Trim is the by-product of manicuring buds: fan leaves, the small sugar leaves that grow out of the flower clusters, and bits of stem. Fan leaves carry few glandular trichomes; sugar leaves can be heavily coated. Growers usually separate the two and keep the resinous trim for processing into kief, ice water hash, rosin or edible infusions.
In practice
Trim from a well-grown, resinous cultivar can be valuable starting material; trim from low-resin plants is often discarded or composted. Wet trim (cut before drying) and dry trim (cut after drying) produce different trim: dry-trim material tends to lose more heads to handling, which collect as kief. House position: wet versus dry trimming is grower preference. The founder prefers brushing dry buds to scissoring wet ones, even at the cost of a little trichome loss, since it all gets used anyway. Store trim like flower, cool, dark and dry, or freeze it for live processing.
Don't confuse with
- Shake: loose bits of flower broken off in handling, more potent than leaf trim.
- Sugar trim: the resin-rich subset of trim.
- Trimming: the act, rather than the material.
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.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.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.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.Trimming sugar leaves from buds immediately after harvest, while the plant is still fresh, before drying.Trimming sugar leaves after buds have dried, leaving the leaves on during the dry to slow it and protect the bud.Sugar trim is the small, resin-frosted leaves that grow from within cannabis buds, trimmed off during manicuring and prized as starting material for hash and rosin.A concentrate is any cannabis product in which the trichome resin has been separated from plant material, giving far higher cannabinoid and terpene content than flower.Fresh frozen is cannabis frozen immediately after harvest without drying or curing, used as starting material for live resin and live rosin to keep more volatile aroma.
