Many sugar or carbohydrate-based supplements claim to improve the smell/taste/sweetness of buds. A cheap alternative to expensive sugar-based bloom boosting supplements is blackstrap molasses. Giving this to your plants for the last few weeks before harvest can help them get bigger and smell/taste better.
Before harvesting, essential oils and food-grade extracts might penetrate your buds via your plant's roots. To prevent an unpleasant taste in your buds, use edible essential oils. Combine 15 mL of extracts or essential oils in 20 liters of water and pour the solution onto the soil for up to 5 hours before harvesting.
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.
Drying and Curing
Drying your bud at a slow pace in medium humidity will maintain a nice smell and prevent trichome damage. Once properly and thoroughly dried, proper curing will finalize the process allowing for the best smell and taste.
After a sugar application, the resulting sugar-like crystals are the flower's trichomes, which are believed to double in production after the plant is treated with sugar.
Flush your plants with ice water to boost trichome production. Cold shock adds icing to the cake of training protocol. We advise using ice-cold water when flushing your buds during the late flowering phase.
As previously stated, moderate levels of nitrogen and phosphorus work best to sustain trichome growth to the maximum level. Dumping nutrients on your plant during the second half of the flowering cycle can result in reduced cannabinoid and terpene content, thereby lowering your bud quality in both flavor and potency.
If the aroma of cannabis is weak or nonexistent when you open the jar, bag, or break open a nug, then it means the terpenes have evaporated or been destroyed in some way. That means lower quality and fewer compounds that influence the overall effects a strain will have.
If they're getting too dry, you need more humidity; if they're beginning to stick together or smell musty, you need less. The ideal range is 60-65%. Consider investing in a hydrometer to help you manage the humidity with precision.
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.
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.
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).
For a correct application of terpenes, spread the flowers or herbs as much as possible, do not pile them up. Spray on the flowers or dried herbs at a distance of 35-45cm, ensuring a quick and homogeneous pass over it, so as not to create excess aroma in certain areas.
One option is to add it to joints, blunts, or spliffs. Simply fill your rolling paper or wrapper with flower and sprinkle your sugar evenly across the top of the flower. Finish rolling, spark up, and smoke your sugar-infused joint, blunt, or spliff the same way you always do.
Simply stick a piece of bread or tortilla inside your cannabis container and check on it in a few hours. You'll be able to tell if moisture is transferring to the flower by feeling the slice of bread or tortilla for its dryness. When the flower is rehydrated, remove the bread slice or tortilla from the container.
Much of the flavor of food comes from smell, so that when you are unable to smell you have lost much of your ability to experience flavor.
Don't Spray the Buds
So keep the foliar spraying to the “veg” phase. If you absolutely have to spray in flower, try to avoid the buds as much as you can.
High quality buds will be dense and thick, having grown to a heavy weight during the flowering period of the plant's life cycle. These dense buds signal that the plant received adequate nutrients and light throughout its lifecycle, resulting in a flower rich in cannabinoids and terpenes.
Quality cannabis has a healthy green color and can have touches of red, orange, and purple all depending on the strain. Bad buds look old — it's a muted green, brown, tan or even yellow, and if you spot anything that looks like mold, don't buy it.
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.
Potassium makes the plant hardier and stronger, better able to withstand hardship or disease. All of these are vital for growing large marijuana buds, but you have to use them wisely. Sulfur is another nutrient that, like potassium, helps the plant absorb other nutrients and water.
Phosphorus and potassium are required during all cannabis plant life cycles but are hard-hitting driving forces in flowering plants. Secondary plant nutrients calcium and sulfur are immobile, meaning they don't move around within the plant.