GROWING GRASS

As Marijuana Dispensaries Close, Some Patients Take Up a New Kind of Gardening.

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down
a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small
guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the
end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain
and ducks inside.

"Isn't this wild?" she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana
grow room she and her husband recently installed. "This used to be my
daughter's bedroom."

Wild is one word for it. Bright is another. Unexpected, yet another.
What had been a teenager's tropical-themed room is now a beaming,
humming, indoor plant laboratory complete with silver reflective
bubble wrap on the walls, blinding grow lights, ventilation ducts
hanging from the ceiling and marijuana plants in various stages of
development neatly labeled with names such as Platinum Kush, Purple
Diesel and Blue Cheese.

"They are like our children," Clarke says, gazing proudly at the
elegant fronds that look familiar and exotic all at once. "We talk to them."

Clarke's grow room is legal - in the state of California, anyone with
a doctor's recommendation to use marijuana can grow it in limited
quantities - yet it still feels clandestine. Although she's open
about using pot (crushed and placed in capsules) to help manage the
pain of rheumatoid arthritis, she and her husband haven't shown the
room to any friends. "Ninety-five percent of the people I know are
fine with it," she says, "but it's that 5% that I worry about. I
don't want to make anyone uncomfortable."

Home Grown Pot

Just as California has seen a rise in small-scale backyard vegetable
gardeners in recent years, marijuana activists and growers cite a
similar, if much quieter, rise in medical marijuana patients growing
pot for themselves.

The reasons are varied: Buying medical marijuana at a dispensary can
be expensive and uncomfortable for those who don't identify with
marijuana culture, and now that the city of Los Angeles has declared
that just 41 of the remaining 169 dispensaries are eligible to stay
open, finding a convenient place to buy marijuana is becoming
increasingly difficult, especially for those with a debilitating
illness. The organically minded are concerned about chemicals that
might be in marijuana they don't grow themselves, and still others
worry about where their pot came from. "I don't want to fund
terrorism," one home-grower says.

Some gardeners - and many do see this simply as a form of gardening -
say they get the same soothing pleasure from tinkering with grow
lights, temperature controls, fertilizers and additives as others get
from nurturing prized rose bushes or carefully pruning bonsai trees.

"My husband can spend hours a day in our grow room," Clarke says.
"For him, it's fantasy land."

The new breed of home marijuana grower comes in all different forms,
whether it's a 25-year-old rooftop gardener taking as much pride in
his first harvest of okra as in the marijuana that grows alongside it
or a 75-year-old retiree cheerfully growing cannabis on her
senior-village balcony. Pony-tailed boomers are geeked out on the
fact that it's actually legal to grow this stuff, and at least one
new grower called up the UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardener
help line for Los Angeles County to ask for advice on growing
"grass." (The master gardener on duty misunderstood the question and
recommended a drought-tolerant grass. When the caller explained he
was talking about grass, she told him she couldn't help: Master
Gardener policy.)

Otherside Farms, a marijuana information and education center founded
by Chadd McKeen in Orange County, teaches medical marijuana patients
how to grow their own pot and also helps people install grow rooms at
home. McKeen says half the people who take the weekend-long class on
growing marijuana, which he teaches twice a month, are older couples.

"My market isn't the 18- to 25-year-olds - they already know
everything," he says. "My demographic is 50- to 60-year-olds."

When he first started installing grow rooms in homes, McKeen was
constantly worried that each job was a setup.

"I thought everyone was a cop," he says.

But over time he's become accustomed to the
embroidered-sweater-wearing, lighthouse-poster-hanging, older pot
smoker who makes up the majority of his clientele. "This is what the
marijuana user looks like," he says.

The grow rooms that McKeen installs are generally replicas of the
rooms he has in his storefront headquarters in Costa Mesa, even down
to the bright orange Home Depot utility buckets he puts mature plants
in. Most of the rooms he installs are in second bedrooms, which he
usually divides in half to create two different environments - a "veg
room" where the plants grow and a "bloom room" where a change in
lighting and temperature encourages budding. He said the rooms
generally cost about $15,000 to set up.

Golden State Greenery, another company in Orange County that helps
novices build grow rooms at home, offers the "California 5-by-5
special," a 5-by-5-foot grow tent that can be set up in a living room
or garage. The tent is black on the outside to keep light and heat
from escaping, and to keep the structure as discreet as possible. But
inside, it's lined in reflective silver to maximize the light source.
For $2,500, the company says it can have new clients ready to grow
their own cannabis within four hours.

Outdoor vs. Indoor

All this fancy (and expensive) growing equipment isn't technically
necessary. It is possible to grow marijuana outdoors in Southern
California. If planted in the spring, a seed or clone will generally
produce one harvest in early fall. Many people have had success with
simply sticking a plant on a balcony or tucking one among the
tomatoes in the backyard.

"Pot is actually easier to grow than tomatoes," said one man in San
Diego, who like many people contacted for this article has a doctor's
recommendation and is growing legally but still asked to remain
anonymous. "There's a reason they call it 'weed.'"

But for many home growers, the best place is inside. An indoor
growing system offers environmental controls that would be impossible
to get outside - no snails or caterpillars, less chance of powdery
mildew. It also offers the possibility of four harvests a year rather
than one. Another reason: Marijuana plants, even just a few, are
still magnets for trouble even though medicinal pot has been legal since 1996.

"We tell our students it's kind of like before: You don't plant it in
your front yard or your front porch, and you don't show it off," says
Jeff Jones, a prominent marijuana activist who teaches grow classes
in Oakland and Los Angeles. "There is still the home invasion issue,
and your neighbor to the left or to the right might want to steal it
from someone who has a VIP pass to grow something that is not legal
for others."

At a recent "traveling party," when neighbors went around to one
another's homes to check out new additions or garden makeovers, a
friend asked Clarke if she and her husband would be showing off their
new grow room. Clarke declined.

"It's still hard for people to understand this is legal," she says.
"So now when people ask about our new hobby, we just laugh and say my
husband is growing a few plants for me. People know we're doing it.
They just don't know the full extent."

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WHAT'S LEGAL?

A Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman reported no increases
this year in neighbor complaints or raids on small-scale, home
growing operations, but clearly medical marijuana still stirs much
debate. The laws surrounding marijuana cultivation are vague at best
and have become more vague over time. A brief history:

1996: Proposition 215 passes, making it legal for "seriously ill"
Californians and their primary caregivers to grow marijuana for
medical purposes if medical use has been recommended by a physician.
No limit for how much marijuana a person with a recommendation can
grow or possess is set at this time.

2004: Senate Bill 420, the Medical Marijuana Program Act, goes into
effect. The bill establishes a voluntary registration of medical
marijuana patients and their primary caregivers through a statewide
identification card system. The bill's guidelines state that a
cardholder can possess up to 8 ounces of dried marijuana or may
cultivate up to six mature or 12 immature plants. Individual counties
may choose to set higher limits, but no county may set a lower limit.

2010: In People vs. Kelly, the state Supreme Court holds that
patients can possess or cultivate as much as is "reasonably
necessary." They cannot be convicted simply for exceeding the
possession or cultivation guidelines in SB 420; however, they can be
forced to defend themselves in court.