Na it was a magazine website forum I wont paste a link to the forum I dont want a bann for advertiseing another weed forum so il paste what it says. How To Cure Your Marijuana Crop Once you have learned how to grow a crop the next step is to cure it. You don't want to always smoke weed that's harsh and bad tasting. Here are some basic tips and a few advanced ones you can experiment with. Preparing The Harvest Curing your harvest is an important step in the cultivation process. Many new growers are so eager to try the product they don't even wait for it to mature. They cut off buds that aren't ripe and dry them out fast. I've heard of people putting buds in the microwave because they couldn't wait for them to dry. If taste, aroma and maximum potency is important to you then you want to cure your buds and not just dry them. There are many ways to do this and I'm just going to go over a few basic things. You can find whole books on the subject if you are interested. The First Steps. Preparations must be made well before curing begins. The experienced grower harvests his crop when 50 to 80% of the pistles have turned color. If you have grown out the strain before you have a good idea when they will be ready. You will need to clear the plants of nutrients (fertilizer) right before you harvest. The growing medium and the plants themselves store some of the nutes you have given them. This will give a nasty taste if you harvest without clearing it out. Excessive nutes will also make the buds hard to burn. Plants need fertilizer to grow and mature so you want to wait right before you are going to harvest and give them plain water. They will use up the ferts they have stored and will not slow down noticeably. If you are using hydro start clearing 3 to 7 days before harvest. This can be done by changing the solution and using only plain water. Some growers will change the solution twice because the rockwool or grow rocks may hold a little. With soil you need to change to plain water at least a week and preferably two weeks before harvest depending on how much soil in each pot. Don't use slow release ferts because they are very hard to clear out. Outdoor farmers who need to use slow release can time it and use just liquid ferts toward the end. So now you have harvested right at the peak. You cleared out the nutes beforehand and you have fragrant, spicy highly potent buds you want to preserve. The most important thing is that they must be dried. Mold is your biggest enemy once you harvest. If you have excessive moisture in the grow room you may have battled mold well before harvest and afterwards it's even more difficult. The trick is to dry them slowly so that certain biochemical processes can go on but not so slowly that mold can get a foot hold. The key is to control humidity. A good cure can last up to 8 weeks or more and will leave you with a stash that's tasty and fragrant and which has lost none of it's potency. A poor cure will leave you with nasty tasting bud that's harsh on the throat. A poor cure can even cost you your harvest. Curing The Crop Immediately after the harvest comes the cure. The reasons for curing and not just quick drying your crop are to make the herb sweet smelling and smokable. You want it mild not harsh and you want a good smell and flavor. After all that work don't ruin it with a too quick cure. A good cure lasts for from 3 to 8 weeks but good results can be had in two weeks or so. The idea is to remove the water slowly enough to let biological processes take place that convert the sugars and starches into harmless and flavorful compounds. Sugar or starch will give a harsh smoke that hurts the lungs. Plants need sugars to live on and they produce them from fertilizer and sunlight. This curing process also breaks down some of the chlorophyll which give herb it's green color. Too much chlorophyll gives an unwanted leafy taste. Your main enemy when you are curing is mold. After pot is dried it's not very susceptible to mold but you have to maintain a certain level of humidity to let the curing process do it's work. The way you control humidity is by controlling how much ventilation you allow. You want some ventilation but not too much. Too much and it dries out without curing properly, too little ventilation and you may get mold. If you see or smell the slightest sign of mold you must immediately stop the cure and let it dry out. If mold is unchecked it can destroy your crop in short order. Mold can be detected by sight and smell. It looks white usually and will be fuzzy. If you see it in one part you can be sure the spores are all over so you may as well let it dry. Mold also has an odor which is always nasty. Never never smoke herb that has mold on it. You want to avoid light and heat at all times