Growing Hemp

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How to grow hemp in the open: planting, how fast it grows, harvesting, trimming it for more buds, rubbing a ripe plant for charas, what stresses a plant and spoils its buds, and the bees, animals and creepers that take an interest in a field. For pots, hydroponics and lamps, see Indoor Growing; for the differences between the three strains, Strains.

On this page: Quick start · Planting · How fast it grows · Headroom · Harvesting · Trimming · Rubbing a ripe plant for charas · Stress and schwag in a field · Bees and animals · Creepers · The smell of a ripe plant · Wild plants and flower pots · Composting

Everything here is the same on Minecraft 26.3, 26.2, 1.21.11 and 1.21.1, on Fabric and on NeoForge, except what is marked Minecraft 26.2 and 26.3. Times and odds are the mod's defaults; a server can speed growth up or slow it down (Configuration).

Quick start

1. Get seeds. Break wild hemp, or look in tall grass and chests — Finding Hemp.
2. Plant on farmland with water nearby, like wheat: Purple Kush Seeds or Lemon Haze Seeds on farmland within four blocks of water. Beldía Seeds go on sand beside water instead.
3. Plant in single rows, or alternate strains row by row, so no plant is crowded. A packed field grows half as fast.
4. Leave room to grow: Purple Kush and Beldía stand two blocks tall, Lemon Haze three. Keep that space clear.
5. Trim it twice with shears as it grows — once at its last short stage, once just after it shoots up. Each trim hands you a Hemp Leaf and adds a bud to the harvest.
6. When it is ripe (wisps drift off the top), shear it once more for a chance of Charas, then break it — with a Fortune hoe if you have one.

Planting

Strain	Plant the seeds on	Water
Purple Kush	farmland	the farmland's own: water within 4 blocks
Lemon Haze	farmland	the same
Beldía (new in 2.1)	sand, red sand or any mod's sand — not suspicious sand, never farmland	water within 4 blocks of the sand, level with it or one block above — farmland's rule

Any strain also grows in a Grow Pot or a Hydro Tray, with no water nearby needed (Indoor Growing).

• Light: a seed can only be planted where the light is at least 8, and a plant only grows at 9 or more — vanilla's rule for every crop. Sunlight counts at any hour: like wheat, a field reads the sky as if it were noon, so it grows through the night. Only a roof makes it dark.
• Beldía and water. A Beldía seed on dry sand is refused and stays in your hand. Take the water away from a planted one and it stops growing — bone meal is refused too, and kept — but it never dies; it carries on when the water comes back.
• Farmland can be trampled, as in vanilla: jump on it and it turns to dirt, and the plant pops off. A Grow Pot cannot be trampled.

How fast it grows

A plant has eight stages, 0 to 7, and is ripe at 7. Purple Kush and Beldía are one block tall until stage 4, then two. Lemon Haze is one block until stage 4, two at stages 4–5, and three at 6–7.

Growth follows vanilla's crop rules exactly. Every so often — on average once every 68 seconds — the game gives each block a "random tick", and a plant with light 9 or more takes a growth roll. The roll's odds depend on moisture, counted exactly as for wheat:

• Moist farmland under the plant, and moist farmland all around it, gives the best odds. Farmland counts as moist until it has dried right out, whatever it looks like.
• Crowding halves it. If the same plant stands beside it on both sides (north–south and east–west), or on any diagonal, its odds are halved. Plants in single rows, with bare farmland or water between the rows, keep the full odds — and a different strain is not the same plant, so alternating Purple Kush and Lemon Haze rows works too.
• Lemon Haze is slower: its roll is harder, so it takes a third longer in the same field.

Seed to ripe, on average	Purple Kush · Beldía	Lemon Haze
Moist farmland (or watered sand), single rows — the best a field does	about 24 min	about 32 min
Moist farmland, packed solid	about 48 min	about 64 min
Bone-dry farmland, single rows	about 56 min	about 72 min
Bone-dry farmland, packed solid	about 1 h 45 min	about 2 h 25 min
For comparison: a fed, watered Grow Pot · a running Hydro Tray	about 16 min · 12 min	about 21 min · 16 min

These are averages: each step is a roll, so one plant can be well ahead of its neighbour. Purple Kush grows at exactly wheat's pace.

