‘Weed tornado’: Watch this pot plant get sucked from the soil, thrown into the air

Michael Johnson was cooking his kids dinner on Wednesday when he got an unexpected phone call from work.

“One of our new employees came to report that he witnessed a mini-tornado come through (our outdoor cannabis cultivation), rip out a huge marijuana plant, and throw it 50 feet from our medical garden, over an eight-foot fence and into our recreational facility,” wrote Johnson, chief of operations at Siskiyou Sungrown, a licensed medical and recreational marijuana producer in Oregon.

Wait, a tornado had uprooted a mature, six-foot cannabis plant and thrown it 50 feet away into a different garden entirely? Johnson wasn’t sure he believed his colleagues, so he told them to head home and that he’d have a look at the garden — and its security footage — the next morning.

On Thursday morning, Johnson checked the tape covering the back corner of Siskiyou Sungrown’s recreational garden — and he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“I had tears coming out of my eyes I was laughing so hard,” Johnson told The Cannabist, calling it a “weed tornado.” “Sure enough, that little twister lifts the plant out of the ground, it went a distance of 50 feet — it went far — and you can see the plant coming into the shot about 15 feet in the air before it comes crashing down on our recreational garden’s netting.”

When Johnson went out to the recreational garden, he marveled at how far the plant had traveled in the air.

“We had to go find the medical plant, and now it’s in the recreational facility, which is obviously not allowed — but it was an act of god. There was nothing we could do about it,” Johnson said. “So we took it to compost pile, because that’s what you do with waste.”