How to Maximise your Terpenes

When it comes to assessing how good cannabis is, like wine tasters, the first thing you do is smell it.

For cannabis to have a good aroma, you need terpenes, and the more terpenes the better.

But what can you do to ensure that you end up with great-smelling cannabis?

First off, choose a seed variety known for producing plants with a high terpenes level.

Next, if growing in soil, your soil needs to be of the best quality to produce the healthiest plants.

Now while we don’t want you stressing about your terpenes levels, you do need to stress your plants, but not the point they have a nervous breakdown.

We recommend low-stress training for your plant, which we have already created a video for and if you haven’t already seen it, why not?!

Removing leaves, though not too many is also a good move as while it stresses the plant, it also allows more light to reach the flowers, helping to boost terpene levels.

Lighting is the next critical element.

Exposing your cannabis plants to UV-B light for roughly two or three weeks during flowering will help to boost trichome levels, and trichomes are packed full of terpenes.

Next comes temperature control.

Lowering the temperature by five degrees at night during the period of trichome production will boost results, and the levels of terpenes.

Two weeks before harvesting, flush your plants with water to remove any unwanted nutrients that can affect smell and taste.

Then the final task while the cannabis is still on the plant, is the harvesting. Make sure you don’t harvest too late as there is a tipping point after which terpene levels, along with trichome levels, will fall.

Then comes the most important part of all – drying and curing your weed.

Aim for a temperature of around 15 to 20 degrees Celsius and a humidity of 50% for a two-to-three week period. Curing should be done in the dark, again at a cool temperature, with a humidity level of around 55%.

So there you have it, beautifully aromatic cannabis, strong enough to twitch the nose of every police dog for ten miles around!