Sugars in Marijuana Plants
We might think of sugar as an ingredient that we add to food, or as the reason fruits and some vegetables taste sweet. But did you know that sugars are actually a kind of carbohydrate? Carbohydrates as a group are one of four major classes of biomolecules. Biomolecules are the building blocks of all our cells, and the cells of most of the living creatures around us, including plants. That means sugars are as essential to living creatures as proteins, amino acids, and nucleic acid. Carbohydrates, and by extension sugars, are all made of different configurations of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms. They have a general chemical formula of CnH2nOn, where n is any number between seven and three, and there are usually twice as many hydrogen atoms as there are oxygens. Biologically speaking, sugars are simple carbohydrate molecules that can be used by living creatures as a source of energy. In plants, they can also be stored and used to create new growth, usually in the form of more complex carbohydrates. Sugars in marijuana plants are produced as a result of photosynthesis. They go towards creating new tissues in the plant. That includes leaves, stems, roots, stalks, buds, trichomes, and terpenes. It’s possible to measure the health of your plants by observing how vigorous its photosynthetic processes are. This is called measuring the brix level, and it measures the density of sugars when the juices of the plant are suspended in water. It sounds much more complicated than it is in practice.
The Production Of Sugars In Cannabis Plants
The production of sugars in cannabis plants is a byproduct of photosynthesis. This process takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, H2O water molecules, and energy from the sun and uses the energy to recombine the atoms of the water and carbon dioxide. From H2O water and CO2 carbon dioxide, plants make CH2O, a simple sugar. Sugars can have a number of different carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms to create more complicated chains that are technically starches or glucoses. Glucoses are used to make the cell walls of plant cells, which house the chlorophyll that powers photosynthesis to begin with. The production of sugars in cannabis plants is a circular system that ensures plant health. The most common place for plants to be producing sugars is in their large fan leaves, since this is where most of the deep green, sun-absorbing chlorophyll is in the plant. The job of a leaf is to be exposed to the light in order for chlorophyll to soak it up and power the process of swapping atoms of carbon dioxide and water. This sugar creation produces more plant cells, which in turn produces more plant tissue, which has more chlorophyll in it, which powers the growth of the plant. It’s a lovely cycle. Sugars are produced by larger leaves and then sent all over the plant in different amounts, to help them extend their tissues and repair damaged ones. How much sugar any given plant can produce is dependent on the size and ability of those large fan leaves.
Distribution Of Sugars Within Marijuana Plants
So, we’ve established that fan leaves are who make the most sugars, but how does the plant know where to put them? The distribution of sugars within marijuana plants has a fixed ratio that’s determined by what’s called the sink strength of different parts of the plant. Vascular tissues of the plant, primarily the phloem as opposed to the xylem, moves the sugars in the form of sap. Sap is a combination of sugars, water, plant hormone messengers, and other building blocks like amino acids and minerals. Buds and young leaves have a high sink strength, meaning they create a large amount of suction that will move sugars up to them through the phloem as the plant takes in water. Large fan leaves, because of their larger photosynthesis capacity and established tissues that usually don’t require energy for new growth, create more sugars than they need, and these are sent to buds and shoots. The proportion of flow of sugars from one part of a plant to another is largely unaffected by any of the external inputs used to grow cannabis like light, heat, water, carbon dioxide, or nutrients. The only thing you can do to make your plant send more sugars to your buds is to grow a larger plant that produces more sugars overall. During the flowering phase, more than sixty percent of all sugars produced are going to the flowers to help them develop. Young leaves also need a lot of sugars, and most of the rest of them tend to go there.
Assist Distribution Of Sugars Within Cannabis Plants
Buds already have sink strength that’s three times that of their young leaf and stem counterparts. You can think of this as a three to one ratio between how much sugar buds and new shoots receive due to their different sink strengths. So, does that mean that if you cut off some of the leaves, your buds will get more sugars? The answer is maybe. Some folks believe that it’s possible to clip young leaves or buds that aren’t doing so well, so that sugars go to healthy buds instead. This is the logic behind trimming so-called sugar leaves before the plant is harvested. These smaller bits of foliage, often found sticking out of buds and covered in trichomes, are called sugar leaves because of their dusting of trichomes. Most folks also believe that these sugar leaves can negatively affect the taste of your crop. It’s safer and more logical to trim these sugar leaves when looking to assist the distribution of sugars within your cannabis plants, rather than cutting off fan leaves that produce sugars. But keep in mind that, regardless of how much sugar there is available to the plant overall, buds will always continue to get three times as much sugar as these young leaves, and that ratio won’t change. However, if there are fewer young shoots and leaves, but the same amount of sugars to go around, all parts of the plant that act as sugar sinks will get more sugar, since there will be fewer sinks to distribute the available sugars between.
