The harvest is underway.
People can and do grow cannabis legally here in Southern Oregon.
The plants needed to get out of the weather. It has frozen three times and the cool rains have begun.
Cannabis grown for its medicinal non-psychoactive CBD is regulated as an agricultural crop and is grown like corn or other annual field crops. Current practice is to control weeds and water use by growing it poking through plastic ground cover strips. One or more drip lines are laid down under the plastic. Young plants are transplanted in small holes poked into the plastic. The plastic is pulled up, compacted, and discarded at season end. The crop is not a particularly high value crop, so farming practice tends to be low-input to control costs. This is a weedy field. Below, a crew of workers start a CBD harvest about October 9:
Cannabis grown for the psychoactive "get you high" THC is grown differently. THC-bearing plants have complicated government rules that limit the size of fields and the number of plants. THC plants tend to be coddled, with careful attention to soil amendments, fertilizer schedules, pest control, and trellising to support the branch. They get the "Ritz Carlton" treatment, so they will grow huge buds.
Here is what a THC plant looks like in early August. The plant grew from an 18-in high transplant in late May to this, in about 70 days.
Look closely. Notice there are no buds or flowers on the plant above, but by October 10 it looks like this:
The plants grew buds like these:
A close up photograph of a bud can be expanded on a smart phone to give a good look at the trichomes on the flower. These little white dots change from transparent to milky-white to amber-colored as the plant matures. This photo was taken on October 10, and it indicated the plants were not quite ready. The trichomes were not yet turning amber.
We mostly avoided a bug-pest problem this year but we had three other problems. The first was a tiny problem of seeds on one plant. Seeds happen when the female plants get fertilized by some errant male plant upwind, probably on a neighbor's property about 600 feet away. The immature seed is that light green football-shaped object about midway between the fingers in this photo. Fortunately, there were few of these.
The second problem was threat of theft. The price has collapsed on THC-bearing cannabis buds, but objects acquired for free are worth stealing. I was one of several people guarding my crop, armed with headlights, high-beam flashlights, a car horn, and a cell phone to call 911. Plus, I located and installed multiple tiny GPS trackers and paid for a service to track their location and alert me if they moved and show me where they go. Perhaps more important, i invested in two signs warning people I had done this. My goal was to be an un-attractive target for the people flying drones that were surveilling my farm.
The third problem was frost. The coldest part of the night is right at dawn. The temperature dropped from 29 degrees at 4:00 a.m. down to 25 degrees briefly just after daylight on October 12, ten days ago. This photo is taken with natural light at 7:20 a.m. Notice a light dusting of frost on the buds and leaves.
Had it been only that single frost, I might have been able to ignore it, but it was followed by two more nights of frost and now cool rains. The golf-ball and tennis-ball sized buds retain water and risk rotting from the middle. We began harvesting to get them harvested before rot began. Better a couple of days immature than rotten. The photo below is a plant 99% harvested.
Here is a final harvest photo, taken Wednesday. I am all done but the clean-up. Notice the remains of the trellising, done with plastic netting.The buds get heavy and the branches will sag and break if they are not supported.
The crop is harvested and safe, I think, from thieves, insects, and mold. The buds are hanging in a room with a de-humidifier and fans. I treat the cannabis crop the way I treat my melons. I grow cannabis because it is fun to grow things. I mostly give the crop away in small amounts to people who find "farm tourism" interesting. I like showing off the farm, especially during melon harvest season in August. People like my cousin, photographed below, had the unexpected fun of dropping a melon on purpose:
Look closely. Notice there are no buds or flowers on the plant above, but by October 10 it looks like this:
The plants grew buds like these:
A close up photograph of a bud can be expanded on a smart phone to give a good look at the trichomes on the flower. These little white dots change from transparent to milky-white to amber-colored as the plant matures. This photo was taken on October 10, and it indicated the plants were not quite ready. The trichomes were not yet turning amber.
We mostly avoided a bug-pest problem this year but we had three other problems. The first was a tiny problem of seeds on one plant. Seeds happen when the female plants get fertilized by some errant male plant upwind, probably on a neighbor's property about 600 feet away. The immature seed is that light green football-shaped object about midway between the fingers in this photo. Fortunately, there were few of these.
