After my brother and I sold both of our halves of the harvest, we managed to come out with $1,500 give or take. It didn’t take long for us to get it off either. We sold out within a few days because like I said, even though it was some home grown mexi, it was better than the burlap bud any of our friends had access to. We decided to pool our money together to make our dream of growing in the woods a reality. But it was already late November so we had to wait until mid-late April to put our plan into action.
We put the money in a shoe box and hid it away. My brother got his license on April 18th the following year and on 4/20, we headed to Lowe’s. I remember feeling like we were on top of the world in this beat up old 86’ f-150 our dad had given him. “Ole Red” was her name and I carried on the tradition with my own f-250 years later, naming her “Ole Blue”. We smoked a pinner on the way through Athens until we got to Lowe’s. We stood in the soil section for like 30 minutes trying to figure out what kind of soil we should use. I pulled out my phone and looked up “soil for weed” and I clicked on an old ICMAG link. I wish I still had the exact name of the forum topic but it’s long forgotten lol. I skimmed through and found out our best bet was FFOF. Luckily they had it and a bag was $15.99 at the time so we got 21 bags. That poor truck was squatting so bad the back tires were damn near touching the flat bed lol.
We got back home and busted out the seed jar. It was an old pint mason jar packed full. We counted out 50 seeds because in our mind, half were gonna be male and half were gonna be female and we didn’t really wanna bother with any more plants than that. We germinated the seeds with the tried and trued paper towel method and 3 days later we put them into solo cups. Only 40 germinated but that was still good to us lol. We cleared out a space in my closet to get them going before we went to plant them. We had these big CFL’s to get them going and in the meantime, we had to find out exactly where to put them outside.
We walked the woods for a couple hours but all the woods behind our house had too much canopy cover to be able to grow anything. So we called our cousin about a mile down the road and he said he knows a spot on his land that would be perfect. We hopped in the truck and headed down there. We got on four wheelers and rode out past the black angus pasture and through a fence where we came across this tall ridge. It was about 50’ of elevation and on the other side was a lightly wooded area in a valley that was pretty much perfect. There was a creek running through it that was being fed by a natural spring so our water situation was covered. We checked on google earth to make sure there weren’t any houses nearby and we were in the clear.
We went back to his house and got some post hole diggers, a mattock, and a couple shovels we found in the barn. We dug 40 holes about 2’ wide and a foot deep and about 10’ from the bank of this little creek and 5/6’ apart. We were stoned and tired, the sun was setting anyway so we called it a day. A couple weeks later the smell in the house was making my mom sick so we had to hurry up and plant them.
We hauled the plants and the soil back to the creek on ATV’s and started filling holes and planting. All we had as far as watering cans were a couple 5 gallon buckets so we gently watered them in and came back home. We’d come back every other day to check on them and make sure the deer or the cops didn’t get them but they were safe in this little valley. They loved the environment and shot up really tall but that made us nervous. So we went through and topped them all at 2 feet. They bushed out pretty good after that so from a distance they looked like wild shrubs.
This grow made my brother and I very paranoid. We’d never done anything like this before and were scared shitless of going to jail. As far as I know, there’s no pictures of this grow because we talked about not taking pictures just in case lol. We would also take a different rout to the valley every time we visited as to not make too much of a trail. Tennessee was extremely harsh when it came to weed and it would absolutely ruin us if we got caught. We were also kids so we didn’t have that much of a clue about what we were doing. It was a learn as you grow kind of thing.
The plants started to show sex in late July so we went though and culled the males. Normally they were easy to spot because they’d be so much taller and lankier than the girls. We’d cut them with a machete and take them farther down into the woods and dump them off. By the end of it we were left with only 13 plants from the original 40 lol. Terrible ratio but we still had 14 which was more than enough for us. The smell on those plants ranged from lemon pepper, black pepper, and hot garbage lol. I specifically remember #6 was my favorite because it had this spicy lime and armpit smell which I had never smelled before in weed.
One night in September a big storm came through and snapped a few of the plants. Unfortunately #6 was one of those. I was so disappointed lol. We started with 50 seeds in the beginning and now we were down to 9 plants. But we were still optimistic…until we lost 1 to bud rot and 1 to PM lol. But those 7 remaining plants were everything to us.
The last week of October we decided to harvest. They were done anyway. Mostly milky trichomes with a few amber here and there. The plants stayed about 5’ tall so it wasn’t that hard to take them back to my cousins house on the back of a couple ATV’s. We set up shop in the barn and dried them out in there. I say it’s a barn but it was more like a big metal garage or workshop for his tractors and stuff. It had 2 bay doors and heating/air. It took us and my cousin 3 days to trim up all the bud and put them into their own 5gallon buckets with lids after they dried for a couple weeks. We cured them for a month and then sampled them.
We got wayyyyy too high and had mini panic attacks trying to test this weed all at one time lmao. I greened out and threw up but to me it was worth it because I just greened out on some weed that I grew!! We were so happy lol. We broke off a half pound to our cousin for letting us do this project on his land. That left us with 2 pounds each (give or take). We sold it and the cycle continued for years. We eventually got better at it and had more success. Made new connections, gained access to genetics. It was truly the best years of my life.
Later on we had a little breeding project that gave us some killer results. We grew next to that creek for years so the name we gave our cross was “Sweet Creek”. My brother bought a house in my neighborhood and while he was moving, he found some original Sweet Creek seeds in a pill bottle. He split them with me and grew a few out.
This is the original Sweet Creek we made that he’s growing indoors right now. It’s an unknown Indica male crossed with our favorite mexi female that we kept for personal smoke for a few years.
that was my half of the harvest in a gallon sized ziploc bag lol
I have spent my entire life trying to recreate that feeling.
