Hippies: Dream Farm

Even the most black-thumbed city slicker could hardly fail to grow a bumper harvest of marijuana. The hal lucinogenic weed — which grows wild throughout America in every kind of soil — requires no plowing, fertilizing, harrowing, mulching, weeding, spraying or watering. To raise a crop of dreams, all the would-be “grass” farmer need do is scatter seed some time in the spring, then go off to a love-in for 60 to 80 days. When the female Cannabis sativa bears its resinous flowers, the farmer simply plucks the plant and dries the top portion in the sun, an oven, or — as one Chicagoan prefers — in a Laundromat dryer set at “Cotton.” The cuttings are then “manicured” by forcing them through a screen (No. 12 mesh, a protective screening used in prisons and detention homes, does nicely). Roll, ignite, puff — and off to Cloud 99.

As a result, many hippies have taken to growing their own, usually in window boxes, rather than paying the high price of “commercial” marijuana ($10 to $15 for a “lid” from which some 40 cigarettes can be rolled). It was only a matter of time before some enterprising head decided to combine the hippie love of things rural with the prospect of easy cash. Early this summer, John H. (“Ian”) Fralich, 18, a cape-draped hippie guru in Washington, B.C., leased a wooded, 35-acre farm in Virginia’s rolling hunt country and seeded one acre in marijuana—enough plants to produce a $100,000 harvest at current market prices. He hoped to turn his grass farm into a psychedelic community along the lines of Timothy Leary’s dream-dome in Millbrook, N.Y. But the plan went to pot last month when the “narcs” (federal narcotics agents) raided the farm and mowed the grass. “Like wow!” protested one resident hippie.

“What are you doing here?” Last week Fralich and three other hippie 4-H types were awaiting trial on charges of marijuana possession, which could bring sentences of up to ten years in prison.

In any case, the narcs disclosed, Fralich’s crop would never have made it to market. He had planted his grass too late in the season: the first frosts would have killed it before it could have been harvested.