with your crop after it has been harvested. Light will destroy it and temps over about 80 degrees are bad. The best place to store it is in the freezer or fridge. If that's not practical a cool dry dark place will do. You need an enclosure to put your crop in for the cure. Depending on the size of you crop you can use a cardboard box, a closet or an unused room. With the cardboard box you want to hang the plants from a string. Don't just dump everything into the box because the plants on the bottom won't get enough air and may turn moldy. I used to put string across the open top of the box and tape the ends to the outside. I would crisscross several strings and attach the plants with twist ties. Make sure the box is tall enough for your plants. If it's not tall enough you can cut the plant in half or even cut off each branch and hang it in the box. The plants or branches should be loose and have some space between it and the next. It doesn't take a lot of space just as long as air can circulate. With a closet you do the same thing. You might want to put nails or thumbtacks in the walls for the strings or the clothes hanger bar may be enough. If you use a whole room you need to set up something to keep the plants hanging upside down off the floor. The first few days you allow more ventilation and as the plants get dryer you allow less. In the box leave the top off, with the closet leave the door open and if you use the whole room leave the door open and use a fan to blow air in. After one or two days you will have lost a good bit of moisture and you can begin to restrict air flow. I used to put a section of newspaper over the top not quite covering the whole top of the cardboard box. As the cure progressed I would cover the top more and more. As soon as the leaves began to get stiff I'd cover the top completely. They still got a little air because the newspaper was not airtight. With a closet after a day or two close the door all except for a couple inches. As the cure progresses and the plants get drier, close the door altogether. Almost all closets have cracks around the door that air can come through. If you have a very large closet treat it like a room. When using a whole room to cure, after a day or two of letting the fan blow air in, close the door part way. With the room cure it's a good idea to have a fan inside moving the air around and qanother fan in the doorway blowing fresh air in. Watch the plants very. closely to see how fast they are drying. As soon as you notice a little bit of stiffness to the stems they have lost probably 50% of their moisture. When the leaves start to get a little bit crisp you have lost most of the excess moisture and you must restrict ventilation some more. Using a whole room at this point you turn off the fan blowing air in but you leave the door open a little. You never cut off ventilation completely because mold is a threat right up until the end. The leaves should start to get a little crisp after a week or two. If it happens sooner you may be using too much ventilation and should cut back. Along about this time you should notice a very nice smell. This is the curing smell and it smells a little like baking bread along with a piney or fruity or skunky smell from the pot. This is the nice smell you want your herb to have. If you notice the least bit of a nasty or rotten smell it is probably mold and you need to check very closely. After the leaves start to get a little stiff and you have restricted the air flow it takes anywhere from a week to 6 week more to finish it. When to stop is up to you. You might want to decide by the color of the herb. It gets less green as it goes along. Buds will retain the green color longer than will the leaves. Buds may still be green at the end of the cure but not quite as bright a shade of green. You will be the proud possessor of a stash of sweet smoking, good tasting buds without the harshness of fresh cured smoke.
I had a big problem with my plant with the leafs dieing and got alot of info from a few dirrent people about what the problem was, I was told ph spotting, calmag defficiency, p deficiency, mold, soil ph too high and not enough cannazyme....... I did a full clean on my tent and found mold under the ground sheet. thewatcher was correct. 2 people (you know who you are) messaged me privately telling me to ignore thewatcher and that thewatcher didnt know what he was talking about, thanks for that you nearly costed me my crop!!!! I will no longer ask for help.
you had mold under the ground sheet , but was it under ur plants pots.just cause u found mold in ur tent doesn't mean he was right. I bet if u do the same thing next grow besides ur tent being clean you'll have the same prob.plus mykos is mold. so mold good in soil bad on foilage.
