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I am not an expert in extractions. The deal I made with my wife, after she became ill, was that I would learn to grow to the best of my ability, and she would learn to process the plant into some congestible form other than smoke.

I am learning to make extractions, and for the purpose of this blog, I thought it would be fun and instructive to have myself do every step and show you how we turn plants into medicine.

I was fooling myself. I am learning, but that’s not what you need to be watching. The best thing I can show you here is the video that Karen made, which shows EXACTLY how to make FECO.

Before the video, I wanted to explain why we chose FECO over RSO.

FECO stands for Full Extract Cannabis Oil.

RSO is Rick Simpson Oil.

Both are extremely effective ways of turning plants into a less harmful form of medicine than smoke. 

RSO is very popular among the chronically ill, and probably costs less to produce than FECO. We have tried RSO for Karen and did not find it effective, but to be fair, FECO has only been partially effective with her.

So why FECO over RSO? The answer is simply, the terpenes. RSO is alcohol based and that alcohol has to be completely cooked off before the medicine is consumed. The temperature used to cook off the alcohol is too high for terpenes to survive. So RSO is the sum of the cannabinoids and the THC, but the terpenes are lost.

Given what I know and am finding out about terpenes, I do not see why I should spend six months of my life growing something, only to completely destroy part of it while processing it for oil. FECO uses reclaimable ethanol, so you can use it over and over. Further, the temperature used is less than the temperature for alcohol, so the opportunity is greater to save the terpenes.

If you are wondering about the importance of terpenes, you should read either of my blogs, Test Results–2024, or The Value in Testing Plants.

That’s a stir bar moving around while the concentrated oil decarboxylates. That’s all those little bubbles in the oil.

So we make FECO. It takes up a lot less space than half gallon mason jars in a closet, and once the FECO is produced, the medicine should remain more stable over time, than jars of flowers, which tend to degrade more quickly. In nine years of making FECO and taking pills from it, I have not noticed any appreciable degradation for the pills I take. They are in the refrigerator and that further slows their degradation.

Again, I want to emphasize that I have no real criticism of Rick Simpson Oil, other than burning off terpenes. RSO is a personal preference for some, and that is perfectly fine.

But the farther I go with this plant and learning about the Entourage Effect; especially for sick people, the more I want to preserve the terpenes. Let me give you one medical example that just happened yesterday.

We give pills to a local stroke victim. I wrote about his case in The Value of Testing Plants blog. Recently, this family ran out of the pills we gave them and there was some difficulty communicating with us for a couple of weeks (SIM card issues in two phones), so they ran out. The patient very quickly deteriorated into regular vomiting (which is not entirely unusual for stroke victims). But in the cultivars that I chose for him, I made certain each had an effective amount of Limonene, a terpene that stops nausea. 

When we found out about the difficulties, we were concerned that our meds had failed and that perhaps, the stroke victim was getting worse. 

Wrong. As soon as he resumed our pills, one for the day, and one for the night, the nausea stopped. This person has lived far longer than anyone, including doctors, thought he’d live. His wife and I both feel it is the cannabis that is keeping him going.

So, that’s one of the ways we know for sure that the terpenes are being spared in our FECO.

On to the video. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

We just finished making our first pills from this year’s crop, sleep pills for Purple Hindu Kush, and they are as effective as I had hoped.

ACDC Aviary is now in the freezer, and I’m lining up the sequence of plants being turned into oil, our annual winter project. We want to process as much of this as we can prior to the next grow. We are going to need all of those jars.

In the meantime, it is raining here. We’ve had nine inches in just a little over two days. It’s still too early in the season to know if we’ll get enough rain this winter, but this a tremendous start. There will be no need to water anything until spring of next year. This huge storm will go far to refill local reservoirs, and water is already running down our hill, so saturation has been reached. Plus, fire danger is over for 2024.

It’s time for me to hunker over winter, and work on my 4th novel. So blogs will slow down, if not completely stop, until I begin to ramp up for my tenth cannabis grow. Some very special cultivars are being planned and the seeds are already in house.

As always, feel free to ask questions over winter. I will respond asap.

But if you need more information on extraction, here is the link that we use, and I suggest you use it as well: https://ichibancrafter.com/2021/01/01/ethanol-extraction-complete-breakdown/

The person in charge there is Troy Ivan. Troy was Karen’s resource for extraction and knows more about this than anyone I know. His experience and sharing of knowledge is invaluable. We could not do what we have done without Troy’s help.

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