By the time I meet Tina Gordon in the cannabis garden she’s already been up and working with her crew since 5:30 a.m. Cannabinoids and terpenes have built up through the darkness of the night, and harvesting alongside the sunrise captures the flowers’ medicinal compounds at the peak of ripeness. The flowers are beginning to draw in on themselves; the small sugar leaves around the buds are folding inward and cupping. The trichomes on the buds are sticky, milky, and opaque. Even the stems smell like juicy ripe fruit—all signs that the cannabis is fully developed.

“Check this out,” Gordon says, pointing to the PleaZure flowers she’s working with. “This is another good indicator. Do you see all the little hairs or the pistils? Do you see how they’re brown?”

It’s late June, during the week of the summer solstice, and we’re on a terraced hillside at Gordon’s outdoor cannabis farm and homestead, Moon Made Farms. The plants for the 2024 full-season fall harvest are barely in the soil behind Gordon’s home—teens that will grow into mighty trees are building up their strength in the wind.

The California-grown cannabis that Gordon and her team are harvesting in the final days of spring is ripened by depriving the outdoor plants of natural light by building a structure around them and covering them with a tarp. Most types of cannabis begin to flower when the 24 hours of light and darkness in each day reach their equilibrium, 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. When that happens during the year depends on your geographic location in relation to the equator. By re-creating the light pattern that occurs in autumn, cannabis plants grown in light deprivation go into flower and are ready sooner than the annual crop.

“There’s an emotional recognition, this feels like fall,” Gordon says. “Everything in my body is saying it’s fall right now because of the smell, because of cutting the fresh flowers.”

Surrounded by oak woodland in Southern Humboldt County, Moon Made is at the eye of the Emerald Triangle. To the south is Island Mountain, a peak where the world-famous cannabis cultivation region of Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties meet. The sweeping view of the mountain provides space for quiet contemplation. The bright scent wafting off of freshly harvested, regeneratively-grown cannabis flowers is this morning’s aroma therapy session.

“The other thing I like to go for is the nose, and the nose has been saying, ‘I’m ready,’” Gordon says. “She’s just like, ‘Take me now.’”

Graduation Day

As Gordon and her crew work to take down the PleaZure plants, Gordon says she’s pleased with the “small but mighty outcome.” If the plants had gone in the soil 10 days later, she thinks they could have been better, but this is her first time growing this cultivar, which finished in 50 days. Gordon explains that when growing cannabis, particularly when growing outdoors, there are an endless number of variables to take into account when setting out to produce the best flowers.

“It’s always a learning experience,” she says. “Every observation around how the plant did in the context of how it was grown, the timing of how it was grown, what the weather was like, what your mood was like. What are you going through?”

Helping Gordon and her team snip off a few branches on harvest day feels like I just popped in to grab the diploma on graduation day without spending any time in class. Still, the sound and feeling of snipping the branches off the stalk is satisfying. The flowers are green with purple leaves and smell like green grapes to me: sweet, fruity, and sour.

“We’ve been all along growing them since they were a little baby, so seeing them finishing definitely feels like a victory, a reward for all the hard work that we’ve been putting into it,” says Andres Caceres, who is originally from Chile and works alongside Gordon at Moon Made. “I started growing when I was very young, and I always liked having different types of weed, like different smells and profiles, and almost like collecting them. And then I started getting into breeding, and I realized if I mix two plants together, I can get a new plant out of it. That was a whole new trip for me, and I’ve been growing ever since.”

Like Caceres, Gordon’s also in a committed relationship with cannabis.

“[Growing] is this whole process. It’s a relationship. It’s tumultuous; there are good days and bad days,” she says. “I really love this plant.”