Walk past a drying rack in a barn in Mendocino and the shape of the plant is still there, upside down. The top of each branch, the cola, hangs fat and heavy. Below it the buds get smaller and looser all the way along the stem, until near the bottom there are little tufts no bigger than a chickpea that spent the summer in the shade of everything above them. Growers call those lowest, wispiest ones larf. Some of them end up in a bag marked smalls, sold at a discount, a shelf away from an eighth of the same cultivar in big buds at a noticeably higher price.

Some of them never should.

The pages that rank for this question mostly agree with each other. Smalls come from the same plant, they say, carry the same cannabinoids and terpenes, cost less because they look less impressive, and break up more easily for rolling. Much of that is fair, and we will repeat the useful parts. Where those pages go quiet is the geometry. A small bud has a great deal more outside for its weight than a large one, and almost everything that makes flower worth buying lives on the outside. That changes how smalls should be bought and how quickly they should be smoked. It is also why we buy them happily some weeks and refuse them flat in others.

Where smalls come from

The best smalls are simply small pieces of good flower. Side shoots near the top of the plant, grown in decent light, can be every bit as dense and frosted as the cola beside them, and plenty of buds snap off a larger one on the trim table. A grower sorting a harvest by size pulls these out because they look underwhelming in a display jar. That is the whole reason for the discount, and it is a good reason for a buyer to be pleased.

Larf is something else. It grew in shade, so it tends to be airy and thin on resin, and some of it was still catching up when the plant came down. Many growers prune those lower branches off weeks before harvest for exactly that reason. What survives usually heads for the pre-roll machine or the extraction room, as our guide on how to judge a pre-roll describes, and some of it ends up in bags with a friendly name on the front.

Then there are the crumbs: bits knocked loose by a tumbling trimmer or a rough day at the packaging table, swept up and sold by weight. Our page on hand-trimmed vs machine-trimmed cannabis explains how to read a drum’s work on a bud, and the tells are easier to see on a small one, because a small bud is mostly edges.

Potency, and the one exception

True smalls from the top of the plant generally test like the big buds from the same harvest, and they were usually in the same lab sample. Larf is the exception. A shaded bud makes less resin, and less resin means less of everything that lives in it, so a bag of lower-branch tufts will often smell weaker and test lower.

Our guide on how to read a cannabis COA shows where to find the batch number. If the smalls carry the same batch as the full-size jar, you are probably looking at sorted flower. If they carry a batch of their own and a lower total, the label is telling you which kind they are. The number itself matters less than most shoppers think (our piece on whether THC percentage matters makes that argument at length), but here it is useful as a fingerprint.

The surface-area problem

Take a large bud and a small one from the same branch. Weight for weight, the small one has far more of itself exposed to the air, and the trichomes, the tiny resin glands that carry nearly all of the aroma and the cannabinoids, sit on that surface. Inside a big bud a lot of resin is folded away between bracts, sheltered until the grinder opens it up. On a bud the size of a chickpea, there is very little inside to speak of.

A few things follow, and they are not equally important.

Smalls dry faster. Hanging loose, a small bud gives up its water well ahead of the cola it came from, which is one reason careful growers hang whole branches, and why a batch of smalls dried on their own can come out brittle and grassy in a way the big buds from the same plant never did.

Smalls also go stale faster, and this is the one that costs people money. Every time a bag is opened, a small bud loses aroma from nearly all of itself at once, while a big bud gives up only its skin and keeps a reserve in the middle. That reserve is the sudden burst of smell you get when you break a dull-looking bud apart. A bag of smalls has no such reserve to fall back on. The bright top notes, the citrus and the pine, leave first, and what remains after a couple of months of casual opening and closing is a jar that smells mostly of hay with a faint memory of the cultivar somewhere under it. Our guide on how to store cannabis flower slows that down. It cannot reverse it.

Then there is handling. More edges, more knocks.

So the discount on smalls is a bargain only if you smoke them quickly. A quarter-ounce of smalls bought to save money and left in a drawer through the winter is worse value than an eighth of whole buds, and we would say so to anyone standing at a counter with both in their hands.

How to buy them

Smell the bag before you look at the price. Good smalls should be as loud as the full-size jar of the same cultivar, and a decent shop will let you compare the two side by side. If the big buds are bright and the smalls smell flat or of cut grass, the smalls were either dried too fast or have been sitting, and our guide on how to tell if cannabis is properly cured explains how to tell which.

Read the packaging date next. With full-size flower we will forgive a few months on the shelf. With smalls we want something packed recently, and we buy no more than we will finish in a few weeks.

Then squeeze one, gently. Top-of-plant smalls are dense enough to spring back. Under a loupe their outer surfaces are as frosted as the sheltered spots between bracts (our page on trichomes explains what intact resin heads look like). Larf is feather-light and leafy, often with more stem than bud. A bag that is mostly fragments with a layer of golden dust at the bottom was swept off a table.

What smalls are good for

Rolling, above all. A small bud breaks down by hand in a few seconds, and a joint rolled from good smalls tastes exactly as good as one rolled from a cola, since nobody can see the buds once they are in the paper. For a daily smoker who goes through a bag in a fortnight, they are the sensible purchase.

They are a poor choice for the jar set out on the table at a dinner, where the look of a big, well-trimmed bud is part of the pleasure, and for anyone who keeps half a dozen cultivars open at once and visits each one slowly. Those buyers should pay for size. It is money well spent.

On the word popcorn

Some shops call them popcorn buds, after the shape, and a bag of them left on a sunny dashboard for a week ends up smelling of the other thing popcorn smells of when it has been out too long, which is cardboard.

Our position

We buy smalls from farms whose big buds we already know, packed in the last month, and we smoke them within the next one. Bought that way they are some of the best value in a good shop, and we have had evenings with a bag of top-of-plant smalls that no display jar would have improved. Bought any other way, as a stockpile or from a grower whose big buds you have never smelled, they are a gamble with the odds tilted toward hay. Ask the budtender which part of the plant they came from. A shop that sorts its own flower will know, and the ones that do not know have told you something too.

Cannabis Smalls Explained