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tobacco

  • Thread starter kahnli
  • Start date
has anyone ever grown tobacco?
 
I look at the seed packets at the garden center evey year but never have grown it. I've always wondered how much better it'd be than the Basic Lights 100's I normally smoke. Being a weedy kind of plant I assume it needs rather poor soil so it'd probably be very easy to care for as long as it got good sunlight and water.
 
Heck, you don't even need to smoke the stuff when growing it - just rub some sap onto your skin once the plant is showing signs of flowering and boom, you have a nicotine overdose. Not nice.
 
curiouser and curiouser
 
I grew up on a tobacco farm in KY.. I own a lot of it now. It can really be beautifyl. If allowed to flower it is very pretty. Watch for the nicotine absorption as mentioned above if you harvest it. That can be very bad. Look for some Maryland Mammoth tobacco if you don't intend to harvest it. Supposedly it is not as good for use, but it gets huge.
 
[b said:
Quote[/b] (swords @ April 10 2006,1:08)]I look at the seed packets at the garden center evey year but never have grown it. I've always wondered how much better it'd be than the Basic Lights 100's I normally smoke. Being a weedy kind of plant I assume it needs rather poor soil so it'd probably be very easy to care for as long as it got good sunlight and water.
As I understand it, tobacco that's smoked undergoes processing and fermenting so that it's something that's not horrible to smoke.

Tobacco actually requires rich soil or lots of fertilization for good growth; it's one of those plants that tends to drain fields dry after a while.
 
I don't know if its still true, but at least here in VA, it is illegal to grow tobacco unless you have a farm and maybe licensed by the state?  I just remember when I was a kid, my father told a story of how someone threw some tobacco seeds into a garden area that was in front of a gas station.  Next thing you know, there are tobacco plants in the garden.  They did that for a joke to get the people in trouble for growing tobacco illegally.

I don't know if that is/was a law only in VA, but I think it was done so that people couldn't grow their own tobacco for smoking thus cutting into the cig industry.  Personal tobacco plants were always a big NO NO to me.

And yes, tobacco has to be "cured" before it becomes smokeable tobacco.  I'm not sure what that entails...hanging in barns I believe.

I grew up in tobacco country. You don't pick tobacco...you pull it (pulling only the leaves and leaving the stalks in the ground). Life where I grew up revolved around tobacco. School started a little later than other county schools because kids on farms were still out in the fields pulling tobacco in early September.  We used to build our high school parade floats in tobacco warehouses and it REEKED of it.  
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You would always see trucks loaded with bundles of tobacco wrapped up in huge burlap bundles going down the highway especially during tobacco market time...when everyone hauls their tobacco to market to be bought by the tobacco companies.

Cash crop in ol' Virginny.
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