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Cannabis flowers are sticky, so why doesnt more stuff stick to them ?

ChaosCatalunya

ChaosCatalunya

5.2 club is now 8.1 club...
Veteran
Apologies for a really basic question, but it is one of the things that has always intrigued me and I have never found an answer.

Buds, resin are sticky, yet the dust and fluff that is pulled in and out of a grow does not seem to settle on the resin, buds regardless of the temperatures around.

Maybe it evolved to be like that ? It is sticky to protect against insects and/or the Sun, but not to dust, or plants would end up covered in it and it would harm them ?


Any ideas ?
 
W

w3rds

Member
I have had plenty of buds with dust and lint on them when randomly checking. Anyone who says they can eyeball the difference between dust and trichrome on a bud is a liar. imho
 
Chunkypigs

Chunkypigs

passing the gas
Veteran
keeps the milk off.
picture.php
 
R

Ruskointhehouse

Member
have you ever seen anyone wash their buds in a water-based solution after harvest? the solution if mega dirty afterwards - especially if you grow outdoors.
 
Douglas.Curtis

Douglas.Curtis

Autistic Diplomat in Training
I use HEPA class air filters, specifically because cannabis grabs stuff out of the air. Massive difference in quality between using and not using them. You know the dirty ash tray smell your car and house get from smoking your cannabis? It doesn't come from the cannabis, its from the dust, lint, dander, hair, fibers and excess nutrients in your cannabis.

Clean cannabis being burnt leaves no lingering odor, the smell fades in a few hours as if it were never there. Washing your cannabis after harvest removes the water soluble terpenes, usually resulting in a decent loss of flavor/aroma.
 
Douglas.Curtis

Douglas.Curtis

Autistic Diplomat in Training
I use HEPA class air filters, specifically because cannabis grabs stuff out of the air. Massive difference in quality between using and not using them. You know the dirty ash tray smell your car and house get from smoking your cannabis? It doesn't come from the cannabis, its from the dust, lint, dander, hair, fibers and excess nutrients in your cannabis.

Clean cannabis being burnt leaves no lingering odor, the smell fades in a few hours as if it were never there. Washing your cannabis after harvest removes the water soluble terpenes, usually resulting in a decent loss of flavor/aroma.
 
R

Ruskointhehouse

Member
Douglas.Curtis said:
I use HEPA class air filters, specifically because cannabis grabs stuff out of the air. Massive difference in quality between using and not using them. You know the dirty ash tray smell your car and house get from smoking your cannabis? It doesn't come from the cannabis, its from the dust, lint, dander, hair, fibers and excess nutrients in your cannabis.

Clean cannabis being burnt leaves no lingering odor, the smell fades in a few hours as if it were never there. Washing your cannabis after harvest removes the water soluble terpenes, usually resulting in a decent loss of flavor/aroma.
Click to expand...
gonna look into HEPA air filters asap lol - need a better vacuum too gonna get a shark pretty soon
 
weedtoker

weedtoker

Well-known member
Veteran
Hey CC, nice that you've started this thread, hope it launches again some talks on all of this matter.

While dust and other particles do adhere to the cannabis plant and specially our beloved flowers, plain filtered/RO will take away the vast majority of it before/upon harvest. What I can also say is that it takes away a bit of the volatiles as DC mentioned (if you smell the water after washing buds it smells of them) just could never test the differences analytically in a lab to see if there's a real difference. Anecdotally I couldn't tell a diff in taste for the worse, I actually feel it smoother and taste it better than ever, but my environment is not set in stone so that throws the experiment out of the window for me. I do know of the HEPA option and think it's going to be standard indoor and greenhouses but how does that leave the situation for outdoor and the simple homegrower? Does washing the buds really takes enough that is noticeable in most of the varieties? Is there any way of avoiding a only resin/concentrates future for smokers?

Cheers
 
Phaeton

Phaeton

Speed of Dark
Veteran
I had to filter the intakes a few years back. Did not want to but had to.
The bugs, hair, dust, whatever cobwebs are made of, and more were clogging the buds. Most visible were bugs on lower buds and cat hair on the middle buds. The upper buds collected all those bright motes seen floating in beams of sunshine coming through windows.
With one particular Fungus Gnat infestation it looked like a pepper grinder had dumped its load into the nuggets.

