13 Intangible Dividends (Besides Weed) that Hobby Grows Pay Every Cycle

At 11:19PM on June 25th, 2019, I planted my first cannabis seeds, and started documenting the process.

Since then, I’ve learned countless life lessons through the lens of a Hobby Grower.

If the best cannabis investment you can make is a hobby grow, then these are 13 of the most impactful dividends that investment offers:

1. Professional Clients — Attract new business opportunities by starting your grow.

By starting a Hobby Grow, you’ll engage with a variety of businesses–grow tents, lighting, nutrients, genetics, substrates, grow containers, etc. Familiarity with the products can lead to professional opportunities with the brands that produce them

2. Professional Knowledge — Stand out in cannabis by knowing the plant.

If you work in cannabis (or a professional ancillary to cannabis), your familiarity with the plant, and the growing process, differentiates you from peers without that experience, offering you an advantage when applying for jobs or pitching clients (See #1).

3. Product Knowledge — What it takes to make what you’re buying.

As consumers, our purchasing decisions are driven by the market’s presentation of information; as a Hobby Grower, you know firsthand what it takes to product products that are desirable.

4. Opportunity to Learn — Personal access to raw materials essential to learning new skills.

When you grow your own, you have access to plant material in its freshest form, allowing you to learn about extraction, infusions, edible production, composting, leaf preservation, and more.

5. The Importance of Cleanliness — “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

We’re all pretty familiar with the importance of showering, washing our hands, and proper sanitation (thanks in part to the last few years). Growing makes you pay attention to the cleanliness of your environment (the setting of your life). You’ll start paying attention to dust, trash, discarded plant material, bugs, molds, mildews; anything that could contaminate your efforts.

6. Time Management — Learn Time Blocking, Scheduling, The Importance of Timers.

Growing forces you to learn time management. Making time to take care of your plants teaches you valuable lessons in scheduling around life’s other obligations. Plus, you’ll learn how to use tools like time blocking (set times for activities) and the importance of timers (both for equipment like lights and to keep you from checking your watch every 5 minutes).

7. Patience — You literally have to wait for the plant to do its thing.

You can’t rush a plant. It takes time to germinate, vegetate, and bloom. And then it takes even more time to dry and cure. And getting frustrated won’t help; you can’t force a plant through its lifecycle, you just have to wait. Some things are worth waiting for.

8. Personal Health — Plant health leads to personal health, often in unexpected ways.

When you start focusing on your plant’s inputs, you start paying attention to your own — fitness, dairy, alcohol, etc. What are you consuming or participating in daily, and how is that affecting your lifestyle? In the same way leaves can turn and roots can rot with the wrong feeds, your body adjusts to how you’re taking care of it.

9. New Friends — Hobby Growers Unite!

Especially when you’re just starting out, you’ll need help. And the people best-suited to offer it are other Hobby Growers. You’ll start having conversations and meetups with people who will become friends and allies in your efforts (and, if you’re lucky, they might even plantsit for you).

10. New Flavors — You’re in control, not the market.

If you’ve shopped on the legal market more than once, you’ve likely noticed a lot of repeat offerings: everyone’s growing the same flavors, everyone’s offering the same products. In commercial settings, growers are limited by the market’s whims. With a hobby grow, you are in charge of what you grow, what flavors you hunt, and what final products you intend to enjoy.

11. Handy Household Repair Knowledge — Minimizing maintenance visits is key to flying under the radar.

This is especially true in a rental situation, but even if you own your house, the more people that know what you’re up to and where, the more potential for word to get out. If you live in a rental, you’ll learn how to fix the garbage disposal or how to replace supply lines to your faucets (both quick trips to a hardware store + an hour on YouTube) rather than simply dialing ‘0’ for maintenance. If you own your home, minimizing random visits from plumbers, electricians, and contractors keeps contamination and knowledge of your efforts to a minimum.

12. Grounded Perspectives — Plants teach us how to stay grounded and embrace complexity.

As much as I (and you) want it to be, growing is not as simple as following a formula for an inanimate project; you have to embrace the complexity and symbiotic relationship inherent to caring for a living being. Additionally, with your increased patience, you’ll start to learn that nothing is as urgent as our knee-jerk reactions suggests.

13. Something to Look Forward to — Daily motivation.

Some days outright suck. Not just in the grow, in life as well. And on those days, being able to get excited about time with your plants–time spent defoliating or feeding or training or trimming or countless other tasks–gives you a daily reason to get out of bed, overcome hurdles, and find joy, even if it’s for 15 minutes out of an absolutely dreadful day.

At the end of the day, plants teach us to be better people.

Starting a hobby grow will catalyze your personal growth, rewarding your investment with new dividends every cycle.