Over the past three months, as your beautiful plants grew, you met their every need while battling the temptation to harvest prematurely. The workload is heavy and your patience is running out. Your trichomes have finally turned creamy white and turned amber; it’s time to harvest. what to do? It’s time to let the best bud trimmer shape your plants perfectly.

Do you need a secondary pruner, depending on how many plants you have to deal with? If you only have 2 to 4 plants, you can feel free to hand trim them. I highly recommend pruning wet rather than dry. Dry pruning is more difficult, especially by hand, and more trichomes may be lost when dealing with dry plant material. In order to scale up your plantings, you need to introduce automatic bud trimmers to obtain the highest quality results while reducing the man hours required to trim buds.

What materials do I need to trim?

You don’t actually need any materials to trim. You can even use your own fingers to remove the excess leaves and plant material but using the following will minimize errors and cross-contamination. For properly trimming you will need:

Shears for cutting branches
It is best to use a separate pair of scissors (or shears) to cut down branches and not the same one that you’re going to use to trim your buds.

Some branches are really tough and can destroy a small pair of scissors. You want your trimming scissors to be sharp.

Disposable gloves to protect trichomes and avoid contamination
Disposable rubber gloves are needed for two things. First, you have to protect trichomes on the buds from the contaminants on your hand.

Using disposable gloves while trimming will help to protect trichomes and avoid contamination.
 
Second, handling your bud without gloves will make your hand sticky, this can become a problem and the resin is hard to remove.

Manicure scissors for trimming buds with precision
If you’re going to invest in scissors to prune your buds, look for trimming shears. They’re not expensive. The extra sharpness and precision will end up saving you time and avoid errors, leaving your buds looking way better.

A clean bucket or tray to catch the trimmed leaves

ECO Farm 18inch Table Automatic Leaf Trimmer Machine

Features:

This ECO Farm Bud Trimmer is a great device for trimming and shaping flowers, buds and spices. This powerful trimmer features a maintenance-free motor and sharp stainless steel (3) blades. Automatic output when finished, it comes with a clean and environmentally friendly tote bag; No litter left behind. It trims excess leaves and stems quickly, efficiently and preciously. Easily foldable design for easy transport or storage. And the speed of this bud trimmer is adjustable. High-speed blades and fans trim spin, fluff, and ultimately eject trimmed plants.

Pro-Cut P2X Leaf Trimmer

Features:

Pro-Cut P2X is an easy to use trimmer that provides you with the benefit of trimming through all of your plants that need trimming. The Pro-Cut P2X leaf trimming machine can trim yields in minutes. With this leaf trimmer separating excess leaves and twigs from a mess of plants and flowers becomes easy. So you don’t have to worry about sorting things here. Alongside, the Pro-Cut P2X garden machine can also trim plants and small bushes like oregano, basil, rosemary, mint, lavender, coriander and parsley. Once the leaves are trimmed, you can then use it for multiple purposes. And the best part: it works quietly which means no more headaches!

WET TRIMMING VS DRY TRIMMING

Although there is an accepted best time to harvest plants, the best time to trim and manicure your plant is debated among growers. There are two ways to manicure them: wet trimming, and dry trimming. Some prefer wet trimming while others prefer dry trimming. Both are correct in certain circumstances, it all depends on things like time and the environment of the curing process, so it’s up to you do decide which one will work best.

WET TRIMMING
Trimming your plants before drying is known as a “wet trim” because the leaves are still wet during the trimming process. This method is arguably the most preferred method for several reasons. Wet trimming gives you better access to your buds, the small leaves will be out due to their moisture content, making their removal an easy process.

Trimming this way will also result in faster drying because the extra plant material will be trimmed off.
 
Drying buds extremely fast will leave them smelling like hay. Even though they will dry faster, you should not accelerate the process even more (e.g. by applying heat or fans facing directly onto the buds).

Wet trimming is better when:

Your relative humidity is above 60%, and removing the excess plant material before drying prevents mold.
You have a small drying space, removing the excess plant material will let you fit more buds in the same space.
You want buds to dry more quickly, trimming leaves before drying will remove the excess moisture.

DRY TRIMMING
Dry trimming occurs after the drying process, this process can take 10–15 days, in this period buds will lose most of their moisture. Many growers prefer dry timing because it tends to be easier and less messy. Wet trimming can leave your hands and shears covered in resin very quickly, you will need a lot of cleaning breaks before finishing.

Either way, both methods work well and you should decide which one you prefer by experimenting and seeing whats is better in your situation.
 
Dry trimming is better when:

You’re not worried about mold.
Your relative humidity levels are below 45%.
You want buds to dry more slowly (drying buds too fast may cause them to smell like hay).

Conclusion

Are you interested in wet pruning? Don’t let anyone tell you what you’re doing wrong.

There are several good reasons to get your produce wet. Maybe the humidity has increased in your area and you’re concerned about mold. Maybe you just need to speed up the process and get your harvest shipped out the door (and with cash on hand).

Either your harvest is simply too much, or you know your buds are destined to be processed into concentrate anyway.

No matter which method you choose, your ideal bud trimmer is likely to be included on this list.

Happy pruning!