Never done it, but I've heard old folks talk about it. Mainly as kids because everybody here had access to to tobacco back just g the day!

I've never heard of the coffee ground thing though. But old folks here do talk of smoking grapevine. They say it'll burn you up too!

 

I've tried smoking grapevine, too, now that you mention it. It was horrible, hot, and bad.

Coffee was hard to get lit and stay lit, and the problem with smoking old dried out coffee grounds today would be that coffee today is ground finer than it was back then. Until only about twenty or thirty years ago coffee came in "regular grind" (coarse) and "automatic grind (finer).

Forty some years ago the barbershops and the park benches were full of old men that would tell you of all the nasty things they smoked "back there when times wuz hard". The cigarettes they rolled looked like "tailor mades", and most of them could roll those with one hand. They always had time for a kid asking them lots of questions about the old times and the old ways.

But the only thing they ever talked about smoking that was worth smoking was home made cob pipes and corn silks. The cob made a good pipe bowl, then you took a coat hanger and heated it hot to burn out the middle of section of old bamboo fishing pole for a stem, and the next thing you knew you had a corn cob pipe. Corn silks had to be dried out, brown, and yet not dried out to the point where they would turn to dust when you loaded them up. Pack the silks really tight, because they are about like cigarette tobacco and will burn hot if you don't.

Corn silks really make a decent smoke. Back when those old timer's didn't have a dime for a tin of PA or Velvet, or a nickel for a sack of Bull Durham,,,,it must have beat nothing at all to smoke.

 

Old timers here talk about going out to the barn, pulling off a few leaves of dried burley, sticking them in your overall pocket and filling your pipe as needed with the crumbled up dried leaves.

Those that remember it say when one of the old timers lit up a bowl of that it'd clear a room!

 

The old timers in Missouri pretty well all agreed that back when they were little kids in the horse and buggy days their grandfathers would sometimes raise tobacco and they called it "long green". Most agreed that it was so strong and nasty they stuck to store bought tobacco, or else smoked corn silks.

The old timers in Missouri would raise all manner and kinds of stuff in a garden, but you never saw any tobacco. It's not that tobacco wouldn't grow here, it's just that everybody agreed that our tobacco wasn't any good. Good tobacco mostly came from Kentucky, and some from Virginia or North Carolina.

Missouri did make the best corn cob pipes, though. And we still do.

 

SX1 smoking corn silk and grapevine. Now it's all coming together....

 

Long ago we smoked grape vine, a vine we called cross vine, corn silks, coffee grounds, and rabbit baccker.

 

My dad said the sickest he's ever been was when he snuck off and smoked a grape vine. Nasty stuff he said. I've tried rabbit tobacco and was glad to have enough money to buy a decent pack of smokes... Or wait tilling wasn't watching and still a pack of those Barclays.. Uhh a step up from rabbit tobacco, but not by much.

 

I'd forgotten all about rabbit baccer.

 

I only tried it once. Burned like fire as I remember. Harsh and dry.

 

Rabbit tobacco was my thing back when I was a kid. It grows on every ditch bank around here. I can't recall its taste or anything else about it because it has been over 60 years. Fortunately, I didn't take up smoking as a habit because cigarettes were ten cents a pack and I didn't have two nickels to buy smokes with. I bought shotgun shells for a nickel apiece when I had the coin. .22 rifle bullets were a penny apiece. Hunting beat smoking in my case.

 

But this reminds me that my Daddy said that when he "got the croup one time" his Mama made him smoke sassafras, and he didn't recommend smoking sassafras. Sassafras made pretty good tea, he said, but it was really hot and nasty to smoke. But it did cure his case of the croup, though.

 

Counselor, off topic a bit. My mom made us kids drink pine top tea, a brew made from pine needles for whatever ailed us. It was worse than castor oil. The most embarrassing part of being a kid was to wear little asphidity bags around our neck to ward off polio. It must have worked as none of our family got polio. She raised a small patch of pennyroyal for another ailment. That was a good smelling herb but it didn't taste very good. We didn't have the $2.00 for a doctor in those days so she made do with what her parents taught her.

Mom believed in poultices. They must have worked as we were all reared healthy. I have a sister 90 years old, one 85, that are more healthy than most folks their age.

 

Off topic even more, whatever happened to Doan's Pills and Carter's Liver Pills? My mother's parents seemed to always be taking them, and my Grandfather lived to be 92 (and might not have ever died, except he got an infection from an ingrown toenail) but Grandma died fairly young at age 84.

 

I have memories of smoking tobacco alternatives in my youth, too . . . but it wasn't corn silk.

 

SuperXOne ,,,that explains alot :mrgreen:

 

I have memories of smoking tobacco alternatives in my youth, too . . . but it wasn't corn silk.

I cheated a guy once by giving him dried leaves to smoke, but he wasn't expecting tobacco.

The easiest way for me to smoke cigarettes was to filch one from my older sister. They were only 25 cents a pack, state tax and all. I never really developed the habit until my thirties. Then it took me five years to quit.