Chef De Green Does It All: Reveg, Clones, Autos & Photos

What's making all those leaves canoe like that, Chef?
She’s too close to the light in the middle.. her outer leaves look good. You can tell cause there are a few foxtails going on too... and temps have been in the low 70s. Id lower her down off her stilts, but we might have something catastrophic happen if I try to move her, then I’d have to harvest earlier than I want. I’m just gonna leave her be... I take solace in the fact that her lowers are getting very good light.
 
I decided to just move this to my journal.

I’ve been looking around at our sponsor seed banks, and I’m thinking to myself, “what do I even want more seeds for. What effect am I chasing?” I realized, I need to figure out what kinds of effects I’m potentially holding. So I’m gonna start digging into terpenes.

Terpenes are what drive the high of cannabis flower. The ratios and families of terpenes are what make each strain have different effects. Each strain is a different combination of specific terpenes, but in general the terpenes found in cannabis fall into 4 categories; floral, fruity, earthy, and gas.

I’d like to catalogue my personal seed collection so I can have a clear idea of where my stock falls terpene wise. Once I understand the potential terpene profile of most of my stock, I’ll have a clearer idea of how different the seeds that I buy are. I need to know this so when I buy seeds I’m truly, genetically differentiating the experience of the flowers I’ll produce. The more kinds of different bud I grow, the more I understand the nuances of cannabis flower... unfortunately, I do not have the money to send samples for analysis, or I would. Ultimately, my goal is not only to be the best cultivator/gardener that I can be, but also the best connoisseur of cannabis that I can be.



Gardening with this in mind will help us all expand our exposure to a variety of terpenes. I believe viewing the material we grow in this light will allow us to be more educated cultivators, and will help us in relating to the grow journals of our peers. The more we think strain equals terpene profile the more easily we can lead new growers to strains that might suit their fancy, have a better understand of the tastes of our peers, and more effectively help the people who suffer.


I have to acknowledge the fact that aroma and effect are subjective. We don’t all feel the effects the same way, and that’s the truth. we don’t all analyze what we’re feeling or smelling the same. Bias often comes into play. It’s a challenge that we face using the experience of others. This is where comparison comes in. When you have something very different to compare a particularly complex smell/effect to, it makes things easier.



I’m going to post, as well as I can, the terpenes related to the strains I’m growing. I will eventually do all of the seeds I have.

Hey, sorry to quote you from over a year ago but I'd like to ask by what basis do you even think terpenes play a role in the psychological effects of cannabis? I've done a lot of research, and mixed my own terpene blends with distillate, doing dips of different terpenes, and apart from the immediate taste & aromatic based responses there is little to no different in the THC distillate high, with the exception of cannabis derived terpenes that contain mystery cannabinoids.

I would never make a claim against the entourage effect, merely that besides the illusionary differences caused by the taste and fragrance of different terpenes, the real non perceptual psychological effects differ due to the unknown cannabinoids that modern chromatography lacks the capacity to differentiate.

Anyways, I'd like to challenge you to back your belief about terpenes up with science, if you can find anything at all that supports it i'd love to be put in my place.
 
Not to step on toes @ChefDGreen but I would like to weigh in on this.

First @HowToWeed, modern science does have the technology to differentiate between various Cannabinoids and Terpenes and has had for decades. When I studied organic chemistry over 20 years ago, the old HPLC we had could tell you every known compound in a sample. Just want to be clear, we have the technology.

The problem lies in the fact that until the last decade or so, the only serious research on cannabis was done by the Israelis as it was illegal to research everywhere else in the world.

Having said that, research has gone leaps and bounds in recent years and we can now identify well over a hundred cannabinoids with new ones being discovered quite regularly.

As for the entourage effect, again, until recent years, little to no research was being done to support what users were claiming, but there IS research published now that supports the claims.

