said that they went home, dried some colas out in the oven, and smoked a few big doobies.  They all had the worst headaches of their lives that night. At the time, I wondered why that was and I often remember that story when trying outdoor.  Ain't nobody got time for a headache! But now I know exactly why the dicks got a headache that lasted all weekend long.

Karma baby.

Autumn is the glorious season of harvest.  Every gardener looks forward to this time of year.  One final push, and then the chance to reap the rewards of your hard work and gardening skill.  As the hairs on the flowers darken from white to yellow to orange to red, the chances of your Cannabis plants being stolen rise significantly. Hide your love away.  Hide your crop away.  Don't tell a soul.  Sad I know, but until the world pulls it's head out of it's ass and finally legalizes personal cultivation, we must hide from thieves.

I'm proud to be a part of a movement of faceless humans who want to have each others' backs.  The majority of us try to live with a one love mentality where we will help one another even if it's just through fb.  We feel the love.  We push the love forward, outward, to anyone who will receive it.  So to steal someone else's Cannabis is simply against our motto.

Happy Harvest to all of the gardening geniuses I know, and of course all of those I don't yet know. Kudos on your hard work. Know that I have your back.  And if you're out on a lovely autumn walk, and come along some ripe and ready Cannabis plants; admire, sniff if you wish, but walk away.  Turn the other cheek.  And never tell a soul what you saw or where you saw it.