Merry Christmas 2019

Christmas time arrived before I knew it. I've been sort of obsessed with the question of will we be stuck with 15 industrial sized bags of hemp buds.
That is a lot to smoke, make into weird tinctures, boil on the stove, give to people who will never actually do anything with it, or store for a year.
I bought everything online.
I did ok with my daughter but the wife presents were a complete bust. The first one I bought she then bought herself, the second present turned out to be the wrong size.
At the family Christmas on Christmas Eve, my wife's sister bought the same thing I had just wrapped and put under the tree.
The final indignity was when I got home and found the last present had arrived.
It was the wrong size.
My daughter and I went out and bought her a heated blanket. (as opposed to a heating pad)
Then I went and checked the hemp dryer. It is getting dry.
The hemp project has turned into a forever project. We improved our quality to the point where we have passed the minimum quality standard and could sell our product if the price ever comes back up.
We had a pretty small Christmas Day with just daughter and wife and I.
We listened to Christmas Records and it was really rather relaxed.

We are going to BBQ for supper and if I was not lazy I would go over and visit my Nephews and give them the Donald Trump fake lego sets I bought from a sketchy Chinese importer. Oh, the lovely Christmas Irony!

Hemp hophead fever

I am trying to drag myself off the couch to work on stripping hemp. It is an all consuming project. I haven't run the dryer for three days due to lack of production. I have to get a load in it today. Goal setting is important but task completion is key...

I would be happy to never smell skunkweed again..

or perhaps we should say the Wildwood Flower?

We are attempting to process our hemp.
As you may recall from last week it has been a bit of a process.
Several things have gone wrong.
Overproduction was the obvious issue and we saw that problem going in. What we didn't imagine was a summer which did not have enough heat units to produce mature buds and that screwing around for a week and not getting the weed in the ground was going to cost us thousands of dollars.
The planting issue came about by me trying to get a job planting for a neighbor who then did and end run around me and borrowed the planter and kept it for two weeks. The problem was that we didn't own the planter and I let that slip... We had the tractor and the pot grower down the road had the planter and bedder and no tractor to pull it with.
But that has been the whole problem with hemp growing. There is so much imaginary money involved that people definitely take care of themselves first.
Not to say that people haven't been great. The farmer who owns the sheds we are using to process the hemp has gone above and beyond being "neighborly" to the point of loaning us helpers and even coming out and stripping hemp himself. My buddy who borrowed the planter has also been coming out and helping in the evenings and has offered his stripping machine. It is what it is.
Our basic problem is that we have less than 10% CBD when we take in anything but buds. Stripping only buds is really slow.

We have considered using the gravity table cleaner as we are processing our hemp at a seed cleaning plant. Air and vibration make the round buds, leaves, and steps separate. But, you can't stop everything and experiment when you have a real job to go back to on Monday...
Things stopped over Thanksgiving as I was trying to get the people buying our material to come out and look at it and we sent samples for more testing. Of course the hemp girl hit a curb and bent two rims on her way over on Wednesday and Thursday was Thanksgiving. Our tests came back and the hand sorted material was three points higher than the material straight out of the stripping machine.
I've been trying to load the dryer before work and then I work till 9:30 or 10 pm afterwork. My wife has been sorting during the day and my nephews also help between school and other duties.
I've tapped labor from previous Workstudy students and my daughter and random individuals I have met. I suspect we will never get done....

Below is a photo of our material. The first photo is hand sorted, the second is just buds. The pen is for scale.

My daughter came home from college and helped last weekend. She does not like to be photographed.

Several Workstudy students have helped me. Here is one of my best students. He even has a real job after graduating from a Liberal Arts College.

Have a happy day...