Here is an excerpt I pulled from another site talking of one such paper


In 2011, Russo published a research study entitled “Taming THC: Potential Cannabis Synergy and Phytocannabinoid-terpenoid Entourage Effects” in the British Journal of Pharmacology. He and his team studied the terpenes a-pinene, b-caryophyllene, caryophyllene oxide, limonene, linalool, myrcene, nerolidol, and phytol.

In his pinnacle study, Russo explains how cannabinoids and terpenes intermingle in the human body to modify the effects of one another and, in essence, create an overall different, or “greater,” efficacy based on the exact molecules present and, of equal importance, the ratios in which they appear.

Examples of this intricate mechanism revealed by the study include myrcene’s ability to reduce the selectivity of the blood-brain barrier, allowing molecules like THC and CBD to pass this biological filter more easily and in greater quantities. While myrcene illustrates how a terpene can amplify, or boost, a cannabinoid, the terpene pinene has been shown to buffer THC by reducing the cognition and memory impairment that sometimes accompanies the infamous psychoactive molecule.

Russo’s research also demonstrated that a combination of caryophyllene, myrcene, and pinene is helpful for reducing and treating anxiety (more than 100 million Americans suffer from the most common form, social anxiety).”

If you search the name of the paper, I am sure you can find it if you are interested, I just won’t link it here as per forum policy.
 
Not to step on toes @ChefDGreen but I would like to weigh in on this.

First @HowToWeed, modern science does have the technology to differentiate between various Cannabinoids and Terpenes and has had for decades. When I studied organic chemistry over 20 years ago, the old HPLC we had could tell you every known compound in a sample. Just want to be clear, we have the technology.

The problem lies in the fact that until the last decade or so, the only serious research on cannabis was done by the Israelis as it was illegal to research everywhere else in the world.

Having said that, research has gone leaps and bounds in recent years and we can now identify well over a hundred cannabinoids with new ones being discovered quite regularly.

As for the entourage effect, again, until recent years, little to no research was being done to support what users were claiming, but there IS research published now that supports the claims.

Here is an excerpt I pulled from another site talking of one such paper


In 2011, Russo published a research study entitled “Taming THC: Potential Cannabis Synergy and Phytocannabinoid-terpenoid Entourage Effects” in the British Journal of Pharmacology. He and his team studied the terpenes a-pinene, b-caryophyllene, caryophyllene oxide, limonene, linalool, myrcene, nerolidol, and phytol.

In his pinnacle study, Russo explains how cannabinoids and terpenes intermingle in the human body to modify the effects of one another and, in essence, create an overall different, or “greater,” efficacy based on the exact molecules present and, of equal importance, the ratios in which they appear.

Examples of this intricate mechanism revealed by the study include myrcene’s ability to reduce the selectivity of the blood-brain barrier, allowing molecules like THC and CBD to pass this biological filter more easily and in greater quantities. While myrcene illustrates how a terpene can amplify, or boost, a cannabinoid, the terpene pinene has been shown to buffer THC by reducing the cognition and memory impairment that sometimes accompanies the infamous psychoactive molecule.

Russo’s research also demonstrated that a combination of caryophyllene, myrcene, and pinene is helpful for reducing and treating anxiety (more than 100 million Americans suffer from the most common form, social anxiety).”

If you search the name of the paper, I am sure you can find it if you are interested, I just won’t link it here as per forum policy.

I'm not 100% sure if this is the exact study i'm recalling but i believe the mice were fed the terpenes as part of there diet in pretty considerable dosages. I don't think this study equates to the claim that terpenes are the dictating factor controlling the real differences between strains. I don't think the study aims to test for that either because it's pretty well established that terpenes don't have psychological effects. They may have some physiological effects when consumed orally, but not psychological and that's what the entourage effect in my mind is referring to.

I shouldn't have said that modern chromatography can't do it, but the lab services that i have access to certainly don't give me the option to test for them. THCP for example, like you said the israeli's are the leaders in this field and it's being done, but I'm still not sold on terpenes being what the goal should be.

