Greetings:
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Vinnie Kaz, and I have been growing, smoking, and researching cannabis for the past 30 years. Past and present careers include door to door sales, gold prospecting in northern Cali, ham radio, electrical engineering, and chinese-style martial arts trainer...tai chi, chikung and xingi; these workouts are about to overtake the world!
I grew up 40 miles west of Chicago. Just after graduating high school, I traveled to Happy Camp, California, in Siskiyou county (northern Cali) in 1981 to dredge for gold on a gold claim located on the Klamath River. This just happened to coincide with the explosion in outdoor-grown, northern california seedless cannabis. When I got there, everybody was growing out in the open, and also smoking it right out in the open!
After a full summer in California, I had a chance to make some local connections, and soon found myself in possession of multiple strains of very high quality, seedless marijuana, the likes of which I had never seen when living in the Chicago area. At this point in time, almost no one was growing indoors because metal halide grow lights were just coming on to the mass market at prices that people could afford. This was the ultimate party for me: 18 years old, pockets full of gold nuggets, and high quality sinsemilla all around me
. My personal gardens were cultivated on a ridge about 75 feet above my gold claim on the Klamath river. Back then (pre-CAMP) my gardens were 100+ plants (Burning Bush, Purple Afghan #2). When the plants needed watering, the pumps on the gold dredge were used to pump water from the river up to the garden above. Needless to say, a whole bunch of that Cali sinsemilla found its way back to my hometown over the course of the next ten years or so.
Over the past 30 years, I have lived in Illinois, northern California, and about a dozen points in-between. I have always tried to move to areas that were "hotbeds" of marijuana cultivation, and, over the decades, many connections and friendships were established with a multitude of professional, outdoor cannabis growers. These relationships have allowed to me to observe, first hand, many of the most closely guarded trade secrets and old-school techniques, used by these professionals to triple their garden yields, increase security, repel cannabis-munching critters, and reduce the amount of back-breaking labor required to set up a clandestine garden.
Over the past 8 years, I have collected this multitude of growing information into a large database. After interviewing fellow outdoor growers (over 12 different states) and recording their experiences, trade secrets, and growing techniques, this information was added to the database. After this, I turned to scouring the internet for many years, collecting and gathering information from the literally millions of available sources on the world wide web, including chat rooms, growers forums, seed banks, growing websites, blogs, and even main stream gardening websites (why reinvent the wheel?). Many of these chat rooms and portals have now been shut down by the government, and are no longer in existence: Overgrow, Cannabinoid, The SeedBank, SSSC, Hemp QC, Emery Seeds, etc.
Our group of experienced, outdoor growers then processed the harvested data, completely rewriting it into a huge collection of detailed, proven, guerilla-growing techniques.
For the past three years, this information has been compiled into printed book form, and will soon be available for sale. My original idea was to make the information available on a subscription website. This all changed when the government claimed that they should have the power to "shut down" the internet whenever they proclaim it as "necessary". It became very clear to me that the safest way to spread this info to the public would be in printed book form, sort of a growing textbook covering every aspect of professional, outdoor cannabis growing. At least the government has not granted itself the power to sieze and burn books...yet!
Let me tell you, writing, editing, publishing, promoting a book may look easy (I always thought that it was!) but it has taken over my life. I put together a website at tradesecretspublishing.com which pretty much tells the story. The name of the book is "GUERILLA GROWING TRADE SECRETS: HINTS KINKS AND TIPS FOR THE CLANDESTINE CANNABIS GROWER and it is a new concept in marijuana cultivation manuals...real life problems and challenges, as faced by todays guerilla-style cannabis growers, are analyzed, and solved, using real life solutions offered up by experienced cannabis growers. Check out the FLASH VIEWER preview on the home page. Especially interesting is the bonus chapter entitled "How To Grow A Five Pound Plant".
Maybe some of you can send me some feedback or a review to
[email protected] I'm not sure what the policy is as far as that goes for this website, but definitely do not want to rock the boat on my first ever post!
Well, that is pretty much my life story..........been involved in the cannabis "industry" for decades, just not in a high-profile way like some of the more well-known cultivation authors out there. Deeply involved in medical and decrim initiatives here in Illinois, and keeping my fingers crossed as far as that goes...the city of Chicago is now discussing a simple ticket for possession of small amounts.
There is nothing like sitting on the Lake Michigan shoreline and smoking a phattie! I look forward to chatting with all of you in the future, assisting you with your outdoor growing challenges, and hopefully, learning some of YOUR most closely guarded cultivation trade secrets and tactics that could be included in the second edition...but that is for another time! I will definitely be spending most of my time in the OUTDOOR growing forums.
Best Wishes To All,
Vinnie Kaz
