One person who has no shame about growing at her Toronto home since 2013 is Lisa Campbell, whose medical marijuana licence allowed her to grow up to ten plants for her own use or buy from the government.

“The healthier options for patients at the time was to grow your own,” said Campbell.

“I was able to bring some of those plants outdoors post legalization and those are the plants that I harvested (last October). They were ten feet tall, so I was able to cure them all and share them with my friends. I was able to do a huge harvest with my friends. We were stripping the plants. We were trimming them.”

“You can transform that product into whatever you want,” she said. “So you could dry the buds. You could juice the leaves. I had one friend who created cannabis cream out of the roots. So we used also every single part of the plant.”

Campbell, as you may have guessed, isn’t your typical home grower.

She’s also the founder-CEO of the year-old Lifford Cannabis Solutions — a subsidiary of her family-owned Lifford Wine & Spirits — which provides sales and marketing to licensed cannabis producers across Canada.

“It definitely is a challenge (to grow it at home),” says Campbell. “It requires a lot of information. There’s a lot of really great books and resources online where people can learn about growing your own and a lot of videos on YouTube.”

“Because Canada has had a medical marijuana program since 2001, some of the top growers in the world have come out of that program and they really are experts and they’ve shared so much of their knowledge online,” she added.

Campbell fully expects that come April — also known as cannabis month for the pot community — there will be an increase in trying to grow recreational weed at home alongside the emergence of bricks and mortar retail stores.

“I know in the most recent product calls (by the OCS), they included grow tents, grow lights, seeds, etc.,” she said. “I do think that come April when it’s ‘4/20 season,’ you will be able to purchase the things that you need from the government to start your garden.”