Growing Marijuana is A Labor of Love in Humboldt County

Growing Marijuana is A Labor of Love in Humboldt County

Well Spring is almost here, which means that all over Humboldt County, marijuana farmers are incredibly busy preparing to grow even more marijuana than they did last year. Even as you read this piece, most of them are hard at work building new greenhouses, clearing more forest land, putting in new water tanks and digging gigantic holes all over the countryside.

This process involves hundreds of thousands of man-hours of backbreaking labor and requires millions of dollars in capital investment.

 

This capital comes almost entirely from the sale of last year’s record setting marijuana harvest. Since most of last year’s marijuana harvest has not sold yet, this investment cuts deeply into the grower’s disposable income. Few feel the pinch however, as they will have little time or energy to do anything else for a few months, but prepare for this year’s grow.

 

Why do they do it? So they don’t have to get a job, of course. Who wants to work for a living when you can grow marijuana, right? You’d think, but you’d be wrong. In Humboldt County, growing marijuana is a labor of love, crazy love.

 

Soon thousands of tractor trailers full of potting soil will clog our roads as they make their way into the hills to fill the millions of holes these growers have so diligently dug.

Every year, Humboldt County’s garden supply stores comb the nation for another sparsely populated and poorly guarded county that they can steal. They then dig up the entire county in the dead of night, pack it into bags labeled “Potting Soil” and smuggle it back to Humboldt County where they quickly sell it off on a strictly cash basis to Humboldt County marijuana farmers.

 

Somewhere in Wyoming, or perhaps North Dakota, one morning soon, the citizens of this unfortunate county will step off their front porch on their way to work, only to fall several feet, smack into the bedrock below. They will look up to see their home delicately balanced on jacks and cinder blocks, and realize that their entire lawn, and the soil which once supported the foundation of their homes, has been stolen overnight while they slept.

 

For them, it will already be too late. Their county has already been sold, distributed, and secreted away behind locked gates, where it will remain, protected by a constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy. Besides, few of them could positively identify the soil from under their own homes, especially now that it has been thoroughly sifted and blended with a myriad of exotic amendments.

 

If you visit any of Humboldt County’s garden supply stores, you will find an amazing array of colorfully packaged, and even more colorfully named, fertilizers and soil amendments ranging from liquified fish guts from Alaska’s salmon canneries to ancient fossilized bat guano from caves deep within the jungles of Peru. Most Humboldt County garden shops also offer their own brands of fertilizers that they make on site, mostly from composted US currency.

 

Many of these fertilizers and soil amendments feature cheeky pin-up girls on the labels. This feature, along with the fact that these products sell for more per pound than fresh organic strawberries in January, indicate that these products are intended for use on marijuana plants. Only female marijuana plants produce marijuana, and marijuana growers often refer to their plants as “their ladies”.

 

You’ll often hear marijuana farmers say things like: “My ladies are lookin’ fine.” or “I take care of my ladies, and my ladies take care of me.” or “I need to to get home and hoe my ladies.” This makes them sound more like pimps than farmers, and greatly contributes to the general classiness of Humboldt County.

 

Can you imagine other kinds of farmers talking this way about their crops? Picture a dairy farmer saying “My ladies give me the sweetest cream.” or a broccoli farmer saying “This heat is gonna make my ladies bolt.” or a cabbage farmer saying “My ladies are full of horn-worms.” Creepy, huh?

 

All of this talk about their “ladies” belies the fact that most marijuana farmers are single and live alone. Growing marijuana in a remote, sparsely populated rural area like Humboldt County is a very lonely and isolating profession that tends to attract social misfits and people with self-alienating personalities.

 

The more lonely and isolated the marijuana farmer becomes, the more they tend to talk to, get naked around, and masturbate in front of, their “ladies”, often while looking at the pictures on boxes of fertilizer. This kind of “intimacy” with “their ladies”, coupled with an otherwise isolated existence builds a special kind of relationship between the cultivator and the cultivated that most other farmers, or sane people would not understand.

Original Artwork by Mykol Blackwell

Soon, the marijuana farmer no longer grows marijuana to make money, and instead, makes money to grow marijuana. For these people, nothing is too good for “their ladies”, and they cannot have enough of them. They work harder, and spend more money to pamper “their ladies” than any sane farmer. This is the real reason why Humboldt County marijuana growers produce the best marijuana in the world, and more of it than any place else on Earth.

 

Over the years, because of their extreme devotion and isolation, many Humboldt County marijuana growers have gone totally bat-shit crazy, and fallen in love with “their ladies” in this way. This is why they work so hard, and spend so much money on, “their ladies”.  Every year, more of them go “over the edge”, and every year this “crazy love” impacts our forest habitat more intensely.

