It’s Hemp Flower Harvest Time!
The 2025 hemp flower harvest was early this year, with smaller plants, but the flowers look and smell fantastic.
Planting Hemp
We’re two weeks past the Spring Equinox and the time has arrived to plant this year’s hemp crop. The last of the snow has melted but nights can still be quite cold here in Maine (and the days too!) through April and May, so the seeds get started indoors. This allows the plants to get…
Growing Hemp with Regenerative Agriculture
You’ve probably hear the term “regenerative agriculture” or “regenerative farming” but what exactly does it mean? And why raise hemp using these methods? Regenerative agriculture is a holistic approach to farming that seeks to restore, build, and nurture healthy soil, promote biodiversity, sustain healthy ecosystems, and foster an equitable and sustainable economy. It’s about taking…
First Flowers – Midsummer Hemp Report
It’s the last week of July and I’m just starting to see a few of the hemp plants beginning to flower–days are getting noticeably shorter now, about 14 1/2 hours today, enough to get the hemp started on the big transition from vegetative growth to flowering. A key milestone in the hemp growing season for…
Summer Solstice Hemp Report
Most of the hemp seedlings have been transplanted from their nursery pots into their final homes in the ground. With summer solstice coming up this week, everything is right on schedule. The young plants were just starting to outgrow their pots so they’re very happy to be in the earth now where their roots can…
- organics | planting | regenerative farming | seedlings | springtime | sustainable farming | vegetative phase
Spring Planting
The robins are back, the brook flows strong, and the nights grow shorter–all signs that it’s time to plant the hemp seeds here in midcoast Maine. As usual, I timed this year’s spring planting just after the new moon in April, which this year fell on the 7th. The idea with lunar planting is that…
Hemp Harvest 2023
Harvest time is when all the hard work through the growing season comes to fruition. After dodging Hurricane Lee early in September, the hemp plants soldiered on through the rest of September and ripened quickly. Hemp harvest 2023 began in late September and continued through the first weeks of October. This year was unusually warm…
Flowering Hemp
Without a doubt the most exciting part of growing hemp is the flowering phase, which begins in mid-late summer as the days begin to shorten. This is when the plants focus all their energy on developing flowers. In the wild these flowers would get pollinated by male hemp plants and create seeds for a new…
Hemp’s Vegetative Phase
It’s mid-July here in Maine, the last of the hemp seedlings were transplanted in June, and now the quick-growing plants really start to bulk up. Known as the “vegetative phase,” this is when these hardy annuals produce abundant foliage and branches prior to the “flowering phase” triggered by the longer nights. In Maine that usually…
Is Organic CBD Oil Better?
As an organic hemp grower and processor, I’m sometimes asked: why bother doing everything organically? Is organic CBD oil better than conventional? That’s a fair question. After all, it’s not always clear what “organic” means or how it really makes a difference. And because there’s so much marketing hype around CBD, it’s tempting to dismiss…
