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This blog is meant for those who long to linger in the loam on the 21st of June.

The longest day of the year is rife with possibilities. There are barbecues, hikes, ball games, parties, gatherings, and rituals. It tends to be a social day.

But for this home grower, June 21 is a day to take my time for whatever I’m doing in the beds. There is no hurry up for anything, other than getting out there and soaking it in. It is a day to cherish the glory of summer, and all the possibilities that summer brings to a grow, in real time.

My plants are not large at this point. They have only been in the beds for three weeks. They have successfully negotiated the most fraught part of the grow, the sprouting, sexing and transplanting, and have been selected to grow for the season. Once they are in the ground, they have to overcome any shock to their roots, or changes in the amount of lighting, in order to resist the temptation of early flowering.

Some years, like last year, when we had 16 straight days without seeing the sun, I was still fighting plants on Solstice that wanted to flower early. I was trying to spark them back into vegetative growth. Thankfully, that is not the case this year.

But on Solstice, while the cannabis is still young, there are other plants and moments to celebrate.

Our 400 plus years old California Buckeye is in full bloom. Those flowers have a similar odor to jasmine.

This tree basically controls my grow every year. When cannabis tap roots hit the mycelium network beneath my beds, I no longer have to water my plants. They will get what they need and they will flower as nature intended. It is from this tree that we get our pure mycorrhizae for compost teas. Having just used raw mycorrhizae for the first time on my plants, I will admit to being astonished at how much they grew in the following week.

Raspberries are in and I picked some fresh for my cereal this morning.

Lavender protects my beds from any deer intrusion, and is lovely to behold.

Something else that begins close to Solstice is plant training, which is one of our key activities to maximize the eventual harvest yield. For this, I turn to my second born child, Bee. They are my growing partner and they are the primary trainer for the plants. They can come in from the outside and see things with fresh eyes that I cannot see. They can also approach each plant with a level of objectivity that I lose over the course of a long growing season.

What they noticed immediately was how much the plants were being buffeted by wind. Some wind is very good for root development. All of my plants eventually become small trees and their stalks are wooden and solid in the ground. But right now, everything is pliable, and  growing furiously fast. There was a bit of vulnerability for one of the plants.

So, they provided two forms of training, one a cross tie to help stabilize the plant from too much wind movement, and the other, the traditional training of a lower branch, to spread that branch out, and open up the inside of the plant to sun. The more sun finds the inside of the plant, the larger those inside flowers will grow. Popcorn doesn’t necessarily have to be small, or even popcorn. The only downside to smaller inner growth getting more light is that you might have to support some of the large flowers that grow on relatively skinny branches. 

Purple Hindu Kush–We were not expecting such a tall lady.

Every plant will be trained, with some fairly elaborate trains once the plants have another month of veg growth. Over the years, we have utilized both training and topping methods for trying to maximize our yield. For us, training makes more sense. Topping definitely creates more flowers, but it also causes more crowding, which can lead to pathogenic problems. That isn’t as much of a concern if you’re growing indoors, where the temperature and humidity are controlled. Outdoors, where humidity is wildly variable, crowding of any kind usually requires consistent pruning, with an eye towards always maintaining the largest potential flowers.

Training is a long game strategy. By opening up the inner growth to sunlight you maximize the size and potency of each bud. We estimate that training increases our yield by over 30%.

In the years we have both trained and topped, we have observed that more potential problems cropped up in the topped plants. Also, we had to do more pruning, to compensate for all the extra buds. As an outdoor grower, I like to minimize the number of cuts I make on my plants.

Generally speaking, while pruning is absolutely necessary, I tend to avoid it if I can. Any cutting of your plant increases the risk of introducing pathogens to the grow. A sloppy cut, or a leaf that strips off bark, creates pathogenic openings in high humidity weather. 

So, it’s always important to have a jar of organic honey on site, to dab onto every cut you make and seal those cuts closed.

But on Solstice, I usually put down the scissors and the tweezers. I don’t spend as much time in the beds working. Besides, I do the vast majority of my work between 5-7 in the morning. On Solstice, when I settle outside, it’s usually in the afternoon. I am always out there when the sun is coming up in the morning, but I’m not always in the beds working when it’s going down. Except on Solstice.

This is the magic time for me, the protracted evening. Some years it’s foggy, but most years, it’s sunny, clear and warm. 

