Be careful how you garden
 

SIL is an enthusiastic gardener and loves to pull weeds. Some years ago she was at home one morning and decided to pull some large weeds. She piled them in neat piles beside the row and left to run an errand. when she got back her neighbor asked her what was going on, there had been a helicopter hovering overhead and a police car in the road. She assumed they had seen the piles of weeds and thought they were the other kind of weed and came to check it out.

It's not unheard of for someone to grow MJ in their garden. A friend was in the yard of a house he was renting and a county cop he knew stopped to pass the time of day. The cop looked across the yard and spotted Marijuana growing among the renter's garden plants. The renter fessed up and said that was one way he got some extra money in the winter.

Some growers will slip some plants into a large cornfield. It seems they show up rather well from the air.

COWS

I never figured out who it was but one of my neighbors called the Sheriff about me growing the illegal stuff. I had a couple of hills of okra growing in a perrenial bed and the deputy just shook his head when he got there and said sorry to bother us.

My DH is friends with a lot of rancher kids in the area. One year when they were in high school there was a HUGE bust on one of the ranchers properties. Someone had been growing weed in their winter pasture and since they own so much land they hadn't noticed.

First time we did a container garden we had the helicopters circling. First time the helicopter showed up they probably watched us for a good 30 min or so, then came back a few weeks later to check again.

Ditch weed grows n the sides of the road here, everywhere!
Whole pastures are just full of the stuff.
I wonder sometimes if the powers that be, have maps of where the wild stuff is, so they know when someone is actually cultivating the "good stuff"....

Ya, first time was about 3 years ago. The black suv's rolled into the neighbors, I was on our little side porch. The chopper came right above me, the top of the maple tree, "cop" had his weapon trained on me. I got up and ran down to the cows to see if they were spooked. The reason I did that was because of an experiance I had with a hot air balloon thinking of landing in our cow pasture-another story that didn't end well. Anyhow the chopper followed me ,ofcourse I had to go right past my corn patch to get to the cows. Between the suv's,cops,choppers, I'm kinda woundering how much they spent on a 175. ticket.
This year, the chopper saw me in my Golden Raspberry patch, they came back a second time for a better look. I didn't wave,didn't want to seem snarky. But I do wave when it's Military...

We bought 35 acres to put a house on. Well, before that got done my husband switched jobs and we knew we had to move closer to the job. In the meantime, our neighbor continued to grow corn on the acreage. Another neighbor was always checking on the property and basically scaring prospective buyers away. Eventually my RE agent finally told me (her DH is a deputy) that the sheriff’s office was keeping an eye on the corn field because there was marijuana planted in the field.

Funny Story..

Years ago, I had to drive down a fairly busy road to get to my house. The homeowner of a modest house built a brick wall around his backyard, He was growing weed back there and attaching faux flowers to the plants.

His neighbors could see his backyard from their second floor and turned him in.

When we moved here, we found lots of weed growing wild. My DS harvested it and I never spotted any more.

When I was a young newlywed, I had many house plants - the 1st Husband planted weed in one of my potted plants. It was a pretty plant, kinda fernlike... It didn't dawn on me what he had done for quite some time. I often wonder if the landlord ever stopped by & saw that.

There is an ongoing case now in the county where I live. An old man had a large field of the stuff growing on his rural property of several hundred acres. The feds came in and charged him and his son with growing weed. The first time it went to trial it was a hung jury. They could not prove he had knowledge it was there and did not find him cultivating it in any way. Funny how the news paper reported on it. They said he had marajauna cultivating and harvesting equipment and they gave some big $$$ figure. When they finally got to the end of the article they mentioned the equipment consisted of various tractors and field implements!!! What farmer does not have tractors and field implements??

don't some folks grow hemp as a crop of some kind besides marijuana stuff?

SP, As far as I know there is no Hemp crop legal to grow in the U.S. many universities have done test and developed strains of hemp that have almost zero levels of THC. To the point you could smoke it all day and never get any kind of high from it. According to the FED's if there is "Any" measurable amount of THC it is illegal. SO far no one has developed anything like this with zero THC.
I am not a proponent of legalized marajana, although I do think it is probably a safer drug than alcohol. I do know hemp is a viable crop which can be made into many different products, it would be beneficial for a textile crop for sure.

