Dunno if this helps anyone, but it was posted by THC... on some forum
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.
