Week 14 | Milky Trichomes, Harvesting First Bud and Back Building

Hey there and welcome (back) to Free the Tree!
This week was pretty exciting, most of the trichomes have started to show, we decided to go ahead a cut down one of our Colas (way too early to do so), we started back building the buds aaaaand we finally got an image of a live, grown thrips (find pleasures in small things right ^^)

Let’s get into it

Trichomes turning milky

We’ve been watching the trichomes closely for the past couple weeks and they’ve been starting to get nice and milky, especially the ones on the side leaves.

You can see on the image on the right hand side that the trichomes are mostly milky with a couple still clear.
Since we’re looking for more of a upper effect we really want to harvest while the THC levels are at their highest, meaning when they’re all milky and have just started turning milky. Seems like harvest is coming up soon 😀

Important note: Something we discovered by the end of the week, but in order to measure readiness looking at the leaf trichomes isn’t reliable. You must look at the flower trichomes or the ones that are are the very small leaves sticking out of the buds.

leaf full of thrichomes that are starting to turn cloudy/milky

First Big Buddha Cheese Harvest

By the end of the week, after looking at many trichomes we decided to harvest a first cola.
We did this for two main reasons

It seemed to be at that THC peak
That cola was really pressuring the Blue Thai, which doesn’t have enough room and isn’t looking too great

Turns out, we really harvested her too early, as we said most of the trichomes are milky but there’s still many clear ones.
This bud definitely would have been much more massive if we had waited about 10 days before harvesting her… But at least we have a clear view of the development stage of the Big Buddha Cheese.

first cola harvested after 7 weeks of flowering

Harvested cola after pruning

clear, milky and amber trichomes on leaves

Clear and Milky Trichomes – Harvested too early

As you can see on the image on the right hand side some of the trichomes are still clear, we really cut this bud too early.. oh well it’ll be a soft taste of the rest of the BBC plant.

Back Building the buds

After cutting that the BBC bud we started looking into different ways to improve yield during the last weeks and crossed the “Back Building” technique. After reading into it seemed to be pretty effective, tested by many people within the community so we figured let’s try it out ^^
Basically the idea is to remove the top tip of the flower. The way marijuana flowers response is to stop growing in height and start getting thicker and fatter. Here’s a good video we crossed that shows how to do it pretty well.

Hopefully it’ll get the buds much fatter 🙂 keep you updated in the next reports