I've been going around making this claim not knowing 100% if it's true but;
Terpenes and cannabinoid synthases are in competition for the building blocks that compose them (FPP & GPP)
Terpenes and cannabinoids are in competition for space within the trichome head, hypothetically you're not going to get a 30% thc 30% cbd strain because you can't fit that much shit in a trichome. The same theory should apply to it;'s terpene profile.

I genuinely feel there's a bit of causation vs correlation happening here. Different strains that have different cannabinoid profiles also have different terpene profiles. You can easily identify the terpenes by smell or taste, not the cannabinoids.
I just feel it's cheap and lazy to say that terpenes are the cause when we know they're not psychologically active, when there are cannabinoids present that are psychologically active that we're not even measuring outside of a lab in isreal.

I think it's also worthy of note that the terpenes that do have well documented physiological properties like myrcene and b-caryophyllene are present in almost all cannabis strains and therefore gives little reason to believe that they're dictating factors in the differences observed between strains.
 
I just feel it's cheap and lazy to say that terpenes are the cause when we know they're not psychologically active, when there are cannabinoids present that are psychologically active that we're not even measuring outside of a lab in isreal.

I think it's also worthy of note that the terpenes that do have well documented physiological properties like myrcene and b-caryophyllene are present in almost all cannabis strains and therefore gives little reason to believe that they're dictating factors in the differences observed between strains.

First, and I may be wrong, but I think you may have a misunderstanding of what terpenes actually are. THC actually belongs to a special class of aromatic terpenes that science has labelled Cannabinoids as Cannabis is the only species in which they occur in great quantity. The ”common” terpenes like myrcene, caryohyllene, linalool, etc are common in all plants and are named according to the plants they were most prevalent in such as pinene being named for pine species where it is found in great quantities.

This is how anecdotal evidence lead to scientific research into the “entourage effect”, things like people claiming that eating a mango (high in mycrene) gave them a more intense high, or that smelling pepper calmed anxiety.

It also explains why the effects of Hashish are different than those of bud, even if the hash was made from the same bud. Just an example. If your theory from the 1st post were true, THC being the most prevalent cannabinoid, should be the prime dictating factor in the quality and intensity of the high. I can tell you from experience that hash and the bud it came from are very different in their effects.

By this reasoning, if I smoke 1g of the Pineapple Chunk I recently harvested, say @ 18% THC, that’s 180mg of THC in the joint. Now if i smoke .25g of hash, made from the same plant, roughly 80% THC, that would be 200mg THC. Pretty comparable THC ingestion, the effects should be similar and yet they are vastly different, something other than THC must be responsible.

I think you may be missing the concept of the entourage effect, in that, its not that the terpenes are psychoactive in themselves, but that they change the way cannabinoids are absorbed and processed within our bodies and thereby change the effects we feel. The scientific community refers to this as modulation. They “modify” the effects.

Terpenes and cannabinoids are in competition for space within the trichome head, hypothetically you're not going to get a 30% thc 30% cbd strain because you can't fit that much shit in a trichome. The same theory should apply to it;'s terpene profile

Now this part, I agree we are not likely to see this, but not for the reason you are thinking. To get a strain that is 60% Cannabinoids, that only leaves 40% for green matter in the bud, it would be more trichome heads than green matter, not likely to happen as the green matter supports the resin heads.

I am not sure where you were going with the bit about competing for building blocks, as that really didn’t fit in with the entourage effect. Cannabis is genetically hard wired to be dominant in either THC or CBD. Until some research suggests that some other cannabinoid could be profitable, and some company like Monsanto decides to genetically engineer a strain to produce more of that Cannabinoid, this won’t change.

If you have an understanding of chemistry and biology, do a search for Cannabinoid Synthesis and Pathways. Although they all contain Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen, it’s the arrangement of these building blocks that differentiates between them. Some Cannabinoids are precursors for others and follow the same pathway to that point, others follow a different pathway.

