Hidden Profits: What to Do with Trim and Leftover Leaves and Stems

After harvesting and bucking your cannabis or hemp plants, you may be wondering what to do with leftover leaves and stems. You might have an idea of how to use your trim, however, how do you know if you’re getting the most profit and potency out of the plant material?

If you’re considering what to do with your cannabis trim, let’s take a look at some quick tips on how to maximize your returns.

Trim vs By-product

Cannabis trim consists of small fan leaves and sugar leaves that are trimmed away from the buds during post-harvest processing. These trimmings can contain high concentrations of cannabinoids such as THC and CBD, making them a valuable commodity.

Cannabis trim can be used for various applications, including pre-rolls, edibles, tinctures, or vaping products. In addition, cannabis trim can also be used for making hash and concentrates, such as rosin, shatter, or wax. 

Cannabis by-product, on the other hand, consists of leftover stems, stalks, seeds, and larger fan leaves that cumulate after harvesting. These by-products have fewer cannabinoids and therefore are not as valuable as cannabis trim. 

However, cannabis by-products can still be used to make other materials, such as hemp-based paper, building materials, or textiles. They are also commonly used to make CBD oil and tinctures or teas. Cannabis by-products can also be processed to create biofuels and animal feed or composted to create nutrient-rich soil for gardening.

What Makes Good Trim?

All leaf foliage could be considered “trim”, including the plant’s larger, low-potency fan leaves. Generally speaking, however, when talking about trim, we’re referring to the smaller fan leaves and sugar leaves found closer to the buds that get removed during the trimming process.

Sugar leaves make for the best trim. They’re visibly trichome-rich and frosty with cannabinoids. Some hand trimmers prefer to leave the sugar leaves untouched because they slow the drying of wispy flower and give the final product a robust, natural taste. Most consumers, however, find that sugar leaves are harsh on the palette when smoked alone.

Big fan leaves don’t have much THC or CBD, which means they’re generally not viable for commercial extraction. However, they aren’t worthless either: fan leaves are found to be medicinal and have nutritional value.

Each fan leaf contains a full spectrum of terpenes, flavonoids, phytonutrients, and modest amounts of major and minor cannabinoids. With that in mind, some cannabis consumers enjoy adding raw cannabis fan leaves to their salads or smoothies.

Sugar leaves are great for different extraction methods. For a solvent-based extract, soak the trim in ethanol to make a tincture or heat the leaves in an oil-based matrix to release the cannabinoids (which are not psychoactive until heated to about 240℉ for decarboxylation).

Another simple approach to trim optimization — if you’re producing edibles — is rosin production. If your cultivar has potent sugar leaves, you may be able to press them without any other preparation. A quality rosin press that’s capable of high pressures can press trim into an extract that’s perfect for smoking or edible and topical formulations.

Cannabis Trimming for Quality Results

If you’re using an industrial cannabis and hemp trimmer, how you remove the fan leaves before trimming will determine the quality of your trimmed material.

With fewer fan leaves going through the trimmer, processors increase the ratio of sugar leaves to fan leaves in the final trim. Having more sugar leaves leads to a higher-quality trim.

The closeness of your trim matters too. If you’re trimming close to the bud, you’re removing more of the trichome-rich sugar leaves and maybe even some pistils. Trimming cannabis is a balance: you don’t want to trim too tight to damage the flower, but trimming close helps to increase trim potency.

Some trimmers use a vacuum system to pull trimmed material through the tumbler. However, this design degrades the quality of the trim by battering the trichomes against the surfaces of the catchment enclosure and fan system. Fans also increase the necessary cleaning time after processing.

With a wide variety of commercial trimmers to choose from, it’s important to look for those that will retain the most trichomes allowing for the most potent results with your buds and trim. Triminator makes a variety of trimmers for cultivators working on a commercial scale.

All Triminator Dry trimmers operate without fans. With fewer moving parts, our machines have quicker and easier cleaning and maintenance, fewer potential problems, and also produce higher-quality trim.

The design of the Triminator’s cutting band eliminates the need for suction required by other trimmer models. This is in part because the nylon band lowers friction and heat, preventing the sticky build-up of trichomes on the cutting surface. With Triminator Trimmers, you can expect the same production capacity as a vacuum-fan trimmer, but without the complexity, noise, or beat-up trim.

Increasing Profitability: Kief Tumblers

The leaves and trim that result from trimming your buds have tremendous profit potential. By processing them further, you open avenues for expanding your product lines and attracting more customers. One such use of the leaves and trim is to maximize the amount of trichomes you can get from each harvest.

Collecting trichomes, otherwise known as pollen or kief, from cannabis leaves dramatically increases your harvests’ value by opening doors for further processing opportunities. Kief can be collected by agitating the trim across a mesh screen or in a mesh tumbling drum. 

Kief tumbling is a perfect use for trim and leftover leaves. At Triminator, we designed Kief Tumbler Kits that work seamlessly with our Dry Trimmer models. The standard trimming drum easily swaps out for the kief drum in seconds for reduced downtime. 

With the kief drum in place, you can tumble your trim dry or add dry ice to speed up the detachment process. The collected kief drops freely into a catchment tray for easy removal.

The Triminator Dry trimmers are particularly good for collecting kief because of their fan-less design. With a fan system trimmer, kief conversion creates a messy cyclone of sticky pollen that increases cleaning time, and it sacrifices high-value kief that sticks to the surfaces of the fan and ducting.

Without the fan, the Triminator Kief Kit can produce better quality kief because it treats the trichomes more gently. There’s less cleanup, more kief, and fewer mechanical subsystems that could fail.

Making Bubble Hash with Trim

Another favorite option for utilizing trim and leftover leaves is to make bubble hash. It’s simple, easy, and the results can be highly potent and profitable. Similar to kief tumbling, the purpose of creating bubble hash is to separate more trichomes from the plant material, allowing for an expanded product line, greater customer reach, and more profits.

A bubble hash system can be as minimal as a bucket, some ice water, and an egg beater, or as massive as the latest commercial hash washers.

The ice water expedites trichome detachment, and a series of mesh screens let the trichomes pass through as the trim is agitated by stirring. The material passes through various screens, with the micron size starting large and getting progressively smaller with each pass.

Using the different micron screens allows for the purest material. When you remove the screens from the water, what’s left is high-purity concentrate ready for sale or further processing for products like rosin.

Making Extracts from Trim and Leaves

While a kief tumbler or bubble hash system are great ways to separate the trichomes from leftover leaves and trim, they are not the only ways to make the most of all parts of your harvest. 

Using Triminator’s commercial trimmers results in high-quality and potent trim and leaves. When the starting material for extraction has greater potency, the process will run quicker, use fewer materials, and result in a higher-purity product. This trim can be used in various solventless or solvent-based extraction techniques to create highly potent shatter, wax, or oil.

Extracts can also be made from kief. By first tumbling your trim in a commercial kief tumbler, you’ll efficiently collect a volume of kief, which can then be pressed into rosin, or further processed.

Whether you’re extracting solventless, or with hydrocarbons or CO2, potent trim and leaves that have been carefully removed with a high-quality trimmer will yield a higher-purity product.

Triminator Dry Trimmer Series

Triminator Kief Kits