Dale J. Chamberlain's High Altitude School of Hydroponics (HASH) courses are specifically designed to comply with Colorado's new cannabis law.

High Altitude School of Hydroponics

Even though Colorado passed Constitutional Amendment 64 legalizing the use of marijuana in November, it's still a crime to sell cannabis in the state. Sure, plenty of charitable Coloradans on Craigslist will accept "donations" for doobie. And others are happy to barter. But what if you don't have a pair of old shoes to trade for weed? How can one score an ounce of super-frosty Golden Goat in Colorado and not run afoul of the law? Former NASA scientist Dale J. Chamberlain has the answer. He'll teach you to grow it yourself, at his (acronym alert) High Altitude School of Hydroponics outside Ft. Collins.

Chamberlain knows more about far-out farming than almost anyone. At the Kennedy Space Center in the early 1990s he studied horticulture for future lunar colonies. "I assisted in building a plant-growth chamber that is still on the space shuttle," he says, explaining that low-gravity hydroponics left him uniquely prepared to handle Colorado's new legal landscape. "The law states that it must be grown in an enclosed lockable space. And although one might argue that could be a garden with a fence around it, there's more pests out there than insects and squirrels." To keep invasive teenage stoners out of your garden, Chamberlain came up with the perfect solution, a device he's dubbed The Colorado Grow Box. "We took this chamber that was designed for the space shuttle and created a grow box similar to what was flown on NASA's space shuttle fleet."

Better yet, HASH will teach you how to get the highest yield from your chamber. Chamberlain (or his cousin Chuck) offer one-day Cannabis Classes for casual growers. "Your Everyman can come away with the knowledge that he or she is not going to ruin months of work and end up with a crop that is really not worth the time. A lot of people will tell you that no one's going to go to the trouble of growing it themselves, but in this day of GMOs and pesticides, there's a lot of interest in this. Teach them to fish, if you will."