Guest
11-20-2005, 10:29 AM
Hello... as I sit here trimming my latest harvest, I started thinking about putting together a do / don't list for harvest / manicuring your buds, as it takes a while to become proficiant at it , and the first few times can be very time consuming and MESSY! That and I shoulda done a few things differently, hopefully some of this info will be useful for some folks and save you some time in learning from the same mistakes and methods that I have tried. I hope these methods will save you time and space drying and give you more time to do what you love..... smoking.
So where to begin......
A. Before you even start to chop your ladies for a trim, make sure you have flushed your plants well in order to get rid of a good portion of it's stored up food supply. But, be watchful and make sure you don't go too long flushing and end up with dying buds. This is also the time when male flowers are most likely to begin showing themselves in my experience. If you're smoking on some well flushed grass it will burn clean and will leave nice gray ash instead of chared black crap in the bowl. Or if you prefer joints ... your joint will stay lit a lot better , and burn more evenly. I use General Hydroponics "Flora Kleen" to break down any excess salts in my res and on my roots for the first day or 2 days of flush, after that it's fresh tap water nightly. If you check the TDS or EC of your flush water, you will notice that it will rise after a day or 2 of your flush, this is ,as far as I can tell, waste material that your plant is releasing into the water and if you let it sit for more than a couple days it will get STANKY, and will allow the plant to refeed on whatever nutrient might be left in its own waste. Thus retarding the effectiveness of the flush. And if you don't flush properly, you won't really need to bother with the next steps, as the flavor is already pretty much ruined to the connesoiurs taste buds. Any more time put into drying unflushed buds than absoulutly necessary brings up the old saying, "You can't polish a turd." So quit trying to polish turds and flush porperly!
For us hydro guys, I know it can be a lot of work to change the water daily while flushing an entire systems worth of plants , that could be 50+ gallons of refilling every day for some of us... yikes! But here's an easy way to flush a single plant at a time hydroponically... start by finding a 3 or 5 gallon bucket , fill it up with enough water/ Flora Kleen mix to be just shy of the bottom of your stalk. Depending on your methods / pot size this might be a gallon , or 3 gallons. Supply the water in the bucket with an airstone, and toss the solo plant into the bucket. BE SURE TO CHANGE OUT WITH FRESH WATER DAILY!
For you soil guys, if you're in real deal solid organics i'm not real sure about the method for you guys, but most likely you'd want to run pure tap water or RO water (whichever you use as your standard feeding water) through the soil until it starts comming out of the bottom of your pot(s) I have 0 experience with solid organics in soil so hopefully someone will add to or correct my methods for flushing in solid organic nutrient based soil mixtures.
If you are in soil or cocoa , or any other soil-less mix, and are using salt based fertilizers , you may wish to run some clearex , or flora kleen , or any other product developed to break down excess salts as your first flush watering. Just be careful not to over water during this phase, let the soil dry out a few inches deep before you run pure water through it , as this might cause some rot issues. Fungis Gnats also find warm / moist spots very inhabitable. Also if you keep your soil too moist this may raise the humidity levels in your room to budrot levels.
1. First of all, before you start chopping everything down... try cutting each plant down 1 at a time. Trim the first plant completely before you cut down the 2nd one. I've come to realise over trial and misery that freshly cut plants are MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to trim than plants that have been hanging up for a day or more. The reason is the trichomes tend to get stickier over a couple days of drying , thus creating some serious issues with scissors getting stuck to sticky plant materials. This can be a royal pain in the ace. Also leaves will begin to droop becomming stuck to your precious buds , making them harder to acces for trimming. Also if you let your plant hang for too long with the foliage still on it, you may notice that your buds take on a sort of freshly mowed grass odor, which is obviously less desirable than the scent of spicy fruit or skunks ass or whatever your flavor is actually bred to produce.
2. Now find a nice comfy chair or couch and an old TV box (and or) poly sheet to cover the floor / put under the box.
3. Hit up the old Pink Floyd CD / MP3 / Tape / Album collection and search out "Atom Heart Mother". Throw that som` bitch in and grab a nice scissors , a spring loaded fiskars preferably.... those are nice and easy on the hands compared to some of the larger harder to control scissors, the FIskars Micro-Tip is pretty much a standard in the trimming business I'd say.
