Zero-Waste Harvest: How to Use Every Part of Your Cannabis Plant

You can use almost every part of a cannabis plant after harvest: trim and popcorn buds go into extracts, edibles, tinctures and topicals, while fan leaves and stalks can feed your compost pile or even become homemade paper. Growing your own weed is rewarding, calming and a great way to learn, and after months of water, power and planning, you want every bit of it to count. No matter how you grow, though, you'll always end up with leftovers.

If you grow, you know the drill: harvest after harvest, the scraps pile up. Tiny buds that fall off, small sugar leaves loaded with trichomes from trimming, the dust at the bottom of your curing jars, and the odd bud you just didn't love.

So here's what you can do with all that material so no part of the plant goes to waste.

What to Do With Leftover Weed After Harvest

Getting real use out of harvest scraps can sound like a stretch. But there are plenty of ways to put those little buds, stalks, flowers and everything else to work, and each one lets you enjoy the plant in its own way.

Turn Trim and Popcorn Buds Into Extracts

Staring at a pile of resin-coated trim and small buds and thinking about tossing it? Don't. Turn it into an extract and keep getting the most out of your harvest.

There are countless ways to make concentrates from cannabis's active compounds. Which one makes sense depends on the material you've got, the quality and quantity you're after, how much money you want to spend, and so on. Weigh those factors, then pick your method.

Types of Extraction You Can Make From Harvest Leftovers

Broadly speaking, extractions fall into two main camps: solventless and solvent-based.

Solventless extraction

Solventless extraction doesn't use any substance to dissolve and carry off the resin. Everything happens mechanically. Within this family you'll find a few techniques:

Dry sift: the old-school method. You separate the trichomes from the plant material without any solvent, purely by mechanical action. All you need is buds, a mesh screen and some agitation to knock the trichomes loose.

Ice water extraction: this one uses water and ice and is less traditional and less widely known than dry sifting. The cold makes the trichomes brittle so they snap off, and agitation separates them from the leaves and buds.

Solvent-based extraction

Solvent-based extractions use a substance, such as alcohol or butane, to pull the contents out of the trichomes.

Cook With It: Edibles From Trim

When it comes to making edibles, where flower, little buds and other leftovers all work, it's easy to see why so many people like them: they're one of the gentlest ways on your lungs to consume weed, and also one of the most potent.

Anything you eat that's made with cannabis takes longer to kick in, roughly 30 to 60 minutes or more. But when it hits, it hits harder than you'd expect, often stronger than smoking or vaping.

That said, if you want edibles with that signature, head-spinning punch, you'll need to decarboxylate (decarb) the weed or extract first, meaning heat it to activate the THC. When you smoke or vape, the heat takes care of decarboxylation for you.

Trim and small buds are perfectly fine for making edibles.

Make Tinctures and Topicals

Beyond the usual extractions, your harvest can also become tinctures and cannabis skincare.

You can make infusions (tinctures or serums), using flower and/or extracts. You can also infuse olive oil or coconut oil as a base, and from there make all kinds of creams that many people use for joint pain and chronic aches.

Compost Your Fan Leaves

If cooking with weed isn't your thing, there's another option: toss the leaves into your home compost and recycle their nutrients into your next grow. That's a smart answer to what to do with cannabis leaves, and it cuts down on chemical fertilizers. Leaves, spent flower, branches and the rest can all go in, so instead of creating trash, you're turning scraps into a source of new life.

And once you start composting, you'll see it's the easiest path to an organic grow. The best part is watching nature hand you excellent soil for your next round of cannabis.

Make Paper From Cannabis Stalks

It's a bit of work and a little fiddly, but you can turn cannabis branches and stalks into paper and help take some pressure off the world's trees. All you need is a blender and a piece of window screen stapled to a wooden frame, which gives you a flat surface to strain the stalk pulp.

These are just some of the many uses for a cannabis plant. As you can see, it's a remarkably versatile crop: you can get value out of every part of it, even the stuff that looks like waste. Where else are you going to find a plant like that? Not many places, so make the most of everything it gives you and experiment with all the possibilities it opens up.