A bud hardener is an additive you can use at the end of the flower cycle to tighten up your flowers and pack on weight. They are typically used in the final 3 weeks or so of the grow cycle and contain a mix of macronutrients, micronutrients, minerals, essential oils, etc.
Increasing the amount of CO₂ in your grow room can help you grow bigger, denser buds. By doing so, you'll help plants photosynthesise faster and encourage them to take up more nutrients and water.
In general, the drying stage takes about 7–12 days, depending on the above factors. During this time, your buds will lose a lot of water, meaning they'll shrink in size and lose a lot of weight, too.
Lack of light is perhaps the most common reason that cannabis produces fluffy, light buds. You may have noticed the lower, puny 'popcorn' bud sites that form below the main canopy. Often these buds are discarded by growers allowing the plant to focus biochemical energy on the main blooms.
Bamboo Canes
These cheap but sturdy tools will help keep the main stem upright and prevent branches from sagging under the weight of heavy buds. You can use them both indoors and outdoors when your buds become too heavy for their branches. Simply lodge a few canes into the soil around your plants.
Buds get less dense when it's too hot. Look at the loose structure of this bud grown in extreme heat. Another thing about temperature: cannabis plants in the flowering stage like it to be a little warm in the day, but cool at night. Warm nights are also associated with airy buds.
The hinges in your jaw that let you chew and talk can sometimes dislodge an earbud, depending on how closely it sits. This is the most common reason, and – thankfully – the easiest to fix. Everyone's ears are different, and a one-size-fits-all earbud may simply not be a good fit for certain people.
Cannabis plants need water and nutrients to grow and develop big, healthy flowers. Drought, overwatering, and over/underfeeding can all affect your plant's ability to develop big, dense, and heavy flowers.
A simple test you can do is to take one of your bigger buds and put it in a small jar or bag. Come back in an hour and if there is any moisture on the inside of the bag or the bud is suddenly damp to the touch, then you know it needs more drying time. If it's just a bit too wet to smoke, it needs another day.
Try some of the buds after 3 weeks
After about three weeks, your buds should be well cured and ready to smoke. That said, longer curing periods (up to six months) will further enhance flavour and potency with noticeable changes in quality. It's entirely up to you, but in the case of curing, patience is a virtue.
If you over-dry your cannabis, it'll be more likely to go moldy, so it's important to monitor the drying process closely. If your buds are too dry, they'll be more likely to crumble when you try to break them up for smoking, so it's important to take them out of the drying chamber before they become too dry.
Big Bud by Advanced Nutrients
Advanced Nutrients Big Buds is a popular bud hardener for hydroponic and soilless growers. With 0 – 1 – 3 NPK proportions, this formula provides good phosphorus to potassium ratio for flower production.
Week 7: The calyxes in the seven-week varieties swell to near bursting as THC is produced in the glands. At the end of the week they will be ready. The trichomes stand more erect and the caps swell with newly produced resin. At the end of the week the flowers reach the peak zone.
The last three weeks is when your buds can actually gain the most weight – that is if you feed them Overdrive®. After your peak bloom phase, your plants enter their late bloom phase (the precise timing and length of which depends on the strain of cannabis you're growing).
Usually, growers trim the fan leaves weeks before harvest, which is a period that leads to senescence, a phase in the plant cycle when the larger leaves start fading away. It is safe to start removing these dying leaves and continue until harvest.
Dry trimming is the process of pruning cannabis buds after they're dried but before they're cured. In dry trimming, freshly harvested branches are hung upside down in a drying room for around 10 to 14 days until the ideal level of moisture is achieved.
When should you trim cannabis buds? Ideally, you should start trimming days before you begin the harvest process. At this stage, growers usually start removing fan leaves when senescence, or when larger fan leaves start wilting, begins.
Molasses adds sugars to the plant and will help it to bud. Like us, plants need salts, nutrients, and sugars daily. Feeding your plants molasses, what could be considered the equivalent to our eating junk food sugars, will pack on the weight to your marijuana buds.
Wearing the headphones properly
To wear the headphones, gently pull up on the top of your ears, put the earbud tips in your ear canal, and twist the headphones into place. Doing this make easy to make sure the headphones are properly and firmly in the ear canal.
They don't hang in the crevices of your ear-folds like a traditional bud. They're meant to be worn fully inserted into your ear, so the squishy tip can form a tight seal with all of the walls of your ear canal — like a cork in a wine bottle.
Any kind of stress, be it from poor watering, a lack or excess of nutrients, the environment, pests, plagues, or improper care, can affect a plant's ability to grow big, dense flowers.
Light Exposure. Perhaps the main reason cannabis plants stretch in an unhealthy way is in response to too little light. In nature, seeds germinate in spring, when light levels are increasing.
Depending on the specific mass and profile of the flowers, the drying process generally takes three to four weeks. For both marijuana and hemp producers of smokable flower, the curing process is an important postharvest step that provides additional value in the quality of the resulting product.