4. Depending on your style of grow you will want to take 1 branch or less at a time (Bucket Trees) or for SOG plants you may wish to take entire plants down at a time, depending on build of the plant, IE.... if the plant is extremely leafy it may be best to trim a branch at a time to maintain ease of control in your hands while you're trimming.
5. Now that you've taken your plant / branch of choice , try to keep your thumb and pointer fingers holding the stem areas located between buds as best you can. Otherwise you will have some sticky nasty fingers (unless you buy a pack of rubber exam gloves for 2$, which is always nice if you don't mind your hands sweating) Do not be scared to fondle the buds a bit of need be, you wont lose much for trichomes or bag appeal on a freshly cut plant unless you get pretty rough with em. Don't be worried to use smaller more flimsy branches to hold onto and support the weight of the entire plant or larger branches, they can handle it ... hemp is an extremely strong fiber.
6. If you have a well flushed plant , the fan leaves should be fairly easy to remove by hand and doing so will speed up the whole process. Grab them by the upper leaf stem , about 1/4 inch below the point on the leaves where the fingers intersect. If they aren't comming off easy, just go back to the scissors, oh well.... most of the time this will work tho.
7. Now that the fan leaves are removed , time to get the smaller leaves on the buds. If you want really nice looking buds with minimal stems you may want to try and hold your plant upside down and hunt out any visible stems from both old leaves that may have died and fallen off, or the smaller leaves on the undersides of the buds. Cut these smaller bottom bud leaves at their stems. Once you got most of the obvious stem leaves from the bottom sides and under buds you might wish to flip the plant back rightside up.
8. Now this is where things can get sticky. With the plant / branch back in an upright position it's time to take care of the remaining leaves. The ones that are only slightly sticking out or the stems are buried within the buds. I find it is easy to just kind of trim around the shape of the bud , not worrying too much about the tiny stems that will remain buried in the bud, most of the time those are pretty frosty anyway and not too bad to smoke. Don't worry about cutting into calyx's once in a while, you can make the bud the shape you want it to be and it will still look good once it's dry. Just don't get too crazy chopping off all the calyxs tho hehe. I used to be very anal about my buds and touching them for fear of lost potency and bag appeal, don't sweat it , the impact is minimal from touching and fondling. Also at this point you may need to clean your scissors off, all those pesky trichomes are probably making things a bit sticky, and sometimes limiting your visibility. The best thing to use to clean your scissors is a little bowl of isopropal alcohol, just dip em , and give em a lil rub down and they'll cut like they're new.
9. Ok..your bud is trimmed, now to dry it out. I find that in order to dry it most efficiantly you will want to remove the buds from their branches , or the main stalk , and place them on either nylon string nets that can be purchased for the specific purpose of drying flowers / herbs, or a cardboard box. It is best and will work fastest for you if you keep these nets / boxes near a softly blowing fan , or a heat vent, preferably in the dark, as sunlight will break down the THC faster and this MAY or may not effect your potency. Space your buds out a bit to allow for easy airflow around them. Try to maintain a temp in the dry room of 78 or 80 degrees or so , and if possible do this in a room that does not get / stay moist or damp IE try and do this in a bedroom or something and not the basement , those BC dryers look pretty nice too, this is a prefabricated carbon filtered drying box. I do not remember the suppliers name but i'm sure if you are interested in one , they wont be hard to find using a Google search. If possible your ideal humidity ranges are 20-30% or so, this will make for a quick 3 to 4 day dry for most average to moderatly thick buds... the thicker they are the longer they are gonna take to dry. the stems inside the buds will become a bit less plyable and will make a snapping sound if you bend them too far. You don't want to dry them TOO much before you get to this next step or they might end up a bit harsh on the throat.
If you don't have access to dry nets, cardboard boxes , or a BC dry box, try just using wire ties and hanging up branches individually. Remove the main stem as it is still trying to keep the plant alive for a while, and your buds will take longer to dry if kept on the whole plant. They'll take longer hanging on branches too, but hey, you couldn't find a box to lay them on. If you need to hang anything , I had mentioned wire ties earlier in this paragraph, These are the best things to use for hanging things, and can be recycled with some thoughful hanging, they beat the hell out of washing pins / clips , or string, they're easy to use and will keep your ladies hanging reliably.
