Lets talk trichome Development

Trichomes are tiny factories that produce the hundreds of known cannabinoids, terpenes, and flavonoids that make our favorite cannabis strains potent, unique, and effective. Many growers have have certain identifying characteristics we look at to determine a plants maturity and potency before harvesting. Of course many of us myself included keep grow logs and marijuana does have a fairly predictable grow duration. As well as outdoor growers not really having much of a choice at least where I live there would be snow on the pot before it turns on you.

For a quick side note

I am smoking the same strain 2 articles in a row because my uncle grew it and he did very well nice sweet mild flavor not a nutrient or fertilizer taste which is hard for sweet flavors to present themselves like say a chesses or a skunk flavor/ smell which is harder to mess up. That ad its a nice couch lock stoned probably why I'm posting so late. Last side note unrelated but brewed one of these today ![

Trichomes

Now that I have several Different THC photos to reference I think I have most of the stages of Trich development.

For starters this Is my grow so I new this photo was taken about a weak weak and a half before it was ready to harvest unfortunately this image is blurry. But the triches where clear but smaller less developed than say this.

also besides the image quality the main differences here are the shape of the trich should be more pronounced shaped more like a mushroom than a hair and the color you either want a amber color or a milky white like this

However the image above👆 is the furthest you want to go in development It may even begin to degrade at this point but I still got high so it may have been just in time.
This next example is what happens if you fail

The trichomes stayed intact so this is rather interesting example past this point the plant/ THC has degraded to far and simply falls off. However I have been doing this for long enough to know not to smoke anything like this.

an Ideal Point to harvest the plant the THC should look like this

or this

The golden zone is arguably a little further depending on who you ask and how your growing. This is a hard moving target to hit and can result in a reduced quality or potency this may even be to far like I said

every plant let alone strain is different in grow time eve trichome development can very in color duration ect so a general guide is always helpful so I thought I would throw something together based on my decade or so of experience. I may have made mistakes welcome the feedback if this is the case these are just some traits I look for with a trich scope and had the images to better explain than a description.