"KNOWING WHEN TO HARVEST"
Another factor is not having anything good to smoke. Your plants get close to finishing and not having anything good to smoke you cut them down before they are finished, missing the best part. Most people don’t realize what they have done until the weed has dried and they taste it.
Paranoia is another cause of picking plants too soon. Trouble with neighbors
because of smell often makes people harvest early.
I always tell people to use a good charcoal air filter to eliminate the odor.
Not just when you are growing, but when you are drying also.
Having a small microscope for checking out the trichomes on your live plant is a handy tool to have in your gardening room. What you are looking for is slightly amber colored liquid filled balls on top of a stalk. If all the trichomes are clear it is too early to pick. When they start to look a little milky they are getting close. One-third amber colored trichomes is what you are seeking in ripe marijuana.
In the Amsterdam coffeeshops, the buyers of the shops continually turn down marijuana that is picked too early. Growers that count on their crop to feed their families would have to change jobs if they picked their crop early.
Knowing how to dry cannabis is an art in itself. What you don’t want
is quick drying. First select an environment that is not too dry or hot.
About 55% humidity is good and a temperature of 22 C. What you want is a
slow cure that gently let’s the chlorophyll escape from the cells of
the plant. If it is dried quickly it will get locked inside the herb, making
it harsh and giving it a bad taste.
When I first cut the plants down I only remove the large fan leaves. I then
hang them upside down for about 10 days letting them slowly dry into sort
of teardrop shaped buds. Next step is manicuring which I like to do with
mostly my fingers, using the scissors for cutting the stems. After all the
fine leaf has been removed, I place the buds inside a glass jar to re-hydrate
for about 8 hours. I save the fine leaf for making water hash, which is one
of my favorite medicinal products.
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by Soma
I have a lot of e-mail coming to me these days asking me advice on when to harvest.
I tell people things like “ Don’t follow your calendar too closely”. “When it looks like its ready wait a week”. “Don’t pick it early”.
One of the downfalls of many growers out there is, not knowing the correct time to cut their plants down.
Nothing in the cannabis world is more unsatisfying than a beautiful plant picked early. Anyone out there who has tried a green banana, knows that they don’t taste very good, especially when it is compared to a nice yellow one with some brown spots. With cannabis it is even more drastic. Buds that are not ripe are not fun to smoke, providing you with burning cellulose instead of THC. Only ripe buds have the right kind of THC that carries the medicinal effect.
Cannabis that is picked early has the chlorophyll smell of fresh cut grass from your front lawn. When it is picked on time it has a strong perfume that smells like the finest hash.
Many new growers get some seeds, read the flowering time for the strain, and proceed to pick their plants on an exact calendar date. What they forget is that many factors can stunt a plants growth, making it take much longer to mature.
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In my 37 years of cannabis cultivation and research, I again point out
that the most common problem growers have is picking their plants to early.
Knowing how to judge ripeness in fruits, plants and people is an art worth
cultivating.
When cannabis is grown for medicine, when it is grown and cured as the sacred herb that it truly is, every way that it is worked with becomes sacred. It is easy for this sacredness to spread to other areas of your life.
Until next time, Keep it GREEN, LOVING and full of LIGHT.
Peace, Soma