I’ll be parking for part of the day in my blue chair, the same chair I used to teach classes from on Zoom. It sits across from the Hindu Kush, and right next to ACDC.

Hindu Kush

Speaking of Hindu Kush. Did you know that she is a landrace strain? She is considered one of the Origin cultivars, and this is the first year I’m growing her from seed. The very first year I grew, I grew two Hindu Kush clones, but from seed is a very different experience. The clones were effective medicine, once I got them to stop trying to flower and got them back to veg growth. To this day, I think this might be my wife’s favorite THC strain, and she generally doesn’t go for THC. But the taste, distinct smell and sleep impact converted her. This is the one strain my wife will probably sample from a bong.

Looking at the particular plant in the photo above, I can’t help but notice the thickness midway up the stalk. This is going to be the largest Hindu Kush I’ve grown to date. So far, I’m impressed by the genetics of this feminized seed. I also note that every Kush I’m growing this year (Hindu, Purple Hindu, Royal and Rainbow) has nine fingers on their leaves, just as you’d find in the Hindu Kush mountain range of Afghanistan, where this plant has grown wild for tens of thousands of years.

I have one more plant in the cottage, a Royal Kush feminized seed that I started when I found a male plant in bed 18. At that time, in response to the male, I decided to do a little experiment–I would start a feminized seed in bed 18 and see what happened, but I would also start a feminized seed in the cottage. Today is day 21 and there is a rather large difference between the two:

The one in the cottage is growing her fourth set of leaves. The one outside is just now starting to form her third set of leaves. There are nine more days before I have to make a decision, but I think we can all see where this is going.

There could be a few reasons for the difference. One is obviously the quality of seed, which can be different. The second is that the two growing mediums (outdoor bed and indoor bucket) are at dramatically different stages of fertilization. The indoor 3-gallon bucket is filled with Fox Farm Ocean Forest soil, nothing more, and the plant doesn’t get her first taste of compost tea until she completes week four. The outdoor bed is rich in fertilized soil. That bed had fish planted last November, had fava beans grow over winter for more nitrogen, and that bed also got a couple of pre-planting teas poured, so that the soil would be as rich as possible for growing. Consequently, the soil might be a bit too rich for a sprout. It is entirely possible the sprout needs to be started in a soil not pumped full of nitrogen. The plant in the bed is growing, but not nearly at the rate of the one in the cottage. Water is another differing factor. Indoors, the plant sits in a reservoir full of water to call upon. Outside, until the plant shows she can stand on her own, some watering is required for a baby sprout. It is a fine line between enough water and too much water. I might have given too much and the plant had to wait until the water level was more conducive to growing. 

In any case, on Solstice, I am nine days from making a final decision on which Royal Kush will end up in bed 18. No reason to rush anything.

At a certain point, usually about the time whatever I have taken for a Solstice bake comes on, I notice that time seems to slow down. On the longest day of the year, everything takes a little more time. I watch a bee leisurely and mindfully collecting from lavender.

There is an undeniable bittersweet quality to the longest day of the year. As I get older, and my social circle inevitably grows smaller, as glorious as Solstice is during those long hours and minutes, there is also a warm, pervasive sentiment that memories be acknowledged. 

I’ll think of my late brother, Patrick. I’ll hear his very laugh, because our laughs were identical. I’ll giggle, too, thinking of how my parents might have reacted if they could have seen the things I’ve grown. 

Sometimes, I close my eyes and just listen. What I hear, when I’m listening with the right set of ears, is a soft, mostly pleasant rendering of moments in time. In those long, slow shadows, images from the past are often conjured, and they come to mingle with the present. Laughter heard might be in the moment, or it might be an echo, a memory, or possibly a hope. 

I am filled with a level of emotion and inspiration that probably causes a pleasant rise in my dopamine. This is the feeling I associate with active mindfulness. When I periodically rise and move about the beds, I share the sentiment of every farmer ever, who loves what they grow. I move in one direction, while I’m looking in another. 

This is how I feel on the longest day of the year. Surrounded by the beauty of growth, both physical and spiritual, I lean in with my full being. Content with how present I am in the moment, I hold hope that my own imprint on this day might one day echo for others, who also long to linger in the loam on the Summer Solstice.

For JS.

PS–The “Special” this year is that both June 20 and 21 are the exact same length of day. We get an encore. Bliss . . .

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