Hiya guys, [my intentions in this thread is for everyone to discuss how they have had the most success while drying + curing there bud, specifically towards aroma. The point in this is, i havnt had a tonne of success myself. I have done 2 indoor grows and i have some killer Purple looking Auto blueberry(see journal) which i dont want to ruin.] So for my first 2 grows i have just hung dried in a dark ventilated spot till stems snapped and then put in jars after they were overdried, which i realise now stops curing from even happening. my first 2 crops smell was gone a day or 2 after hang dry until you squeezed the buds or grinded them, even after 2 weeks or so in jars. So now i have this purple that came down about 4 days ago which absolutely reeked when was chopped. Still does smell a bit 4 days later. But some of it i put in jars and 1-2 nice buds i kept in a mini jar with lid open. Whats bugging me is the Buds that were put into sealed jars to cure have picked up the moisture to the outside again like expected, but dont smell at all. And the Straight dried bud in mini jar smells really nice, and when its squeezed a little it stinks exactly like the original. How does the drying / curing process + changes in smell over the time curing go for you guys?
The one thing that changed that gave me a ridiculous amount of aroma was to leave the entire plant in one piece when harvesting. I just trim off the leaves and save them for cookies and then cut the tree (mine are usually trees because I allow them to veg for a few months) at the bottom and let it hang until the outside feels a bit crispy, but if you squeeze a bud the aroma is there. The next thing I did was to leave every bud attached to a stem. I find that the oil from the stem eventually seeps out of the stem leaving it crispy and moves into the bud, leaving it smelly, oily, and lovely. All of my mason jars have buds with stems attached and as time goes on, the aroma gets better and better. Even six to seven months later it smells fresh and new. I also notice the longer I cure, the better it gets. Patience is an acquired skill that many never learn, but it goes a long ways in gardening.
now thats the shit im looking for always wanted to grow trees mind me asking what lighting your using and what yield your getting? Also, i left the buds on my stems this time when they are jarred luckily. before, i was just thinking that maybe the stuff in the stems shouldnt be allowed to go into the bud and that was maybe what was making them smell differnt, like it was diluting the bud aroma with the salts / nutes in the stems. Also my plants where drying in like 2-3 days crisp on outside, 4 days and snapping which was too much. However this time its taken 4 days so far and they still have some moisture in the stems, maybe that is helping.
You should be flushing your plant so that those nutes and stuff DONT work their way into the buds. I let my buds hang dry for a few days and then Jar them. Burping the jar a few times a day. Nothing is worse than having a Jar of Dankness that starts growing moldy shit.
yea, i have definately tried to flush all my plants but these were done outdoor and i hadnt fed them anything in like 6 weeks so the FBB i used should have been wearing off but maybe not totally. Ive never been unlucky enough to have gotten mould on bud (fingers crossed) dont you follow some sort of rule of thumb before its jarred? Like so far i have picked up to jar when its just gotten crisp on the outside but making sure to burp at least 4-5 times a day or it gets too moist. Not sure if thats the right thing but its definately an improvement to not curing at all.
Im using a 600w hps. Its a sun system super sun 2 hood, quantum 600w digital ballast, 90 dollar grow tent from amazon, the 4x4x7 tent, an eye hortilux bulb, bat guano as the nutrients, as well as feeding the plant cold pressed neem oil a few times throughout the grow, as well as blackstrap molasses during flowering, no chemical nutes, some fish fertilizer and some of my own compost. Sometimes Ill even mix in some soil from fox farms -ocean forest, the stuff with bat guano and worm castings. My yields have been fantastic and imo, my bud is better than any dispensaries bud Ive gotten in 80 miles of my house and I live in central california (I know this, because I spent a few days hitting up 40 or more dispensaries and getting free samples, which filled up some duffel bags). Ive been pulling a pound per plant and that's after it dries. I grew enough last year starting in april and harvesting in september that I havent had to grow a thing in 12 months. Ended up with just over 3lbs for 3 plants, after curing and drying. Ended up making a shitload of brownies and cookies which I put in an airtight bag and froze and then jarring up the rest. Still have enough to last me til next year but am going to start 4 plants in the next few days. Last grow was for bud, the one before that for seeds and this grow will be a sativa dominant grow, since I have waaay too much indica and am tired of smoking and getting hungry and tired. As for jarring, be careful not to put them in there when they're too wet or youll get a smell like amonia, and thats bacteria and fungus decomposing your bud. If it feels wet, leave the lid off for a few hours. I had a whole jar that smelled this way. Ended up laying it out on a cookie sheet and letting it dry overnight. Put it back in the jar and the smell was gone but the good smell was still there. Used that for cookies, because 3 hours on low is gonna kill that bad stuff. Let me know if you have any questions.
awesome mate thanks for the tips, i have the lids of atm as i saw the hygrometer in the jar reading 67% you getting 3 pounds from 1 600W? or a 600 on each, they must be some monsters. How long were they vegged?
