Book Review: Cannabis Grower's Handbook: The Complete Guide to Marijuana and Hemp Cultivation by Ed Rosenthal, et al, 2021

Call this the magnum opus of the widely acclaimed guru of cannabis cultivation. An encyclopedic tome, it is not one to be read leisurely from cover to cover, no more than you might read an entire volume of 20-volume encyclopedia. Rather, depending upon your immediate needs for information, you first consult the Table of Contents or the Index, and then read a passage here and another page there. This is the book’s strength for the experienced home gardener or commercial large-scale cannabis cultivator, but it is also its weakness for the novice or the hobbyist.

If you are a first- or second-time grower, do not buy this book. Not yet, anyway. Because you will not know where to start reading, and then you will not know how to start growing. If your interest is in growing indoors the more conventional larger strains, then Ed Rosenthal’s unfortunately out-of-print slim 1999 book, The Closet Cultivator, is perfect for beginners. Surely Ed has other startup books in print suitable for the neophyte, but I just do not know them well enough to be able to cite them.

I was about to order Ed’s Marijuana Grower’s Handbook until I noticed that publication was imminent for its updated and expanded and retitled edition, Cannabis Grower’s Handbook. So for several months, I waited, eagerly. Judging from Ed’s Instagram photos showing him personally readying for shipment advance book orders, many of Ed’s acolytes eagerly awaited it, too. When my copy arrived the week of its publication, I sat down with it, perusing here, browsing there, skimming elsewhere. Just during the span of one hour, I came upon one mangled sentence structure and one typo, both on the same page. (Publisher, take note on page 551: “loses” for “looses,” and the twisted syntax is found in the paragraph above that.)  Apparently, with so many readers eagerly awaiting this tome, the publisher rushed its editing and copyediting.

There is much here to like, maybe too much. And there are a few features here to dislike. Most egregious are the many glossy photos throughout the text of heavy equipment that would interest only cannabis corporations, not you and me. Other photos push specific products, making the book more akin to an infomercial. Worst of all are the 50 pages of glossy full-page advertisements relegated to the back of the book. (What!?! All those ads were even included in the Read Sample on Amazon, though soon deleted.) Two or three pages of ads for the publisher’s other related books are more traditionally found on the back pages, but these shameful ads mark a new low in book publishing.

Ads in magazines subsidize the cost of the magazine, thereby reducing the price for the subscription or single copy. However, at a $45 list price, no such subsidy for the reader was granted here. Those 50 pages of ads add much weight to an already heavy tome. Instead of those pages, the publisher should have enlarged the font size of the micro-type of the index, which would have been more reader-friendly. Of those 50 pages, seven pages are for seeds, and so are relevant to you and me. The other 43 pages are for industry insiders, but then, so is nearly half of the text of the book.

I harvested my first two autoflower crops the summer and fall of 2021, moving the plants under the sun outdoors during the day, and indoors at night. In preparation of my third crop, I spent the winter reading some, not all, of this exhaustive book. This book is a sound investment only after you’ve read two or three other how-to books, of which several are by Ed, and only after you’ve grown two or three crops. But this book is simply too overwhelming and mostly irrelevant for the total beginner.

If you are a beginner interested in specifically growing autoflower cannabis, then I recommend Jeff Lowenfels’ book, DIY Autoflowering Cannabis.