When you grow your own, you create the best highs, initially a few lows, but a better life, too.Like other Colorado cannabis consumers, Trevor was a self-described weedhead who celebrated when medical and recreational marijuana were legalized in his home state in 2000 and 2012, respectively.
He thought legalization would decrease his marijuana costs, give him alternatives to the cannabis black market, and greatly increase the variety of cannabis products he could buy.
But like many other people, Trevor found that marijuana legalization wasn’t everything he’d hoped it would be.
“I’ve been to marijuana shops in Nederland, Denver, Boulder and Aurora. They have awesome medibles, candies, drinks, tinctures and dabs, but what I really wanted was premium buds. The dispensary bud was dry and crumbly, and the prices were too high. That’s why I decided to grow my own,” Trevor said.
Despite having easy legal access to retail marijuana, Trevor is now a marijuana cultivator. And even though there was a steep learning curve and the typical trials and errors you might expect when first starting out, he’s never regretted his decision to essentially become what is a small-scale, independent farmer in a budding industry.
So with that in mind, let’s take a look at the top seven reasons why people like Trevor grow marijuana — even though they can now legally buy it.
1. Growing Your Own Weed Saves You Money
Cultivating your own is a lot more cost-effective than purchasing it, whether you’re buying from the source or a middleman dispensary.
Sure, you have significant initial start-up costs as you invest in marijuana seeds or clones, hydroponics gear, grow lights, and other supplies and equipment for setting up a grow op.
You have ongoing costs including electricity, reverse osmosis water, hydroponics nutrients, grow light bulbs and air conditioning. (Keep in mind that if you grow outdoors, your costs for setting up and running a marijuana garden are significantly lowered.)
However, your start-up costs will quickly be recompensed. In just one indoor season with a one-light marijuana grow room, you can harvest two pounds of premium dried bud — worth about $6000 retail in today’s market.
And in one outdoor marijuana season, you could grow a couple of pounds of bud per plant! This could spell the end of expensive, inconvenient trips to the dispensary for you.
2. Growing Your Own Marijuana Can Generate Income
If you get serious about growing marijuana and generate maximized yields per light or from outdoor cannabis plants, you’ll have way more marijuana every harvest than you could possibly consume all by yourself.
More and more people are consuming marijuana, and some of these people won’t want to buy it from dispensaries. They might even want to buy from you!
Once you’ve reduced or paid off your start-up costs and are only forking out a few hundred dollars in ongoing (and unavoidable) spends per season to grow several pounds, you can retail your weed and make significant profits.
3. Growing Cannabis Is A Fun Hobby
If you ever enjoyed non-cannabis gardening, building up aquariums, owning pets, or otherwise nurturing living things so they grow safely and vigorously, then you’ll enjoy cultivating cannabis.
Cannabis horticulture can be therapeutic and fun. There’s something that’s just so fulfilling and grounding about digging your hands deep into cool soil.
Your marijuana garden gives you the rare opportunity to connect with nature and life cycles, work toward achieving a desired result, learn self-reliance and competence, and see the fruits of your labor bloom in a very personal and literal way.
When you inhale fine buds that you grew, or eat medibles you made in your own kitchen, you’ll feel that warm glow of satisfaction that only makes the end product more potent and tastier.
And you can even turn your grow room into a man cave (or a woman cave), for extra recreational benefits.
4. Growing Your Own Weed Enhances Cannabis Genetic Diversity
Too many of us grow the same ol’, same ol’ marijuana strains over and over, mostly from clones. These clones tend to be such familiar names as Blue Dream, Girl Scout Cookies, Platinum OG, Tangie, Headband, OG Kush, Super Silver Haze, Golden Goat and Ghost Train Haze.
No doubt about it, cloning is fast, moneymaking, and easier than growing weed from seeds. That’s all well and good, but where’s the fun in that?
When you take the time to study the product and attempt to grow from seeds of rare strains that have incredible stats and creds, you expand the cannabis gene pool and get buds that change your head in new ways. The challenge is rewarding in that your knowledge increases and makes you an asset to your cannabis community as you work to give the consumer fresh variety.
5. Now That It’s Become Legal, Growing Your Own Can Lead To Gainful Professional Employment
There are many employment opportunities within the ever-expanding legalized marijuana industry for cannabis cultivators.
If you’ve got your own marijuana garden and become familiar with hydroponics nutrients, irrigation, lighting, cultivation protocols, trimming, cloning, germinating seeds, and other marijuana gardening skills and supplies, you’ve got a niche skill set that can get you hired at a legalized facility.
Managers of the most successful legalized marijuana grow ops are earning on average $75,000 a year and up. And according to CNBC, Master Growers are now cracking the six-figure ceiling! So if you’ve reached a career plateau or are currently stuck in a dead-end situation, the marijuana industry could open doors you never knew existed.
6. Growing Your Own Marijuana Gives You The Best High
No matter how many jars of different strains of buds you see at a retail marijuana dispensary, only by growing your own can you find exactly the kind of high and medical benefits you want.
Indeed, you can choose seeds and clones that have the precise psychoactive and medical benefits you seek.
Not only that, you can utilize different growing techniques, cannabis concentrates processing, and selective breeding to further refine and customize marijuana for your needs.
You can also grow using hydroponics nutrients that boost harvest weight, and cannabinoid and terpenoid percentages, producing supernaturally amazing buds to your tastes.
7. Growing Your Own Marijuana = Total Control
When you buy retail marijuana, you won’t have complete knowledge about its genetics or how it was grown.
You can’t know for sure what strain it is, whether insecticides or other toxins were used to grow it, whether the crop is contaminated due to pests or plant tissue storage of nutrients salts, or whether it was flushed, harvested, dried, and cured properly and safely.
By growing your own, you control every detail, from start to finish.
You can choose the best seeds for your needs and breeds, induce those genetics to create customized personal strains, use the best hydroponics nutrients, and apply cultivation protocols.
You can make your own dabs, medibles, and other processed cannabis products at a fraction of the cost of buying these retail products. You can also get experimental and artful when concocting such products. Lavender-infused chocolate-coated pineapple edibles, anyone?
Yep, growing your own marijuana requires an initial investment of time and money.
It also requires that you learn how to grow. But there are plenty of articles on the BigBudsMag.com site explaining the entire process of selecting cannabis strains, creating a grow room, germinating marijuana seeds, and other such useful tips to help you on your path to success.
Growing your own marijuana isn’t as easy or convenient as buying legally. And even though I grow my own weed, from time to time I still enjoy tasty medibles, THC beverages, and other specialized products sold at legal dispensaries.
But if you make the leap from consumer to grower, you’ll discover it’s more interesting and fun to cultivate and process your own weed, which is the only way for you to be absolutely certain you’re using safe, clean, potent cannabis that gives you all you want from your weed! In short? The satisfaction of smoking and consuming your own and a painstaking, self-educated job well done cannot be underestimated.
