Harvest, drying, curing

An open-field flower is made as much after the harvest as before it. This page sets out the handwork, the durations and the dates.

Harvest

By hand, plant by plant, at full maturity. No harvest date is set in advance for a whole plot: each plant is harvested when it is ready, which spreads the harvest over several passes. Eight months go by between the March sowing and the last pass in November.

It is possible here because there are two hundred plants. It would be impracticable on five acres, and it is the first concrete consequence of the size of the plot — see Canabec Ar Leur.

Drying

Two to three weeks, indoors, cold, with temperature and humidity held steady.

The word “cold” is not decorative: drying fast and hot drives off in three days what a plant took six months to make. Drying slowly, in an atmosphere that does not move, costs weeks of space and monitoring. In the October climate, drying outdoors is not an option anyway.

Trimming

Cold, with scissors, by hand. A minimum bud size of nearly half an inch: no flower below it leaves the workshop.

« Des jolies têtes bien formées et bien manucurées, bien vertes […] »

“Nice, well-formed, well-trimmed heads, nice and green […]” (our translation)

Oro Oro, Testeur de CBD, on the Legendary Skunk — tasting of September 8, 2026. Read the article

Curing

Below 61 °F, under vacuum, in the dark. The flower goes in ripe — harvested when 5 to 10% of the trichomes have turned amber — dry and pre-trimmed. It stays there from three weeks to more than a year; no flower is offered before three weeks of curing. The vacuum is drawn without pressing the flower. The duration is not set in advance: a batch comes out when it reveals its best qualities. That is a grower’s judgment, not a measurement; the measurement is the lab report — dated like the harvest, and published for every batch.

What curing does. A dry flower is not frozen in time: its bouquet evolves for months. The lightest molecules, which carry the brightest notes, leave first; the heavier ones, with woody and sweet notes, take up more room. A team at the University of Ferrara, which kept the flowers of three hemp varieties in the dark for six months, measured it: the aroma changes over time, whatever the storage conditions it tested.

What cold, darkness and vacuum change. They do not stop this evolution: they slow it down and limit oxidation. Work published since the 1970s points the same way: light is what damages stored flower the most, heat speeds things up, air oxidizes, and ground flower keeps less well than whole flower. Hence the whole flower, the cold, the dark and the vacuum.

What curing does not do. It does not rejuvenate a flower, and it does not make up for a failed crop or a failed drying. It even has a cost: the most volatile aromas leave first, in the cold as anywhere else. That is why its duration is never set as a matter of principle, and why the same batch can be released twice — en primeur, after one month, with its most volatile aromas; then cured, after several months, with a more blended, denser bouquet and subtle notes that come through.

• Legendary Skunk (LGSK-SD26) — harvested July 24, 2026, trimmed September 1^st, presented en primeur after one month of curing. The rest of the batch continues curing; it will be released cured, with its date.
• Lulu La Nantaise (LLN-SD25) — harvested in early August 2025, cured for twelve months, tested at the end of curing on August 19, 2026. The report describes the flower as it is sold, not as it was harvested.

A twelve-month flower, an old flower?

It is a fair question: curing can serve as an excuse to clear old stock. Here, four things settle it.

• The age is stated, not hidden. The harvest date is on every product page, to the day or to within two weeks, and the curing time on the flower’s badge.
• The lab report is dated too. Lulu La Nantaise was tested at the end of its twelve months of curing, not at harvest: its report describes the flower as it is sold. Every report carries its date, and the QR code on the label opens it.
• Nothing is added. No added terpenes, no humidity pack, no flavoring: what comes out of curing is the flower that went in, plus time.
• The same harvest can come out at both ages. The en primeur release and the cured one can be compared side by side.

To get an idea today: Legendary Skunk en primeur, and Lulu La Nantaise after twelve months of curing — two Sun Deps, two ages.

A practice from the Emerald Triangle

Long curing was not invented here. In Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties, in Northern California, where open-field growing has gone on since the 1970s, leading farms dry slowly, in dark barns, then keep their flowers for months, cool and in the dark. One of them, in Mendocino County, holds that a flower gives its best only after at least five months of aging, and that it gains from aging up to a point. It was in this county that Jonathan Dartois did his two Californian seasons, in 2013 and 2014, long before the House — see The House.

California has even made post-harvest part of origin: its appellations require drying and curing to take place within the appellation area. The science of curing, for its part, is only just beginning: in 2025, a Cornell University team noted that most publications on hemp curing are reviews, with little data. What is known about curing comes first from those who practice it — that is why, here, everything is dated.

Sources: Spadafora et al., University of Ferrara, Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 2024; Milay et al., Frontiers in Plant Science, 2020; Baek, Grab and Chen, Cornell University, Plants, 2025; California Department of Food and Agriculture, appellations program, regulation approved July 14, 2025.

The dated calendar

2025 season

Swipe the table →

2026 season

Swipe the table →

The start of the calendar

Every season opens with a sowing, in March. It is the only operation in a cycle that depends neither on the growing method nor on the cultivar: the plot starts at the same time for everyone, and it is the growing methods that then spread the harvest dates from July to November.

Between the March sowing and the harvest, everything published on this site is dated. What is not dated to the day is dated to within two weeks — never just to the season.

Packaging

Sealed on the estate. TerpLoc pouches for the Signature and Tête de Cuvée ranges; stand-up pouches for the Sélection and Classiques ranges. 3.5 g, 10 g and 25 g sizes depending on the product.

The TerpLoc pouch, the House’s last step. Its film, developed by Grove Bags, is designed to hold the humidity inside the pouch between 58 and 62%. It lets oxygen out and shields from UV light: air and light, what wears a stored flower the most, are kept at bay. Anti-static, it does not strip the trichomes. Nothing is slipped inside: no humidity pack — the film takes its place.

A child-resistant closure. The double-track zipper — the strongest of Grove Bags’ three closures — only opens by pulling on its tab. Above it, the seal applied on the estate keeps the pouch closed until it reaches you: as long as it is intact, no one has opened it since Trémargat.

Opening, resealing, storing.

1. Tear. Above the zipper, two notches mark the sealed strip: tear it off from one edge to the other.
2. Hold the tab. It is the edge that sticks up above the zipper: hold it with one hand.
3. Pull. With the other hand, pull the opposite side toward you, starting from a corner. Pulling the two sides apart from the middle does not open it: that is the child resistance.
4. Reseal. Pinch the zipper between thumb and forefinger and slide from one end to the other, until it is locked along its whole length.

Pouch closed, cool and away from light, out of reach of children. Keep the flower in its pouch: it was chosen for it.

The batch number appears on the label of every pouch and stand-up pouch; its QR code opens that batch’s lab report — see The batches.

The tested batches are on sale. See the flowers.