Hello friends!
Before I got into hemp, I was a successful translator and copy editor. It was a great job that made decent money and allowed me work from my desk from home. Unfortunately, working from my desk - for sometimes 10 hours at a time - almost killed my back. I felt pain when I sat down, when I stood, when I walked, and even when I laid down in bed. For me, an avid walker, this was unacceptable. I gained weight (45 lbs!!!) due to less movement, ate more comfort foods, got mad/sad/depressed, while at the same time menopause not only knocked at my door, but kicked it in with a battle ram... Yes. Perfect recipe for a medical nightmare, even though there was never a doubt in my mind that I would get through all this without even ONE pill from Big Pharma. Big Pharma and I don't exactly see eye to eye, because I truly believe that God has given us a herb for every ailment that He afflicts us with... Anyhow, I had to think about an alternative, before I lost all mobility.
The alternative presented itself, when a good friend of mine and I were reflecting on our lives... (there may have been several glasses of wine involved). We felt the whole weight, the sorrow, the political discord, and the pressure of the world on our shoulders. The year prior, 2018, farming of hemp had become legal, and we decided enthusiastically that we'll spearhead the Hemp is Hope-movement, the Revolution that takes America by storm, putting Big Pharma as well as Big Oil out of business, lets nature recover and people BREATHE again. Needless to say that we both knew little to nothing about hemp.
Growing hemp. Industrial hemp. For CBD oil. That's IT!
I've always liked Hemp.
Hemp is a very versatile plant that has so many medical benefits. CBD oil helps to battle lots of medical conditions: anxiety, seizures, neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's and stroke. It is used for pain relief, for acne treatment and cancer treatment. We're really all just at the very beginning of the learning process what this amazing plant can do. Our bodies have CBD receptors that encourage the body to heal itself. The technical - and totally unromantic bio-chemist reaction/explanation - can be looked up on the internet and I admit that I only get half of the chemistry-talk.
When hemp is grown for fiber, it is capable of replacing pretty much any use for plastic, it's biodegradable and cleanses the soil. Hemp was - as a matter of fact - used to take the radioactivity out of the soil near Chernobyl and made it after decades of detoxing inhabitable for the wildlife again. Hemp could be processed into all kind of paper products, cloths for clothes and even concrete... your imagination is the limit, really. Engineers have even built, cars, planes and more out of hemp fiber, before it was declared illegal.
If everybody would just see this beautiful plant as the God-sent that it is, the world would be a better place.
YES! There really COULD be a HEMP-REVOLUTION!
Needless to say that it didn't take any persuasion AT ALL for me to commit to hemping *cough helping* "SAVE THE WORLD" and start to grow it on some of my acres.
As idealistic as all this may sound... it quickly turned out that I had to learn a LOT. One can't just put the plant in the ground and forget about it. Starting in my first year, 2019, with three acres, I believe that I made every single mistake there IS in the book of big mistakes. So, for example, had it been my vision, to train one of my horses to drive a cart, and I could literally see myself so clearly driving down the paths with my horse cart, being at perfect peace as a perfect symbiosis between man, nature and animal. Mitakuye Oyasin - we're all related.
It took me about 10 minutes of fighting my horse to figure out that a) I should have told the horse sooner about my plans and b) that it was very unrealistic - horse cooperating or not. Romantic out the window, I got a fourwheeler. Since the first year, I refused to listen, when people told me: "plant on plastic mulch/tarp" - after all, I was on a mission to combat the plastic and oil industry singlehandedly! - I spent most of the first year chasing after weeds, so my poor hemplings would see some sun. There were many times, where I lay awake pondering, whether I had done the right thing and got mad at my husband for NOT preventing me to get into such a crazy venture. At this point, I just HAVE to thank my husband, partner for life, lover and best friend that he supported me ALWAYS in whatever I set my heart to. And there were many changes of heart professionally, lol. He is right after Buster *wink my grounding rod, my de-stressor and my best and hardest worker, when I need somebody's help.
