Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

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I grow regular food plants (chiles), and it's not that simple. You have germination, irrigation, fertilization, repotting, pest control, weeding, etc. If you just carelessly throw some seeds on the ground then they probably won't germinate or they'll get eaten by animals and you'll get nothing. If you forget to water them they'll die. You have to check them every day if you want them to grow reliably.

Making wine is as easy as buying a carton of grape juice, adding some dried yeast, and covering the top with some aluminum foil. It won't be good wine, but it will be recognizably wine. People living under prohibition would be happy with it. If you try growing chiles with that level of effort you'll get nothing edible.

Weed is often grown by people tossing seeds on federal or someone else's land then coming back to collect when grown and doing nothing else. For a while it was in WV's top 3 crops because there was so much unused land for people to do this.

Like all crops they benifit from care, but the trade off of ~zero time, effort, and risk for some value is the appeal.

Eh, peppers are harder than lots of other vegetables. If you have good results with them, you'd have no problem with tomatoes, turnips, onions, radishes, lettuce, etc. I've never grown an "illegal" plant, but you may not be able to generalize from chili peppers to e.g. pot.

Eh, mescaline, weed and (sort of) Psilocybin) is fairly easy. I guess the difference is it takes a lot longer to grow these things rather over fermenting alcohol.

These are the two I was thinking of. If you're trying to optimize for quality then there's difficulty. But simply hiding a weed plant and getting a yield isn't difficult unless you live in a colder climate. Shrooms are so easy people grow them in shoeboxes.

Edit: When I said two I failed to notice mescaline. I haven't done much reading on mescaline.

People in California grow huge San Pedro cacti in their garden, but that doesn't work so well when you are living in a colder climate.

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