10. Now that your buds are relatively dry, they are ready for the paper grocery bag treatment. Toss your buds into a paper bag, they can be piled on top of eachother with no issues at this point , as the goal here is to sweat some of the leftover moisture out of the buds and slow the drying down a bit before the curing process begins. After a few hours in the bag you may notice your buds are a bit more moist than they were when you put them in. This is OK. Make sure you check on your buds every day and try to open the bag up for a period of time every day so as to allow some fresh air in. If you notice any mildewy / moldy odor you may have put them in before they were dry enough. What you SHOULD notice is a nice weedy aroma begining to take over the wet planty smell. Once they have become a little bit dryer than when you put them into the bag they are ready for the Jar cure. This grocery bag process may take 3 or so 4 days , if that. (depends on strain , and dryness of the buds upon their introduction to the bag)
11. Finally the last step , and the step with the most impact on the quality of your buds IMO other than maybe a good flush, Jar curing. Take your now dry buds and put them into jars, they should NOT be bone dry , but still easy to break apart , and the stems should snap without bending much if any. Wide mouth jars are the best to use for this IMO , they allow for easy access to your treasured fruits. Don't over pack your jars as this cause a bit of moisture to build up inside the jar if the buds weren't dry enough this can cause mold or rot. What the process of Curing is doing is allowing for non psychoactive chemicals to break down , and the THC should become more pronounced and possibly more potent. This process and the previous are NOT required to make good buds , but will most definatly improve on their flavor quite a bit, you might be surprised how something you thought tasted only OK at a few days dry tastes after hitting the paper bag and being cured for a month or so...tho sometimes it seems hard to maintain a supply for that amount of time lol.
anyways, that's MORE than enough rambling from me lol, took a while to type all this so I hope that it does SOMEONE some good somewhere , somehow hehe. Anyone is welcome to add their methods to this thread , as I hope to begin a compilation of tips and methods how to harvest your buds thread.
Good luck and grow on. And remember to take your time harvesting, drying, and curing because it will show in the end , and you will be all the happier for it!
THC
So where to begin......
A. Before you even start to chop your ladies for a trim, make sure you have flushed your plants well in order to get rid of a good portion of it's stored up food supply. But, be watchful and make sure you don't go too long flushing and end up with dying buds. This is also the time when male flowers are most likely to begin showing themselves in my experience. If you're smoking on some well flushed grass it will burn clean and will leave nice gray ash instead of chared black crap in the bowl. Or if you prefer joints ... your joint will stay lit a lot better , and burn more evenly. I use General Hydroponics "Flora Kleen" to break down any excess salts in my res and on my roots for the first day or 2 days of flush, after that it's fresh tap water nightly. If you check the TDS or EC of your flush water, you will notice that it will rise after a day or 2 of your flush, this is ,as far as I can tell, waste material that your plant is releasing into the water and if you let it sit for more than a couple days it will get STANKY, and will allow the plant to refeed on whatever nutrient might be left in its own waste. Thus retarding the effectiveness of the flush. And if you don't flush properly, you won't really need to bother with the next steps, as the flavor is already pretty much ruined to the connesoiurs taste buds. Any more time put into drying unflushed buds than absoulutly necessary brings up the old saying, "You can't polish a turd." So quit trying to polish turds and flush porperly!
For us hydro guys, I know it can be a lot of work to change the water daily while flushing an entire systems worth of plants , that could be 50+ gallons of refilling every day for some of us... yikes! But here's an easy way to flush a single plant at a time hydroponically... start by finding a 3 or 5 gallon bucket , fill it up with enough water/ Flora Kleen mix to be just shy of the bottom of your stalk. Depending on your methods / pot size this might be a gallon , or 3 gallons. Supply the water in the bucket with an airstone, and toss the solo plant into the bucket. BE SURE TO CHANGE OUT WITH FRESH WATER DAILY!
