Beltane Waxing Last Frost Moon
A long, 3 hour, nap, perfect for a gloomy, chill spring afternoon. Then off to the grocery store. With Mark here there are items on the list peculiar to him like Raisin Bran, lots of bread, more fish than usual (a good thing) and a greater quantity of fruit.
The same kid from Anoka/Ramsey Garden came with the pocket sized dump truck, navigated it through our gate and dumped the load right in front of the orchard, saving several steps with a heavy wheelbarrow. He remembered our place, “An old cannabis farm, right? Not as much up now.”
Yep, during WWII the government wanted more rope so hemp farms were common in Anoka county. The weed grows everywhere, will get 8-9 feet tall if allowed to mature and has a stem at maturity that is so thick a machete takes two or three whacks to bring it down. It laughs at weed whips. And, no, its THC content is too low to be any good. It made rope, not laughing teen-agers and college students.
True story. When we first moved up here to Andover, back in 1994, we were the only house in the development. A white car pulled up on 153rd about two hundred feet from our house and two young kids popped the trunk and hopped out. They busily pulled hemp plants from the lot across from us and threw them in the car, not even bothering to shake the soil off the roots. Someone, we think it was the developer, Harvey Kadlec, called the police.
When they arrived, the kids were still at work. Oops. The police impounded the car and gave the kids a lift back to the Anoka County Jail.
Kate always tells this on me, so I’ll just go ahead. I had laced several hemp plants through our chain link fence, reveling in the fact that the forbidden weed grew wild on our property, a sort of dream lot for a sixties kid. When the police came, I went out through our back garage door and pulled the plants out of the fence. Can’t be too careful in these circumstances.