Sugar leaves are the small leaves that emerge from the flower clusters, so named because they are often coated with glandular trichomes that look like sugar. Sugar trim is the portion of trimmings made of these leaves, as opposed to the much less resinous fan leaves. It sits between flower and fan leaf in resin content.
In practice
Hash makers often separate sugar trim from fan leaves to make cleaner kief, ice water hash or rosin. Some cultivars produce generous, frosty sugar leaves; others produce few, which affects how much hash a harvest can yield beyond the flowers. Leaving a little sugar leaf on buds is a matter of taste and market: a tight manicure looks better, while leaving it protects trichome heads from handling. Its yield and quality depend on the plant and how it was trimmed and stored.
Don't confuse with
- Fan leaves: large photosynthetic leaves with few glandular trichomes.
- Bracts: the small leaf-like structures enclosing each flower, part of the bud itself.
- Shake: broken flower pieces.
A small leaf growing from within the flower cluster, often coated in trichomes, which is trimmed off and commonly kept for processing.A hair-like outgrowth of the plant's skin; in cannabis the glandular types make and store the resin holding cannabinoids and terpenes.A large palmate cannabis leaf with several long leaflets on a long petiole; fan leaves do most of the plant's photosynthesis and carry few trichomes.Hash is any concentrate made by separating trichome heads from cannabis and collecting or pressing them, from dry sift and ice water hash to hand-rubbed charas.Bubble hash, or ice water hash, is a solventless concentrate made by separating trichome heads from cannabis in cold water and collecting them on graded mesh bags.Trichome heads are the bulbous resin-filled tops of capitate glandular trichomes, where cannabis makes and stores nearly all its cannabinoids and terpenes; they are the raw material of hash.The process in chloroplasts that uses light energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugars and oxygen; cannabis uses the C3 pathway.In cannabis, the small leaf-like sheath (perigonal bract) that wraps each female flower's ovary and carries the densest capitate-stalked trichomes.Trim is the leaf material cut away from buds after harvest, especially the small resin-coated sugar leaves, often saved for making kief, hash or other concentrates.Kief is the loose, powdery collection of trichome heads that falls or is sifted off dried cannabis through fine screens; it is the simplest solventless concentrate.Rosin is a solventless concentrate: resin squeezed out of flower, kief or hash using heat and pressure, then collected as an oil free of plant material.
