Picnic Cannabis focuses on cultivating high-quality fresh-frozen Cannabis for hashmakers. Its Turners Falls location on the banks of the Connecticut River touts 14,000 square feet of mixed-light cultivation space, where they benefit from reduced energy consumption and the sun’s unrivaled light spectrum.
Catching up with Ezra Hagerty from Picnic, I got to hear about early meetings with friend and fellow hash enthusiast Ian Collins, where they focused their mission to cultivate exceptional Cannabis responsibly and sustainably. “Our whole process — from genetics to cultivation practices to harvest, process and transport — is specifically tailored to protect the trichomes for solventless extraction,” Ezra said.
He told me this was Picnic’s first summer focusing on flower production. Last summer they focused mainly on vegging, building mother stock, and beginning the process of selection and refinement. They currently have 21 cultivars in production and have cycled 22 more since starting up a year ago. He attributes a large part of their success to sourcing and selecting genetics. Finding plants with high yield and terpene expression is easier with help from friends like Ryan at Piranha Farms in Maine, where Ezra and the team sourced many cuts.
With the focus on quality persisting past harvest, the team at Picnic is aware of the need to get the plants processed and into the freezer as quickly (and gently) as possible to preserve the quality of the trichomes. “We only cut as many plants as we can process in 30 minutes,” Ezra said. “We’ve borrowed techniques from our experience in the frozen food category to ensure the flowers are frozen individually. That’s the difference between getting individual flowers to dump into the wash instead of a clump of frozen biomass… We sought input from as many hash experts as were willing to share their techniques with us and are confident that our process allows us to protect the trichomes and terpenes.”
Two plants Ezra said he was fired up about this harvest were the Honeydew (Honeybee x Tallmon, bred by Dammit Bobby) and Papaya (Citral #2 x Ice #13 from Nirvana Seeds).
“Honeydew thrived in the summer months, dumps in the wash, and recently had 17 detected terpenes in rosin made by Blue River Terps,” he said. They’ve also seen those two mix well together, noting that Treeworks just rolled out a blend of those two strains called Banana Melons.
