Toby Young Toby Young

My brief career as a marijuana farmer

[iStock]

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976, when I was 13, but three years later, by which time my family had moved to Devon. My father had been commissioned to write the biography of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the founders of Dartington Hall, a utopian community in South Devon, and wanted to be nearer the archives and the couples’ friends and colleagues whom he was planning to interview. Having been brought up in London, I was terrifically snobbish about how behind the times the local teenagers were – still wearing flares and listening to Status Quo, gawd help them! But at least the house we’d bought came with a tiny bit of land. That meant I could cultivate my own cannabis plantation.

No internet back in those days, so I ordered a growers’ guide from one of the small ads in the back of High Times, the weed smokers’ bible. The advice was to germinate the seeds at the beginning of February and keep the seedlings inside in a warm place with artificial light, then plant them outdoors in June with a view to harvesting them in September. My sister, who was two years older and a pupil at Dartington, an ultra-progressive independent school, supplied the seeds.

I lived in the garden in what we referred to as ‘the hut’, but it was actually more of a guest house with electricity and running water. It didn’t have a bathroom, but it had a sink behind two cupboard doors and it was there that I set up my indoor greenhouse. I bought a fluorescent tube, attached it to the J-shaped pipe below the sink, rigged up a switch on a timer and placed the seed tray beneath it. Bingo! My very own ‘grow op’, as we drug lords like to say.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in