The second problem was threat of theft. The price has collapsed on THC-bearing cannabis buds, but objects acquired for free are worth stealing. I was one of several people guarding my crop, armed with headlights, high-beam flashlights, a car horn, and a cell phone to call 911. Plus, I located and installed multiple tiny GPS trackers and paid for a service to track their location and alert me if they moved and show me where they go. Perhaps more important, i invested in two signs warning people I had done this. My goal was to be an un-attractive target for the people flying drones that were surveilling my farm.
The third problem was frost. The coldest part of the night is right at dawn. The temperature dropped from 29 degrees at 4:00 a.m. down to 25 degrees briefly just after daylight on October 12, ten days ago. This photo is taken with natural light at 7:20 a.m. Notice a light dusting of frost on the buds and leaves.
Had it been only that single frost, I might have been able to ignore it, but it was followed by two more nights of frost and now cool rains. The golf-ball and tennis-ball sized buds retain water and risk rotting from the middle. We began harvesting to get them harvested before rot began. Better a couple of days immature than rotten. The photo below is a plant 99% harvested.
Here is a final harvest photo, taken Wednesday. I am all done but the clean-up. Notice the remains of the trellising, done with plastic netting.The buds get heavy and the branches will sag and break if they are not supported.
The crop is harvested and safe, I think, from thieves, insects, and mold. The buds are hanging in a room with a de-humidifier and fans. I treat the cannabis crop the way I treat my melons. I grow cannabis because it is fun to grow things. I mostly give the crop away in small amounts to people who find "farm tourism" interesting. I like showing off the farm, especially during melon harvest season in August. People like my cousin, photographed below, had the unexpected fun of dropping a melon on purpose:
9 comments:
Wow! If that had been so readily available in the past, I never would have made it through college. It's too bad that in spite of legalization, it remains such a magnet for criminal elements.
I remember when smoking the leaves was the norm. Mexican lids, one ounce, 3 fingers wide in a sandwich bag for $10. Aww the good old days.
"The price has collapsed on THC-bearing buds".
Not in places like Boise, Indianapolis and Birmingham, it hasn't. Quite the opposite. That's why there is so much theft and so many giant illegal grows in the Rogue Valley, some even administered by cartels with dozens of workers living on-site.
I've been told by a source I consider informed and involved, that many, maybe most of these huge greenhouse installationsxare financed ,if not outright owned by Eadtern European (Russian, etc.) Cartels.
Illegal pot fuels ‘narco-slavery’ in Rogue Valley
"Together, the busts uncovered 15,000 pounds of processed illegal marijuana, more than 20,000 plants yet to be cultivated, five guns and nearly $650,000 cash. One suspect was arrested, and 111 workers were taken into custody, interviewed and released, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office said."
“Living conditions for migrant workers at the grow site were uninhabitable,” the sheriff’s office reported. “Living and working areas were filthy, cramped and otherwise unsafe with many sleeping on cardboard inside shipping containers with little or no access to bathing and bathroom facilities.” -Medford Mail Tribune
This is confusing. Supposedly legalizing marijuana would curtail crime, while apparently the opposite is happening. I'm also amazed that the appetite for the drug is so large that that these grows are worth it. My guess is that we are in a transitional period leading to corporate farming of MJ that will push out the private growers. It's not a boutique activity, like wine, and scaling up operations will drive the price even lower.
Also note that ORD2 Rep. Bentz spent his time with the AG yesterday asking him to address the problem in Oregon, whatever that tells you about his priorities.
$50 on the streets of so many "dry" American cities for an eighth of good Oregon green bud can make the venture highly profitable, conducted behind the partial shield of legal grows and hemp farms.
It’s legal and it isn’t. The workers get paid under the table. No payroll taxes are collected. No one gets benefits. If one is injured on the job there is no unemployment insurance. There is no crop and hail insurance to protect the grower from such risks. The sherif won’t prosecute theft from the grow sites. The risk of violence is high due to the growers needing to provide their own security. And the water use and pollution runoff are a drain on the environment. But the resultant weed is far f#>¥ing out.
Born too soon… :-(
“You could be target of this sort of violent crime, a home invasion, a robbery, assault. It’s an added danger at the end of this grow season,” Lewis said.
https://kobi5.com/news/local-news/2-arrested-1-suspect-on-the-run-after-home-invasion-robbery-at-eagle-point-marijuana-grow-site-171472/
Not child’s play. Violent criminals from California sucking up local law enforcement resources. We voted for that...
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