Harvesting

Harvesting. One of the more controversial parts of growing cannabis. Why? Because it goes hand in hand with the curing process. And everyone has their own way of harvesting and curing which leads to much debate. Check out our post on curing to learn more on our philosophy. When trimming for dry flowers, the focus of the trim is the cure. A good cure is reliant on removing just the right amount of water for the desired biological processes to continue after harvest. Too much water removed too quickly will stop all metabolism in the plants cells, and not enough water removed will encourage pathogens like mold to flourish. Once the flower is cured, the nugs are trimmed to show the best visual representation of the cultivar possible. To do this at 710labs, we hand trim our buds only. In our experience, we have found trim machines handle the buds way too aggressively and virtually destroy every trichome. We like a nice delicate trim. Take off those leaves that aren’t covered in trichomes and leave the rest. It may take longer and cost us more, but that’s where quality always comes first. When trimming for extraction we keep the same philosophies but alter the process a bit. First and foremost, we use fresh frozen flowers instead of dry flowers. What does that mean? When the plants are ready for harvest we chop them down and freeze them while the plant is still “alive”. We do this with the goal of keeping the trichomes as untouched as possible up until the moment they are extracted/separated. This is because we are trying to retain as many of the terpenes as possible that are typically lost in the curing process. The drying process alone will naturally lose 30-40% of the terpenes. Meaning dried flower has much less terpenes than fresh frozen flower. We trim with our solventless concentrates in mind, and carry that same method for our plants destined for hydrocarbons as well. What’s that trim style? Careful and minimal. We take off all the fan leaves and then trim away the leaves that have less than 60% coverage of resin. How do we measure that? Nothing too scientific just by eye. The colas are then “shucked” off the branch, transferred to air tight vessels and stored in our freezers at -20º for 72 hours before extraction. The key to a proper fresh frozen harvest is getting the live plants in the freezer as soon as possible, which limits any terpene off-gassing and trichome degradation