After harvesting your cannabis plant, you will need to do the trimming process. In this article I’m going to give you a basic overview of trimming and manicuring your cannabis plant after harvest.
First, let’s talk about the time it takes to trim a cannabis plant. Lots of growers are shocked and amazed by just how labor-intensive and time-consuming the trimming process can be. It takes approximately 4 to 6 hours to trim a medium-sized plant using hand trimmers. If you use an automatic trimmer, it still can take over an hour to do the trimming process. There are many different techniques when it comes to trimming and none of them are really wrong. Some people cut their plants down first, then trim after drying. Others will trim their plants prior to drying. I like trimming after drying because when trimming your plants before they are dry, the wet foliage gets stuck to your trimmers and it becomes tougher to cut. Now let’s get into the kind of equipment that you need. To trim, you’re going to need a pair of trimmers with a short blade and a comfortable grip. Here are the best trimmers on the market today:
You will also need a container to hold your trim and disposable gloves because your hands are going to get very sticky. Step one, trim the large leaves off. When cutting off the large leaves, put your scissors right at the base of the stem and then cut it off. After you’ve trimmed off all of the large leaves, next comes the small leaves. The amount of small leaves that you cut off depends on the quality job you want to do. If you want to trim quickly, you can attempt to quickly cut off the small leaves and leave parts of them intact. If you want to thoroughly trim your plants, attempt to cut them off from the base just like you did with the large leaves. This does however result in the trimming process taking much longer. I’ve seen buds that are trimmed very well and I’ve also seen buds that are trimmed very poorly. It’s really your choice.
Once you are trimming the smaller leaves, you’ll notice your trimmer will start to gunk up with resin. You’ll need to clean off your scissors every once in a while. I typically scrape off the resin with my finger nail and save it to smoke later. That’s right, the resin accumulated on your trimmers is in fact smokeable. Many people call it scissor hash.
The trim you accumulate can be used for other things such as making butter, oil, bubble hash, and dry-ice hash. After you trim all your buds, you can continue on to either the drying process or curing process (if your buds are already dry). Like I mentioned in the beginning of this article, there are many different ways to trim cannabis plants. How do you trim your cannabis plants? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
