Elders find fun, community, and pain relief in growing and smoking weed
BY MOLLY REINMANN JUL 31, 2024
WELLFLEET — The Outer Cape is full of children of the ’60s. Some of those who have green thumbs have found in their home gardens a new way of reconnecting with their roots: by growing their own marijuana.
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Some are passionate gardeners who see pot as another plant to add to their catalog. Some want easy access to marijuana for pain relief. Some give their crop to friends and family. Some just enjoy the stuff.
Older Outer Cape cannabis afficionados seem to favor homegrown, and some have become experts at the nuances of cultivating the plants. (Photo by Emily Schiffer)
“Growing it is sort of your connection to the earth, and there’s a mental satisfaction that comes from that that is different from when you just walk into a dispensary and buy the product,” says Mike Fee, a retired lawyer who grows his own cannabis in Truro.
The popularity of homegrown here does not seem to have had an effect on dispensary sales, according to Zachary Ment, owner of the Piping Plover, a cannabis shop in Wellfleet.
“People can easily ferment beer in their basements, but that doesn’t necessarily hurt liquor or beer sales,” Ment says. “Everyone grows tomatoes out here, but the supermarkets still seem to sell a lot.”
In fact, Ment is all for his neighbors’ hobby. The uptick in seniors growing their own pot helps destigmatize the herb, he says. As more retired people grow pot and share it with their friends, the number of those interested in the product goes up.
Ment says that in the three years since the Piping Plover opened, he has seen a softening of biases against marijuana among older customers. About 20 percent of the people who come to his shop — between 2,000 and 3,000 per year — are over age 65, he says. “The stereotype that old people don’t like pot is just not true anymore.”
Wil Sullivan of Wellfleet rediscovered marijuana upon his retirement from a career as a lawyer and began growing his own shortly after Massachusetts legalized home cultivation in 2018.
Wil Sullivan always keeps two jars of his Wellfleet Weed in the car in case he sees a friend coming down the street. “I roll down my window and give them a jar,” he says.
Now, he says, he probably smokes six times a week, almost always partaking from his own garden. While a lot of his friends — nearly all of whom get their weed from him — smoke for medicinal reasons, Sullivan dabbles with marijuana strictly for fun.
Wellfleet artist and former select board member Helen Miranda Wilson is one of the medicinally inclined. She says she rarely smokes recreationally, but she started growing pot because she was suffering from severe hip pain and wanted easy access to cannabis for relief. Wilson says she has not grown marijuana since she got her hip fixed in late 2019.
Wilson wanted to grow her own not only because she loves to garden but also because she wanted to know exactly where her pot was coming from.
“I always want to be really sure that the stuff I am taking into my body has not had any pesticides used on it,” she says, adding that she has never purchased marijuana from a dispensary or anywhere else. Many senior smokers the Independent interviewed for this story said they prefer homegrown pot to the store-bought kind because they know exactly what is in it.
According to the Cannabis Control Commission, the use of registered pesticides on cannabis is prohibited by both federal and state law. Only 25b Minimum Risk pesticides are permitted for use on Massachusetts crops.
An exception to the aversion to shops that many elders noted: some do visit dispensaries to buy edibles. Ment says that edibles are the most popular purchases among his older customers.
The Joy of Gardening
Bucky Johns of Wellfleet loves smoking pot. But he has grown vegetables his whole life and says there are few joys greater than a good harvest. His cannabis harvest is no different.
Bucky Johns is growing shorter cannabis plants this year — these are roughly five feet tall. He wants to be able to move the plants inside in the fall more easily. (Photos by Emily Schiffer)
“It’s sort of like when you get the perfect tomato,” he says.
Fee has also always been an avid gardener. While he does smoke once or twice a week, he says, he grows the plant mainly as an exercise in horticulture.
“There are nuances to doing it correctly,” says Fee. “I think growing your own is sort of a niche for folks like me who have the time, and the space, and the inclination.
“I know plenty of folks who don’t have a green thumb and couldn’t care less about gardening, but they still want to get high,” he adds. “They go to the dispensary religiously.”
The pot growing process is demanding and requires more attention than other plants, Johns says. But that doesn’t bother him. “I spent my career in manufacturing, and that’s really what this is,” he says. Johns currently tends four plants on a deck on the second floor of his home.
The wet, warm climate of the Outer Cape makes marijuana plants particularly prone to mildew, Fee says, so home cultivators need to know a lot and give the plants extra attention.
“But it’s really quite cool to learn all of these tricks about soil and genomes,” says Fee, noting that he learns most of his gardening skills from a community farming group. “There’s a lot to it.”
Fee currently has three marijuana plants growing in the sun outside his house and two that he keeps inside under a light. The plants are roughly five feet tall, but he says they could easily grow to eight feet. Taller plants don’t necessarily mean more buds, though, Fee says — he puts metal posts and netting around his plants to help them grow out instead of up.
“You don’t want to grow a Christmas tree,” he says. “You don’t want to have to get on a ladder.”
Unlike Fee and Johns, Sullivan never considered himself much of a gardener before he started growing cannabis in 2018.
“My first plant was horrific looking,” he says. “But once the plants catch hold, they just fly.”
Sullivan says he learned how to grow from friends who garden — both those who have marijuana in their gardens and those who don’t. “But most of them do,” he says. Currently, Sullivan has six marijuana plants in progress. He will begin harvesting in early September.
Each year, Sullivan invites over a group of friends to celebrate the harvest. The group — usually four or five men, but sometimes more, he says — sit on his front porch and pick the buds off the plants before storing them in jars.
Giving It Away
Massachusetts state guidelines dictate that a residence with more than one of-age individual may grow up to 12 cannabis plants at home. When grown properly, even the six plants that Sullivan grows produce far too much pot for a single household to consume. As a result, many home growers must give away much of their crops.
When a nor’easter comes, Sullivan ties up his backyard cannabis plants with police tape to keep the stems from breaking.
Johns estimates that he gives away 60 percent of his marijuana each year; for Fee, the number is closer to 75 percent. Recipients are usually family members and close friends.
For Sullivan, giving his pot away is his favorite part of the whole endeavor.
“When I rediscovered smoking in my later years, what I really rediscovered was the enjoyment of giving it away,” he says.
Sullivan distributes his product in jars, which he adorns with custom-made labels — circular blue and green stickers that say “Wellfleet Weed.”
The recipients of his jars are many, he says. The circle started as a group of close friends but has grown to include local businesspeople and community leaders, he says, like the owner and employees of a local restaurant who enjoy the occasional smoke. The endeavor has instilled in Sullivan a new sense of connection to his Wellfleet community.
“A friend of mine joked, ‘You should run for select board,’ ” he says. “ ‘You’d win in a landslide.’ ”
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