For you soil guys, if you're in real deal solid organics i'm not real sure about the method for you guys, but most likely you'd want to run pure tap water or RO water (whichever you use as your standard feeding water) through the soil until it starts comming out of the bottom of your pot(s) I have 0 experience with solid organics in soil so hopefully someone will add to or correct my methods for flushing in solid organic nutrient based soil mixtures.
If you are in soil or cocoa , or any other soil-less mix, and are using salt based fertilizers , you may wish to run some clearex , or flora kleen , or any other product developed to break down excess salts as your first flush watering. Just be careful not to over water during this phase, let the soil dry out a few inches deep before you run pure water through it , as this might cause some rot issues. Fungis Gnats also find warm / moist spots very inhabitable. Also if you keep your soil too moist this may raise the humidity levels in your room to budrot levels.
1. First of all, before you start chopping everything down... try cutting each plant down 1 at a time. Trim the first plant completely before you cut down the 2nd one. I've come to realise over trial and misery that freshly cut plants are MUCH MUCH MUCH easier to trim than plants that have been hanging up for a day or more. The reason is the trichomes tend to get stickier over a couple days of drying , thus creating some serious issues with scissors getting stuck to sticky plant materials. This can be a royal pain in the ace. Also leaves will begin to droop becomming stuck to your precious buds , making them harder to acces for trimming. Also if you let your plant hang for too long with the foliage still on it, you may notice that your buds take on a sort of freshly mowed grass odor, which is obviously less desirable than the scent of spicy fruit or skunks ass or whatever your flavor is actually bred to produce.
2. Now find a nice comfy chair or couch and an old TV box (and or) poly sheet to cover the floor / put under the box.
3. Hit up the old Pink Floyd CD / MP3 / Tape / Album collection and search out "Atom Heart Mother". Throw that som` bitch in and grab a nice scissors , a spring loaded fiskars preferably.... those are nice and easy on the hands compared to some of the larger harder to control scissors, the FIskars Micro-Tip is pretty much a standard in the trimming business I'd say.
4. Depending on your style of grow you will want to take 1 branch or less at a time (Bucket Trees) or for SOG plants you may wish to take entire plants down at a time, depending on build of the plant, IE.... if the plant is extremely leafy it may be best to trim a branch at a time to maintain ease of control in your hands while you're trimming.
5. Now that you've taken your plant / branch of choice , try to keep your thumb and pointer fingers holding the stem areas located between buds as best you can. Otherwise you will have some sticky nasty fingers (unless you buy a pack of rubber exam gloves for 2$, which is always nice if you don't mind your hands sweating) Do not be scared to fondle the buds a bit of need be, you wont lose much for trichomes or bag appeal on a freshly cut plant unless you get pretty rough with em. Don't be worried to use smaller more flimsy branches to hold onto and support the weight of the entire plant or larger branches, they can handle it ... hemp is an extremely strong fiber.
6. If you have a well flushed plant , the fan leaves should be fairly easy to remove by hand and doing so will speed up the whole process. Grab them by the upper leaf stem , about 1/4 inch below the point on the leaves where the fingers intersect. If they aren't comming off easy, just go back to the scissors, oh well.... most of the time this will work tho.
7. Now that the fan leaves are removed , time to get the smaller leaves on the buds. If you want really nice looking buds with minimal stems you may want to try and hold your plant upside down and hunt out any visible stems from both old leaves that may have died and fallen off, or the smaller leaves on the undersides of the buds. Cut these smaller bottom bud leaves at their stems. Once you got most of the obvious stem leaves from the bottom sides and under buds you might wish to flip the plant back rightside up.
8. Now this is where things can get sticky. With the plant / branch back in an upright position it's time to take care of the remaining leaves. The ones that are only slightly sticking out or the stems are buried within the buds. I find it is easy to just kind of trim around the shape of the bud , not worrying too much about the tiny stems that will remain buried in the bud, most of the time those are pretty frosty anyway and not too bad to smoke. Don't worry about cutting into calyx's once in a while, you can make the bud the shape you want it to be and it will still look good once it's dry. Just don't get too crazy chopping off all the calyxs tho hehe. I used to be very anal about my buds and touching them for fear of lost potency and bag appeal, don't sweat it , the impact is minimal from touching and fondling. Also at this point you may need to clean your scissors off, all those pesky trichomes are probably making things a bit sticky, and sometimes limiting your visibility. The best thing to use to clean your scissors is a little bowl of isopropal alcohol, just dip em , and give em a lil rub down and they'll cut like they're new.
