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October is a special time of year for us at Lazarus Naturals. When the warm, dry days slowly give way to crisp cool nights and those dewey, foggy mornings, our farm team begins to get excited. The change in leaves as our hemp fields reach upwards of eight feet indicate that those thousands of hours of work are near culmination. It’s harvest time.
"Every season is good; when we’re planting and when we’re preparing the ground," said equipment operator, Jesus Terrazas. "The most fun though is the harvest, for me. Somehow I feel like I’m with the right people."
It was a mild summer on the farm this summer. A wet spring that extended into June led to warm but not blistering heat, that peaked at the end of July with daily temperatures of 110°F, and average temperatures around 86°F. Now, with the plants reaching their maximum height and flower production, we wait for — best case scenario — a frost, that will freeze the plants, preventing further growth and locking in the trichomes and terpenes chock full of the cannabinoids we’ll extract this fall.
Some years, the early fall frost doesn’t happen, and the team has to first cut down the hemp plants and then scoop them up into the combine with as minimal movement as possible. Too much shifting of plants leads to the loss of some trichomes, and with it - the cannabinoids that make our hemp some of the most potent in the industry.
It's that attention to detail that makes our skilled team at the farm such a crucial part of the products we sell. As September ends they keenly eye the forecasts.
"It’s kind of the fruits of your labor," said Chris Sullivan, Field Plant Lead at Lazarus Naturals. "It’s an exciting time, it’s a nerve-racking time because you do all that work throughout the season and then if we get two weeks of rain or we get some snow on there it can really drastically reduce our overall yield and damage the crops quite a bit. So we’re always looking at the weather so that keeps your interest and it’s just overall an exciting time. You’ve got to kind of be ready to flex and be prepared to do the things that need to get done as they’re happening because you might see rain coming two days from now so you just got to put the pedal to the metal and run a few long days because that rain might not allow you to harvest again for another week or two."
We're grateful for the experienced crew that puts so much time, energy, and love into the farm each year. It's evident from the hundreds of acres sprawling the eastern slopes of the Cascades that it is indeed paying off.