The Midseason Panic Attack: Rookie Focus
Colville Tribal Land, near Omak, Washington, 2017
I’ve found, as a general rule of life, that the things you think are going to be the scaliest nearly always turn out not so bad after all.
—P. G. WODEHOUSE, The Inimitable Jeeves
It’s usually around 60 days into the season that a farmer jerks awake in the night, panting with a premonition about something biblical going wrong in the field. Might be hail, deer invasion, or state inspectors insisting on testing cola flowers.
Last summer a colleague shot me the most adorable picture featuring a nest full of just-hatched thrush of some kind. They were asking for breakfast from the middle of the hemp field. The adorableness wasn’t the reason for the note. At least not the only reason. She also wondered if the family’s superfood dining habits might prove a significant detriment to the harvest.
You’re going to have a midseason panic attack surrounding your first hemp crop. It’s just probably not going to be for the right reasons. That’s because the debut season hemp farmer usually freaks out only about the field, rather than also thinking about the great unknown that lies beyond harvest.
For instance, one morning late in the summer of 2017, I woke to a series of horticultural text images from Eastern Washington, accompanied by a request to report to the Colville field to investigate. My heart was heavy as I sipped my hemp, turmeric, and blueberry shake that morning. For one thing, few demands of modern life are more grating than trying to sufficiently enlarge a phone-transmitted image to the size one would need to begin to make an actual diagnosis about anything botanical. Was that an aphid or someone’s elbow?
What became clear was that in at least portions of the tribe’s 60-acre field, the outer perimeter of the leaves on the just-starting-to-flower field were turning yellow in a sort of jagged pattern. Suddenly I was viscerally experiencing the spot-on nature of Bill’s advice about the ceaseless vigilance required when your living depends on Mother Nature. I was not dirty at this moment. But I wanted to be.
If a crop is showing evidence of distress by August, it’s not necessarily too late to do something about it. And you should address the issue, even though it’s almost definitely the result of preseason soil realities or genetics. The alarm itself is what matters, not the cause. Whether or not the steps you, the helicopter parent, take to deal with the field issue are the catalyst, that field issue tends to get resolved. It feels like a code red at the time, but you’ll live to fight another day.
Partly that’s because you can often treat the symptoms, say, a crop that is late to transition from veg to flower. Thirst is generally the easiest plant message to understand and mitigate. Pests, weeds, or unauthorized critter visits are next easiest. Nutrient surplus or deficiency is harder. And genetics, being already in the ground, are impossible to mitigate, until next season. In Colville that season it seemed to be a nutrient issue plus the crop’s underlying genetics.
But the real reason to take a field issue in stride is that plants are smart. That might sound like a compliment, to some ears even a woo-woo declaration. But when you give it some thought, it’s fundamentally condescending. Plants know they are clever. Ferns, to name one family, have been humming along without fail for 360 million years, 120 million years longer than we Johnny-come-lately mammals have been around. They don’t need our affirmation. Plus, we’d be pretty offended if the first line of a chapter in some plant author’s book about us read, “Many of the more hairless primates are not the absolute imbeciles their post-shamanistic leadership style would indicate.”
Still, recognizing the scope of plant intelligence reflects a fairly new mind-set for me. It provides immediately valuable information: Plants, like most intelligent life-forms, are good communicators. They deal with a problem if they can, and if necessary, they tell us very clearly how things are going in their lives. I wouldn’t say they gossip, but if your plants are not happy, you’ll know. They are without question chatting. With each other, with the microbe community we’ve been architecting, and with us.
That plants are talking to us is not new information for the world’s farmers, historically. Certainly not to Bill Althouse. He’s part of a tradition that in the United States goes back to colonial times. George Washington knew to tell his head gardener of the hemp that he grew on all five of his estates, “Let the ground be well prepared.”1 General Washington understood that what comes out of the ground is contingent upon what steps you take before planting.
It was only recently that this commonsense awareness was nearly forgotten. Plants and animals split. About the time that the “12 items or fewer” lane came online. But like separated twins living similar lives, we’ve always known deep down we were related.
