Even for the most well-read flower consumers, walking into a shop and seeing 50 different brands with 50 different ways of labeling flower can be overwhelming!
We often rely on the knowledge of our budtenders to help us differentiate between the different brands and grow types and to justify the prices, especially with that heavy ~30% or higher tax! But when our budtenders are new to cannabis or haven’t read up on the newest trend that’s entered their shop, that’s when we can fall victim to clever marketing terms designed to up the price of your flower.
Enter Light Dep and Mixed Light flower. These are some new(ish) terms you might be hearing as you look at different products, and you may have gotten confusing or somewhat contradictory answers about each to justify higher prices. The first confusing answer being that they are the same thing.
They are not the same thing, and one of them doesn’t actually have much to do with your experience at all. So let’s go through these two terms, what they mean, and whether it should affect your prices.
Light Dep – the practice of depriving the plant of light for hours at a time during its growth.
A cannabis plant grown outdoors or in greenhouses may take up to 8 months to grow and produce ready-to-harvest flowers, which is really not helpful for cultivators who need to supply customers year-round. So, they trick the plants a little!
When they purposely shorten the amount of time the plants spend in light, cultivators are simulating the weeks in winter when the days are getting shorter. For most plants, this is a natural signal to start producing flowers so that they may drop their seeds into the ground before the conditions are less favorable. When cultivators do this in a greenhouse, the plants act as if “winter is coming” (hello GOT fans) and put their energy into producing flowers ahead of time so that they can be harvested once every 3-4 months rather than once a year.
So what does this mean for you? It means that your favorite outdoor or greenhouse producer has a way of keeping you stocked year-round, which is sick, but not that the bud is any better itself! While a little labor and sometimes equipment are needed to achieve this, it shouldn’t lead to an extra $10 on your bud with the idea that it’s some dank new format.
Mixed Light – the process of alternating between natural sunlight and indoor-grade lighting.
Sometimes the sun goes away, whether from a rainy day or that month-and-a-half of wildfire smoke that’s suddenly become the new norm. When that happens, our poor plants are without the light they need to produce the extra bit of terps and THC that we’re looking for.
Mixed Light cultivation helps our plants grow by providing the light they need on cloudy days or by extending that light time in the winter. As opposed to light dep, this does have a noticeable effect on the plant growth, nug structure, and trichome production. Those extra trichomes mean more THC, cannabinoids, terps, and an overall increase in the quality of your bud.
Mixed Light is typically done in a greenhouse, so the prices are based more on that than outdoor prices. A small premium may be placed on mixed light bud, but when it’s a difference greater than $10 to you, it becomes your call whether to go for the mixed light flower or to search a little harder for that outdoor or greenhouse (without mixed light) bud that has the properties you’re looking for.