 

Personally, I enjoy smoking marijuana, and strongly believe it should be legalized, so that sane farmers, with tractors, and flat land to till, can grow it economically.

I also know that marijuana provides relief for millions of sick people who should have unfettered access to it, at the lowest price possible, but I also care about this community.

That’s why I feel that something must be done to stop Humboldt County’s marijuana farmers before it’s too late. It has become clear to me, that nothing short of intervention, can save these poor souls, and our natural environment from this serious mental disorder.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in Humboldt

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in Humboldt

 

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Humboldt County

Not a creature was stirring, not even Sheriff Mike Downey

The herb was all trimmed up and packed into bags

For smokers of taste, who will not smoke swag

Me in bed naked, my wife in her panties

It’s that time of month, so it’s the ones that are ratty

When out at the gate there arose such a racket

I got out of bed and put on my jacket

Threw on some pants and picked up my rifle

So they’d know I was serious and not to trifle

I stepped out of the door and into the rain

“To be out in this shit, this guy must be insane”

I thought to myself as I trudged up the path,

“This better be good or he’ll feel my wrath”

What did my dumb struck eyes then behold

But a bearded old man in a late model Olds

I yelled “It’s Christmas Eve, are you out of your mind?”

He said “I’m Jewish, you’re Pagan, why’s this a bad time?

My friends all need weed, and I’ve plenty of cash,

At $3,000 a pound, I’ll take your whole stash”

I thought to myself, “Well that’s quite a laugh,

These days I’d a probably sold it for half.”

He showed me a bag that was packed full of bills

I opened the gate and we drove down the hill

I made up some coffee, and rolled up a jay

And showed him a few of the buds on the tray

“Oh, this is the stuff that my friends all love.

They say that your stuff is a cut above.

They’ll pay what I ask for all I can get.

Did you have a good year? Is it all trimmed up yet?”

“This year I grew more than ever before,

It’s weighed up in bags just behind that door.

You can inspect it while I count this cash,

Hand me that ashtray, and I’ll knock this ash.”

We packed all the weed in the trunk of his car.

I said, “You found me out here, you must know where you are”.

“Oh yes, he said, “I’ll find my way out from here,

And I’ve many more stops to make, far and near.”

He started the car, and then turned on the lights,

And I heard him say, as he drove out of sight,

“Marijuana to all, and to all a good night.”

In the Zone… On the Humboldt Co. General Plan Update

In The Zone

(on the Humboldt Co. GPU)

 

Can you think of anything more boring than the Humboldt Co. General Plan Update. Tonight, on KMUD’s newest and dullest talk show, The Hum CPR Show, we got yet another tiresome talking-to on this tedious topic.

We’ve debated the General Plan Update for about 7 years already, wasting hundred of hours of airtime and enough column inches of newsprint to reach the moon, and we aren’t any closer to agreement on it than we were 7 years ago.

Listening to developers, real estate agents and land-owners try to sound righteous about what they do to the land out here can really turn your stomach. Hearing the county try to justify their outrageous permit fees, as a health and safety issue, when they refuse to permit composting toilets, or greywater systems of any kind, will make you choke as well.

None of the people in the debate seem to have a clue about how to live on planet Earth. None of the proposed plans really address Humboldt County’s housing needs. None of the proposed plans will allow anyone in Humboldt County, the opportunity to live anything like a sustainable lifestyle, and none of the proposed plans will enjoy any more voluntary compliance than the current General Plan. As long as they continue to outlaw sustainable living, only outlaws will live sustainably.

The General Plan Update is bound to fail, and fail spectacularly, for a few good reasons. For one, roughly 2,000 people in Humboldt County go without housing or sanitary facilities of any kind. Every day, that number continues to grow. The GPU continues to ignore the needs of this population, and as a result, they will continue to ignore the zoning restrictions of the General Plan, by sleeping, living and relieving themselves whenever and wherever they can.

Tens of thousands of Humboldt County residents, including many, many, landowners live in unpermitted structures, trailers or mobile homes in violation of current General Plan zoning restrictions, but the county lacks resources to prosecute these cases. Just because the county adopts a new General Plan, doesn’t mean they will ever get the money to prosecute these cases in the future.

Finally, since most of what the Planning Department does, is respond to people’s complaints about their neighbors. And since most of those complaints have less to do with health and safety than aesthetics, prejudice and personal disputes, it seems to me that the best thing to do, is close the whole thing down. Stop wasting the taxpayer’s money on petty, vindictive complaints by people who cynically use the County Planning Department to harass their neighbors.