9. Ok..your bud is trimmed, now to dry it out. I find that in order to dry it most efficiantly you will want to remove the buds from their branches , or the main stalk , and place them on either nylon string nets that can be purchased for the specific purpose of drying flowers / herbs, or a cardboard box. It is best and will work fastest for you if you keep these nets / boxes near a softly blowing fan , or a heat vent, preferably in the dark, as sunlight will break down the THC faster and this MAY or may not effect your potency. Space your buds out a bit to allow for easy airflow around them. Try to maintain a temp in the dry room of 78 or 80 degrees or so , and if possible do this in a room that does not get / stay moist or damp IE try and do this in a bedroom or something and not the basement , those BC dryers look pretty nice too, this is a prefabricated carbon filtered drying box. I do not remember the suppliers name but i'm sure if you are interested in one , they wont be hard to find using a Google search. If possible your ideal humidity ranges are 20-30% or so, this will make for a quick 3 to 4 day dry for most average to moderatly thick buds... the thicker they are the longer they are gonna take to dry. the stems inside the buds will become a bit less plyable and will make a snapping sound if you bend them too far. You don't want to dry them TOO much before you get to this next step or they might end up a bit harsh on the throat.
If you don't have access to dry nets, cardboard boxes , or a BC dry box, try just using wire ties and hanging up branches individually. Remove the main stem as it is still trying to keep the plant alive for a while, and your buds will take longer to dry if kept on the whole plant. They'll take longer hanging on branches too, but hey, you couldn't find a box to lay them on. If you need to hang anything , I had mentioned wire ties earlier in this paragraph, These are the best things to use for hanging things, and can be recycled with some thoughful hanging, they beat the hell out of washing pins / clips , or string, they're easy to use and will keep your ladies hanging reliably.
10. Now that your buds are relatively dry, they are ready for the paper grocery bag treatment. Toss your buds into a paper bag, they can be piled on top of eachother with no issues at this point , as the goal here is to sweat some of the leftover moisture out of the buds and slow the drying down a bit before the curing process begins. After a few hours in the bag you may notice your buds are a bit more moist than they were when you put them in. This is OK. Make sure you check on your buds every day and try to open the bag up for a period of time every day so as to allow some fresh air in. If you notice any mildewy / moldy odor you may have put them in before they were dry enough. What you SHOULD notice is a nice weedy aroma begining to take over the wet planty smell. Once they have become a little bit dryer than when you put them into the bag they are ready for the Jar cure. This grocery bag process may take 3 or so 4 days , if that. (depends on strain , and dryness of the buds upon their introduction to the bag)
11. Finally the last step , and the step with the most impact on the quality of your buds IMO other than maybe a good flush, Jar curing. Take your now dry buds and put them into jars, they should NOT be bone dry , but still easy to break apart , and the stems should snap without bending much if any. Wide mouth jars are the best to use for this IMO , they allow for easy access to your treasured fruits. Don't over pack your jars as this cause a bit of moisture to build up inside the jar if the buds weren't dry enough this can cause mold or rot. What the process of Curing is doing is allowing for non psychoactive chemicals to break down , and the THC should become more pronounced and possibly more potent. This process and the previous are NOT required to make good buds , but will most definatly improve on their flavor quite a bit, you might be surprised how something you thought tasted only OK at a few days dry tastes after hitting the paper bag and being cured for a month or so...tho sometimes it seems hard to maintain a supply for that amount of time lol.
anyways, that's MORE than enough rambling from me lol, took a while to type all this so I hope that it does SOMEONE some good somewhere , somehow hehe. Anyone is welcome to add their methods to this thread , as I hope to begin a compilation of tips and methods how to harvest your buds thread.
Good luck and grow on. And remember to take your time harvesting, drying, and curing because it will show in the end , and you will be all the happier for it!
THC