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Many first time growers don’t know how to trim cannabis plants once they’ve harvested them. With this article we want to explain to you how to trim your weed plant.
First, you need to remove all the leaves until the buds are clean, which is the part of the plant that contains most THC.
The leaves and stems also have THC in them but they don’t taste nice. You can use the smaller leaves to make extracts if you want.
The leaves on cannabis plant are like their lungs. It’s where they receive the necessary light for the photosynthetic process, which is why there’s so much chlorophyll in that part of the plant. Chlorophyll is like blood for the plant and it gives buds that leafy green aroma and taste when they are fresh.
You can use the leftover trimmings to make BHO or other extracts. The only parts of the plant that we can’t make anything of are the roots.
Choosing the best method for your needs
There are many ways to remove the leaves but it all basically boils down to two things; by hand with some scissors or by using a bud trimmer.
Doing this task by hand can be a tedious job as you need to remove the leaves one by one. This will make your buds look spectacular and you’ll have champion-looking weed without any leaves, which also increases the quality.
Sometimes people grow 100 plants or a few massive ones. In such cases, doing all the work by hand is a bit of a stretch and using trimmers could make it a lot easier.
Why trim your cannabis plants
Trimming your cannabis plants serves many purposes. To start with, buds look a lot better when they’ve been trimmed. This will result in a more appealing final product. If you remove the sugar leaves the trimmed buds will retain more moisture, making the smoking experience less harsh and more flavorful.
How to trim cannabis plants with scissors
Trimming using scissors will take you much longer than with a trimmer, but your buds will look much nicer and healthier. The only inconvenience is that it takes quite a while to trim an entire plant that has a good yield.
If you decide to use scissors, make sure to touch the buds as little as possible so you don’t end up removing the resin. Trimmers aren’t so careful, and you generally have to clean them afterwards to get back all of that lost resin. My preferred method is to grab the plant and branch by branch, leaf by leaf and from the bottom upwards I remove every single leaf and then I remove the buds from the trunk.
I pull the bigger leaves off by hand, but for the smaller ones I grab them, taking special care to not touch the buds, and then I cut the leaves off, up and down the bud, until it’s clean and I move on to the next one. The bigger leaves don’t tend to have much resin on them so I throw them out.
Then, you’ll need to hang the plant up to completely dry it in a dark place. We have an article all about curing and drying your buds here.
Once you’ve finished trimming the buds you’ll notice a layer of resin on your scissors. If you scrape that off, you’re left with some hash that can give you a hint of how your buds are going to taste.
How to use a trimmer
There are various trimmer models available. In this post we are going to talk about two specific types. Some of them work by removing branches from the plants and putting them trough a mesh with blades. Other types remove everything except for the buds and leaves. You introduce the buds into the machine and the leaves are removed and separated from the buds. Both of these ways are extremely comfortable, although the second type of trimmer is more popular as it’s cleaner.
The Leaf Cutter trimmer is the most efficient one in my opinion. You place the buds on a sort of mesh with some spinning straps above them. The clean buds are left on top of the mesh and the blades make sure leaves fall to the bottom. Now, all you have to do is hang your buds in a dark and dry place or you can use a drying sock.
Just like with the scissor method, you can also get a sneak peek at the resin from your buds. You’ll need to scrape the edge of the turning straps with a plastic card and you’ll get some nice hash. You can repeat the same process with the leaves container.
Now you know what to do with your recently harvested buds, and I bet you know exactly what to do with them once they’re dry, right? Enjoy them!
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