Hopefully this helps in your understanding of the research into the entourage effect.
 
Whew! I smoked so much weed trying to understand these posts that I think I permanently modulated my entourage! :Rasta:
 
alright well, it’s high time I weigh in. First of all, thank you @The Celt. You’ve helped shed some light on this in a way that definitely could not.

@HowToWeed first of all, I’ll be surprised if we ever approximate the affect of any particular cultivar with distillate. There’s just too many variables that contribute to the cannabinoid/terpene cocktail inside the trichomes of cannabis.. and as you said, there are minor cannabinoids that play a part. It’s possible that the minor cannabinoids are produced within the plant with an indicator terpene... whether the terpenes are biproducts produced as a result of the precursors left from the synthesis of minor cannabinoids, or if they’re produced completely independently, we can get some idea of the effect of the cannabis based on scent it gives off. Whether that entourage effect is due to the minor cannabinoids or the terpenes has no bearing on what I’m trying to do.

Now, I typically don’t have the time (or desire) to pour over peer reviewed journals and studies. So I listen to the professionals who have been growing since the 70s and are now leaders in the legal industry. When someone like Kevin Jodrey says that gas/fuel smelling strains produce an aggressive, cerebral high you can pretty much take that to the bank(I’ve also found that to be the case in my own smoking/growing).

You might think it’s cheap and lazy to say that smells and terpenes produce a particular high. The fact is, whether the high produces the aroma, or the aromatics produce the high, it doesn’t make a difference for my purposes. They’re still undeniably linked, so aroma is a good indicator.... and I’m trying to write in a way that is easy to digest for all.
 
alright well, it’s high time I weigh in. First of all, thank you @The Celt. You’ve helped shed some light on this in a way that definitely could not.

@HowToWeed first of all, I’ll be surprised if we ever approximate the affect of any particular cultivar with distillate. There’s just too many variables that contribute to the cannabinoid/terpene cocktail inside the trichomes of cannabis.. and as you said, there are minor cannabinoids that play a part. It’s possible that the minor cannabinoids are produced within the plant with an indicator terpene... whether the terpenes are biproducts produced as a result of the precursors left from the synthesis of minor cannabinoids, or if they’re produced completely independently, we can get some idea of the effect of the cannabis based on scent it gives off. Whether that entourage effect is due to the minor cannabinoids or the terpenes has no bearing on what I’m trying to do.

Now, I typically don’t have the time (or desire) to pour over peer reviewed journals and studies. So I listen to the professionals who have been growing since the 70s and are now leaders in the legal industry. When someone like Kevin Jodrey says that gas/fuel smelling strains produce an aggressive, cerebral high you can pretty much take that to the bank(I’ve also found that to be the case in my own smoking/growing).

You might think it’s cheap and lazy to say that smells and terpenes produce a particular high. The fact is, whether the high produces the aroma, or the aromatics produce the high, it doesn’t make a difference for my purposes. They’re still undeniably linked, so aroma is a good indicator.... and I’m trying to write in a way that is easy to digest for all.

I think you really captured the possibility that I'm focused on, that there are links between certain terpenes and certain minor cannabinoid synthases. Whether it be the byproducts, or some sort of mutual stabilizing factor.

You're right that for any grower right now outside massive Monsanto esque coorperations and these labs in isreal, working with the terpenes is the best the majority of us can do with the resources we have, but being able to work with the minor cannabinoids directly in a breeding sense would produce much more differentiating buds.

I don't think there's reason to believe that Cannabis is inherantly high in CBD/THC. I believe it's that way because we've selected for it, and i think that in the future we'll be selecting for things like THCP instead of selecting for the terpenes that correlate with it simply because we lack to the capacity to do more.