Wet hands and scissors are standard trimming techniques, but some sticky long trichome plants get their own five gallon bucket of cold water to be dipped in, saves enough trichomes to make it worthwhile.
The water though, it gets dirty right now, the first dip clouds it up and as the leaves get trimmed off the water gets thicker and thicker.
Most of the contaminants are too small to be seen on the bud. Even some of the finer cat underfur shows up as a dark patch rather than as hair.

Now that the inlets are filtered the buds are cleaner, not perfect as the buds still attract dust fine enough to go through the filters. The room has eight square feet of filter area, too much, at my age, to deal with HEPA filters. Furnace filters are so easy and cheap besides. Giving the finished buds a good swishing before hanging leaves them pretty clean.
 
ChaosCatalunya

ChaosCatalunya

5.2 club is now 8.1 club...
Veteran
weedtoker said:
Hey CC, nice that you've started this thread, hope it launches again some talks on all of this matter.

While dust and other particles do adhere to the cannabis plant and specially our beloved flowers, plain filtered/RO will take away the vast majority of it before/upon harvest. What I can also say is that it takes away a bit of the volatiles as DC mentioned (if you smell the water after washing buds it smells of them) just could never test the differences analytically in a lab to see if there's a real difference. Anecdotally I couldn't tell a diff in taste for the worse, I actually feel it smoother and taste it better than ever, but my environment is not set in stone so that throws the experiment out of the window for me. I do know of the HEPA option and think it's going to be standard indoor and greenhouses but how does that leave the situation for outdoor and the simple homegrower? Does washing the buds really takes enough that is noticeable in most of the varieties? Is there any way of avoiding a only resin/concentrates future for smokers?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Many thanks weedtoker, I am happy people have seen what I was getting at

Interesting ideas about washing the buds, what is lost or added by rains and foliar spraying.

7 Years ago when we were first talking about setting up a medical club here the proposed facility got named "HEPA Land" as we were looking forward to growing in "proper" conditions.

Re outdoors, Tobacco is washed before drying etc.

Reading DouglasCurtis' post below and bearing in mind what you say, rinsed outdoor buds should smoke better (significant factors for locality, season++)
despite the loss of water soluble terpenes.
 
ChaosCatalunya

ChaosCatalunya

5.2 club is now 8.1 club...
Veteran
Douglas.Curtis said:
I use HEPA class air filters, specifically because cannabis grabs stuff out of the air. Massive difference in quality between using and not using them. You know the dirty ash tray smell your car and house get from smoking your cannabis? It doesn't come from the cannabis, its from the dust, lint, dander, hair, fibers and excess nutrients in your cannabis.

Clean cannabis being burnt leaves no lingering odor, the smell fades in a few hours as if it were never there. Washing your cannabis after harvest removes the water soluble terpenes, usually resulting in a decent loss of flavor/aroma.
Click to expand...

Thankyou DC, fascinating. I cannot go full HEPA at the moment, but can build a basic particle filter panel for my air entry to at least get a fair part of the dirt out.
 
Douglas.Curtis

Douglas.Curtis

Autistic Diplomat in Training
For the record...

Hepa filters are cheap, when you make your own plenum (look it up) and use hepa class furnace filters. $50 for each intake and a $15-20 replacement cost on each filter. Deep filters last 6 months and still have great results.

No need to wait till you can afford $200/intake for off the shelf versions. ;)
 
N

noyd666

have run intake filters (phresh for years, filters inside transferring air anywhere, just finished cleaning two smaller 12'' fans and the edge of blades are always dirty from dust etc and wire cages trap some. brush n spray with eucalyptus spray.at the moment i'm having a carlton cold beer, filtered below zero.
 
S

St. Phatty

Active member
One of the charas/hashish production techniques I read about in the pre-Internet days,

was the practice of having workers run through the fields so that they would get covered with hash.


like scissor-hash, but different.

Then they would scrape the cannabis residues off the workers and sell it. Or maybe the hash makers kept it for themselves.

Anyway, that's definitely a case of stuff sticking to the bud, except then the pistils & resin would end up on the collection tool - the "ganja walker" or whatever they called them.
 
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