My first plant wasn’t even originally mine. My mom let my older brother sprout a couple seeds on the back porch because she was cool like that. He planted like 6 seeds in a 5ish gallon pot because he didn’t know better lol. It really didn’t matter if anything came of them though because they were just seeds out of some mexi brick weed. He was never that good of a gardener to begin with lol. But over time he would neglect them and they all died but 1. It got to around 3” tall and wilted really bad because he didn’t water it. My brother, being who he is, threw his hands up in the air and said “fuck it, you can have it. It’s dead anyway” and so I inherited the plant. I brought it back to life and I started low stress training and topping it. After it got to about a foot tall, he regained interest in it lol. I would go outside every morning to check on it before we went to school and he’d be hovering over my shoulder asking questions like “what are you looking for? Is it a female? Can we smoke the leaves? Think we’ll get a pound off it?” Typical stuff for him lol.
One day I realized the leaves were curling downward and I had a buddy named Bostin that was growing autos in his closet at his grandmas house. So I sent a pic to him and said “what’s going on?” He informed me that it’s nitrogen toxicity and that I needed to flush the soil with a few gallons of water. So I went outside and started flushing the soil. My brother came outside and screamed “YOURE GONNA FUCKING DROWN IT WHAT ARE YOU DOING???” I tried to explain to him that it has nitrogen toxicity and that I was flushing the soil to get the excess nitrogen out. That wasn’t a good enough reason for him so next thing I know, we’re trading blows. Typical stuff for brothers in the south of course lol. After that, we shook hands and talked it out. He apologized and everything was kosher. We fought 24/7 all of our lives up to that point. But it would be the last fight we ever had.
It was clear to me that he had an emotional investment in the plant because he started it and realized afterwards that he gave up on it prematurely. We’d go on the back porch and pass the bong back and forth talking about the plant and gawking at it. We planned out this elaborate garden we’d have in the woods next growing season (which we actually did, that’s a story for another time) if anything just having the plant around allowed us to bond more as brothers.
Once it started to flower we had to hide it from the landlord in my moms shower lol. He didn’t come around much but when he did it was a race to the plant in order to stow it away. It started to develop this rotten garbage terp profile that made it hard for people to come to the back porch. It was a long flowering Mexican sativa but it stayed short. It only got to around 3’ tall but it was leafy as hell lol. It flowered all the way until the first frost of the year but it could have gone another 2 weeks. I woke up one morning and there was ice on my bedroom window. I leaped out of bed and went and grabbed my brother from his room. We ran outside to find that the entire plant had frozen over. He said “is it fucked!?” And I said “nope, it’s fine, but today is harvest day”.
So we recruited one of his friends to help us trim. We trimmed it up in my room after thawing it out with moms hair dryer. We then took a long piece of yarn and strung up the branches in my room. We celebrated by smoking the scissor hash. It was…not great lol but it served as a job well done. We let it dry over the course of a couple weeks. I read somewhere that it had to dry low and slow so that’s what we did. The entire house reeked of those oh so distinct hot garbage terps and that’s the only thing my mom had a problem with (understandably so).
After I did the branch test it was time to cure. This part I had dreaded the most because I didn’t wanna fuck it up lol. I put it all in a jar that wasn’t so air tight but it’s all we had. We were broke kids so we couldn’t invest in actual mason jars. I’d open the jar and sit it on its side for an hour a day and over time, less frequently. After a few weeks the smell turned from hot garbage to this beautiful lemon starburst smell. At that point neither my brother or myself had smelled weed like this before. We were used to black pepper and sage smelling weed because this was before we had access to “loud” y’all remember those days? Lol.
After a month of waiting and exercising our ability to keep our hands out of the cookie jar, it was ready. I split the harvest with my brother and it was time to actually smoke the fruits of our labor. We invited our friend Greg over because we promised him we’d smoke it with him. He rolled a blunt and we went outside. The moment of truth lol.
We passed it around a few times and Greg tapped out. Then my brother tapped out. I was thinking “this shit ain’t even working…I don’t feel anything at all” so I just started hitting this blunt over and over again. Then it hit me all at once. A huge wave of euphoria washed over me and the giggles were so intense that my sides were hurting. We went inside and my lil girlfriend at the time (who later became my fiancé) called me and I couldn’t keep it together. I was laying on my bed while Greg and my brother played video games and I just couldn’t stop laughing. She got frustrated and hung up on me lol. I remember this being the first time I ever had “shutter vision” on weed. I had LSD tracers and all that. It was pure bliss.
Me and my brother just kept looking at each other like “we actually grew this!” Lol it was amazing. We ended up marketing this bud to our friends as “Limon Fresco” which is Spanish for “fresh lemon”. We quickly sold out because it was better than anything our friend group had access to. We pooled our money together to make our dream of a grow op in the woods a reality the next year. But like I said, that’s a story for another time.
Thanks for reading!
-GTA
Oh, here’s some pics of it that still exist.
Edit: 
that was my half of the harvest in a gallon sized ziploc bag lol