Grow tips for fullmelt Hash

Hey there, Welcome to Full Melt xTractions, I'm David, and if you're a solventless extractor, or you want to learn to be one, I'm here to help you gain the knowledge you need to elevate your craft to the next level.

So today I wanted to talk about growing in the context of being a single source solventless extract producer. Basically someone that grows seed to weed to solventless extract whether that be dry sift, bubble hash/live rosin or flower rosin, dedicating all, or least a significant portion of their crop to solventless extraction. A lot of this is common sense, but some of it, you may not know, including a proven way to significantly increase the terpene content in your plants. More on that later.

Now this is not a growing tutorial website, so I'm not going to go over every little detail of how to set up your grow, what environmental conditions to maintain, etc. Hopefully if you don't have a really solid grasp of all those type of basics yet, you have some other resources you're working from, such as a solid grow manual, and that, along with following at least one quality YouTube channel on the subject, should equip you with the resources and knowledge to handle any grow-related issues you might happen to come across.

Is this post I'm going to talk about growing with an extractor's mindset. And how I feel it affected certain decisions I made when I was growing my own cannabis. First and most obviously, it affected my selection of genetics. Caused me to do research into breeders that produce genetics known to be solid solventless extract producers. As well as learn that belonging to certain lineages (such as Afghani) can be an indicator that a given strain will be a solid hash plant.

In addition to learning as much as you can about breeders and lineages, it can be a massive help to go online to somewhere like r/BubbleHash on Reddit, or some other online hash group or forum, and simply do a site search and see if anyone has grown and/or extracted that strain. You can also make a post asking if anyone has grown or extracted a particular strain and as often as not you very well might find someone that can give you an insight to their personal experience with that particular genetic. 

This can be quite helpful in deciding what strain you would like to run, but don't base your decision 100% on this type of information, especially if the person has only run one phenotype or cultivar of that particular strain and gotten subpar results, they may have simply gotten unlucky, or had an undiagnosed problem somewhere along their growing or extraction process.

One more selection tip I'll pass along here, is to not get too attached to any one particular cultivar that you might be growing. Many times, you may start some seeds of a particular strain, and right out of the gate you might have a plant that starts very vigorously or has a very interesting structure or coloration compared to the others. Or maybe they start similarly, but through the process of flowering out your original round of those genetics, one plant really impresses you by flowering quicker and packing on more weight, seeming frostier than the others, or displaying impressive coloration. In these kind of cases, don't ever decide what is going to be your keeper for that strain until you've extracted from that cut.

Your eyes can tell you a lot, but the bags, screens and the press can tell you a lot more. And when it comes to cannabis, you definitely shouldn't trust your eyes. They absolutely can fool you. But the extraction process, if done properly, never lies. It will always tell you the true quality of what you've grown and extracted. So If you're growing for single source solventless extracts, always withhold judgment on what cut to keep until you've performed at least two methods of extraction on it. Most commonly, bubble hash and rosin, but maybe you do dry sift, either way. Isolate those trichomes and learn what those specific cultivars are all about, because that will tell you all you need to know to make a well informed decision on selection.

Now when I started growing cannabis a few years before I even began to make bubble hash, I was using some fairly complicated nutrient programs. Over a few years of experimentation, I found that I could get the results I wanted with very simple nutrient programs, and that it was very difficult to distinguish in quality or other factors between runs done with the bare basics and ones using multiple supplements such as advanced nutrients. 

Cannabis plants have very simple needs. They need fresh circulating air. They need water and oxygen and beneficial fungi to their roots and light, humidity and CO2 to their leaves. They need some nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and magnesium and calcium and a few other micronutrients. And if you can provide a cannabis plant with all those things, in the right measures and proportions, it will not just survive but grow and thrive to more or less it's fullest potential. We're not trying to find what chemical boosts vegetative growth or other factors to some unnatural degree when we're growing for solventless extracts, or at least I don't. That leads to atypical plant growth and may have a negative effect on the expression of your trichomes. Especially in the case of using things like PGRs.

Instead, I use the KISS principle. The KISS principle (or Keep It Simple, Stupid) states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made overly complicated. I found this to be especially true in cannabis cultivation for single source extraction. And it's for that reason that I recommend you use a nutrient line that has between three and eight main parts to it. And for your first run, I recommend no more additives beyond a mild starter fertilizer such as rapid start, a mycorrhizae product, and compost tea. And that any additional additives you wish to use should be added one per run, and assessed for effects both positive and negative, at the end of that run.

Plants are living things and living things are all about chemistry. So naturally, the chemicals in these additives are having an effect on your plants. Now, we don't necessarily know all the effects that every single chemical in all these additives produce. A good nutrient company will be able to tell you the intended effect, such as silica, strengthening cell walls. Fact is though, most of these additives don't have the ingredients listed. And even if you know the intended effects, you don't necessarily know that there are no unintended effects.

Is this me saying never use additives? It is not. But in a hypothetical example, where you are introducing only one additive per run, if you get that different result the next run, you've got a fairly decent indicator of what your issue is since you only changed one thing. Then you know that you either need to back off the use of that additive somewhat or eliminate it altogether. This type of approach can make diagnosing issues in your garden much less of a headache.

I have found this approach to be the best at allowing my plants to express their genetics most fully. As much as we'd like every plant to be a keeper, you must always keep in mind that this is a sorting process. We're not trying to find a specific cut, zero in on it, and grow it bigger and frostier and stinkier and better. We're providing an environment to allow all our cuts to express their genetics to the fullest, and then selecting the biggest frostiest, stinkiest and best.

One thing we know about the frostiest stinkiest and best cannabis is, it has a high terpene content. Terpenes contribute most of the oiliness and much of the melt to your trichomes. Naturally, everyone is looking for the best ways to increase terpene production in your plants. I just luckily happened to stumble on to one of the ways right away in my cannabis growing journey because I chose to grow in DWC, or deep water culture.Which is a hydroponic method where you grow plants with your roots suspended in a bucket of water.

Having done multiple soil runs side by side with my deep water culture plants, I noticed that I got bigger yields of meltier hash with the same strains grown in DWC compared to a soil run. To be clear, It wasn't a dramatic difference I never did any testing to confirm this, but it was just the general sense that I got. 

However, just recently there have been tests run on hydroponic versus soil grown methods and the differing terpene content between the two. I'll leave a time stamped link in a comment, to a podcast where the chief science officer for Total Health Cultivation, Harley Smith, explains these studies, and their results, but suffice it to say, though I was already sold on hydroponics as my growing method, after learning this, there's zero chance I will ever switch to soil for anything other than mother plants, as terpene content can be shown to be considerably increased (up to 20%) by the use of hydroponics. 

Since the majority of your terpene content is in your trichome heads, more terpenes=bigger heads, bigger heads=bigger yields in your upper bags or screens, and higher rosin yields as well as a more oily and flavorful extract. All this is not to say that you can't make phenomenal bubble hash growing in soil, just to highlight one advantage of growing hydroponically. It certainly has its disadvantages too, such as being a less forgiving method to mistakes, and more prone to equipment failure.

So If you've never grown before, how can you have a baseline, to know if your grow process is on point? Well, if you're lucky enough to live in a place where you can easily source some clones of a known dumper such as Gorilla Glue #4 or GMO, it can give you that baseline as to whether your grow process is on point and help you to troubleshoot issues. If you grow something you know has dumped for someone else (and I'm talking that particular cut, that clone's genetics, say you got a cut of Gorilla Glue from GG strains in Colorado) then you know, if you don't get a good yield or get particularly melty hash. There's something wrong, either with your grow or your hashmaking process. 

In hashmaking there's only a minor amount of things to go wrong in comparison to the growing process so you should be able to either eliminate, or zero in on the problem being the hashmaking fairly easily. 

Just examine your extract with a magnifying device. If you see a lot of capitate stalks, or tiny pieces of plant matter, the problem is your hashmaking process. If it looks like you've isolated the heads pretty well and you don't see many stalks or fragments of plant matter, That will tell you you've likely done a decent job isolating the trichomes, and that something in your grow process is likely the issue, since you already know that you're working with a well-performing hash cut, so if your extraction process was solid, but melt or yield are lacking, you can rule out the genetics as the problem. And that, will allow you to more quickly address the actual issue.

If you're a single source extractor, are there any factors I missed that you would include in this list? As for anyone else, If any of this raised any questions, feel free to leave them in the comment section. I'll do my best to answer them in a timely fashion. If this information was helpful to you, please drop a like, it really helps these videos to get out there to more people.

This has been David with Full Melt xTractions, reminding you to keep up that passion for the hashin'

Happy hashing!