Hemp is an incredibly important crop with a troubled history in the United States. Hemp is one of the oldest plants ever used to create textiles, and while hemp is still used to make textiles, paper, ropes, and more, it’s got another important use: CBD.
Yet while we may be familiar with CBD, most of us aren’t so familiar with hemp cultivation and the process of growing hemp. In this guide, we’re going to take a look at how people grow CBD hemp and the key steps of the process.
Ready to learn more? Then read on!
1. Preparing to Cultivate Hemp
When growing hemp for CBD, you need to have a lot of plants. This requires four things: capital, a growing space, soil, and seeds.
Hemp farmers usually start small, as growing hemp requires some special skills that take time to cultivate, just like the plants themselves In terms of soil, you need to have high-quality soil if you’re growing CBD plants. The soil should be loose, airy, and rich in organic matter.
While hemp can grow pretty much anywhere, many types of soil won’t result in a high-quality crop. This means that hemp farmers usually put a premium on the quality of their soil.
2. Sowing the Seeds
Now that you’ve got a place to grow your seeds, it’s time to sow them. When you’ve found premium hemp seeds or hemp clones, you’ll need to till your soil and then plant the seeds about an inch under the topsoil.
If you’re growing hemp for CBD, you’ll need to space the plants well apart: if you’re growing the plants for fiber, this isn’t such a big concern. You’ll need to plant the seeds when the soil is around 50-60 degrees Fahrenheit, which means that the growing season will vary a lot from region to region.
3. Water Your Seeds
For your seeds to grow, they’ll need water and a surprisingly large amount of it. Over the course of its growth cycle, a hemp plant needs around 20-30 inches of water. Some of this will come from rainfall, but you’ll also need to water the plants yourself.
4. Taking Care of Your Plants
Taking care of your plants while they grow is of the utmost importance. You’ll need to give them all the nutrients that they need such as nitrogen, phosphate, and potash.
You’ll also need to protect them from pests. Common pests that trouble hemp plants include different types of mold and blight, grubs, and aphids.
5. Harvesting Your Plants
So your plants have survived to harvest time and you want to harvest them and turn them into CBD isolate. While we can’t help you with the latter, we can help with the timing of the former.
You should harvest hemp plants for use in CBD after around 16 weeks. The flowers should be fully ripe by this point, which makes them perfect for CBD.
Hemp Cultivation Is Surprisingly Simple
Despite the large amount of labor that goes into hemp cultivation, it’s surprisingly simple. If you’d like to grow it yourself, all you need to do is follow our steps!
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