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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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I've both make my own alcohol (cider) and grown my own cannabis. Both have some challenges and different aspects that make them easier or harder than the other.

For the cider I get the apples from a local orchard's roadside stand where they crush the apples into cider and put it in milk style jugs for you. I've processed the apples myself in the past but its a pain. Once I have the soft cider I use a few of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5Z78SC/ fermenting bottles with yeast from the local wine shop. Takes about two weeks to ferment. You can easily screw it up and make revolting vomit cider if your equipment is contaminated. I give some of it to my father in law who makes apple jack out of it. I drink very little personally so 3 gallons last about a year. You can make it at any time of the year but I do in the fall, as that's when the local apples are up. This is the only alcohol I consume.

Cannabis is dead easy to grow and process if all you want is dried flower. You can put effort into preparing the soil, using fertilizer, staking the plants to encourage multiple flowering runners etc. You can also just literally throw handfuls of seeds at your yard. Cannabis is an extremely hardy, robust plant that can overcome some pretty rough conditions. I've seen seeds sprout in wet carpet near a window. With even a small amount of prep: tilling the soil, checking on the seedlings a couple of times, maybe giving them a generic garden center fertilizer, they will do the rest of it on their own. This assumes outdoor growing. Indoor setups are a whole other beast and largely driven imo by prohibition and the need to hide it. I put a fair amount of work into my outdoor plants. I grow them from seedlings in planters inside until they are about 6-8 inches tall them transplant them outside when the weather is foretasted to be nice for a week of so. I prepare the soil well with a tiller and fertilizer, stake them up, and check on them regularly. Its legal in my state so they are just beside the house. 5 plants per person is the limit, so my wife and I grow 10. Curing is easy, I just cut the flowers off in the fall and hang them in the barn for a week. I live pretty deep in the country so I'm not really worried about passers by bothering it. Everyone in eyesight of my farm is a family member anyway.

The cannabis is ostensibly more work, but not that much more. Not really any more than growing tomatoes tbh, which I also do, and peppers and some herbs. What is a bit of work is that I process the flowers into hash oil, which requires specialized equipment (https://www.dabpress.com/products/4x7-rosin-plates-diy-heat-machine) and has a learning curve. Of note, 10 outdoor plants produce a tremendous amount of product for personal use. Each plant can easily output 1.5 lbs of dried flower. With high quality seeds and care, before it was legalized, this was like $30,000 worth of cannabis per year. Honestly its still worth that much now, IF I was part of the legal market, which I'm not interested in. Prices really haven't gone down for the high end stuff. I give about 2/3rds of it away, as wax or oil. For personal use I ingest it in cookies/gummies etc. I haven't actually smoked dried flower in years, I may occasionally vaporize some of the oil.

The cider is less work, but mostly because I produce so little. In equivalent dosage it would probably be more work overall.

Apples are harder to ferment nicely than other fruits/berries due to the high levels of pulp and pectin in them. Every time I make cider dealing with the pulp is a huge pain in the ass, and it varies by apple variety as well. Berries are much easier to manage and generate much less pulp, and since they don't have any pectin, they clear up nicely just standing in the fermenter without the need for fining agents.

Since fruits and berries are and always will be available at any market (unlike cannabis, which in most places and times is a specialty product), and yeast is in the air all around us, there's really no contest here between growing and processing a plant by yourself vs blending some berries and letting it sit.