Covid19 has slapped our sense of normalcy into a coma—you know this, we know this, I’m sorry. It’s hard to deny that the effects we are seeing are here to stay for quite a while. In order to stop the spread, we are told to stay home and interrupt our regular ties to our communities through physical distancing. These quarantine measures force us to confront the frailties of industrial civilization, and even worse, the precariousness of our own lives as social creatures in modern times. In order to avoid the quarantine blues, we need to get creative. Life in the time of Covid-19 requires us to revisit our relationship with ourselves, and with the things that give us meaning. It’s time to turn inward and cultivate something for ourselves, to tend to our own private gardens, to develop new ways of connecting. It’s time to start growing your own weed.

No seriously, though. As awful as things are, conditions created by the novel coronavirus make this time—this exact time—the perfect space for you to grow a marijuana garden (or even just one plant). Why? Well for one, this time of year happens to be the ideal season for planting cannabis. Expenses for growing are low, and it’s a fairly simple process to learn. As a hobby, growing marijuana is personally enriching, because it cultivates a sense of self-sufficiency and connection to the earth at a time when many of us feel down and isolated. And anyway, you know that you’ve at least wondered what it’d be like to grow your own weed. It’s okay, just say it—if you’re doing physical distancing right, no one will know.

Ti-i-i-ime is on Your Side

...yes it is! It’s okay if that Rolling Stones reference didn’t land, because inadvertently dating myself is a sacrifice I’ll gladly make if it means I’ll impart to you that the time for growing weed is right now. While the best time for the government to order a dystopian lockdown upon your city is no time, at least the timing of this one happens to be great for growing marijuana. Weed is exactly that—a weed (and a hearty one at that) with a natural growth cycle, rhythmically tuned to its climate. In North America, naturally growing cannabis seeds tend to germinate after winter, around February and March. How convenient!

Physical distancing isolates us indoors, but it can’t keep us from our own backyards (or porches, or balconies). Plant your seeds right now—indoors—then transfer them outside as the weather becomes gentler and your plants grow stronger. Choosing to plant cannabis seeds at this time of year is good for the plants, but it’s good for you too. Growing is a way to stay connected to the outdoors, maintain contact with nature, and to feel grounded with the cyclical patterns of the earth. As we enter spring, and quite possibly an indeterminate societal quarantine, planting now will keep you and yours properly Stoned in the Time of Corona for months to come.

Of course, this applies to outdoor plants. The time to plant indoor plants is all the time. And the truth is, you have nothing but time, so it’s important to make sure that those precious moments of your day are nourishing positive growth, rather than unhelpful feelings of doom and anxiety. It’s easy to dwell on all the things we can’t control, but we can choose how we wish to spend our days during this pandemic.

Home-Grown Weed is Fun and Free (Practically Speaking)

It’s so much cheaper to grow your own. Go check out the price per gram of weed at your dispensary (oh wait, you can’t). Do you have any idea how much weed you can get at that price when you grow your own? We’ve already established that you have plenty of time on your hands, so why not invest the 80 days? When you’re sitting with a pound of your favorite strain of cannabis on your hands, you’ll be so glad you did, and covid-19 won’t even know what hit you. Growing your own can yield you a thousand dollars or more worth of weed—help your neighbor, send some to your mom, whatever.

Covid-19 has economically brutalized practically everyone. The virus has suddenly forced us to make radical adjustments to our lives in order to stay afloat, including Yours Truly, who, at the very moment of this article’s production, is still afraid to check the wreckage of her mutual fund, because even though she let go of the Myth of Millennial Mobility years ago, it still hurts. Regardless, we need to adapt our lifestyles according to the oncoming economic trauma, and this includes the way we consume our weed.

Growing at home will prepare you for your community's needs. When the risk of covid-19 fades, the financial impact will remain for a long time. This means that sick people are still going to need their medicines, but they may or may not be able to afford them anymore. It may be that someone down the street treats their kid’s seizures with medical cannabis, or the dude living above you needs it for insomnia. This economic crisis is going to require us to mobilize locally for each other’s needs in a way that we haven’t before, and three months from now, when unemployment has families struggling to cover the basics, that pound of indica you grew for practically nothing will go a very, very long way to help those near to you. In a hypothetical future where everyone’s broke and so are you (or close enough anyway), sharing from the abundant harvest that a home grow can yield will be an easy, affordable way to gift something positive to yourself and your friends.

Kits Make Growing at Home Easy During Quarantine

If you’re stuck in a house all alone with nowhere to go, then you might as well grow. You can do it while physically distancing and following all your favorite coronavirus protocols! Growing at home for your first time feels understandably daunting, but there are all-in-one kits out there that seem like they were practically made for this covid-19 crisis. Shops may be closed, but kits can be ordered online and delivered straight to you, touching as few hands as possible. This includes the seeds too! Do you remember the first time you tried to bake a cake and didn’t know what you were doing, so your clammy little fingers handled every ingredient with more precision and intensity than Keanu deactivates a bomb? Well pot kits are meant to relieve a lot of that stress for you. The beautiful thing about growing weed for yourself is that it’s an art and a science with endless capacity for growth. You may end up making this your life’s work, but the point here is that growing your own cannabis is a rewarding way of coping with the quarantine blues, and it won’t demand time and energy away from your daily routine.

Growing Weed at Home Feels Good and Makes You a Better Person

The spread of Coronavirus is going to change us. Many expect us to eventually tumble out of bed from our work-from-home robes and depression nighties, into a business-as-usual that will never come again. After having seen how little the unspoken promises of hyper-modernity actually protect us—not the government, not our healthcare system, not the military—and after seeing who really does support us, in the end—“essential” minimum-wage workers (restaurants, groceries, pharmacies, delivery services), medical professionals, neighbors looking out for each other—we will begin to think about our lives in different terms. It will make us think about community and sustainability differently.

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Like “slow food,” we will start to adopt “slow consumption”: hyper-local, self-reliant, sustainable. That is what growing cannabis at home will gift you. Any gardener knows these things like the creases in their own hands, and your great-grandparents did too. Growing at home gifts you a feeling of power and self-reliance, intimacy with the environment—a birthright that only feels novel because industrialisation desperately wants you to forget it.

So, understand this—when you meet your cannabis before someone else has clipped, dried, packaged, shipped, and displayed it beneath fluorescent lights—you are doing something radical. When you feel compelled to name your little sprout after three weeks of tending and praying, you have tapped into something primal and true. When you begin to think about your grow relationally—to consider the interconnective rhythms of the insects and fungus as if old friends—you are joining something meaningful. And when you derive inexplicable joy and fascination out of the divine simplicity of life: dirt, water, sun, death—you are beginning to see how beautiful and easy it is, has always been, and always will be, if we let it.

In stressful times like these, it’s important to nourish our bodies with fundamental, radical acts of self-care. So, close your eyes. Take a breath in through the nose, deep and slow. Now imagine how much better that could be, if kissed with the aroma wafting from the bouquet you are holding of your favorite strain, freshly harvested and all your own.