MALEVOLENT MILTON AND THE MINIONS UPDATE

Malevolent Milton has shot up since I first posted progress on my tobacco growing experiment a month ago and so has her Ashite Minions although they have now been separated.

I gave two away to friends who were very grateful and excited to receive them but they accepted the gift on condition that when their plants grow to seed, they spread the love and plant them in the countryside, in parks, and wherever they find a good spot to enable others to find them and share them too.

That's two new members of The Resistance and I see that Frank Davis has also got involved and is reminded of his wayward yoof.

The first couple of tiny leaves I wrapped in damp disposable kitchen towel but that wasn't successful in curing them. It just made them go wet and dry without much change. They did turn colour and shrank a lot and when completely dry, I managed to mix what was produced - a sliver of tobacco - into one my commercially produced tobacco roll ups but the taste was indistinct. I guess there just wasn't enough to make a judgement.

The next leaf I picked - pictured above - was hung on a wire coat hanger by a split paper clip. The effects you can see there are after five days of just hanging naturally. Sadly, on that fifth day, just after the photo was taken, the leaf fell off and landed in my watering can which had a bit of water in it. I managed to fish it out undamaged but it was soaked. I dried off the excess as best as I could and put it back to hang.

After 8 days it has gone darker in colour and now has one of Malevolent Milton's bigger leaves, picked yesterday, to keep it company. I will continue to watch progress.

There are loads of growing and curing tips over at The Bolton Smoker's Club which I have watched avidly. The next three leaves that turn yellow on Malevolent Milton will be packaged as Junican suggests but first I thought I'd try the natural method of curing which seems to be to just hang them for a long time.

I'll also leave one on the plant to go dark brown and shriveled naturally following a suggestion from Leg Iron and just see which method works best for me.

Hopefully all my mistakes will be made on Milton and the real and serious effort of growing and curing can focus on the Minions.

I currently have three in one huge pot now but one of those is to go to another friend interested in joining The Resistance, and will be potted in time for Christmas, and one will go into another large pot to grow separately to the one final Minion that will remain.

I guess my next update will be when I finally have enough cured home grown tobacco to put in a roll up.

TRUE SPIRIT OF THE RESISTANCE

Smokers have been pushed to the to the edge of reason and beyond but with the threat of criminalisation looming the line has been drawn and they will go no further.

Leg Iron has written a powerful piece showing how we are are not prepared to play the game any more. Stuff tobacco control, stuff the anti-smoker's false "caring", stuff the lies about smoking and health, the false studies, the emotional blackmail, and stuff the state-paid bureaucratic idiots who think they can force us to quit by controlling our supply.

Many of us have taken to growing our own tax-free, chemical-free, home grown tobacco and we intend to spread the love and share the seed. I live in the countryside and have plenty of places where I can begin a new tobacco crop for anyone who wants to go and pick it. If I throw the seeds next spring, then I imagine there will be a strong colony of plants within a couple of years all around where I live. We have three commons close to town for those that live in the city.

And as Rose says in the comments on LI's post, if they stop us doing that then we'll just find something else to smoke because, in the true spirit of The Resistance, we will never surrender.

Our tax is being withheld because of a lack of political representation in more ways than just growing our own product. We are buying our personal stock in EU countries and the Govt's tax yield from us will get smaller and smaller as more people hear about and join The Resistance until it eventually disappears.

Companies and businesses that actively seek to exclude us will lose our trade. We will, for example, work towards bankrupting those ferry companies that fail to recognise their core customer base while treating their paying passengers worse than farmyard pigs.

We will not support fake cancer charities that plunder donations on anti-smoker propaganda for a share of the Govt's funding pot rather than research on how to cure cancer. We won't stay in hotels on holiday or visit bars and pubs that don't adequately cater for our needs.

We demand to be treated with the same respect and consideration as any other person in this country. We will not obey any new laws made to restrict us further including car bans. A car is our private property, our private space, our choice whether we smoke or not inside it, our friends, our families, our personal community, our lives to control.

It is the same with our homes and we will not let the anti-smoker industry bully us via the scaremongering fear they pump out in TV propaganda ads night after night. The current "please stop for Xmas" exploitation of young children being forced by Big Tobacco Control to read words they can barely pronounce from auto-cues is disgusting and immoral.

Our Resistance is growing and getting stronger as anger bubbles into organisation and focus with each offensive new piece of propaganda. This only inspires zealots to think they have the right to dictate our lives and bully us because we don't agree with them or pander to their paranoia. It is shameful and wasteful.

The waste of public money on anti-smoker propaganda is taking food out of the mouths of other more vital public services in these austere times that the Uk can ill-afford. It's a shame our politicians haven't got the sense or courage of their Dutch colleagues who recently did the decent thing and stopped throwing tax-payers cash down a black ideological hole.

Smokers have said enough's enough and action is now backing those words. One day The Resistance will bring this nonsense to an end.

MEET MALEVOLENT MILTON ...

... and her Minions From Ash.

Finally something to show after planting my tobacco seeds indoors in mid-September. In the true spirit of The Resistance, I've taken a leaf from other bloggers' and smoking ban warriors' pages and named my plants in the best way possible to shove two fingers up at our persecutors.

