Last year, the Constitutional Court officially legalised the use, cultivation and possession of marijuana within the privacy of a person’s home. While there is ongoing concern surrounding the controversial plant, its decriminalisation has led to a ‘growing’ interest in learning how to cultivate it.
Capetonians who wish to privately grow and use dagga can now buy South Africa’s first cannabis home-growing kit at Starke Ayres Garden Centres in Cape Town.
Stark Ayres is one of the largest seed suppliers in Africa and known for its innovation in agriculture and gardening. After receiving many inquiries daily from customers wanting to know how to grow their own cannabis, it decided to provide a comprehensive solution, collaborating with the best specialists available to create a product that would fulfill cutomers’ demands.
Cape Town’s go-to garden centre partnered with bio-active cell food supplier enOrmous Bud to produce the country’s first “complete” marijuana home-growing kit. Each kit purchase comes with a free ‘How To Grow your Bush Outdoor’ guide.
While it is described as a “complete home-growing kit”, the paraphernalia does not include dagga seeds, as the buying and selling of these remains illegal.
“We’re not offering seeds. We spoke about that idea, and given the legal situation, we decided to stay on the right side of the law on that one, and not offer seeds at this stage,” Peter Searll, Managing Director at TransfOrmus, the parent company of EnOrmus Bud, told Cape Talk. “We know that seeds are very widely available, so we provide … the soils, and the guide, the pots and everything else that you need,” Searll added.
Speaking to Cape Town ETC, Richard Morris, the Garden Centre Manager at Starke Ayres, says the response to the dagga home-growing kits have been overwhelmingly positive. “Our phone lines have been crazy and we have been inundated with walk-ins, emails and social media hits enquiring as to how the products can be acquired,” he says.
Morris emphasises that Stark Ayres does not supply or grow cannabis. “We are not suppliers nor growers of cannabis but enthusiastic professionals that embody our company philosophy, “Providing the beginner or professional with Innovative Gardening Solutions”.”
“The most interesting response we have gauged from the over past two days is an overwhelming appreciation for broaching the topic which seems to have liberated the man in the street to talk about growing medicinal cannabis,” he adds.
What the kit includes:
– Soil: three custom-designed soils which each support the different stages of growing – germination, vegetative growth and flowering
– Pots:for different stages of planting
– enOrmous Bud: the bio-active cell food that supports the microbial life of the plant and enhances its growth.
– Spray bottle
– ‘How To Grow your Bush Outdoor’ guide.
enOrmous Bud has also launched South Africa’s first competition to grow the largest marijuana plant. A R1 000 cash prize is being offered for the “best bush mastery”.
Searll says the growing process when using the kit will likely take anything between three and five months.
He is expecting the winning plants to be almost “mielie size”, although there is no direct correlation between size and quality of the plant’s flowers.
The dagga-growing competition closes on May 30 2019. Details are available on the enOrmusBud website.
Picture: enOrmus Bud/Facebook