Edit: THC is not a precursor to THCP
 
It also explains why the effects of Hashish are different than those of bud, even if the hash was made from the same bud. Just an example. If your theory from the 1st post were true, THC being the most prevalent cannabinoid, should be the prime dictating factor in the quality and intensity of the high. I can tell you from experience that hash and the bud it came from are very different in their effects.

By this reasoning, if I smoke 1g of the Pineapple Chunk I recently harvested, say @ 18% THC, that’s 180mg of THC in the joint. Now if i smoke .25g of hash, made from the same plant, roughly 80% THC, that would be 200mg THC. Pretty comparable THC ingestion, the effects should be similar and yet they are vastly different, something other than THC must be responsible.

I think you may be missing the concept of the entourage effect, in that, its not that the terpenes are psychoactive in themselves, but that they change the way cannabinoids are absorbed and processed within our bodies and thereby change the effects we feel. The scientific community refers to this as modulation. They “modify” the effects.



Now this part, I agree we are not likely to see this, but not for the reason you are thinking. To get a strain that is 60% Cannabinoids, that only leaves 40% for green matter in the bud, it would be more trichome heads than green matter, not likely to happen as the green matter supports the resin heads.

I am not sure where you were going with the bit about competing for building blocks, as that really didn’t fit in with the entourage effect. Cannabis is genetically hard wired to be dominant in either THC or CBD. Until some research suggests that some other cannabinoid could be profitable, and some company like Monsanto decides to genetically engineer a strain to produce more of that Cannabinoid, this won’t change.


Hopefully this helps in your understanding of the research into the entourage effect.

The main reason i mentioned that is because in any cultivar your terpene profile is going to be a genetic bottleneck to it's cannabinoid profile because they share the same building blocks, and competition for space. Every mono and sesquiterpene contained within a trichome is in theory space and resources that a minor cannabinoid could have encompassed.

Now I know with certainty the cannabinoid profile is the dictating factor of the entourage effect, that's pretty well unarguable in my mind. What's hard for me is to justify that Terpenes deserve the space they encompass, when weighing the possiblity of their role against the established role of more important components.

I mean, I just feel this is wort discussion. People have a firm belief about terpenes that isn't based in science, not to imply that either of you have said anything that isn't sound. I can't deny the physiological role terpenes can play when consumed, the "modulation", but I think that entourage effect as a phenonmena, isn't due to the terpenes, but the cannabinoid profiles. Not just because of the terpene distilate dips that i've done, but because the more i've tried to research it the more apparent it becomes that the hype about terpenes is ill placed.

Just consider the possibility that the terpenes are 5% of what makes the difference between strains , and that's if they're in your system when you get high. Just consider that terpenes aren't neccesary when forming an argument for the entourage effect and difference between strains, and that trying to attribute phychological differences to the physiological changes they modulate is redundant because what's causing 95% of those differences is the components that are phychologically active and bind with the CB1/CB2 receptors.
 
So? I mean really, what does all this matter to the typical grower of weeds? I am perfectly content to let the genetics geeks work on adjusting the thc/cbd ratios and all I care about is whether it has a good taste. If they tell me it tastes like girl scout cookies, and it does... I am happy. Why do I care why it does what it does? I mean, this is interesting and all, but was it really worth all this to invade someone's grow journal with challenges to his thoughts from a year ago, like 2 days upon joining the forum? If you were looking to make a mark, you did. :rolleyes:
 
So? I mean really, what does all this matter to the typical grower of weeds? I am perfectly content to let the genetics geeks work on adjusting the thc/cbd ratios and all I care about is whether it has a good taste. If they tell me it tastes like girl scout cookies, and it does... I am happy. Why do I care why it does what it does? I mean, this is interesting and all, but was it really worth all this to invade someone's grow journal with challenges to his thoughts from a year ago, like 2 days upon joining the forum? If you were looking to make a mark, you did. :rolleyes:

I mean, yeah. You're right. I'm sorry for ruining everyone's modulation.

Sorry @ChefDGreen
 
Back
Top Bottom