Courtesy of Sarah Kelley
“Raising bees and growing hemp are the same in regard to how often you have to check the plants or the bees, and make sure they’re both well maintained,” observes beekeeper and hemp grower Sarah Kelley, of Sarah’s Garden, and its offshoot business, The Hemp Hive (136 S. Main St. Greenwood, Wis.), in Clark County. In 2011, she started helping her mother, Bev Kelley, with beekeeping. Using gifts from bees such as beeswax and honey, Sarah began crafting lip balm, lotion bars, soap, and, of course, jarred honey and honey products.
It wasn’t until 2018 that hemp came onto Sarah’s radar. While selling her wellness products at a craft fair, she was approached by a cannabidiol (CBD) oil seller. The person asked Sarah if she could put CBD into her skin products. Intrigued, Sarah began tinkering with CBD in her product line. “That took a little bit of practice. The oils like to separate,” she says, “but we already knew how to make beeswax products, so we had that figured out.”
Sarah and her boyfriend, Jamie Degenhardt, became intrigued and started growing hemp in 2018, the first year of Wisconsin’s hemp pilot program. Degenhardt extracts CBD from the hemp via the rosin press method, which applies only heat and pressure to hemp, without gas, alcohol or ethanol. They started with an acre of hemp on their 200-acre-plus property, and they expanded to four acres in 2019. This year, they will scale back to less than two acres. They grow the Umpqua, rogue, cascade and awesome blossom strains, which they use in their CBD products.
Sarah’s Garden offers CBD-infused body cream, and the popular chill cream, with menthol and other cooing agents, which her customers have found helpful to relieve arthritis, back pain and neck pain. Her honey coconut balm is formulated to help with skin conditions such as eczema or psoriasis.
Degenhardt sells his Uno Extracts full spectrum CBD tincture through Sarah’s Garden and The Hemp Hive. Sarah’s CBD-infused honey or honey sticks can be used in tea, on toast or even by the spoonful to help boost the immune system. She has seen an increase in sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her CBD items are available online at sarahs-garden.com or locally at Dr. Feel Good Health and Wellness, LLC, in West Allis.
Hemp and honeybees
Sarah says they had sought out feminized seed, so they didn’t have to look through fields for male plants. But then there were the bees. “The bees made it harder to grow hemp,” she explains. “They found the male plants and helped pollinate a large portion of our field. Having honeybees while growing CBD don’t necessarily mix. They’re fine for industrial hemp, because you want seeds.”
According to Cannabis Business Times, when THC-bearing male cannabis plants pollinate a hemp plant, their seeds produce high-THC plants, ruining the CBD crop. “Pollination occurs when male cannabis plants release pollen near female plants, triggering female plants to produce seeds,” explains Crystal Oliver, executive director of Washing Sungrowers Industry Association. “And when plants invest energy in seed production, they produce less CBD—making them less valuable.”
Sarah says that last season, they kept their bees next to the hemp. Although bees can travel far, this year, they will have bees on one side of their property where they will be drawn toward the woods to forage what’s in front of them, instead of flying into the hemp field.
They use worm castings to provide nutrients to soil, and they water plants with nutrient-infused water. Last season, their hemp crop yielded just over 6,000 pounds of biomass. They sold one-third of the crop to a customer in Minnesota. The crop fetched $5 per pound. “That’s actually a decent price. I’ve seen it as low as $3 a pound and as high as $8 per pound,” she says, adding that many hemp farmers have biomass left over from last year because there was an oversaturation of growers compared to processors and extractors.
For more information, visit sarahs-garden.com.
