Hi bro a great deal of old school growers believe 48 hrs of dark before the flip gets them prepared for flowering , and they say 48 hrs of darkness before harvest is meant to increase tricones
I know bigun swears by it !
I’ve only tried it once or twice never seen a major improvement
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Not necessarily. For example… Indicas will always have denser buds than hybrids or sativas. My climate is too humid for outdoor Indica because the buds are too dense…
EDIT- Not denser outdoors, comparable depending on your climate, but WAY bigger. lol
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I’m kinda thinking it’s the LED that’s making my buds denser. I started with a couple CMH and they were nice, beautiful buds, but they weren’t as dense as what these QB’s are doing for me. The CMH was frostier though.
This is the same plant that I’ve had for 2 1/2 years, so it’s all the same. Not like different phenos.
I’m thinking the LED’s and lighting is #1 for density, than organic slow growing buds (but this is just my new broscience theory, lol.) for #2. Besides strain of course. It’s all the same strain like I said.
It just interests me.
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Lights are outside of my expertise… I’m sure someone in here knows though. Got some smart mofos in here.
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Thanks Paps, I read it somewhere recently but not in detail… maybe it was from BOG’s book. That could be… I’ll have to look.
I think I’ll try the harvest just before lights on, because it’ll be easier, lol, just to say I’ve tried. I hope it helps. It’s a BOG Sour Bubble. I never smoked in before. I had a GG#4 x SB two years ago that was pretty nice.
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The commercial growers that I’ve worked for cure in 5 gal buckets.
Takes a crew of 4 an hour or so to burp.
A lot cheaper than maintaining a freezer.
Pretty sure some of it if fresh frozen by an extractor that comes by towards the end of flower.
Is that what you meant?
@DougDawson — to your point; the commercial ops I’ve worked for grow top-shelf dispo and a couple strains specific for extractions. Nice products all around.
They’re nothing compared to those guys’ personal grows…
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Doesn’t surprise me. Typical stoner here. 
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naw just like I said, to ensure each batch is like you dried it yesterday it’s stored frozen. Then they put it in the freeze dryer and it ships from there. Hash is freeze dried as well. Buds are extracted from the freezer and made into live rosin and freeze dried bubble hash. As long as the bud is still frozen it can become different things, but once you dry it… that’s all it is. The freeze dryer looks like a space ship.
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I’ve seen the tech - actually it’s the future once the price of admission comes down a bit - farmers are more focused (probably too focused) on ROI.
For now most of the ops I know of still hang / bucket cure.
Probably something to do with us old farts & not fixin’ stuff that ain’t broke… 
I can’t wait till I have a chance to try freeze drying mine. I’d love to preserve some of the terpenes that I lose while curing.
Till then… 
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There was a crowd online who did tests with harvesting in the dark then testing in a lab for THC and terps. The longer the plants were in the dark the more THC they produced but the more terps degraded. From the several strains they tested they made an assumption that 12 to 24 hours in the dark before harvests was the best “mix” of THC production and loss of terps.
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That man, from what I saw here, nobody cares about slavery, pollution and poverty, because it is not in your country …
They are only interested in obtaining the strongest herb with the most terpenes, with cheap fertilizer and without a bad smell.
I believe in selection, if you select plants to eat chemical fertilizer, the best results will be achieved with chemical fertilizer.
Food seeds available for sale are usually f6 to f10, with no selection.
If they do not have chemical input, they do not produce …
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I understand the advantage of freeze drying for concentrate production…
Freeze drying for buds you plan for smoking though… is anything done to break down the chlorophyll? That is one of the main benefits of the curing process that the enzymes in the plant help with during a slow dry or ferment/cob type cure. But the bottom line is pretty much the only way I have seen to accomplish that involves time and moisture.
I’m really just asking here, because I know from experience that buds that still have a lot of chlorophyll smoke really, really harsh and tastes it too. Does the freeze dry method somehow address this issue, or is the trade off a slightly different maybe slightly stronger aroma and really harsh smoke and taste?
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Which would line up with just harvesting right before/at lights on, or qn extra 12 hours of dark. I tried giving 3 days of darkness and didn’t notice it being any better than stuff that I harvested right at lights on.
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The herb tasted floral, and pleasant. OK You can read this article, it’s light on details and has lots of puffy glowing words with secret cryo-tech, but underneath are the grains of truth
https://cannatechtoday.com/freeze-dried-buds-take-cannabis-from-stalk-to-smoke-in-24-hours/
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Interesting. It doesn’t mention anything about chlorophyll at all, except indirectly by saying the flowers retain a more vibrant color. I assume this is because the chlorophyll hasn’t been broken down.
There might be something to the freeze drying that I’m missing or don’t know about. I’d definitely be super curious to try it, and it makes a lot of sense for a lot of applications on an industrial scale. I’m just very skeptical that the smoke of this flower will be superior to smoke from flower that has gone through a quality curing process. It just doesn’t compute with my experience with all sort of green plants or anything I have learned about any of the related sciences, so I am very curious.
In my experience with cannabis, the harshness from chlorophyll comes as a burning in the back of the throat, and an unpleasant finish and aftertaste I have trouble finding words for other to say it tastes like burnt chlorophyll. This is minimized, but still present if vaporized.
In the tobacco world, all of the highest quality that I know of goes through a curing process to break down the chlorophyll.
In the culinary industry, you sometimes see freezedried things like peas, parsley, chives, things where the fresh/green/ chlorophyll taste is a big part of what you are after. Also, to retain nutritional content for things like the powdered green healthy drinks. Most other things, including the woodier herbs grown more for their aromatic properties(thyme, oregano, rosemary, bay), all are slow dried, allowing the chlorophyll to break down. The few of these I have tried freeze dried haven’t been as desirable as those that have been dried slowly. Some things, like mint, kind of fall in the middle and can taste good either way.
Freeze drying takes a massive amount of energy/resources compared to just setting up a controlled curing environment too, but in the highly regulated cannabis industry I could see where the advantage might be. And hands down it would be superior to poorly cured flower.
Very curious to try some and do some more digging into any science I might not know or be missing.
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So true, and so true of so many things.
I think one of the most important things for positive change people can do is spend their money in ways to support the business practices/supply chains/processes that align with their own ethos and morals. Clothing, machines, furniture, food, electronics.
In the US and other places, many don’t have many options for what they can afford ; but of the people with the means to do so, the number who actually do this is depressingly small. This is true in both consumer purchases and B2B wholesale.
How many people would say that everyone should make a living wage for a hard days work? How many of those same people, with the means to do otherwise, continue to support the businesses and institutions that continue to keep that from happening (or much worse)?
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trying to be vague so you cannot figure out the process and just order it. a good deal of that is flat BS Likely they have run out and are trying to patent the process as ‘unique’
Sublimation is nothing new. Neither is freeze drying.
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The history of freeze drying going back to the Incas is awesome. There’s lots of great info on it out there, but for a quick overview
Also, this is super interesting, but maybe should be split into thread?
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