Audrey Silk from America's NYC Clash smokers' rights group named her home grown tobacco garden after Smokerphobic snob Barmy Bloomsberg.

And Leg Iron named his plant after Witch-finder General Dreadful (Deborah) Arnott.

Mine are named in dishonour of the head of our health department and those in her ideological front group.

The seed supplier told me I'd be better off growing the plants indoors under a grow light as I planted out of season. Spring outdoors seems to be the best time. I chose to leave both Malevolent Milton and her Minions from Ash in my office to watch as I smoked and worked. Light came in from one window but the poor souls didn't like the winter gloom and didn't develop much.

At the brink of death, I caved in and went to my local hydroponics shop and bought a over head grow light that my other half set up for me. Malevolent Milton went under it as I left the Minions from Ash to wilt without help - just to see if they could make it on their own.

Milton soon settled in and stayed unmoved for about a week and then suddenly began to grow to the size pictured above. Ash's healthiest leaf from it's biggest puny plant, about the size of a small fingernail, poked out desperately searching for light but I left it for a while longer.

Satisfied after a few days that the Minions were not going to develop without any help, I succumbed and moved them next to their buddy Malevolent.

Leg Iron advised me to plant in big pots and these are the largest I have. Some of the Ashites may not survive but I would expect one to suck the life from the home made compost and ruthlessley take what's good from the others to save its own neck.

Milton's small bottom leaf began to yellow so I picked it and now, with no clear idea of what I'm doing, I'm curing it as an initial experiment. I've got it in a damp disposable kitchen towel. So far it's just wet, a bit broken, but not going brown.

I'll check on it tomorrow and report back if there is any change.

CAN'T WAIT

I'm really jealous of Leg Iron and others who are ahead in home grown tobacco stock. Those flowers sound lovely.

I can't wait until my indoor crop starts to grow but it could still be some time yet as the first two tiny leaves only came up a couple of days ago and haven't grown any more since.

Patience has never has been one of my virtues but I'm trying and I'll learn more than one lesson during this home grown experiment.

How exciting this all is. In five years tobacco has gone from being just the thing I bought in the shop with my paper and other bits and pieces to becoming a full time hobby of great interest, driven by a passionate cause.

THE B'STARDS

My tobacco seeds have arrived and I wasted no time in planting them.

I took Leg Iron's advice and put the first batch in a huge pot inside the house. The seeds are so tiny it is impossible to handle them individually but I reckon about four or five got scattered.

Checking them each day for any growth is a bit like watching paint dry but they've only been in for three days and so I should be more patient. I don't expect to see any sign of life for at least 10 days after planting. However, I put another few in pellets in a germinating tray today to see if I can make them grow any quicker.

I am a bit behind most people who are already thinking about harvesting and curing what they have grown. the Bolton Smoker's Club has more on that including a link to the video below.



I noted a comment over on the BSC about paying tax on home grown tobacco and so I thought I'd better check out the law. In the 1600s the King hated tobacco so much he put tax up by 4000 percent which resulted in the peasants growing their own. So much was lost to the Treasury that the King had to have a rethink. He lowered the tax and the cash poured in once more.

I thought he might have wanted to close the loophole and left us with an olde law that might be the basis of making home grown tobacco illegal today but it seems not.

Neither our Monarch nor our Govt make our laws today but rather the EU which decided in 1992 that all EU citizens should pay duty on what they produce because of the unelected B'stards from smokerphobic lobby groups.

Of course we only have to start coughing up and paying the smokerphobics indirectly through our tax if we produce a successful crop that can actually be processed and smoked. As I'm still waiting for my first growth, I'll reserve judgement on that for now.

INSPIRED!

Former NYC police officer Audrey Silk is so pissed off with the harassment of smokers she has decided to stick two fingers up to the system that is beating us down.

She's taken to growing her own and it looks as if she can manage to sustain her supply to stop her tax being used against her.

It's not so much the amount of cash she'll save as the message she is giving to those who just will not listen :

In the state with the highest cigarette taxes in the country, in a city that has become one of the hardest places in America to find a place to smoke, Ms. Silk has gone off the grid, growing, processing and smoking her own tax-free cigarettes from packets of seeds she buys online for about $2. She expects to produce a total of 45 cartons after planting two crops — the first in the summer of 2009, the second last summer — and estimates that she will have saved more than $5,000.

“It’ll make the antismokers apoplectic,” said Ms. Silk. “They’re using the power of taxation to coerce behavior. That’s not what taxation is supposed to be for.

“The only way we’re going to win now, since you can’t reason with the irrational, which is the City Council or any lawmakers,” Ms. Silk said, “is you have to take the position of giving them the finger.”

She's also named her tobacco garden in honour of the stupid prick led blind by the anti-smoking industry - Bloomberg. Nice touch.

ASH's latest hysterical tantrum fit screaming at the UK govt to increase taxes to stop people smoking sounds a bit hollow in the face of Audrey's defiance. She's shown us the way to go.

ASH of course is scaremongering again and the Govt is either in with the lie or its ministers are just plain stupid enough to believe it when it's obvious that we've already found a better way to avoid paying Deb's wages and the inhumane public health programme of Denormalisation.

Now where can I buy my seeds ...