Like most kids, even growing up in 1980s Long Island when Madonna was like a virgin, I wondered if trees “feel.” I mean, I recognized as I swung a hatchet that it is a powerful act. I grew up at a time when you could say, “talking to plants helps” and not be considered insane. You could find the occasional middlebrow journalism article to back you up.
But when it comes to totemic relationships, I’d always been more of an animal guy. I’m the fellow on the rain forest canoe trip who woke early and locked eyes with the jaguar mother and kitten having a sunrise drink. In everyday ranch life, I’m the goat whisperer other members of my family call down to the corral if Bjork is acting rambunctious on the milk stand. It is my sweetheart and kiddos who have the green thumbs in the family.
It’s taken two decades of journalism, first about local living and then about the cannabis/hemp plant, to provide the immersive education that’s allowed a much muddier me to truly understand the sophisticated intelligence of, for instance, your basic bean sprout. Now I see clear as day that plants, as they go about their day, do the equivalent of getting the chores done, feeding the family, and squeezing in some exercise. In short, plants do what we do.
Ultimately the only substantive difference between animals and plants is one of pace. Plants divide their year seasonally, rather than weekly. This awareness has deeply affected nearly every phase of my life. You should hear my Chauncey Gardiner–like requests for journalistic deadline extensions these days. I hear myself saying thing like, “The piece will ripen in due course.”
Likewise my entrepreneurial philosophy is now grounded on the pace taught by plants—I model business plans on creatures that grow for 10 months and allow you to make a living while working on climate stabilization. Advance soil building, high-quality hemp-processing modes that require more time, caution about the chemical composition of the people with whom I consider collaboration: I’ve learned from green leafy cannabis plants how to handle all of these. And it seems to be working out.
In the ground, of course, is where plants teach the most directly. Three months before planting hemp here on the Funky Butte Ranch, I began my overwinter soil preparation by planting a nitrogen-fixing clover-vetch combination. A crop that has, on the surface, nothing to do with hemp, is going to one day soon play a role in the hempseed shake that I and my family enjoy every morning.
However it works in the real work marketplace, I find that patience as a business strategy suits my nature. Throughout the hemp-cultivation cycle, I keep relearning the same lesson: that best practices might be about leaving a few steps out. That fifth isn’t the only gear for a farmer, entrepreneur, or species aiming for survival.
But that awareness not to freak out the moment you have an issue in the field has been hard won; it’s not how I handled it in that 2017 large-acreage field. In truth, we didn’t primarily have a field problem in Colville that year. We had a harvest-transport and drying problem. But we wouldn’t be aware of this for several more months.
You never expect a negative diagnosis. When those yellow-leaf text images came microscopically over the ether, I, like most relative newbies, had tunnel vision. After spending the day overreacting and booking flights, I crashed but quickly woke from nightmares about regiments of diseased leaves—suffering from much more severe disfigurement than the real leaves—storming in formation after Jackie and me.
I cared too much about that Colville crop. I really wanted it to succeed. Even the Colville Tribe’s chairman at the time, Dr. Michael Marchand, had told me that the tribe was deeply committed to hemp. “We always thought, maybe this is the crop for us someday,” he said. “We want to diversify our economies. Hemp looks like the place we want to be. I’m happy to actually see a plant growing.”
There was, in other words, a lot riding on this crop. As lead consultant to the project, it was on me to figure this out. In waking life, all I wanted to do was change those leaves from yellow back to green. I wanted a magic wand. A magic soil supplement. As for jagged yellow leaf perimeters, I had never seen this variegated pattern before. I found myself taking it personally.
Hmmm, I thought. Could be overwatering. Then again, could be underwatering. Could be too much nitrogen. But dang, given the struggling soil when we planted the crop, could be too little nitrogen.
That first morning with a midseason problem, I perused the Emerald Triangle ganja blogs that I find provide the most comprehensive photographic analysis of cannabis issues. To this day, I love sending former black market cannabis-cultivation URLs to clients as part of my official advice. Best gardeners of Michael Pollan’s generation, indeed.
