FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

• Why Our Dry Trimmers?

  Our line of bud trimmers have been designed with one goal in mind, to produce hand-like bud trimming quality, while saving you money. Our bud trimmers are award winning for this simple reason. Growing flower is an art, that's why we have designed dry trimmers that prioritize keeping your flower intact. 

• Blades Not Barrels?

  In our pursuit to provide you with a product that will not hurt or damage your bud, we had to think outside of the box. Our dry trimmers have patented blades, that mimic the action of scissors when hand trimming bud. Unlike barrel trimmers, our bud trimmers don't use a tumble chamber but instead a simple singular blade. 

  This is different than what you see with wet trimmers or combination wet and dry trimmers. These trimmers usually employ a tumble and other tools like a vacuum chamber which can be damaging to your flower as it tumbles.

• What is Dry Trimming?

  Dry trimming is the process of pruning cannabis buds after they’re dried but before they’re cured. In dry trimming, freshly harvested branches are hung upside down in a drying room for around 10 to 14 days until the ideal level of moisture is achieved. Once dry, the large individual branches are cut into manageable pieces. Trimmers then carefully remove the sugar leaves from each bud, beginning at the bottom and working their way to the top. Once the majority of sugar leaves and their remnants are removed, the trimmed buds are carefully loaded into curing containers and stored until the active compounds within the remaining trichomes reach their optimal level of flavor and potency.

  Dry trimming is generally considered better at helping flowers maintain their full flavor as a result of a slower dry time. This allows the chemicals within the plant to mature at an optimal pace. This process also helps produce finished buds that are denser or more compact, which makes them more desirable for retail. On the other side, a drier cannabis bud is more delicate and the brittle trichomes may be easier to damage if not handled with care. The drying process also takes up much more space in a drying room because of the large amount of plant material present prior to trimming. From an operations standpoint, dry trimming can be more complicated if you’ve already sent the workers home while you wait for your hanging plants to dry. However, this last issue has become largely antiquated with automated dry trimming machines able to process up to 16 pounds an hour, outpacing the fastest human trimmers who are able to produce up to three pounds in one hour.

• What is Wet Trimming?

  Wet trimming is the process of pruning cannabis buds immediately after they’re harvested but before they’re dried. Regardless of your moisture content, learning how to trim is largely the same for wet and dry cannabis. You begin by cutting each branch near the node or joint that connects each new stem offshoot with older more substantial growth. It’s important not to set a wet branch down on a flat surface, otherwise, the buds will likely begin to flatten under their weight and lose their bulbous shape — and shelf appeal. The next step is to carefully prune the small sugar leaves on each bud, starting at the base of the bud and working your way up. Once the buds are mostly free from any sugar leaf remnants during a wet trim, they’re ready for drying and curing.

  Generally speaking, commercial growers who trim wet tend to be in a time crunch and look to wet trimming as a way to speed up the post-harvest process. But that does not mean there aren’t a few advantages to wet trimming, including mold prevention, faster drying, and the ability to place more buds on the drying rack. From an operations standpoint, it may make sense for some growers to keep staff on from the harvest through the trimming process, without waiting for any drying in between. On the downside in terms of operations, trimming wet can result in a much higher cost of labor per pound. Because most trimmers across the industry are paid by weight, trimming wet means growers are essentially paying for water that will be lost before the product is weighed for retail. This means that a grower will likely pay a trimmer much more to work with a wet product than a dry product. For most commercial operations, the costs tend to outweigh the benefits when comparing wet vs dry trimming.

• Dry vs Wet Trimming

  When working under normal growing conditions, experience, aroma, aesthetics, and sales price are all positively impacted by dry trimming. But when a cultivator is contemplating all of the pros and cons surrounding each trimming method for cannabis flowers, it’s important to consider how this decision impacts the rest of your post-harvest activities. Deciding between wet and dry trimming dictates the way in which you’ll dry and cure your cannabis. If you add the benefits of machine automation to tackle the vast majority of your trimming work, any of the time-saving arguments for wet trimming dry up very quickly. Knowing that you can save countless hours with automation means that farms can shift their time and energy into higher-value activities, such as a proper curing process that ensures the plant’s chemicals have reached their peak aroma, flavor, and effects without being rushed to market.

• Left Over Trim

  Regardless of your trimming preference for dry, wet, hand, or automated trimming machine, you’re going to have a great deal of leftover plant material. This includes stems, stalks, fan leaves, and the sugar leaves you removed during the trimming process. While many growers will consider these low-cannabinoid items waste products, this collection of “trim” does have value and should be put to good use with the help of a dry-sift, solvent-free trichome extractor machine. For large commercial grow operations, selling their bulk plant material or “biomass” to other processors to turn into kief, topicals, and other extracts is an excellent way to capture as much value as possible from every plant grown.

  For home growers as well as retail consumers, keeping your stems to steep into a homemade cannabis-infused tea is a popular pastime. While your trimmed sugar leaves may not be bursting in trichomes, they do have enough THC and other active compounds to be used in a cannabutter recipe for edibles. You can also use your leftover plant material to make a cannabis salve from CBD-rich or THC-rich plant trimmings.