Ok, you’re getting to the end of the grow cycle, now the question is: when is the bud ripe for harvest?
You may be towards the end of your growing journey now but ripening your buds so that you can harvest at the perfect time can have a profound effect on the product you end up with. Just like a piece of fruit, there’s a time when your buds are perfect, fat, juicy, and ready to be harvested and consumed. Harvest too soon and the buds will not be so good, harvest too late and the buds will also be not so good.
The most important thing is to track your grow time with a calendar, ensuring that you made a note of the day you flipped your plants to flowering. Being aware of the day you switched to flowering is going to be the best indicator of when your chosen strain of marijuana is going to be ripe enough to harvest.
Once you start to see those little red hairs alongside the glistening trichomes, you know the time is near. Once you see the hairs you’re going to want to use a lighted jewelers loop, a magnifier, to inspect your trichomes. The trichomes will go from being fully translucent to slightly more opaque and milky, once you see this then you know you’re close. Ensure you check the trichomes towards the interior of the plant to get a more accurate view, once you see those trichomes begin to turn an amber, brownish color then you know the buds are ripe!
Know where best to look. The last few inspections are the most important of all. Make sure to always check the buds that grow on the interior, so the coat of trichomes has not been touched. When walking through the garden, any contact like rubbing or brushing against the flowers could turn the bulbs brown, potentially leading to misjudgment.
Know what the colors mean. When you first look at the trichomes, those tiny mushroom-looking stalks will be clear. As ripening gets close, maybe a week or two out, they will begin to turn opaque. The cloudy or milky heads will then turn amber or brown, just like a ripe piece of fruit. Once 5 to 10% of the spread of trichomes have achieved the amber the color, perfect ripening has been reached and that’s when it’s time to harvest.
The next video is all about how to hang and cure properly. We’ll see you soon.