Hmm. This just added to my variables. I scanned every yellow cannabis leaf since prohibition began. Looked like it probably wasn’t a potash issue. The third-generation greenbud experts said leaf discoloration in that case is often associated with spotting rather than striping. That’s when it occurred to me to FaceTime with someone who had 60 years of cultivation under his belt. It’s good to have the world’s most experienced hemp farmer as your mentor.
“Sounds like a real quackmire,” Edgar said when I had forwarded him the tiny photos of apparently struggling plants. “In year one, when you’re building stressed-out soil, this kind of thing can happen.”
When I asked him if it was more likely a nutrient issue or a genetics issue, Edgar replied, “Could be either. It’s a half dozen of one, fifty of the other. These problems can cohabitate.”
Michael LaBelle, when I discussed the quackmire with him two years after the fact, concurred. “Pictures might be worth a thousand words,” he said. “But on-site time is worth a thousand pictures.” In other words, diagnosing a field issue is not so easy until you see it in person. Especially a large-field issue.
I was learning that fast. A key question to ask with any plant health problem is whether it’s localized or pervasive. In Colville in 2017, it was somewhere in between. At the time, Edgar and I agreed a sulfur deficiency was the likely culprit, based on preseason soil testing and the outer-edge yellowing pattern.
Jackie was on board for a sulfur application. But adding OMRI-compliant nutrients to 60 acres in the middle of the growing season is no small task. That was the week I went from gentleman hand-weeding kale gardener to pricing aerial sulfur applications and back. We landed somewhere in the middle. Jackie decided to add the nutrients to the pivot watering apparatus in solution.
But really, the core problem in the Colville field that year wasn’t sulfur any more than the problems in the Middle East are about last week’s headlines. By the time I sashayed to the field with my family and dogs in the ol’ camper, after driving through the—ho hum—Armageddon of wildfires the whole way through Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, the crop already looked much better.2
Wading each morning into a square mile of Kelly green hemp, scaring the bejeezus out of the sun-darkening flock of blackbirds and neighboring rancher’s goats snacking on the crop’s just-forming hempseed, my sons and I had to get deep into the weakest portions of the shoulder-high field before I saw them: fast-maturing leaves yellowing in a weird pattern around their perimeters.
I thought, naturally enough, that the sulfur application had helped. But when I spoke to her about it more recently, Jackie, who knows the field best, said she doesn’t think midseason liquid sulfur application was the way to go. Indeed she isn’t convinced sulfur was the main issue that year.
“Obviously the ideal situation is to address your nutrient shortages months before planting,” she said. “But if you have to do a midseason sulfur application, granular rather than liquid is less likely to burn the plants. And whether or not sulfur was our main issue, you can’t expect to monkey with your nutrients too much midseason.”
Indeed Dan had already noticed that his prior season cattle run sported by far the best swath of the field. That’s where we took all our social media shots that season. So something was happening with nitrogen too. Suddenly I was thinking it was a good thing the state of Washington’s crappy genetics laws didn’t allow the tribe to save seeds in 2017.
Which really gets to the heart of the rookie midseason focus: Thankfully the crop did improve, and did get harvested. But even if it hadn’t, Jackie could only do her best to mitigate what was at core an off-field issue: bad genetics policy. Yellowing leaves had their origins in disastrous hemp legislation passed two years earlier in Olympia, Washington: no domestic cultivars allowed. Late-arriving permits delayed planting. Only four projects even applied to the program that year.
The situation in Colville in 2017 is the reason the term perfect storm was adapted to nonmeteorological phenomena. In fact, weather was about the only thing that went right, other than perseverance. The tribal project was forced to plant non-acclimated seeds from tired genetics sporting a germination rate lower than I would ever sell. Furthermore, a fiesta of bureaucratic nonsense forced the project to plant in July instead of Jackie’s target date of May 20. Robust hemp genetics planted in early June could’ve handled the challenging soil situation. The law and regs were so unfriendly that it was something close to a miracle that, after months of paperwork delay and weeks of confusion at customs, the sacks of European seeds even arrived in Seattle. All for genetics that the project never should have been forced to import in the first place.
