Uses #5

My friend Shannon at Mystic Mountain and my friend Jim at A Life full of Books,both here in Chatham, Ontario, gave me permission to mention their stores in connection with my ongoing research into hemp and hemp products.Mystic Mountain sells Hemp clothing and other hemp products, as well as some of my drums, Bee's wax candles and Silver jewelry and A Life Full of Books is a bookstore that I work out of in the back room. I have written whole books back there and used material gathered at the shop as a starting place in my research Some People would be paranoid of even talking about hemp because of it's strong connection to the recreational use of Pot and the fact that (for some silly reason)it is still outlawed while other drugs like alcohol, nicotine and aspirin have been found to be more harmful than Marijuana.
People have overdosed on aspirin. There has never been a case of overdose on pot. I have not been able to find one at any rate. I could be wrong. If you have documented proof of that I would be interested in taking a look at your proof and have a chance to cross check your sources. On to the next use.

It was brought to my attention that before there was a gold standard for money, hemp was one of the most common means of exchanging currencies. If we ever wanted to get off this crazy money system we have now, we could go back to hemp. This universally useful product would give developing countries a chance at levelling the playing field as far as world economics goes if we were on the hemp standard. After the time of chaos and adjustment, going on the hemp standard would mean stable prices for all goods and a way of standardizing the world's standard of living. When we were on the gold standard, only the countries that had gold could participate. With hemp, every country could participate. Instead of dollars and cents we could have bales, buds, stems and leaf. You could own stocks in stalks,printed on tree-free, hemp paper.

Michael J. Kaer, President of Kaer Enterprises (.com) and www.mikesworms.com

Support your local hemp guy

If you have read my other posts on this blog and at Survival-List and Kaer Package you will know I am a Green party member. The Green party is all for replacing fosil fuels for renewable ones, replacing trees with alternative fibre, replacing farming practices that have a high chemical cost for ones that do less damage or none at all. The list goes on. Hemp foots the bill perfectly. It has been proven that hemp improves the soil it is grown on and the fibres easily replace trees at a ratio of 4-1 (1 acre of hemp makes the same amount of fibre as 4 acres of trees) and if you multiply that by the time it takes to grow a tree (say 25 years) than that ratio goes up to 100-1. Hemp does not need any chemicals to grow-its a weed for God's sake.
Here is where we get into the support area. One way you can support hemp is to look for your local green party member and help with their bid for office. We have a federal election looming on the horizon here in Canada and I am helping my local Green person, Ken Bell go to Ottawa. We want to run Ken out of town so he can spread his good to the whole country instead of being selfish and keeping him to ourselves here in Chatham-Kent/Essex.
That is another use for hemp, getting into office. The reason we are not able to freely grow hemp in our back yard is political. The way to fight to regain that freedom is in politics.

Michael J. Kaer, President of Kaer Enterprises (.com) and www.mikesworms.com

Eat My Shorts!

100% Hemp


That is what the tag said when an actor friend of mine, Howard , pulled down his pants part way and showed me the tag from his new shorts. This was in Toronto in the late 1980's when hemp clothing was almost unheard of. Some paranoid people thought you could be arrested for wearing hemp. Flash foreward to the mid first decade of the 21st century and there are hemp stores in small hick cities like Chatham.
You can get hemp shoes, shirts, pants, boots, socks, mitts and caps. You can also get other things made with hemp like hemp soap and hemp jewelry. There is a way to eat hemp ( and no I am not talking about hash brownies or cookies, though I may write about that in future installments). Well actually more than one way. The easiest way is to just pop the seeds in your mouth and chew them as is. They are extremely nutrient rich. The oil from the seeds can be used for cooking and adding to your baked goods. The seeds can be ground down to a flour or paste, popped like popcorn and added to nutbars and snack foods. Have some in your breakfast bowl added to porridge.The roots and the leaves can be eaten in a multitude of ways.

Yep... eat it, wear it, burn it as fuel, build with it.. the list goes on.

Michael J. Kaer, President of Kaer Enterprises (.com) and www.mikesworms.com

Uses #4

I recently went online for a search on something to do with worms and found a site that deals in various seeds, bird seed,animal feed, human feed. They are based in China where hempseed is sold in bulk as birdseed. They grow alot of hemp in china because they are wise when it comes to useing every bit of land to feed and clothe their people. They have had to be. It is a status symbol to wear jeans made from inferior cotton because it means such a huge outlay of money and resources and land that the regular hemp clothes does not. The hempseed is so plentifull in china it is sold to feed the birds! I pray China does not totally submit to the western culture of waste. I do not think they can. The efficient use of materials in China is what makes it a force to be delt with on the global stage.

As a side note, if I had written this during the McCarthy era I would be labeled a "red" and tossed in jail. I am grateful we live in (somewhat) more emlightened times.

Michael J. Kaer, President of Kaer Enterprises (.com) and www.mikesworms.com

Uses # 3

It was easy to google the Canadian laws around industrial hemp,just google
"industrial hemp canadian law". If you see the prohibitively long list of hoops you must jump through, just to have a couple of plants in your garden, you will understand how difficult growing hemp can be. You basically get a licence for a year, only if you are a certified member of a growing group and you can prove you are a breeder and on the whim of the minister. The testing procedures are expensive and a large waste of time. Luckily it does say that you can own the by-products and sell them fairly easily. This leads me to my 3rd use- jewelry.

I can go to wal-mart or many other large stores and get a large roll of hemp twine. I also buy glass, ceramic or wood beads there that have holes large enough to put the twine through. With those items I braid, knot or crochet beaded necklaces, bracelets, rings and anklets. I sell them along with my drums, bee's wax candles and Stering Silver jewelry.

It is more expensive than cotton string yet it lasts forever compared to cotton. Speaking of Cotton vs. Hemp, did you know cotton uses a vast amount of pesticides,herbicides and fertilizers (all made from oil products) just to make a fibre that is less durable than hemp. That makes it more costly from an environmental viewpoint, and a monetary one. Hemp needs little or none of these and if you let the leaves fall off the plant, it would fertilize the soil naturally. It is only by restricting the production of hemp that allows the cotton growers to sell in any quantity meanwhile adding huge profits to the oil companies.

What oil company or cotton farmer or logger or wheat farmer would put up with a wonder-weed that could put all of them out of a job? The answer is... the smart oil company, fibre-farmer, logger or wheat farmer. The smart ones would add this crop in a huge way while taking their time getting out of the more intensive, intrusive farming methods.

That is something to think about till next time.

Michael J. Kaer , president of Kaer Enterprises (.com) and www.mikesworms.com