There’s something special about growing your own garden. It requires hard work – time invested in turning the soil, sowing the seeds or planting the starters, weeding, watering and pruning – but come harvest time, you realize all that work comes with a fantastic reward. Homegrown gardens produce the best-tasting fruits, vegetables, and of course, Cannabis.
When a friend in Maine recently invited me over to see his home garden, I jumped at the opportunity. As this had been a great year for growing outside, he promised it was one of the best he had ever grown.
When I arrived and began walking across the lawn, I spied the garden in the back of the yard. I could see a few rows of tomatoes still staked in their supporting wire cages, empty areas where lettuce, spinach, and carrots had grown, as well as a large patch still covered with squash, cucumbers, and pumpkins. However, it was the fenced-in, private garden behind the veggies that he wanted to show me.
With deep pride he again insisted that this was one of his best grows yet. He then opened the gate to reveal the four plants allowed for home cultivation under Maine’s adult-use law.
Tall, bushy, eight-foot-plus plants filled the 20×20 garden, each grown in a 100-gallon pot – with the space discretely surrounded by fencing to keep his beautiful bounty from prying eyes on the road or at nearby houses.
With the cooling of the autumn nights, two of his eight-foot-plus monster plants were quickly finishing out and needed to be cut, trimmed and hung to dry. A pile of yellow and purple-tinted sun leaves covered the ground below the plants, mixed here and there with a few oak and maple leaves from the trees surrounding the backside of the property.
Branch by branch, the last of the sun leaves and fan leaves were cut off, leaving only the closer sugar leaves on the flowers to be trimmed. Next, the branches were cut from the stock and brought in handfuls to wet trim and then hang. Turning on a fan in the room, my friend smiled and told me there’s just eight to 10 days until the final trim. Then the perfectly manicured buds would be stored for curing.
He estimates it will be November by the time the batch is fully cured. The burping process will be finished around Thanksgiving time – just in time for the holiday cornucopia of Cannabis, pumpkins and squash his garden will provide.