With the ton of seed actually in the United States, it looked like planting might finally be upon us. So I flew in to Spokane right around the July 4 holiday. For 3 days Jackie begged for the release of her project’s seed from customs. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the afternoon of July 8, bumping in Jackie’s truck, with its tribal license plates, toward an absurdly out-of-the-way location in Airway Heights two and a half hours from the field, as specified by state regulators. This is where the seeds would have to be stored—if they ever made it out of customs—in DEA-compliant lockers until we picked them up.
Even as we drove, the UPS folks were saying that there were no fleet vehicles in the entire metropolis of Seattle available to get the seed to Airway Heights for the long-delayed planting. As she argued with customer service on the truck’s speakerphone in the remote town of Omak, population 4,787 and home of the annual Suicide Race indigenous horse competition, not one, not two, but three UPS trucks ambled past us. Brown, shiny, and in formation.
As a final insult, when we picked up the seed many hours later (technically the next day) and sped off back to the field, Jackie got one last call from a customs official.
“Don’t plant yet,” the voice said. “We have some more questions.”
In the passenger seat, I made the downward “in the hole” arm gesture from Caddyshack.
“Too late,” Jackie reported. “The seeds are already in the ground. Sorry.”
That crop only got planted because a lot of people went the extra mile, including one Victor Shaul of the Washington Department of Agriculture. He, in fact, went the extra 200 miles, on a Saturday, to bring the “second key” we needed to open the DEA-approved seed-storage locker in Airway Heights, from his office in Yakima.
This protocol ensured that, as of 2017, hempseed was as difficult to obtain in Washington as it would be for a president to launch a nuclear strike. It was far easier to grow psychoactive cannabis than hemp in the Evergreen State that year. By contrast, in 2019 I just shipped my Samurai seed home to myself in New Mexico.
If we hadn’t gotten that seed out of that Airway Heights storage locker on July 8, it’s doubtful the tribe would have planted that year. The days were already getting shorter, for crying out loud. It was nearly two months later than the ideal planting time. The plants were going to want to start flowering before they even matured. Short of Superman reversing the earth’s spin, there was nothing we could do about that.
Plus it really was bottom-of-the-barrel seed. Long story, but thanks to the fierce loyalty of my sister-from-another-mother Hana Gabrielová in the Czech Republic, who essentially broke a Canadian seed blockade of Washington that season and sent us what she had left so late in the season, we were allowed to be stuck with offshore genetics.
The French breeders of the cultivar Colville grew that year, a variety called Ferimon 12, didn’t really care if we replanted. It was very difficult to find them, actually, and my high school French isn’t very good. But the State of Washington’s hemp rules that year wouldn’t let us save seed anyway. Nor grow for flower. You see why I’m so passionate about the genetic level playing field: I’ve lived the horrors of trying to plant without it.
But miracles happen, the crop got planted, and it came up. And everyone was psyched. Even the Colville Tribal Council came to bless the crop—an hour drive from tribal headquarters, and not an easy drive. The elders came in a van.
It was an impressive ceremony. There was drumming and chanting. Then Chairman Marchand told me something that proved prophetic:
“This is nice, being here today,” he said, gesturing over the vast field. “But once we’re gone and the plants are left in the ground, then you’re under pressure. It’s like any farming: It kinda [chuckle] takes control of you.”
Darn tootin’. We don’t think about it too much, but a lot has to go perfectly right in life for us to reach our current age. So when we got some leaf yellowing a month later, we all freaked out a bit. But it could have been worse. We treated the symptoms and, I’m only being factual here, kept praying over the crop long after the council ceremony had concluded. On reflection, I think that might have helped as much as any soil applications.
Given the comedy of errors the project faced, I look back on the 2017 Colville crop as a not-at-all-bad debut effort. The tribe wound up with a multi-ton harvest that year. And it would have been even more if we had known what to focus on even as we discussed leaf coloring. But, hey, they say pain is the best teacher. We sure learned. And now you get to benefit from that trial by fire.