Every day, as regular as clockwork but with increasing regularity, they come: the kids in their late teens who feel about weed the same way I do about a glass of Fat Bastard; the baby boomers who stopped sparking up because they “grew up:” the octogenarians luxuriating in having the social licence to indulge once again.

The other day Jack Fanning, Halifax Seed Co.’s indoor horticultural specialist and resident cannabis expert, had a call from a woman who introduced herself as a member of the St. Margarets Bay Gardening Association, wondering if he would come out to the bay some day and do a little seminar for the membership, which is mostly over 80 and entirely female.

“They’re gardeners,” Fanning told me when I paid him a visit on Tuesday. “For gardeners it is just another plant.”

Albeit a plant that, just to have it in your possession, once meant the possibility of jail in this province.

That, of course, is expected to change forever as soon as possession of marijuana for recreational use becomes legal across the country.

The federal government’s proposed law also permits adults to grow up to four marijuana plants at home.

So, no more clandestine grow-ops, hidden from the parents — or the kids.

The pot will be right there in the den, next to the spider plant. Guests will admire the girth and the buds of your weed plant as they now gush about the flowers on your peace lily.

Which is why I took a drive Tuesday down to the Kane Street store of Halifax Seed —according to its website the nation’s oldest continually operating family-owned seed store — where, as usual, a person could buy arugula, celery and radish seeds, geraniums and hollyhock and lawn fertilizers, shovels and pruners, but where they will also soon be able to buy cannabis seeds.

On Oct. 13 at this very store, Fanning, who was brought on board to launch the whole new cannabis product line at Halifax Seed, is offering a short primer on the ins and outs of growing your own pot.

Since my thumb is decidedly ungreen, I am unlikely to ever try cannabis cultivation, even on a small scale. But one never knows, and time acquiring some new skill is seldom wasted.

There is also a small but salient fact revealed earlier this week: The good people of Nova Scotia smoke the most weed per capita in the country, according to the latest numbers from Statistics Canada.

From here on in a reputation as a decent home entertainer in this province may no longer depend on having a generous hand with the whiskey bottle, but on whether your homegrown is “dank,” a word I’m used to seeing describe our weather but which I now understand is a descriptor of marijuana excellence.

As a pre-emptive strike I asked Fanning, who is compactly built and keeps his hair as short as woolly yarrow, what I really needed to know about growing cannabis.

A thorough guy, he gave me a little history — the drug is said to have originated in the Yunnan province of China — and some rudimentary science: There are three basic strains, sativa, indica and ruderalis; cannabis plants are either male or female; they can grow according to light and dark cycles, or automatically, without regard for light.

Then he got down to the basics: how you can plant the seeds in any run-of-the-mill potting mixture and let them germinate anywhere from 48 hours to 7-10 days depending upon the room temperature.

Then how a young seedling is allowed to mature for a few more weeks until it reaches the stage when it’s ready to enter the four-foot-by-four-foot “grow tent.”

The tent, which is equipped with an extraction fan, keeps the pungent smell contained. It also keeps the light in. That, Fanning tells me, is important, since lights are what trigger the plant’s flowering cycle to make it grow.

This last explanation, you will notice, contains scant detail. Fanning must be able to tell that this talk about light cycles and halides is too much for my low-wattage brain because he starts to make the information really simple.

A crop cycle generally runs 50-60 days.

During that period you would nourish the plants with feed and soluble nutrients.

In time, a cannabis plant will double and triple in size.

“It is trying to make as much of itself available to pollen as possible,” says Fanning. “It is a genetic mechanism.”

When the trichomes — those little crystal-like hairs covering the plant’s buds that hold the all-important cannabinoids — go from clear to milky, the harvesting can begin.

Cut the plant at the base, hang it upside down for a week to 10 days, then throw it into an air-tight container.

“What you are doing is slowing down the drying process to preserve the smell and taste and even the effect,” he says.

Fanning suggests that a person who consumes a gram of cannabis a day adopt a system similar to a traditional farmer rotating crops: setting up a pair of grow tents so that you always have plants in the vegetative and flowering stages at the same time, ensuring a harvest every six months.

The whole thing isn’t cheap: The whole above-described operation runs $2,000-$2,500, “which is about what a person who consumes every day would be spending to buy cannabis commercially,” says Fanning.

That’s it for the upfront costs. Keeping the lights on runs $150-$200 a month, ensuring that this is a game for the committed cannabis consumer, not a hobbyist grower.

I expect to be neither. But there was a time when, I imagine, neither did the members of the St. Margarets Bay Gardening Association.