Will the "Pandemic" Ever End?

[Ninurta]

I've downloaded some modern and 19th century herbalist books. I'm not unfamiliar with herbal remedies and have found a number of plants growing wild in my garden including catnip, field mint, yarrow and belladonna. Plus I planted some tobacco, cannabis, fennel, and hot chili peppers along with my veggies. There is winter green in the wild and other wild plants more on the poisonous spectrum like poison ivy, poison hemlock, pokeweed, milkweed, buttercup, and some others.

I only live about 15 or 20 miles from where I was raised, but it's a world of difference, botanically speaking, here. We had wild catnip, spearmint, peppermint, blood root, yellow root and a whole host of other medicinal herbs growing wild there, which I can't find in the wild here. I'm hoping that a trip down that way this fall will net me the seed I need to get plants already acclimated to this zone growing here.

I had some cannabis seed coming from overseas, but I think Customs may have snagged it on the way in - it's overdue. It was for a high CBD, low THC variety to keep it within Federal law guidelines (>0.3% THC), and since 1 July any sort you want to grow has been legal to grow in small amounts for personal use here in VA - so it is "legal" within both federal and State guidelines - but I suppose one cannot tell that it is high CBD/ low THC just from looking at the seeds. I've not gotten a Bad Boy letter from Customs yet, so there is still hope, but in the intervening month and a half since the seed was supposedly sent out, the shop I got it from has closed, so there is always the chance I just got hoodwinked, too... or, best case, it's still on the way, and just rolling slow. The last time I ordered from that shop, it got here in about 30 days, but this time it's about 2 weeks overdue. I've been out of the cannabis loop for over 40 years, so I no longer know anyone locally to try to get any seed from.

I've also managed to acquire some nicotiana rustica "native tobacco" or "sacred tobacco" seed for next season. I got 3.5 grams of seed for that variety, which is 12.000 or 13.000 seeds, way more than enough for a small patch. I have also just ordered some seed for an even more ancient variety of rustica, which came from plants grown from some seed found buried in a 1000 year old urn, most definitely a precolumbian type, but it's not arrived yet. I'm after the rustica for smudging ceremonies, and because it has between 3 and 9 times the nicotine concentration of normal smoking tobacco, so that I can extract the nicotine from it in higher quantity to make vape juice with.

On another note, I'm almost positive that I passed a wild lettuce plant that was about 9 feet tall on my way home from a meeting I had with my author buddy today. Wild lettuce (lactuca virosa) has lactucarium ("lettuce opium") in it for pain relief without he nasty side effects of real opium, so I'll need to get my raggedy ass down there and make a positive ID of it one day soon, before it goes to seed, and if that's what it really is, I'll have seed for that come spring, too.

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