I revegged my ladies because I liked the bud so much. Problem is I'm having mold issues. I was f-ing around in my grow tent when I noticed what I thought was nute burn on some leaves...turns out it was mold starting to form. At harvest this time I left some of the smaller popcornette size budlets on the plants in tiny little clusters because they looked way too small to bother drying out to smoke. That was 5 weeks ago and they are already back to 12/12 in preflower & white pistils beginning to form...all the frosty buds and sugar leaves that were left have now expanded to normal size & and are attracting mold deep under thick canopy. The plants grew back ten times more bushy but I was worried that new bud growth could become infested with this mold if allowed to spread.
So I cut off all the small buds & sugar leaves where visible trichomes were present & ended up with maybe 8g of poor quality trim when it's dry. I do not expect a huge yield or great quality because the material is sub-standard- mostly just frosty sugar leaf. How long should I wait to blast with butane? Until it's dry(4-5 days)? or should I jar cure it?(2-3 weeks min) Do you think the long exposures to light has degraded the thc content?
We hang the plant in a cool dry area, pull off the fan leaves, and extract them on about the 5 to 7th day, when the small stems snap. That gets the water content down to around 25%. The reason that we extract while there is still a fair amount of moisture left, is that the monoterpenes responsible for most of the smell and flavor, are alcohols, ethers, esters, aldehydes, ketones, and carboxylic acids with high vapor pressures and leave right along with the water.
Because we are concentrating all of the terpenes, not just the diterpene cannabinoids, loss of some monoterpenes getting down to 25% water content is not an issue, because there is still more than enough left for the extract to smell and taste exactly like what it was extracted from, or even strongly more so, in the case of Pinene.
For the absolutely most floral extract, we use a thermos and do a frozen extract from fresh cut and frozen material. It usually smells as potent as sticking your nose in a pine sol bottle and can even be too, too much. Terpenes that smell and taste great, don't always do so in serious concentration and some are expectorants, inducing heavy coughing.
An effective way of dealing with too too much, is just to winterize the extraction to pull out the waxes, and it will also lower the monoterpene content, purging away the alcohol. The absolutely most delightful extractions that I've made, were winterized fresh frozen extractions.
I only do those in small amounts, usually in class, because the yield is low for all the work. A pound of fresh frozen material will take more work than the same amount of material with a 25% water content material and produce only about 25% as much resin. The yields are about the same, just one has a higher water to resin ratio when it comes to computing yield.