Since the process isn’t working, won’t work, and won’t help, it ought to be more entertaining, and it ought to, at least superficially, reflect what really happens on the ground in Humboldt County. So, I offer these:

New Zoning Designations for the

Humboldt County General Plan Update

 

First, a few desperately needed and long overdue, zoning designations:

 

CMR – Commercial Masquerading as Residential, describes those neighborhoods full of “homes” with bicycles and swingsets in the yard, and laundry on the clothesline, but no one lives inside but marijuana plants and spider-mites.

 

PLR – Parking Lot, Residential These days lots of people live in their vehicle. From converted school buses to “house-bicycles” people, often entire families, have pressed all kinds of vehicles into their primary residence. Still, they all need a place to park for the night. Isn’t it time they had a zone of their own?

 

UBR – Under Bridge, Residential Some cities already issue permits, for a fee, allowing very low income people to use the prime real estate beneath highway overpasses as their primary residence. Can Humboldt afford to ignore this revenue stream?

 

DFR – Debris Field, Residential Many of the homesteads in SoHum contain not a single permitted structure. At first look, many do not appear to include a single habitable space, just acres of junk cars, rubbish and debris, but people live there.

DFC – Debris Field, Commercial Many of Humboldt County’s most profitable businesses operate out of the most squalid surroundings. Humboldt County’s economic engine has never been exactly clean.

OLG – On Line Ghetto Block after block of towering concrete housing projects full of 8′x8′ cells, each containing a bed, a toilet and a high-speed internet connection with unlimited bandwidth.

The following “specialty zones” will help foster harmony in special neighborhoods catering to the diversity of Humboldt County lifestyles.

CCL – Competitive Christmas Lights Won’t it be so much easier to decide who has the most impressive display when all of the Christmas light fanatics live in the same neighborhood.

YMCA – Yoga, Massage, Crystals and Acupuncture This zone allows the listed establishments, plus vegan eateries and tea houses, no cafes.

DD + EP – Dangerous Dogs and Exotic Pets Why not put all the pit-bulls in the same neighborhood with the idiots who keep tigers, chimps and pythons.

BYOB – Bring Your Own Birds Backyard chickens, ducks, geese pigeons, flamingos, falcons and peacocks all have their appeal, but they also create a special burden on a neighborhood. In this zone, they can squawk, honk, crow and shit whenever and wherever they please.

CG – Compulsive Gardeners Are you sick and tired of neighbors who can’t just leave the fucking dirt alone? I know I sure am, but they just keep digging it up and planting shit in it. Soon their whole place becomes an overgrown, water-sucking jungle, and they start dumping their excess zucchini and tomatoes on your doorstep. Get them out of your hair by giving them their own zone where they can plow, till and weed to their heart’s content, and they can let their vegetables rot in their own fridge.

DYM – Dope Yuppie Mansion A zone for the successful dope yuppies among us, where they can build the kind of ostentatious country home that doesn’t belong in Connecticut either.

PS – Pot Squat This zone is for all of the substandard housing, adjacent to commercial marijuana operations, occupied by otherwise unemployed tenants.

RHH – Redneck Hell Hole The place to see NASCAR decals, confederate flags and Calvin peeing on stuff. Cars on blocks, refrigerators on the porch and motorcycle repair in the living room are all accepted in this zone.

HA+D – Hanging Around and Drinking Always a popular activity here in Humboldt County, now people will have an acceptable zone to do it in.

SS – Smoking Section Smokers really take it on the chin lately. I see them cowering under the eves in the rain, outside the back door, fondling their butts. Shouldn’t they have a zone where they can all commit slow suicide together.

M+M – Musicians and Meth fiends. Both of these groups tend to keep odd hours and make a lot of racket.  Why not zone them together?

DPS – Discarded Potting Soil This zone designates new land created by the accumulation of discarded potting soil.

Zones for the dregs of society. Even the most contemptible members of our community need someplace to live

SOF – Sex-Offender Friendly With so many people returning from prison with release orders that forbid them from living withing 1000 ft. of schools, parks and playgrounds, shouldn’t the county designate a zone to accommodate them.

UWB – Uptight White Blight For those obnoxious people who think they should be able to dictate what their neighbor looks like, what their home looks like, and what they do with it. Even child molesters and rapists deserve better neighbors than these. By establishing this zone, they can all spy on and out-conform each other without disturbing the vibrant diversity of people and lifestyles that makes up the rest of our community.

Are you “zoned out” on the Humboldt County GPU yet?  I know I am.