My understanding has always been that the flowers are at their peak ripeness when the trichomes become milky with about 20% of them turning amber. . .
. . . Based on this, I don't believe it's a good idea for the personal-use ops growers to use the same criteria as the industry uses...because the industry doesn't care about putting out ripe marijuana.
Thoughts?
I hear's ya, tstic, and I fully understand and appreciate where you're going with this. <two thumbs up>
I'm a wannabe botanist, and just love looking at and learning about trichomes and terpene production, especially if there's some sort of definitive correlation between colour ratio <> to potency (or some other, pleasurable attribute that we would like to achieve) that can be determined.
The problem is that there are just too many variables, too many cannabis strains (with a plethora of new cross-strains popping up every year), each with their own unique attributes, to consider.
Then there's the big elephant-in-the-room problem of Subjectivity. Average potency, to a newbie, might blow his mind, where average potency to a very experienced, long term user is just that: Average. Everyone else will lay somewhere along the spectrum line.
So, ok, then the answer is that we get "
qualified" users to perform our assessments. A "Cannabis Sommelier", Yes? But then that brings up the whole "Panel" issue (think Master Distillers, where a panel of 3 legendary moonshiner hosts, - along with Tickle, judge 3 contestants each week on how well they craft and distill a unique type of popular alcohol product: - whisky, vodka, rum, gin, etc. - awesome show) . They always end up choosing a final winner, but they each vary widely on their assessment of quality and taste of the 'shine.
It would therefore be no different if we assembled a distinguished panel of our own, legendary Rollitup-ians. (but then, i can just see a post with 15K threads, in one week, all arguing and fighting over who should be on that distinguished panel.)
lmfao
And then there's the question of How Many? A panel of 3? 6? or even 10, you say should do the trick? Sorry, not even close. Even with 10 panelists, the quality, taste, potency assessments, will vary too greatly in order to come up with any reliable statistics. To get reliable information from any sample collection, you need a data set of at least 1,000 samples, or in this case, 1,000 qualified panelists, each giving their personal assessment.
Note: At least room for 1,000 nominated panelists should narrow down the bickering in the post, quite a bit.
lmao
The end data result will then be what's called a Bell Curve Normal Distribution, which looks to be quit a varied, all over the bloody map, F'n sampling, I agree, but out of that curve, you get what's called a Mean distribution, and Standard deviation points. This is too complicated to get into here, but the data collected then falls into a mathematically reliable pattern, that when repeated again with another different group of 1,000 panelist, becomes amazingly, and almost identicle in comparison with the first graph. And, if you increase the number of panelists by a factor of 10, and now have 10,000, the bell curve would, again, look and be amazing and remarkably the same. In other words, the original assessment data of 1,000 panalist becomes a very reliable representation of the larger population (all of us other folk in Rollitup), and therefore can become a very reliable predictor.
(keeping in mind that, as mentioned, this theoretical exercise has only been for
one strain, so far, which will have to be assessed multiple times for each of the different quantitative grow lengths that are being discussed and submitted in this post: Clear; Cloudy; 30% Amber; 60% Amber and 90-100% amber, AND for each of the subjective quality assessments. That's 150-180 assessments, depending on how many qualitative tests you want to include.)
Now that's one hell of an undertaking (1,000 panelists, each performing 5 different quantitative assessments, on, what? 6-7 different qualitative assessments?) man, count me out of that nomination.
However, i'm not finished yet. . .
In another post, i jokingly exaggerated that
"I'm targeting to reach 73.648% amber thricomes, per square 1,000 nano-meter, across a random sampling of 7.3 Caylx's, taken off of the tertiary stem."
this may be an absolutely ridiculous statement, as was intended, but it brings up an extremely valid point and question: Just how do you actually quantify and go about doing such a measurement?
There would therefore have to be some sort of established Standard that everyone would have to follow, and, in trying to establish such a Standard, i can just anticipate it taking 10+ years of specialists and experts and wannabe experts, all arguing over how the sample is to be counted, from where on the plant is the best place(s) to take the count from, how the count is to be analysed, what colour values or hues (digital values? or hand/visual colour pallet comparison?) determines what consititutes an "Amber" colour, or how clear does a trich have to be of terpenes or impurities to determine it's Clearity value?. . . you get the picture.
The point I'm trying to make here, is that we would all like to be able to look at trichomes and say "
Ah Ha! I'm at 60% amber, which will give me a super potent, couch-lock high, with the perfect ratio of lemonene and black forest pine aromas. I will therefore harvest the plant now."
But in reality, you "guessed-chopped" at what you thought might'a been 60%, which you then subjectively proclaimed to produced the perfect super potent, couch-lock high, with the perfect ratio of lemonene and black forest pine aromas. Your whole exercise was just that, nothing more than a subjective
guess.
"
Well. . . that's just like. . . your assessment, man."
- The Dude
PS
Also, at time of this writing, a new issue just popped up today (which perfectly exemplifies exactly what i've just been tlaking about), that i never even knew existed or considered until right now:
The eye vs. Science.
I therefore submit the following for review:
if you look at the following pictures, you would be reasonably correct in assuming that the trichomes are 100% Cloudy (i'm in at 19 weeks, and today just completed 8 weeks of bloom. Note: i also used a 30x Jewelers Loupe, looking at many buds on the plant, and i could not see one amber trichome, and just about nil clear trichomes,, so i was very confident that i was making a good, over-all assessment.)
I therefore secateured a branch this morning and labeled it 100% Cloudy, for assessment. I therefore plan on continue doing the same when the amber ratio reaches around 30%, again at 60%, and if i'm lucky on whether my plant can weather das Kanadian weather for another 2 weeks (Avoid Alliteration Always
), then final harvest close to around 90/100%.
When done, i should therefore be able to come up with a very good quality assessment by trying out and comparing each of the difference trichome colour ratios. Yes? So far, so good.
BUT! . . when I put samples of today's cuttings under the microscope, i saw a completely different picture. What were by all initial indications perfect, 100% cloudy samples , turned out to be 100% clear.
WTF??? 
That's one big F'n, unreliable assessment difference.
So which method are we supposed to be using? eyeballing it, or do we now need to relay on scientific instruments to perform our measurements? And if scientific, that means everyone will need to purchase a scope if they want to achieve any reasonable level of accuracy and confidence. And if that is the case, then let us all stop beating around the cannabis bush and just get it over with and buy a Spectrometer to perform a chemical analysis, and be done with it.
So, again, my point being, is that we here, in this thread, are trying to determine just what roll trichome colour ratios play in terms of overall quality, potency, etc., and we would all very much like for that information to be a "reasonably accurate" indicator of when to cut the plant down. but, just how are we going to accomplish this when the information on thricohomes that we use to judge when a plant is ready, is soooo damn variable and subjective and unreliable.
as you can see, we all still have a long way to go.
.
