Albany's Penny Barthel is the Bay Area's most prominent advocate for home cannabis cultivation — and the author of the guide on how to do it. Albany's own Ordinance 2017-07 says outdoor growing is illegal. On Solano Avenue, a nursery is advertising seeds anyway.

Penny Barthel grows cannabis in the backyard of her Albany home near the BART tracks — alongside mint, thyme, blueberries, and lemon trees — and she expects the four varieties she's putting in this summer to hit six or seven feet by October. "They really look like shaggy Christmas trees when mature," she told the East Bay Times last week. Barthel, an educator, gardener, and author of The Cannabis Gardener (Ten Speed Press, 2021), has been teaching Bay Area gardeners to do the same at Sloat Garden Center branches and SummerWinds nurseries from Concord to Cupertino, and at the Marin Art and Garden Center.

Her city has other ideas.

Albany's Ordinance 2017-07 — adopted by the City Council on November 20, 2017 — explicitly bans outdoor personal cannabis cultivation within city limits. Indoor grows are permitted: up to six plants, in a fully enclosed and locked space no larger than 32 square feet, by adults 21 and older, with written landlord consent required for renters. Beyond that, Albany bans all commercial cannabis activity — dispensaries, deliveries, commercial cultivation, nurseries — under the same ordinance.

That last prohibition creates a quiet tension on Solano Avenue. Flowerland Nursery, at 1330 Solano, is operated by Humboldt Seed Company and currently advertises cannabis seeds on its website, with a disclaimer that buyers must comply with their local laws. No enforcement actions against the business appear in available Albany public records.

Meanwhile, Berkeley — barely a mile from Barthel's Albany garden — moved in 2019 to explicitly license retail nursery microbusinesses to sell cannabis plants and seeds, and allowed two existing nurseries to convert to that license type regardless of zoning.

Barthel, who also serves on the board of the Berkeley Herbal Center, has watched the nursery talks fill up. "I will say my real goal is pretty lofty," she said. "I want cannabis to be legalized and to be available and safe and legal for anyone who wants to grow it in their backyards. And the best way to do that is just to encourage people to grow it and see what happens."

Albany has not yet seen what happens. A person walking past the 1330 Solano storefront today would find no cannabis on display — whatever seeds the website offers ship from elsewhere. The revolution Barthel is tending, variety by variety in her kitchen garden, is for the moment a mostly indoor project as far as her own city's code is concerned.