Cannabis buds can smell like all kinds of different things in nature and this is one of the reasons why the plant is so interesting! Your plants can smell like citrus, mangos, sour fruits, rotting fruits, sweet fruits, woody, earthy, pine, and even cat peep, garlic breath! It is really pretty fascinating how many different ways these plants can smell.
What Causes Cannabis Plants to Smell?
Cannabis plants smell because their flowers contain safe plant chemicals called “terpenes” and these are what give your cannabis buds that amazing smells they have when growing. Cannabis isn’t the only plant that has these awesome terpenes, they share these natural chemicals with thousands of other plants on our planet.
Any plant that has any of these smells that you can smell in cannabis buds will have terpenes in them, from oranges, herbs, bananas, garlic, pine wood and many others. All these types of plants have terpenes in common with cannabis buds and plants. Of course we can’t forget that famous skunky smell. However Skunks don’t have terpenes. Interestingly enough cannabis gets its overall skunky aroma from sulfur compounds found in the plants.
Can Growers Increase The Smell of Cannabis?
Yes, grows can strive for increasing the smell of cannabis plants using different useful types of growing techniques, and even harvesting techniques that will help to increase the smell of their plants. The overall smells of the plant will come down to genetics within the plant, for example as a grower you will not be able to change the genetic smell of a citrus cannabis bud, to pine smelling cannabis plant.
Using these growing tips are meant to help growers enhance the smell of the plant, there is no real way to change the actual smell of the plant overall.
What week of flowering do buds smell the most?
If you have ever grown cannabis flowers before you know that the plants don’t have very much smell when they are growing vegetatively in your garden. Cannabis takes time to start to smell even when you start to flower. Most growers will not be able to notice much of a smell of cannabis until they start to see trichomes on their flowers.
Trichomes are what contain the terpenes that give your buds their smells. These are the little clear balls that you see growing on your buds about 2 to 3 weeks into the flowering cycles.
Typically cannabis will start to smell the most after about 3 weeks of flowering outdoors or in your grow space. The buds will continue to smell even more as the weeks progress.
Buds Losing Smell Before Harvest
As the trichomes start to degrade once the plant has hit the perfect time to harvest the buds will start to lose their smell and more importantly potency. It is important to harvest before this happens to have the best smelling buds for your harvest. Harvesting your plants too late will decrease the amount of smell quality of the buds.
Never Harvest your Cannabis Buds Too Early
Likewise harvesting your cannabis flowers too early can also seriously decrease the smell and taste of your buds. Once your cannabis plants start to flower, they will increase their amazing smells as the weeks progress over time. There is a fine line when harvesting cannabis, you can read more about harvesting here. You will want to harvest before the flowers start to decrease in smell, but not before they have reached their maximum potential.
Regularly putting your nose up to the plant can help you assess the plant for the best smells before you harvest your buds.
Green Avenger Seeds Cannabis Plants that Smell Amazing
Here are some of our best naturally smelling cannabis strains from our cannabis seeds lineup of genetics. These plants have amazing smells that will hit your nose like a ton of bricks!
Why Growing Organically Creates the Best Smelling Buds, It’s not what you think.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many “smell enhancers”, “bud enhancers”, and “bloom enhancers” on the market? It’s because they are trying to do what organic nutrients do for your buds. Salt fertilizers will never be able to recreate the same amazing cannabis plant tastes and smells that organics do.
All of these enhancers to salt based fertilizers will contain some form of organically based sugars to help promote better smelling and tasting cannabis buds. They are looking to promote carbohydrates in the plants. However this is done naturally in organic growing and much easier to do.
I’m not saying you can’t grow great smelling cannabis growing with salt nutrients, you can, but it costs more and is somewhat more tricky to get the great enhancement you do with organics.
Never Over Dry your Buds
If you are looking for the best tasting and smelling cannabis flowers it is important once you harvest the buds to not over dry them. Over drying your buds will remove the important terpene oils that are helping to get the best smells overall. Once the buds are over dried there is no bringing back these oils into the trichomes, thus removing the smells forever.
Dry the buds as slowly as possible in order to keep the flavors and smell intact, but at the same time keep a close eye to prevent bud rot. You can read more about cannabis bud rot here.
Do Buds smell when drying?
Once you have started to dry the buds it’s good to also again keep good track of the smell of the harvested plants. You will notice that the plant will seem to start to lose a bit of its amazing harvesting smells. Don’t worry this is perfectly natural for drying. You will lose a bit of the oils from the plants during this period, drying is a must though.
The key is only drying them as much as you need, and being able to return to the harvested smells through a flower curing process. That step comes after the drying time.
The Most Important Part to having Amazing Smelling and Tasting Buds, Curing
This is where you work to bring back all the smell that was lost when you dried your buds over time. Your buds are dry, and you could start to use them at this point. But if you do, you are missing the most important step for increasing the smell of cannabis buds.
Curing cannabis buds, means slowing down the drying process, and enhancing the smell of your buds by slowly curing them (drying them). This process is much slower than the drying where you are looking to dry the plants quickly, to avoid bud rot.
Slowly doing this will bring back all the favors and tastes that were lost during the quick dry. You can read more here about curing and drying your buds in depth.
This process is removing the chlorophyll from the buds, this is what makes the plants green but also makes the buds not smell as good. Essentially your goal is to enhance the terpene oils and remove the chlorophyll from your buds though a quality cure.
How long to cure before the smell comes back?
While curing isn’t an exact science you can expect that the smell of your buds will start to come back after about a week of curing your buds. Many growers like to cure their buds from about 2 weeks to about a month. The slower the cure the better the buds will taste and smell.
Many cannabis connoisseurs believe that the more you cure your buds, the more potent they will be when finished. This is because most believe that terpenes factor into the overall potency of the buds.
What should curing cannabis smell like?
When curing your cannabis, it should smell like your buds when they were in their final weeks of growing. The smell that way when finished. The buds should not at all smell musty, moldy, hay like, dry or bland. Any of these smells when curing cannabis buds signals that there was an issue with the drying or curing process. You will need to reevaluate how you did your drying and curing processes for next time.
How to Keep the Smell of your Buds after Curing
Next you want to keep your buds with this fresh amazing smell. We recommend placing the cured buds into jars, to keep them fresh and keeping the smell of cannabis buds amazing. When you first add them it is important to keep opening the jars every so often at first to monitor the smell and favor of the buds. Once again keep a nose out for any bad smells. Once this is completed you can keep your buds fresh for months or even years without opening the jars.
Your buds will now keep this smell for storage and may even increase a bit more over time.
What to do if your buds have no taste?
Some cannabis strains just have less taste and smell then other strains. There isn’t much you can do about this. If you have a strain that is very potent but lacks great smell then you can do the things that we suggest above to get the best you can from them.
You can also always try a good breeding program to cross the strain with a better smelling strain to create a strain that smells great while keeping the same potency.
If you don’t have the time for this, and smell is very important to you, then we suggest switching strains to a cannabis strain that has more natural smell. It really comes down to which is more important to you, smell or potency.
Final Thoughts
There are so many natural tastes and smells when growing cannabis we have come across so many in our breeding programs. I personally love finding that new smell that we have never found before and working to create a plant for our customers that reflects what it is and tastes like.
We wish you good luck with increasing the smell of your cannabis buds, and we hope this article can help you with that goal.