The growth roll, exactly

On each random tick the plant grows one stage with odds of 1 / (floor(R / M) + 1), where R is 25 for Purple Kush and Beldía and 35 for Lemon Haze, and M is the moisture:

• M starts at 1. Farmland directly under the plant adds 3 if it is moist (moisture 1–7) or 1 if bone dry; each of the 8 farmland blocks around it adds a quarter of the same. Best case: 1 + 3 + 8 × 0.75 = 10.
• Crowded (same plant on both axes, or on a diagonal): M is halved.
• Beldía on watered sand reads 10, or 5 when crowded; on sand with no water in reach it does not grow at all.

At M = 10 that is 1 in 3 for Purple Kush and 1 in 4 for Lemon Haze; at M = 5, 1 in 6 and 1 in 8. A block gets a random tick every 4096 / 3 game ticks on average at the default randomTickSpeed of 3, which is 68.3 seconds; seven stages make the times above. The config's cropGrowthMultiplier multiplies the odds themselves, so 2.0 really is twice as fast.

Bone meal works, but more slowly than on wheat: each use grows the plant one stage, and one use in three does nothing (the bone meal is used up all the same). From seed to ripe that is about ten or eleven bone meal on average. Bone meal is refused, and kept, when the plant has no room to grow into its next stage, and on Beldía with no water. A bone meal step is a growth step like any other, so it counts for stress and for the plant's record of the light it grew under.

Headroom

A plant needs air above it to grow tall:

	needs	if the space is taken
Purple Kush, Beldía	the block above it free from stage 4	stops at stage 3
Lemon Haze	one free block from stage 4, two from stage 6	stops at stage 3 with no room, at stage 5 with only one block

A boxed-in plant simply waits, and carries on by itself once the space is cleared. Bone meal is refused rather than wasted. Anything that is not air blocks it — glass, a slab, a torch. A plant already grown keeps its stage if you later build over it.

A plant stuck at stage 3 can take the early trim but never flowers, so it never gets the late trim or a rub.

Harvesting

Break any block of a ripe plant — top or bottom — and the whole plant comes down and drops once. Any tool, or your hand, will do; Fortune raises every count, so a Fortune hoe is the tool of choice. A plant broken before it is ripe gives back one seed.

A ripe plant gives	Purple Kush	Lemon Haze	Beldía
Buds	2	2	2
Hemp Leaf	5	3	5
Hemp Stem	2	4	1
Seeds	3	3	3

Those are the base counts, untrimmed. Each comes with a small random bonus even without Fortune — on average +0.4 buds, +0.9 leaves, +0.9 stems and +1.2 seeds — which Fortune III roughly doubles. Strains has the exact numbers. A plant grown under lamps gives more buds, and one grown in a pot or tray one stem fewer (Indoor Growing).

Trimming

Shearing a growing plant takes a fan leaf off it — defoliation, as growers call it. You get the Hemp Leaf on the spot, and that plant's harvest shifts one step towards buds: one more bud and one fewer leaf per trim. Ignoring it is a perfectly good way to play; the plant matures either way, leaf-heavy instead of bud-heavy.

There are two windows, split on the moment the plant shoots up into its second block:

Stage	What it looks like	Shears do	At harvest
0–2	a seedling	nothing — "Too young to trim"
3	its last stage as a one-block plant	early trim: 1 Hemp Leaf	+1 bud, −1 leaf
4–5	just shot up into two blocks	late trim: 1 Hemp Leaf	+1 bud, −1 leaf
6–7	ripening and ripe	rub — see below	−1 leaf

• Each window takes one cut. Shears on a plant whose window is spent say "Already trimmed". Miss the early window and the late one is still there.
• Any shears work, a mod's included, from either hand. Each cut costs one point of durability. Fortune cannot go on shears in vanilla, so it has no effect on the leaf; it still counts at harvest.
• The leaves add up to the same. Every leaf you trim off comes back off the harvest, so trimming never makes extra leaves — it turns your effort into buds. Under a Grow Lamp a trim gives two leaves, and that second one is a real extra (Indoor Growing).

