Bud Washing
We wash everything else we consume, don't we?
We recommend washing 100% of your cannabis harvest. The cannabinoids in your buds are fat-soluble; a gentle wash does not disturb the potency of your product and will prevent you from combusting and inhaling dirt, hair, and dust, leading to a far cleaner smoke than you're used to.
Once you wash, you'll never go back
HOW WE DO IT
Take 3 clean 5-gallon buckets and fill them with Reverse Osmosis (RO) water. If RO not available, use filtered water.
Dissolve 1/4 cup Lemon Juice and 1/4 cup Baking Soda into the 1st bucket.
Gently dip, swish, and swirl your freshly cut colas into Bucket 1, then rinse them off by swirling them in buckets 2, then 3.
Be careful not to smash them into the sides or bottoms of the buckets.
Drip dry, and cure as normal.
Why the heck would I wash my harvest?
Let’s say friends invited you over for an organic meal, prepared from their backyard harvest. They’re obsessed with quality--getting soil tests, using mineral amendments in the soil, foliar sprays for the leaves, and special drenches for the roots of their leafy greens, fruits trees, and vegetable plants.
On this lovely summer evening they’ve prepared a salad for your consumption--but you've watched as they went into the backyard, cut the salad greens, and placed them directly onto your plate. At no point did those greens get washed--or even rinsed!
Slightly grossed out and a little curious what kind of critters may lurking on your plate, you ask them about it--"Hey, would you mind washing these greens before I consume them?"
They're outraged at the suggestion. "That's ridiculous! We grow organically--nobody we know washes their greens before they have a salad!"
While silly, this analogy fairly accurately describes the cannabis industry we know today. Though it will do nothing but wash dirt, dust, and other impurities from the plants, black-market driven practices have led cultivators around the world to simply cut the plants from the dirt, dry them, trim them up a bit, and place them before you on the dispensary shelf.
But--with more and more hobby growers experiencing the apples-and-oranges difference of washed cannabis, we’re hopeful the big operations will adopt the practice soon. For now, they tend to see it as a bogus practice or an added expense; we see it as a simple step towards superior produce.
The bottom line: This is a plant that has not been washed for a multitude of reasons, but we’d like to think prohibition is to blame. When the goal is quality and the best possible experience, we like to ask: why wouldn’t we wash our harvest?
How does it work?
The lemon and baking soda solution is a classic organic produce wash. Together, the chemical reaction acts as a surfactant that gently encourages dust, dirt, and most other non-native things from the nooks and crannies of the plant.
Then, dip two more times in clean water to rinse off every bit of the first bucket’s solution, and of course get anything remaining.
Still feeling uneasy about it? Try it out on a few branches and let us know about your experience--then, tell your friends.