Deep In The Piney Woods, A Big-Ass Pot Farm Grew

Don't give these two any ideas

​Police say they typically find a couple of hundred pot plants when they raid an outdoor growing operation. This is Texas. Everything's bigger here, including the pot farms.

Hunters sprucing up their deer blinds in darkest East Texas made a startling discovery Sunday -- close to 5,000 pot plants growing in the woods.

The hunters alerted the San Jacinto County sheriff's office, and the responding cops took one look at the enormity of the ganja crop and called for back-up from both the Department of Public Safety's narcotics division and game wardens from Texas Parks and Wildlife. And that was when the San Jacinto County cops still thought there were only 3,000 plants in the crop, which sprawled across several acres of the Sam Houston National Forest 10 miles north of Cut and Shoot.

The cops says the investigation into who was growing all that weed -- estimated street value: $1.9M -- is ongoing. One thing is certain: it is surely a bummer for the farmer, as harvest time is nigh.

Earlier this summer, police in Montgomery County stumbled on a similar, though much smaller, operation.

In July, cops seized 2,400 marijuana plants and an assortment of expensive fertilizers, insecticides and other growing paraphernalia, all of which they found hidden near a pipeline right of way along the Montgomery / San Jacinto county line. That operation was scattered over 10 acres, with some of the plants growing in God's green earth and other pot plants in plant pots.

In that case, no arrests were ever made. Nobody lives on the property. All police could do was tell the absentee owner that someone had set up a major-league pot farm on their land.