:hysterical:

When we used to live in the 'burbs, we thought it was funny to grow a big clump of Texas Star Hibiscus in the front flower beds. It's a gorgeous flower but it always managed to fool LE, who would slow down/stop for a look.

A few years back, we had a black helicopter hovering over the little 10' x 10' tomato patch out back----I presume because we had black shade cloth above the plants. Sorta ticked me off at the time but now, when we put up the shade cloth each year, I kinda wish they'd come back again, just for the chuckle factor. :D

I wish the cops would spend their time catching murderers, child molesters, & rapists.

Mind reader are you?

Can't quite justify the helo with those.

Quite the money making racket that whole DEA thing.

We had the helicopter over our home once. I thought they had some kind of weapon trained on the house but it was a device for checking for grow lights. The neighbor exactly one mile south was growing it in his house and they were a mile off. We walked beans for my uncle back in the day. There were several rows planted in one of his fields. Obviously planted in straight rows between the rows of beans. Perfect spot as that field was only accessible by a dirt road then a fence row. Who ever planted it took it before he could turn it in. My bet is on his step-sons!

I like the perspective from the rest of the world. L.E has cut down about 100,000 plants in my county so far this year and that is just the outdoor grown. With the first rains of the season, they will switch to indoor now.

What? Helicopters? Black SUV's? Also from the State of Jefferson here and the air is so pungent with "skunk" it is amazing. All small medical marijuana grows around us, someone said there are 24 legal gardens on our road alone. The Sheriff's Department leaves the little grows alone, only occasional big busts, the DEA usually like to make an example out of someone yearly.

Well, but it is legal to grow Marijuana in a few states, it I am not mistaken. I think Colorado, and Washington State and maybe California have Legalized the growing and use of pot. It's still Illegal to the Feds, though.

It makes sense to me to legalize it. . It is a lot safer then alcohol, to use.

Edit to Add.....I just absolutely do not believe in Breaking the Law. And that's why I won't do it.

I am by no means a proponent of pot use, but it seems there are much bigger fish to fry for LEOs than someone's tiny garden plot that has a pile of weeds sitting at the end of a row! Meth labs for starters.

I worked with aerial images for 12 years. You can see a LOT of detail from the air and it doesn't take a very expensive camera (relative to LE budgets) to spot all kinds of things.

Once there was a helicopter hovering in the field next to my fish farm. It just hovered and then moved and hovered some more. I thought it might be more harassment from the DNR so I decided that when I got done feeding the fish I would moon them. Just as I was walking down the dike towards them they flew away.

It turned out to be a helicopter mechanic trying to adjust their elevation equipment. :)

I keep a few raised beds between my garage and backyard fence because A)It gets full sun and B)No one really goes back there.


We always have military helicopters flying over, but sometimes we get those small black ones that buzz around mine and my neighbors house.
About 2 months ago we had one get almost land in the neighbors yard it was so low.. Since I have a fence and dogs I wondered if they werent trying to spy on my little gardens and thats the closest they could get.
They havent been back since.


Cleome is a fun one to grow.
It has the 5 pointed leaves and the skunk smell.
I use to grow it along my front walk and people would always ask me if I had marijuana growing

Around here, they don't use helicopters. They use ultralights.

Ha Ha I grow cleome too and I always get asked if it's weed anytime someone new comes over. You'd think the flowers would make it obvious it's not pot, lol

I'm planning on trying to heat my greenhouse this winter and see if I can grow stuff in there-but not weed! I'd love to be able to have some fresh produce all winter long. I hope I don't get raided.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...mon-Kenny.html

I have watching this story a little while.http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...p-seed-seizure
Federal overreaching grab of power .

I remember growing up we had a patch of wild ditch weed growing around our little cluster of mail boxes. City folk were always driving by, slowing down and checking it out. Finally one day after watching a bunch of kids stop and jerk a couple of plants out of the ground, my mom called the local LEOs and informed them of what was going down. They told her not to worry about it, that the quality of that weed was so low you couldn't even get a buzz off of it. She finally had to go out and chop it out herself to get the novelty to go away.

Another time I was talking to a police officer and asked him when law enforcement was going to bust the drug house that was directly behind me on the next street. The LEO admitted that they knew all about it but the city was making too big of a chunk of revenue off of busting cars doing business with them a block or two away for them to shut the operation down.

At that point I realized it was a waste of time worrying about it when the law wasn't concerned in the least.

