Purple, Gold, and Greeeen

In the course of this grow, I'll be developing a Harry Potter closet into a personal grow room. In the meantime, I'm using a 3' x 20" x 5' tent from Urban Farmer with a 400w HID light in a ventilated hood. I'm popping beans, so really, this is Week 0. Right now, Acapulco Gold is an adorable week-old sprout, while Ayahuasca Purple has cute cotyledons and some purple on the stalk that I hope stays true! I'm very curious about the purple strain from Barney's. I see one of the ancestors is Red River Delta and that the seed was provided by a veteran, so I wonder if the genetics were brought home after the Vietnam war. I've read that the Hmong people of Vietnam have long lived symbiotically with hemp, making it a part of their food supply and the source of their textiles in addition to being a medicinal plant; hemp has significance across the lifespan, becoming part of the ritual of a funeral when relatives bring hemp cloth to wrap the departed. This stands in contrast to the way we view the plant in the society I was raised in. I am encouraged by the idea of home growing in Massachusetts--perhaps as more of us develop a day-to-day connection with this herb, we can reclaim it as a helpful species and reduce the stigma upon people whose lives have been changed by a spurious war on drugs. I'm not going to say that this herb is for everyone--for people who are at risk for certain mental illnesses, cannabis use can bring a sooner onset of symptoms, so limiting use to people age 21 and older is a reasonable measure--but for some of us, it provides us with the power to produce our own medicine. For me in particular, that feels rad.