Base harvest by trims	0 trims	1 trim	2 trims
Purple Kush, Beldía	2 buds · 5 leaves	3 buds · 4 leaves (+1 trimmed)	4 buds · 3 leaves (+2 trimmed)
Lemon Haze	2 buds · 3 leaves	3 buds · 2 leaves (+1 trimmed)	4 buds · 1 leaf (+2 trimmed)

Stems and seeds never move; the stalk is the stalk.

Tip: Telling stage 3 from 2, or 5 from 6, takes a practised eye. Press F3 and look at the plant: the targeted block's details on the right list its age, which is the stage. JEI and REI show the windows on their In the World page.

Rubbing a ripe plant for charas

New in 2.1.

At stages 6–7 the shears do something else. They snip one small, resin-caked sugar leaf — always one Hemp Leaf — and the resin gumming up the blades is a 1 in 4 chance of a pinch of Charas. The trade calls it scissor hash.

• Once per plant. Shears on it again say "Already rubbed".
• The plant lives. It ripens and harvests as usual, one leaf lighter (the one you already have). Its buds are untouched.
• A sticky, honey-like squelch means you got charas; the plain snip means you did not. The durability point is spent either way.
• Plants grown under any lamp, and stressed plants, give it half as often: 1 in 8. Charas is a field craft.
• A wild Beldía is a ripe plant, so it can be rubbed too, before you harvest it.
• It is a right-click on a living plant, so there is no machine for it, and there never will be. That is what charas is: rubbed off by hand, plant by plant.

On average that is about four plants for a pinch, and nine pinches roll into a Charas Ball. What to do with it is on Hash and Concentrates.

Minecraft 26.2 and 26.3: a plant under a roof can also catch powdery mildew, which turns a quarter of its buds to schwag; a field plant never does. See Indoor Growing.

Stress and schwag in a field

New in 2.1.

A stressed plant is one that has had a bad time while flowering. It shows — its colour drains, its oldest leaves yellow and die back, and yellow anthers appear in the flowers — and it pays for it at harvest:

• one bud fewer;
• two extra seeds (a stressed plant sets seed in its own buds);
• each bud has a 1 in 4 chance of coming off as Schwag — and Fortune only softens that, to 20%, 15% and 10% at Fortune I, II and III;
• it gives charas at 1 in 8, and loses any lamp bonus it had.

Stress is for good: a plant does not recover. A ripe plant is past all of it — once it has finished growing, nothing can stress it.

In a field, only one thing does it: bone-dry farmland. Each growth step a flowering plant takes on farmland that has dried right out has a 1 in 20 chance of stressing it. Flowering is the plant's last four growth steps (the ones that take it to stages 4, 5, 6 and 7), so a plant that flowers start to finish on bone-dry ground ends up stressed about one time in five. Bees' pollination and bone meal are growth steps too, and take the same chance.

How farmland dries is vanilla's rule: with no water within four blocks (level with it or one block up) and no rain falling on it, it loses a little moisture each random tick, and is bone dry after about seven of them — roughly eight minutes. Water or rain puts it straight back. So a field with water in reach is never at risk. Deserts, savannas and badlands never see rain, so there it is the water channel or nothing.

Indoors there are more ways to stress a plant — losing its light, a dry pot, a stopped pump, overfeeding, overwatering. They are all on Indoor Growing, with pictures.

Schwag, the bud gone seedy and stemmy, also turns up without stress: one ripe plant in fifty gives one of its buds as schwag. Any Fortune at all prevents that (but not a stressed plant's spoiling). It smokes badly (Smoking), the Decarboxylator takes it at half a bud (Cannabutter), it rolls into a spliff, and it composts.

