Cannabis Flowers

Cannabis Sativa

Hemp is a powerful and useful herb.

Cannabis (hemp), according to modern concepts, has three types: industrial, Indian and weed, and industrial Hemp reaches a height of five meters.

Industrial hemp - Cannabis sativa L. belongs to a special family of hemp (Cannabaceae), consisting of only two genera.

Industrial hemp is a one-year plant, but in one season it grows in suitable conditions to the size of a decent shrub, reaching 4 and sometimes more than meters in height (growth rate in good conditions like bamboo!).

The usual height of cannabis is from 50 to 150 cm. The taproot penetrates to a depth of 2 m. Stems are erect, unbranched, cylindrical at the bottom, ribbed above, covered with glandular hairs. Leaves are palmate-lobed, with petioles.

Numerous small flowers are collected on the top of the stem in a dense paniculate inflorescence. The plant is dioecious - some individuals carry only male flowers, which give a lot of pollen, others only female ones.

Female cannabis plants are larger than male plants, their name is "mother." In the female flowers, the perianth is almost imperceptible, but the pistil with the upper ovary and two columns is clearly visible.

Marijuana flowers

Flowers on the mothers form a more compact, almost capitate paniculate inflorescences. Heated with wind. Fruits - spherical gray-brown nuts.

Hemp culture, according to scientists, it has been around for several thousand years (according to some data, people have been growing cannabis for 8 thousand years).

References to the cultivation of this plant are contained in Chinese and Indian sources belonging to the VIII - IX centuries. BC er

In ancient India, an intoxicating drink was made from hemp leaves. They drank during religious celebrations. For a long time, cannabis was bred only in the territory of modern China, Mongolia, and India.

Surprisingly, marijuana was not known for a long time in the Middle East and Egypt. About her there is absolutely no mention in the Bible.

According to Herodotus, "the Scythians take hemp seeds and, hiding behind the thick cloth of their tents, throw it on hot stones, where it smokes, spreading steam that no Greek bath can match, and this steam makes the Scythians happy."

For Scythians, steam bath and fumigation of hemp were closely related. Probably, we are talking about the ceremony of purification, which often took place after burial.

In this case, hemp acted as a means to come into contact with the deceased and, having penetrated into the realm of his “being,” to go beyond the limits of the natural human state in order to communicate with the entire cosmos, visible and invisible.

Probably, from the Scythians learned about cannabis and other peoples of Europe. In the Middle Ages, hemp was already grown in virtually all countries of Eurasia and North Africa.

With the advance to the West, the use of the psychotropic properties of hemp, apparently, has not disappeared.

According to the German expert on the history of primitive society Hugo Obermeier, the ancient Germans and Gallo Romance was known to smoke cannabis with the help of pipes.

Cannabis Canada

Hemp was found in some crypts, which is most likely due to its use, which was known to the Scythians. Since the XIX century. the areas under it in the southern countries were rapidly declining, since here they began to give preference to another plant that gives fiber - cotton. However, to this day, hemp has not lost its value - it is still cultivated in many countries, although in more modest sizes.

Now this plant is cultivated in India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Romania, Italy. It is a light-requiring and demanding culture of high soil fertility.

The growing season of early ripening varieties 115-125, mid-ripening 130-140, late ripening 150-160 days.

Unfortunately, the exciting properties of hemp, which were known to the ancient Indians and Scythians, are still used today. The southern forms of the plant, in particular the varieties belonging to the group of Indian hemp, are distinguished by stronger narcotic properties.

In all countries there is a fight against drug addiction, therefore, the planting of these varieties is universally prohibited.

Economic use of cannabis.

Industrial hemp - food and technical plant. Its seeds contain 30–35% of excellent fatty oil of dark yellow-green color.

In terms of food quality, it is inferior to sunflower and flaxseed.
For culinary use it is cleaned (refined). The bulk of hemp oil now goes to the production of linseed oil, varnish, paint.

