Feral Cannabis of the Midwest

[norm]

I wanted to share a few pics of this naturally sinsemilla wild plant I found growing near me in the upper Midwest. These are a remnant of the hemp industry which thrived here briefly in the 1940s. There are plenty of stands of hemp along the railroad tracks here, mostly extremely seeded without much resin. This one reminds me a litle of a Bangi Haze I grew, with a smooth & fruity aroma, and decent trichomes. I took her home and have her curing right now...

Super interesting plants... Even with a relatively short growing season here, I found 8-9 feet tall plants covered in seedy buds, many of them ripe by September 1 (although with a very large variance, the one pictured was collected around October 15). And the plant structure & terpenes are very unlike anything you'd get at the dispensary. No skunk at all, rather they mostly have lemony, fruity aromas. I found one that smelled exactly like cat piss, and another that was something similar to garlic...

A UMN study in 2020 found that roughly 1% of hemp (collected in MN) contains the genes for a high THC:CBD ratio, although the THC content was usually very low. Another 10% had a 1:1 THC:CBD ratio. Without fancy testing equipment, I wonder how I could find male & female individuals with the THC genes. I am thinking if I spend the next few years smoking lots of sample buds from a lot of hemp plants, perhaps I could find some worthwhile females. I'd love to grow some super early, hardy as fuck, old school weed. Even if I could achieve 3-5% potency it would be extremely worthwhile. Has anyone ever tried something like this?

Anybody know how to judge whether a male plant will produce THC or CBD? I think this might be the most challenging piece of the puzzle.


Here's a fun tour of a hemp patch I found on another icmag thread

 

[Landwolf]

I wonder if thats the way that ancient people found the good stuff. One at a time. I wonder if there's certain parts of male plants that have higher thc than others.

I like the history in that video, thanks for sharing. Looks like the sinsemilla pictures have resin on their trichomes.

 

[norm]

There is definitely resin! After I gave the plant a rough trim, I had some sticky black resin on my fingers.

 

[subrob]

In the late 80s, early 90s I was stationed at Fort Riley KS.
One night, while camping, somehow some LSD seems to have mysteriously got in my system. Two things stand out from that night:
1) I don't recommend LSD for the first time you fish in a region that has gar fish! I had never seen one, or even heard of one and when I reeled one in, my mind almost broke! Lol
2) I walked into a forest of plants that I SWORE was pot! I was sure at that point I would never come down! But, morning after, they were still there. I had never stood in a patch that large! The plants were over my height and fully blooming. Of course, that's when I learned it was feral hemp, but I will never forget that night. Lol

 

[phunkeeboodah]

i lived in northwest iowa in 99/00 and hemp stands were common on country roads and corners. some plants i saw on a trail were alien like in smell and appearance, but nobody was smoking any of it since it was all hemp variety

i feel bad but in the small town i was in, an elderly woman lived in a house on the corner near me and had a single 6 foot tall fully budded plant a few feet from the sidewalk with no fence or anything. it looked like skunk #1 or something and smelled nice and i stole it and smoked some of it and no high

 

[bloyd]

We used to hand rub the feral plots in MN when desperate. Mostly just achieved a headache. It's still plentiful making seedless outdoor near impossible ime.

 

[Landwolf]

The video tells how people let the best hemp in the world go extinct! Kind of shocking that it could happen.

 

[JetLife175]

The video tells how people let the best hemp in the world go extinct! Kind of shocking that it could happen.

Imagine doing this with a bottlenecked drug type line.

I wonder if it would open things back up so someone could actually fix a mistake or two they made while breeding.

 

[Landwolf]

@JetLife175 That would be cool. It seems that if the bottlenecked plant reached 1000's of individuals per year some variation would show up. @norm mentions the 2020 study that found 1% nowadays has THC. Heh, but what if its from escaped pollen from somebody's back yard drug plant grow?

 

[norm]

Heh, but what if its from escaped pollen from somebody's back yard drug plant grow?

That's what I was thinking also. In the paper it states

"Numbers of intermediate and THC-type plants at each of three sampling locations were 12, 20, 1, and 3, 1, 0, respectively."

So of the 4 plants with THC-type, 3 were collected from the same location...

Unfortunately for us they didn't explain exactly where the collection was made!

 

[norm]

Quick smoke report on the pictured plant...

No psychoactive effect. But it smokes nice, not very harsh and with a mild flavor.

 

[Landwolf]

@norm Thanks for sharing, I always wondered what hemp was like. I guess its like Neer Beer, the non-alcoholic stuff I've seen. I wonder what blend of tobacco and hemp would be like.

My history teacher was from Missouri. He said the proper pronunciation was "Missourah." He said it was funny to watch hippies roll up on some hemp growing by the road and quickly load up their car and then take off.

 

[Wolverine97]

Got burned on a bag of what in hindsight was 100% ditch weed, back in high school. It looked nice enough, the buds were pretty big and airy, it had decent resin, but would not get you high at all.

 

[bloyd]

Got burned on a bag of what in hindsight was 100% ditch weed, back in high school. It looked nice enough, the buds were pretty big and airy, it had decent resin, but would not get you high at all.