Bees and animals

Bees pollinate hemp, as they do wheat: a bee flying home with pollen now and then grows a plant beneath it by one stage, with vanilla's green sparkles. Your trims survive it. A bee's step is a growth step like any other — it reads the plant's light and takes the same chances of stress — and a plant a bee ripens in a pot or tray uses up the bed's water and food as usual. Nothing draws bees to hemp itself; they come for flowers, so keep a hive and a flower bed near the field. The wild plants are not flowers to a bee.

Note: There is no config switch for bees. Whether they pollinate hemp is the #minecraft:bee_growables tag, which a datapack can change (Tags).

Animals:

Animal	Eats	What for
Parrot	any hemp seeds	taming, as with wheat seeds (the Pretty Polly advancement)
Chicken	any hemp seeds	breeding and leading
Goat	Hemp Leaf	breeding and leading

Creepers

New in 2.1.

A creeper is green, and a grown hemp field is a block or two of green — a creeper standing in one is very nearly invisible. Now and then a creeper wandering past a field drifts into it, prowls about for a while and moves on. It is not a beeline and not a siege; it just makes an open field somewhere to glance around before you walk in.

The rules, so you can plan around them:

• Only about half of all creepers ever care. Which half is fixed per creeper.
• Only a grown field draws them: plants at least two blocks tall. A sown field, or a row of seedlings, draws nothing.
• Only under open sky. If anything at all is over the plant — a roof, glass, a lamp — they never notice it. Indoor growing is safe by design.
• One creeper per field. A creeper ignores a field another creeper is already near (within eight blocks), so a field never fills up.
• They notice fields within about 24 blocks, at roughly their own height; a big field is noticed much more readily than a lone plant.
• A visit is a few steps through the crop, pausing a few seconds in it after each, and then the creeper leaves hemp alone for one to three minutes.
• A creeper that has seen you attacks as usual. No field makes one walk past a player.

Walls, a roof and good lighting keep them out, as for any farm. Server owners can turn the behaviour off with creepersSeekHemp in the world section of config/hempdustry.json (default true); /hempdustry reload applies it at once, even to creepers already mid-prowl. See Configuration.

The smell of a ripe plant

A ripe plant lets off a pale curl of scent from its top now and then, so a finished field can be told from a growing one across the farm. Only the top block of a ripe plant with open air above it does it — a plant with a lamp or a roof right on top of it stays quiet — and the ripe art says the same thing on its own.

It is a client-side effect only, with no cost to a server. Vanilla's Particles setting thins it out (Decreased) or hides it (Minimal) along with every other particle, and ripeAroma in the client section of config/hempdustry.json turns off just these.

Wild plants and flower pots

Wild Purple Kush is one block tall; Wild Lemon Haze is two. Each looks like its strain caught halfway through growing. Where they grow is on Finding Hemp.

• Break one — by hand, with a sword (one hit) or any tool — for 1 to 4 seeds of its strain, 2.2 on average; Fortune adds more.
• Shears or Silk Touch give you the plant itself. Replant it anywhere it can stand — Wild Purple Kush on grass, dirt or moss; Wild Lemon Haze on those and on sand, red sand and terracotta too — or put it in a flower pot. A potted one gives back both the pot and the plant when broken.
• A wild plant does not grow, takes no bone meal, and is no flower to bees or to suspicious stew: it is raw plant, and raw plant does nothing.
• Bone-mealing grass never grows wild hemp.
• Wild Beldía is different: it is the ripe crop itself, standing on sand by water. Break it for a full ripe harvest (rub it with shears first), or leave it as it is — it lives for ever there.

Composting

Every part of the plant composts. Each item has this chance of adding a layer to a composter:

	Chance
Any seeds, Hemp Leaf, Scorched Hemp	30%
Hemp Stem, any buds, Schwag	50%
Wild Purple Kush, Wild Lemon Haze	65%

The storage blocks made from them compost too (Hemp Materials).

See also: Strains · Indoor Growing · Finding Hemp · Hash and Concentrates