Off of one 600w. Most of the people who see my plants just dont believe me. I always hear, whoa, or wtf, or omg, those are huge! I dont know how I forgot to mention the most important aspect of my grow. A lot of lsting. See, when people trim plants, it causes shock, because cutting the plant makes it first shocked, then have to heal the cut. This can immedietly halt growth for anywhere from a day or two, to 3-4 days depending on the pruning job. You can get the same results by bending the plant. When you bend a plant, it forces hormones to alter their patterns. In lamans, it makes the part you bent think its dead, so that hormones move to other parts of the plant, without causing shock and without causing the limb that you bent to stop growing. Because I lst, I never have one big cola, Instead, I get 50-60 huge colas per plant because the tree becomes a bush. I make the plant grow around and around in a circle, and the bottom of the plant is about as big around as my wrist. I've vegged them anywhere from 1-3 months depending on the size and strain. I never cut one leaf off or one branch in all my grows and the end results are difficult to argue with.
dang man sounds good. do you have a seperate place where you veg them so you can have trees coming down every 2 months or full bloom cycle? thatd be insanely productive.
when i dry/cure i make sure the room is on the cooler side ~60F-70F i try to keep a fan on them very low so it doesnt dry it out too fast. if you let it dry really slow when your hanging them.. it dries more of the center out instead of just crisping the outside and having the inside very moist still. if you jar them too soon they get a nasty smell that usually doesnt get any better until you grind it up. they either ending up smelling like amonia or grass clippings and slightly like mold. most of the bud from dispensaries around here in MI end up with that smell =/ its funny when people think its hard to get a lb from 1 tree or when they dont believe you... its way easier to get 60 - 1/4 oz buds from 1 plant.. than a single 1 lb bud.. lst is the way to go for high yield heres my baby atm
ah... your doing Scrog? i thought you meant just straight 6ft tall 4-5ft wide tree thats planted in like a 20gal container. Scrog is damn amazing. my last Scrog landed 10oz from 1 x Big bang + 19.5oz from a Super lemon haze vegged 6 weeks. The veg is long but its certainly worth it. My journals posted if you wanna take a look.
hi again, i was just wondering this, do you aim for your buds to be dry in the jars or wet. (when curing) What i mean by this is that what im doing right now is only burping the jars when the buds are getting quite wet again, and just leaving the lids open for 30 mins - 3 hours. till there dryish on the outside again. (i picture it like the bud is dried until the moisture is only in the middle, then curing for 1 day brings some moisture back to the outside where i dry it again and so on..) The thing is, eventually, before the 2 weeks - 1 month of curing i want to do. the buds will probably be dry and not curing anymore if i keep drying them every time they get wet right? any comments?
72 hours hang drying after trim then into brown paper bags with a few shredded brown bags in there also.When the stem snaps then I cure in jars to wick any inside moisture to the outside of the bud.
nice, and how often do you burp? my stems are still bendy atm, but its starting to get snappy in certain places.
Havent been around the last few days but wanted to answer q's and comment. I plant my girls in a 5lb bucket and this is the size they stay in throughout the grow and the results are those I mentioned above. As for burping jarring. As others have said, you want to make sure the outside is a bit crispy, but the inside needs to be a bit wet. If you put your buds in your jar and then jar them up overnight, wake up the next day and they all stick together when you turn the jar upside down and nothing falls out, they're too wet. You need to lay them out on a cookie sheet. A lot of people use newspaper, but paper absorbs oils, whereas the cookie sheet does not. After you leave them out for an hour or two, toss them all back into the jar. The cookie sheet will leave you a nice surprise of thc covered pistils and broken off trichromes. Use your finger to pick them up, use a knife to scrape them onto a bowl, and smoke it up. You only need to burp a few times a day. If you burp too much, theyll dry out and lose their smell. The amonia smell is a big no no. When you get that, I wouldnt even risk smoking it. Trust me, Ive had pneumonia develop from smoking bad weed, because it causes bacteria to grow in the lungs. Notta gooda. If you ever get amonia smelling weed, dont throw it away, cook with it immediately. Go buy some butter, toss a block or two or three into a pan, put a bit of water in it, grind up that weird smelling bud and let it cook away the bad shit on low for 3-4 hours. When you put the buds in the jars, the outsides need to be dry. If the whole thing is dry, youll end up with the hay smell, which means the cure was rushed and no cure happened. Hay smelling weed sucks and youll be reminded of it every time you smoke it. If you leave the inside too wet, youll end up with the amonia smell, or decomposition smell. Its a lot of trial and error and if you want to experiment, separate your jars and try burp/curing each jar differently. That way you'll know exactly which method works for you and you can change your cure to your preference/strain. At one point I had two grow rooms, one for veg, one for flower, but my results were too good. I ended up having more weed that I knew what to do with. It scared me, so my new method is to grow every other year or so and just grow enough to sustain me throughout that time. I kinda feel like walter from breaking bad. Ive got this kickass formula in my brain and if I was to be put into a superlab year around, I could easily and cheaply supply a ridiculously good product in huge quantities every few weeks. Thank god that hasnt happened.....have you seen how much trouble he got in hehe
haha thanks for all the tips, i guess im doing it right this time then, ive been leaving them to dry on the outside each burp. breaking bad is awesome.
Posted this in another thread, figured I'd post it here as well since I gave advice but no proof of my results. Btw, Im 6 feet tall and weighed about 245 when this pic was taken. You can see part of me beside the plant. That sucker was huge!
cool man, was that spiral lst i spotted there? if so, how long was it vegged and how complete was the spiral when it was 12/12'd
I usually try to go around the pot at least once. I never cut anything off my plants and you can see how big the buds are because of this. Flowering plants love sugar! I add black strap molasses to the feeding schedule as well, at least 2-3 times during flowering. I usually veg for 2-3 months. I think this one was a clone, so it was only vegged about 5 weeks, all under a 600w hps, so they grew incredibly fast. When it was 12/12 the spiral was around once, but it continued to spiral during flowering. When I start to see big buds, I increase the fan blowing on them to ensure stronger stems, since each top weighs enough to snap the little stems off. I can't give you a definitive "they were vegged for this long, they were flowered for this long" because unlike most people, I dont keep journals anymore. I basically play it by eye and experience. I can tell just by looking usually what's wrong if anything. The last few grows have been a breeze, because I've worked out most of the kinks. I've found the soils to mix together at local stores that dont contain most of the pests people fear, as well as treatments that work 100 percent if they do. Spent basically the last 4 years of my life studying plant science in school and practicing it in local gardens for friends and family.