When Should You Harvest Cannabis?

Why

I’m talking about the trichomes on the buds themselves, but first, a quick terminology note.

Growers commonly call the swollen, teardrop-shaped flower parts calyxes. Botanically, the visible structures are bracts, modified leaf-like structures that wrap around each female flower. The flower’s actual floral covering is tiny and mostly hidden inside.

So, inspect the trichomes on those bracts, not the little sugar leaves around them. Use the bracts as your consistent reference because leaf trichomes don’t necessarily match the stage of the flower trichomes.

I’m old school, so I still use my thirty-power jeweler’s loupe with a built-in light.

Some iPhones with Macro mode can focus as close as two centimeters and may also work. But Macro gives you close focus, not the equivalent of thirty-power magnification.

Brace the phone, use good light, take a still photo, and enlarge it. If you can’t clearly distinguish the individual trichome heads, use the loupe.

Start checking near any estimated flowering time provided with your seeds or clone. That estimate gets you close, but the plant gets the final vote. Plants are notoriously bad at reading seed packages.

Clear heads generally represent an earlier stage. Cloudy or milky heads represent a later, mature stage. Amber or brown heads indicate that the trichomes are beginning to age.

When several buds are mostly cloudy and the first amber heads are appearing, your practical harvest window has opened.

Check several buds from different parts of the plant because the trichomes don’t all mature at the same time. Judge the overall pattern.

Darkened stigmas, the hair-like parts growers often call pistils, are another useful sign. But don’t use stigma color or the calendar by themselves.

And don’t chase a magic amber percentage. Research has not established that ten, twenty, or thirty percent amber guarantees a particular effect.

Use the calendar to know when to start looking, the stigmas as a cross-check, and the trichomes on the bracts to make the decision.