Same. Pretendica was plentiful in early outdoor window which accompanied supply drought. No shortage of resin or terpenes on some of these feral plants.

 

[goingrey]

Anybody know how to judge whether a male plant will produce THC or CBD? I think this might be the most challenging piece of the puzzle.

Finding a good female would already be pretty impressive.

 

[moose eater]

My understanding is it was planted in (typically) 500-acre plots during the Hemp for Victory campaign during WWII.

After the war they used chemicals, bulldozers and any number of other eradication efforts to get rid of the stuff... but it's pretty tenacious.. it is a weed after all.

We got busted down in Rensselaer, Indiana in 1975 by what had to have been the most southern sounding cops in the north at that time, Jasper County Sheriffs' folks. We were out of SW Michigan, and about half of those of us in the pickup truck were underage and half were 17-18 or so. Several of us were out of state without permission from our probation officers.

Some comical events for those of us who were already experienced with shakedowns, but tense for (especially) the one guy who was on the first-string football team in Luddington, Mich. and was mostly worried about losing his first-string status. I informed the nitwit that he had plenty more to worry about than losing that status.

They got one corncob pipe with residue, equivalent to possession. Another guy, Bruce H., stashed an oz. or so of the fabled Indiana ditch weed under the back seat of a cruiser.... successfully.

I'd just finished putting about 18 dimes into a payphone at a Clark gas station while others fueled the truck and Bruce and I were calling folks in Mich who'd been there, to inquire why we weren't finding these patches, when I turned around and our truck was surrounded by local PD cars. Oops!.

Apparently driving through the cornfields country with a spotlight and a truck loaded with young hippies in the dark of night was noticeable enough to the local farmers that they called it in, and we had been tagged shortly after by an Opal Cadet of all UC vehicles, which I figured was either looking for the same things we were, or were not friendly to the cause.

At the Sheriff's station, where they figured they had us all by virtue of that corncob pipe, I raised my hand where we were sitting in the holding area, and asked the officer in charge the rhetorical question that I already knew the answer to; "If one of us claims ownership of the pipe, then the most you can detain is the owner and the driver; one or 2 of us, assuming the owner isn't also the driver, correct?."

He reluctantly admitted I was correct, and eventually we got Bruce to claim he owned the pipe.

The short lecture that followed remains in my mind fairly clearly, and it ended with, "We're going to escort y'all in your truck to the on-ramp north and if you're ever caught in Jasper County again, we're going to throw you in jail."

I restrained myself and my young pseudo-attorney tongue/knowledge from pointing out that what he proposed was, in fact, illegal, as the fact was that if he was going to bust us, he had to simply bust us; he couldn't leave this hanging over our heads for an indeterminant period of time, negating our right to freedom of movement, so I left that educational tidbit for another day, figuring that getting out of there with no bruises or other legal losses was pretty cool.

I took over driving on my learner's permit, and the owner of the truck crawled into a sleeping bag in the bed of the truck to sleep.

When we got up near Holland, Michigan, I pulled into another Clark station to fuel up, and the owner grabbed the bed rail, peeked up and over the rail and saw the orange round Clark sign, and I'm told he exclaimed, "OH NO!!" assuming I'd turned around and gone back to Rensselaer, Indiana, which I had not done.

A while later I went back with 2 different adults, who were a bit more savvy about avoiding detection. One took our car and went back into town and the other and I scoured the fields and found a patch, which we harvested a fair bit of.

Much of that harvest was seized when my home was raided during a week-long kegger before school resumed. I had about a lb. and a half dry-weight hanging in the attic, and that's where a bunch of people chose to hide during the raid. Bad choice.

A learning period in life, in retrospect.

And from my 'knowledge' back then, roughly 1:100 of that hemp weed had decent THC content, based on natural selection and recessive traits. 'Decent' being relative to that period of time where cannabis was concerned.

 

[flower~power]

Looks like Haze …lol

 

[Landwolf]

Dude! There's a bounty on feral hemp sites. This video with Shelby Ellison was posted on therealseedcompany.com's blog from 9/24/24. There is a university that is collecting seeds of US feral hemp. They did genetic analysis and found 3 distinct sub populations. They did chemotyping and have graphs with the amount of THC a little after midway. They give you $150 for help with the collecting.

 

[norm]

Dude! There's a bounty on feral hemp sites.

Oh this is sweet! Thanks for sharing, I will definitely watch when I have an hour to spare.

...

And from my 'knowledge' back then, roughly 1:100 of that hemp weed had decent THC content, based on natural selection and recessive traits. 'Decent' being relative to that period of time where cannabis was concerned.

Thanks for another data point!

 

[norm]

This is a (GUERILLA GOLD x DANISH PASSION) plant that I pollinated with mystery feral hemp male, almost ready to harvest. Genetics from Aridbud, supposed to be very hardy and very early. Smells slightly like blueberry.
I'm just learning about plant genetics, but my understanding is that these are 'F1' seeds, and that they will likely have a balanced THC:CBD ratio and low-to-average potency?