2024 has been a rich and rewarding season of growth both for me and my garden. My five stately cannabis plants are nearing ripeness, and have overtaken about 1/4 of the space in my small garden. The air is heady with weedy fragrance — all those terps! This past year I’ve had the honor of teaching hundreds of every day folks how to grow cannabis in their own gardens, outside, in the bright sunshine, happily in community with all sorts of other herbs, shrubs, bulbs, trees. Cannabis loves growing in community, and so do I.

This year was rich with collaborations for me. I continued teaching with my Wondering About Weed business partner (and dear friend) Kaisha-Dyan McMillan. I added many workshops with Emily Gogol, PhD, (also a dear friend) of Grow It From Home. She — clever one that she is — got a grant from the USDA to provide us the opportunity to travel and share about her seeds and plants and my book The Cannabis Gardener in nurseries and esteemed public gardens about the joys of growing cannabis in the garden. I teamed up with Stefani Bittner, owner of Homestead Design Collective. Stef (also a friend!) is author of several books, her most recent being The Fragrant Flower Garden (Ten Speed Press/2024). Stef and I are in the dreaming phase for a series of workshops on the herb garden which naturally includes Cannabis.

I love the full, rich sunlight of summer and find that as Fall approaches I feel the change with mixed emotions. This year as I’ve settled down from the whirlwind of tending my plants and a big new garden of people I’ve taken time to feel the blessings that come with the harvest. My garden will yield abundant bud, my relationships have grown and deepened, and my many collaborations are sending their tendrils out toward new spaces. I will miss the sun, but will choose to bask in the afterglow of these relationships.

Harvest is both an activity and a state of mind. I have a few more harvest workshops to teach — come to one if you can! (check out my Events page for details) Come October all of my cannabis will be curing, and I’ll be embracing this calmer gardening season to do some more writing. I hope that as the year moves in the golden time of Autumn you too will make space in your gardens and hearts to sense the abundance all around us.