Remains after the extraction of oil from seed cake - a valuable concentrated feed for livestock.
In the years of hunger, he saved from death and people.

Hemp seed is a favorite food of many songbirds and ornamental birds.

But not only oil is obtained from hemp. This is one of the best spinning plants, besides one of the first, which gave a person a solid clothing.
Hemp fiber is rather coarse, in Russia his name is hemp. Hemp compares favorably with flax fiber and cotton more durable and resistant to rot.

For this reason, hemp fiber is indispensable for the manufacture of things and materials constantly residing in a wet environment, such as sails, fishing nets, nautical ropes,
tents, fire hoses, etc.

Tarpaulin, canvas, burlap, other tare fabric, twine, driving belts are made of hemp fiber. In a word, now fabrics from hemp have mainly technical purpose.

But hemp fiber is suitable for the manufacture of thinner linen fabric, towels, tablecloths.

Waste, formed during the processing of hemp fiber, called tow. She caulk log walls of houses. A package is used to shift fragile items when they are transported, such as dishes. Tow - an excellent material for wiping machines and mechanisms.

Back in the XIX century. it was noticed that people who collected hemp sometimes experience strange sensations; it turned out that hemp is a drug.

Baudelaire, in his Artificial Paradise, described these sensations in such a way: “It seems that an unknown spirit rises from the stands of hemp, causing dizziness, circling around the legs, and then slyly sneaking up to the brain. It’s like a whirlwind breaking into the head of collecting hemp,
and sometimes the collector plunges into reverie. Members get weaker and refuse to serve. ”

Alas! Not only useful qualities brought fame hemp. Moreover, now this plant cannot claim special popularity due to its fibers and oil - there are plenty of other equally valuable substitutes as natural,
and artificial origin.

Hemp Flower

Nevertheless, hemp knows the whole world. More precisely, the world knows marijuana, hashish, anasha, and all these “charms” are nothing but products derived from a truly wonderful plant.

Hemp synthesizes and naturally accumulates in the leaves, especially in the upper ones adjacent to the flowers, resinous cannabis oil and other substances of different chemical nature, which have a characteristic odor and have the ability to cause a pleasant arousal (euphoria) in humans.

The tops of flowering cannabis have long been valued as a good painkiller. But it turned out that to the "blissful" state that these substances bring, a person very quickly gets used to it so much that it becomes their slave; he constantly needs to replenish them in the body.

Now we call these substances and products containing them drugs, we unequivocally talk about their harm to the human body, especially harmful to the psyche.

Although cannabis and other cannabis drugs belong to the least harmful and dangerous to health (in any case, their action is incommensurable with the detrimental effect of heroin and other poppy drugs, and especially from ergot), but it is fraught with special danger - it develops carelessness.

It all begins, it would seem, not with alarming a few puffs of marijuana (drugs from cannabis usually smoke, while other potions of this kind are taken orally or injected directly into the bloodstream), and ends the same way - personality decay.

Hemp is a gardener and garden attendant. In the trees in the garden there is no aphid, codling moth,
potatoes do not become infected with blight if there is a hemp planting. Bees do not become infected with ticks.

Additional information from geneticists:

In 2005, a detailed study of cannabis, belonging to K. Hilling, was published, which used the newest method based on the analysis of DNA structure.

The results of the study generally confirm the concept of Small and Cronquist, but the author proposed a new interpretation of the systematics of hemp.

Based on the analysis of the most extensive genetic material, he argues, in particular, that Indian and industrial cannabis come from different centers of diversity,
originally isolated from each other.

Thus, according to Hilling, a gradual transition between these forms does not exist (at least from a genetic point of view).

According to the modern classification, the genus Hemp includes one species with two subspecies:

Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa - Industrial hemp

Cannabis sativa subsp. indica (Lam.) E.Small & Cronquist - Indian Hemp

Earlier, a third species, Cannabis Weed (Cannabis ruderalis Janisch.), Stood out, but now this combination does not have an independent rank and is synonymous with Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa.