Harvest, prep and processing

Hey there, welcome to FullMeltxTractions I'm David. And if you make bubble hash or you want to learn how to, I'm here to help you gain the knowledge you need to elevate your craft to the next level.

Lately we've discussed genetics selection, as well as how to grow for whole plant extracts. So now it's time to get into harvesting and processing your crop in preparation for extraction.

First off, how do we know when to harvest our crop? How can we tell when it's ready? Looking at the trichomes is the most accurate and foolproof way of telling when your plant is ready to be harvested. But it is important which trichomes you look at. The trichomes on the sugar leaf will always mature faster than the trichomes on the bud, so always scope the bud when checking your trichomes.

Funny story, back in my teens, when I was first reading up on how to grow cannabis, for the first few years, I kept misreading the word trichome as trichrome. What I didn't notice till recently, was that, both of those terms mean something in Greek, trichome, being the anatomically accurate term, meaning plant hair, and my mispronunciation, trichrome, meaning three colors in Greek. 

So really, what we have on cannabis plants can accurately be called, the Tri-Chrome Trichome.

Since they exhibit three main colors that give us an indicator as to when it's time to harvest.

Clear, Cloudy and Amber. 

Clear heads are immature with low active cannabinoid and terpene content. Cloudy heads are mature with high cannabinoid and terpene content. Heads that are beginning to turn Amber are in the process of converting THC to CBN and other cannabinoids that will produce a more sedative effect.

If you're going for a more energetic and sativa like effect, harvest with less than 10% amber. If you're looking for a more balanced effect, you might want to wait until 15 to 20% are amber. People looking for a more sedative indica effect, commonly wait for 25 to 40% of the trichomes to amber before harvesting. Some even prefer over 50% amber.

With different strains of cannabis, flowering time is going to vary, even with different phenotypes of the same strain. This is why you can't necessarily go by your breeders recommended flower time. Every seed is unique genetically, and even among genetics where the seeds all grow very similarly or homogeneous, some plants may take longer to finish than others. 

Even if you're growing a clone of a plant that's known to finish in a certain time in one person's garden that doesn't necessarily translate into it finishing in the same timeframe in the conditions of your garden. The color of the pistil hairs is not a reliable indicator of ripeness either. Pay attention to the individual plant and what its trichomes tell you.

For myself personally, when it comes to more narrow leaf or sativa dominant strains, I prefer to harvest between 10 to 15% amber. As far as more broadleaf, or indica dominant strains, I'll harvest between 20 to 30% amber. If I want a more balanced effect from a strain I'll shoot for 15 to 20% but it's really all just down to personal preference and the cultivars that you grow.

Once you've decided it's time to harvest your plant, the next step is to process it in preparation for extraction. Before cutting it down, I prefer to remove all the easily accessable fan leaf up top and on the sides, then cut the plant at the base and invert it and hang it upside down, exposing the rest of the fan leaves I couldn't easily get to with the plant upright. At the same time I'll cut the non frosty tips off all sugar leaves with less than 50% trichome coverage. 

When you harvest for flower, you tend to leave some fan leaf on there to help moderate your drying process. When you're preparing for a WPFF or whole plant fresh frozen extraction, however, you're freezing the plant live, so no drying occurs. And the fan leaf can do nothing but contaminate your process so it's best to just get it out of there.

Once you're left with a hanging plant with only sugar leaves and buds on the branches, start cutting off individual branches, and snipping carefully at the nodes, trying to avoid cutting into bracts (or calyxes as some people call them) snip the buds away from the stems into nickel to quarter sized pieces.

I like to snip them directly into hard plastic containers, such as cereal totes. Many people use bags, but I have found bags don't tend to freeze material quite as hard as a hard plastic container will.

Deep freezes that freeze material well below zero are not recommended for freezing your cannabis, especially long-term. They seem to encourage more ice crystallization which has a tendency to burst cell walls such as the ones in trichomes. If you have a deep freezer but it can be turned down to the regular freezer range, it's recommended to do so. Combination refrigerator freezers are fine, and require no special settings. Freeze your product for 8 to 12 hours, and you are ready for extraction.

I think a lot of new hashmakers, or people on the outside looking in, thinking of getting started in solventless extraction look at the raw yield numbers posted by people doing live extractions and others doing dried, cured extractions, and come to the incorrect conclusion that live extractions are a poor yielding process, without understanding the context of those numbers, namely that with live extractions over 3/4 of the input weight is water weight. So to get a true comparison with dried cured yields you would have to multiply your yield percentage by at least four.

Others may have tried fresh frozen extractions, but due to problems in their genetics, growing, prepping or extraction process, truly did yield poorly, say, under 2% and from that, just assume that fresh frozen is a poorly yielding process. The problem with that thinking is that any individual growers results do nothing to change the fact that fresh frozen hash very commonly yields between a 2% and 8% return of Rosin. 2% being around average and 8% being an exceptionally yielding batch. Compare that to dried cubed material where 10% is approximately average and 25% is an exceptionally yielding batch. As I mentioned a moment ago, with fresh frozen material being at least 3/4 water weight, to get an accurate comparison of yields from dried to fresh, you need to multiply your fresh frozen yield percentage by at least four. So 2% to 8% becomes 8% to 32% So on the low end it seems to yield about the same, but on the high end it seems to yield a noticeable bit better. Considering that you preserve more terpenes and essential oils of the plant in a live extraction, this makes complete sense to me, those extra preserved compounds weigh something after all.

So let's talk a little about the mechanics of extraction, specifically, fresh frozen extraction versus extraction from dried cured material. Anyone who's grown in the past, knows that in the time between being harvested and fully dried, flowers lose about half their size and over ¾ of their weight, mostly due to evaporating water.

As you might imagine, this means that working with fresh frozen, or "live" material means you are sifting trichomes off of a considerably larger surface area, and this is an advantage to working with fresh frozen along with maximizing the preservation of terpenes and other essential oils, but live extraction also comes with it's disadvantages. 

Put simply, the square cube law of mathematics says that as the size of an object increases, its surface area increases by the square while its volume increases by the cube. 

So the surface area, and therefore, ease of sifting is indeed considerably increased when fresh, but nowhere near as much as the overall volume of the flower. Which means compared to dried cured material, fresh frozen material is not as structurally sound, it breaks apart easier in the wash, so with fresh frozen, it's easier to over agitate to the point of contaminating your wash.

This is partly why working with dried cured material is more forgiving and easier to work with. Yes, it's partly because the resin is not as sticky any longer, but it's also due to the decreased volume to surface area ratio. Even with a good presoak it never gets back to its original size. 

This makes it structurally stronger than fresh frozen material which has the same cellular structure supporting a proportionally much greater volume in comparison to its surface area.

This, along with its lack of chlorophyll content in comparison to fresh frozen material means you can wash dry material harder for longer without it getting beat up quite as much, and without getting as much green in your wash, assuming you didn't let it get super brittle and dry, and assuming you did a good presoak.

But if we're truly trying to preserve the most accurate possible profile of what we've grown, really the only game in town is live extraction. There's nothing that does that job better. But we also know, that not every strain is suited to water extraction. So how can we get an idea if we've never extracted from the cut that we've got growing if it's worth washing or not?

This is where test washes come in handy. You can use a mason jar around half filled with ice, chill the jar in the freezer first, snip off one or two lower branches (enough to fill the other half) trim off the non frosty bits and snip the flowers into nickel/quarter sized pieces, freeze them, then put them in the jar, fill jar to an inch from the top with cold water Wait 30 seconds to a minute for the temperature to equalize. Then shake the jar really good for a couple minutes. Set it aside in your refrigerator and wait 20 minutes. A good washing hash cut should have a nice layer of trichomes on the bottom. 

If you get little to nothing you might want to try pressing rosin or keep that one as flower. Oftentimes a failure to wash well does not necessarily mean a particular cultivar lacks potency. Some types of trichomes are not conducive to the water extraction process but still can be easily extracted through rosin tech, If all else fails, there's also always one of my personal favorite methods of solventless extraction, vaporization.

But more on that in a future post.

Happy Hashing!