The Hemp Conference is now over, I have been given the keys to the kingdom, I have a handful of seeds. and armed with the knowledge that I can get clones from the seeds that I plant, and I am relieved to know that I do not need to spend thousands of dollars to plant an acre of hemp. With the knowledge that I gathered at the conference; I will reduce the cost of planting an acre of hemp from $14k to less than a thousand dollars.
The trip back home flew by, it seemed like I was back home in minutes instead of hours, if you have ever driven Highway 58 in Virginia you know what I mean, that is a hard drive, speed limit is 55mph, speed traps all along the way, speed limit drops to 25mph in some of the small towns hard to make time. None of that mattered on the trip back, I was eager to start this new adventure.
The conference was on a Friday, and I planted my seed that following Saturday look at what I had seven to ten days later.
These are the first seeds that I planted and I had a very good germination rate as you can see. I was able to take these plants and clone them and plant and acre of hemp isn't that cool?
Now that I have a small stand of hemp plants growing, my goal at this point was to get the plants large enough to get cuttings off of them. Do I do it the old fashion way like I use to watch my mother do with her flowers or was there a better way to do it.
As I was researching how to grow hemp, I realized that I almost made a critical mistake, luckily I caught myself. I read that if hemp did not have enough light the plants would go into flowering stage, what is a flowering stage I thought, after more reading I learn a lot more, you see by going to the conference I was given the keys to the kingdom; however, I didn't learn the nuances of growing hemp at the conference. As they say reading is fundamental.
I learned that hemp needed more than 12 hours of sunlight and as long as the plant is receiving more than 12 hours of light it will remain in the vegetative during this stage the plant directs its energy to growth of the leaves, stems, and roots providing a strong structure for the flowering stage. The flowering stage occurs when the plant is getting less than 12 hours of light and last about 7-9 weeks.
I was talking to a buddy of mine who owns a nursey and was telling him about it and I was asking him what type of lights I should get, because my money was short. He said "don't worry about that, they just need light, get a timer and hook it up to a lamp and have it turn on when the sun goes down and cut off at 9pm and you will do just fine." Guess what, he was right.
Getting back to my cloning research, I discovered that there were several cloning machines on the market and the prices were varied and I settle on a unit that would clone 64 plants at a time.
I went online and printed out the application to become a hemp grower, and about forty-five days later I received my growers license in the mail and I was a certified Virginia Hemp Farmer. Now I was off to the races.
Til Next Time