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uaHarvesting Mariuana
Bob Marley
Harvesting cannabis is the most exciting moment for most growers. This procedure has to be done correctly – cannabis harvested improperly will suffer a quality loss. Wouldn’t it be sad to spoil the result of several month’s work? If you haven’t read previously about how to harvest marijuana, bear in mind that this process is divided into 3 stages:
- One week before harvesting, feeding nutrients stops. Plants should live through this week on plain water, this is called flush. Flushing marijuana is important, because otherwise nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus and other elements will be smoked together with the weed – very harmful.
- Then plants are either cut down and placed into a dark dry room or left without lights/watering where they are. In the former case, every branch is usually cut off and hung upside down. Also remove at once all the leaves (even the smallest ones) – that’s called trimming. Drying takes 5-7 days.
- Dried buds then have to be cured. Basically, they are cut off and placed into glass jars which growers put into… a dark and dry place again. Every day the jar should be opened for 2-5 minutes and shaken well to mix all the buds inside. This process lasts for 4-7 days and is absolutely crucial to give your product a high quality. No rich aroma or truly strong impact is possible without curing.
When is it better to harvest marijuana?
Each variety has a different flowering period that ends with the buds gaining maximum mass, resin and THC. For most hybrids and Indica strains about 50-70 days of flowering is enough, whereas pure Sativas may take up to 130 days to finish blooming (just blooming – vegetation is not counted here!) Harvesting too early is really a bad idea, resulting in less yield and poor quality. Neither is it okay to be late, since most THC will have become something else in a month after buds ripen. So how to tell when cannabis is ready to harvest? There are several methods:- When approximately 40% of the stigmas begin to curl and darken, marijuana is considered to be at the top of its psychedelic qualities.
- If you can use a microscope to look at trichomes, another option is to wait for about 90% of them to stop being transparent and take on a cloudy milky hue.
- Medical weed is commonly harvested a little later, when 60-100% trichomes darken and turn orange / amber. The THC will have converted to CBD by this moment. Recreational users don’t usually like such buds, because their effect is sleep-inducing.
Is cannabis ready for harvesting?
If the stigmas are sticking straight out, it means that the buds aren’t ripe yet. Early harvested stuff is not only unpleasant to smoke, it may also induce a “rush of thoughts” or even a headache. Harvesting too late, when the trichomes have dried up and look gray and hard, means that this herb will mostly cause drowsiness since all its THC has become CBD and CBG. This happens a month after the period when cannabis can and should be harvested.
Before you start harvesting the product, it's worth removing the large leaves, leaving only the small ones.
16.08.2016
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