Planting alone was a nightmare, cashing in EVERY favor of ALL of my friends to beg them to help me put ~4000+ seedlings in the ground. And even though I had all dates planned very well wayyy ahead, Mother Nature and her spring rains rendered my field unworkwithable until mid June and drove me up the wall, looking impatiently 'fingers drumming on the table' at my clock to make the rain stop. It did and finally, we had all the plants in the ground and now, NO RAIN AT ALL. The transplant shock was even harder than it would have been normally, because I frantically tried to install drip line, working from dawn to dusk to keep my hemp babies alive! I lost 13 pounds that week, working against the blistering sun. Once I was done with my irrigation lines, the rains started again. Hard.
I lost about a third of my hemp to rain damage. And yes, realizing that I couldn't transplant them to higher grounds fast enough, I did cry about the ones that didn't make it.
So much to learn: the registration to grow organic, the registration for the Department of Agriculture, the fertilizing methods (topical and in-line through the drip tape). There were days, when I thought my head would burst with all that information that I had to process simultaneously in order to harvest. And I don't even want to get in the nightmare of harvest... that's a whole BOOK with 13 chapters!
Then, sometime in December, it was all over and I sat down on the couch and relaxed. I looked back and looked at all the relationships that I had built. My friends - my wonderful, colorful 'bunch of misfits' shared two traits: their love and respect for me and the immeasurable size of their hearts. During the summer, in my field, there had been the straight, the gay, the exotic dancer, the shy motel owner, the grandmother, the Amish neighbors, the experienced farmer-neighbor-friends, the ex-addict, ex-convict, the divorcee, the black, the white, the Facebook friends, the cool dudes and the bikini model. Side by side. Laughing, sharing life stories, loading off confessions, healing on my property through the dirt and in perfect harmony. THERE was my revolution! And I loved it!
Little after little, my back recovered as well. I was able to move again, walk, eat healthier, eat fresher... After I had decided that I love the "happy without the high" that smoking hemp provides, I started to experiment with alternatives. There HAD to be a way to bring CBD and its benefits to people without them having to smoke it - I still can't quite muster the art of smoking hemp without coughing my lungs out. Confusing instruments such as the pipe, one-hitter and bong are all still strange to me - whatever happened to rolling a joint, lol?! Also, and very unfortunately and unjustified so, the hemp plant still bears the burden of being related to its crazy, illegal cousin. So I started to experiment with decarboxylation, eating it dried on salads, on eggs, in soups or wherever I would put otherwise parsley on a dish; and finally drinking it as tea (very bitter by itself) but lovely with our honey.
During the process of experimentation, I almost didn't notice that while I had started to drink my tea creations, I had also stopped drinking coffee! I had always thought that my CBD would help OTHER people. Never had I imagined, when it finally dawned on me, that I had successfully battled my menopausal hot flashes and night sweats in the process! - Yes, it WAS hard to drop my coffee habit, but after going back on, and then back off, so did the hot flashes and night sweats (with a two week delay of what I think was my body's time frame to detox the coffee).
I had found my calling. Tea. Hot in the winter curled up with a good book and iced in the summer to watch the Amish buggies drive by on the porch. Yes. I'm mixing herbs with hemp for teas now. All ingredients are carefully selected and purchased from suppliers that are on the trusted and verified organic list. My goal is to eventually grow every ingredient on our own land, but that may take a couple of years yet.
For the future, I see myself developing more and more products around the hemp plant. I have made soap and oil based lotion. Hemp honey, hemp oil with flavors peppermint, orange and rose hip are planned for the next rainy days as well as a hemp tea-based lotion, shampoo bars and more. As I learn more, I'll be adding more.
I cordially invite you to join Daniel, Buster and me in our hempy adventures...
I'm curious to see how my hemp teas can be of service to you. How those tiny CBD receptors in YOUR body figure out where it needs healing the most (again, the bio-chemistry behind this is a mystery to me). Honest feedback is not only rewarding but feeds creative energy, so don't be shy!
Love and peace, don't forget to BREATHE in these difficult times and sit back with a cup of hemp tea...
Silvia
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