Harvest at Lily Hill Farm

It's a bittersweet time here at the farm: the leaves are bursting with color, hinting at the end of another growing season. It's sad to see the summer go but exciting to harvest our beautiful hemp crop that we put so much love into over the season.

While planting hemp in the spring is a large undertaking, it's nothing compared to how much work goes into harvesting. First, we hand harvest the plants, clipping the largest flowers.

Bins of these beautiful buds are then carried to our "big-leafing" stations, where we remove the (you guessed it) big fan leaves in order to help them dry and cure more efficiently. This step can be done with fan tables, which use sharp blades on a fan beneath a grate to remove the biggest leaves without damaging the buds (watch your fingers!).

We only have a few fan tables, so we also remove the leaves with scissors in order to get the job done. It's a little bit like hemp bonsai!

Once the buds have lost their big leaves, they are carefully put back into bins and transported to our drying facility. The flowers are hung until dry, then are bucked from the stems and stored for curing (we'll share more info on that process in a future post!).

Once dried and cured, much of the flower will be further trimmed and then sold; the remainder will be extracted and used in our CBD products.