And for that service I paid taxes every year.

No money in that.

With the right camera you can see a garden hose at 1,000' elevation. I'm sure that LEO and the military camera's are even better.

Just outta curiosity, can those fancy cameras see what kind of veggies are growing inside of a plastic covered hoop house from way up in the air? Most greenhouse type plastic is not clear so just by looking directly from above, the naked eye couldn't really see much.

I've never had much interest in heating a hoop house to tropical levels but perhaps just enough to keep it from freezing.

We have millet all over from the Bird Feeders.

To the untrained eye it looks a bit like a patch.

State boys buzzed the place three times before landing in the back field.

There was a stand of rag weed, looked like some heavy colas. lol.

We also have a few pilots that like to buzz everyone.

I told the one guy it bothered me and he knocked it off.

Read the book or listen to the audio book of "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Force" and you'll learn a lot more about why there's so much focus on drugs instead of violent crimes, but it pretty much all boils to department funding from the federal government and asset forfeiture laws.

Just a little info. I have found on aerial surveillance. I read a article that said in WW2 they were able to read the headline on a German news paper from an airplane. The same article also said with the satellite imagery they have now a farmer in Oklahoma could walk out across his field in the morning and they could see the steps in the dew on the ground and tell you where he walked! I do not know for a fact, if that is indeed where we are at, but I really do not doubt it with much of the new technology out there. The ability to do many things is well beyond our capacity to determine if we should do these things or not.

Yeah, that's why the Canadian Gov't warned its citizens to not go to the US with lots of cash. Apparently it's a bit of a cash cow for LE. $2.5 Billion, they say...

Even in the 1950s the military had spy satellites that could read newspaper headlines in Red Square. When I was in the Air Force in the 1970s the base photo recon outfit had a trophy wall of satellite photos of nude beaches in Europe. The detail was amazing! These days they can use facial recognition software from satellites, no need to hack a street cam. They can also listen to conversations inside houses from space, using lasers that read the vibrations on the window glass.

Wild hemp was all over the place when we lived in Nebraska. Every fall the county sheriff would bust farm kids who were harvesting the stuff, drying it in their dad's barn, and then selling it to city kids who didn't know the difference. It dates back to World War II, when the government handed out hemp seed to Midwest farmers to grow after the Japanese occupied the Philippines, which were the source of hemp rope for the Navy. I've seen photos of the harvests; the cannabis plants grew eight-ten feet tall.

Unfortunately hemp and marijuana look identical, so it's currently illegal to grow hemp in the U.S. I understand it's legal in Canada, though. However, Maine has legalized medical marijuana, which has become so popular that legal growers have revitalized the agricultural industry here. I have a medical marijuana card (I have cancer), but haven't chosen a grower yet to supply me.

BTW, law enforcement has taken a hands-off approach to marijuana in Maine. I've heard that the DEA is on notice to stay out of it except for large, obviously illegal quantities. Last summer a medical marijuana holder had three plants stolen from his back yard in Portland. Police caught the thief, seized the plants ... and returned them to the grower.

It always seemed wrong that a government could declare a plant illegal, It seems nature or God trumps governments. Since God made all things, including drug plants, why don't they have a warrant out for his arrest. :)
On another point, in Wyoming county here in western New York, a cop raided a place, pulled up all the plants, charged the guy... turned out it was tomato plants, what an idiot.
I'm told moth mullein has some marijuana like effects, never tried it. I've found Jimson weed, beautiful trumpet flowers and a spiky green seed pod. Seeds are real nasty, supposed to be more powerful than LSD, easy to over dose on. Too scared to try it.
Did you know that when lettuce goes to seed the milk in the leaves is a pain reliever? It has some narcotic like effects yet isn't a narcotic. The wild lettuce is more potent than the tame stuff. It seems to work, helps you sleep too.
Just for fun, just to see if I could, I bought poppy seeds in the bulk section at the grocery store and planted them, some grew. I suppose I could have made something out of them if I had wanted to. Supposedly, if you eat enough poppy seeds, you can test positive on some drug tests. Always wanted to try it to see if it was true.
For kicks if you want to get people upset, burn catnip, it smells very close to marijuana. You'll have every cat in the neighborhood breathing the smoke :) Found this out by accident.
Ok, now you know all my drug experiences, aren't I a man of the world. :)