[quote name='"thesage3"'] you had mold under the ground sheet , but was it under ur plants pots.just cause u found mold in ur tent doesn't mean he was right. I bet if u do the same thing next grow besides ur tent being clean you'll have the same prob.plus mykos is mold. so mold good in soil bad on foilage.[/quote] Yes the mold was under the ground sheet, the sheet has stitching holes in it which I dint know was there and the holes are under the pot, basicly the runnoff water was running under the sheet in small amounts makeing a big furry patch. Over time. Its hard to explain but I can definatly say the runnoff was mixing with the mold and the plant wa sucking up the runnoff water with mold in it.
Fair play for coming in and updating it bmc. The sage is right to say that the two don't definitely have to be directly linked. It's possible the fungus is airborne and came from outside. But what you found just shows that you don't always know what's going on in your room. You can guard against some things but sometimes even that's not enough. However he, and anyone who pm'd you, is wrong to dismiss that it's a fungal infection, because however it was caused, that's what it is. I've had plants affected by it in the past and know exactly what it looks like. Make sure everything's fully cleaned down in between grows and spray down with a fine mist of bleach or hydrogen peroxide etc.
whoa!! sloooow down I didn't pm anybody about you, just cause we clashed heads doesn't mean I would go and slander you to another, and if I would it wouldn't be hidden in a pm. And I'm sorry but I'm still not convinced its fungal. and that link you put up says it rarely affects the top of the plant. and the top is where I once had these issues, and it looks like bmc86 also shows problems at the top hmmm.
[quote name='"thesage3"'] whoa!! sloooow down I didn't pm anybody about you, just cause we clashed heads doesn't mean I would go and slander you to another, and if I would it wouldn't be hidden in a pm. And I'm sorry but I'm still not convinced its fungal. and that link you put up says it rarely affects the top of the plant. and the top is where I once had these issues, and it looks like bmc86 also shows problems at the top hmmm.[/quote] The way you can determine that it is not fungal is in the pictures. The sick plants in here have a light brown spotting on the leaves. Mold damage leaves behind a more black or very dark brown spotting. I think what is also telling is that by applying a new nutrient program the issue no longer progressed. If the problem was an infection then a simple ratio change would not stop the spread of the infection to new leaves. Since the spots are light brown rather than black, and since the issue was resolved with a new nutrient solution, it follows that this issue is very likely not a mold infection.
That's totally and utterly 100% completely bullshit. Where on earth do you get your information from? Black spotting is indeed a fungus, but it's a fungus whch sets in as part of necrosis of a leaf and if nothing to do with a fungal infection. Necrosis is death of cell tissue, like you'd see on a yellow bottom leaf which is about to be shed, for example. That you have a naturally occurring black spot fungus on that dead leaf does not mean your plant has a systemic fungal infection. In fact I'd like to see a grower who can create an atmosphere where leaves die without this fungal occurring. It's impossible. The two things are not related. It's like comparing the fuzz on a piece of dead fruit, to a fungal infection of the fruit tree itself. People don't have to take my word for it. In fact with the amount of bullshit I see floating around this part of this forum I'd advise anyone who's at odds over who to believe, to copy and paste some of this utter crap (quote SCMC's post above about fungus for a start) and taking it to a general gardening forum to see what professional botanists have to say on the matter. I'd be glad if nobody takes my advice, as long as they don't take the advice of some of the bullshitters masquerading on here as pros.
I never said you did, and I haven't asked bmc who it was either. I'm not bothered. In the end, one way or another, people can find out for themselves who is talking shit. The link I posted showed a picture of LSF (Leaf Spot Fungus) The bit about it only affecting the top leaves was the one thing which is wrong. Disregard that. It can show up anywhere on the plant. Go to google images. Post the picture elsewhere. Ask around. See what other gardeners have to say. The majority of experienced growers, especially those who've seen it first hand, will tell you that it looks like LSF.
I wont say who told me to ignore thewatcher but I will say that one of the people who messaged me hasnt even made a post on this thread. The infection went away because the water that was in/under the ground sheet dried up im assumeing that no dampness/moisture = dead fungus?? I have anbsolutely no knowledge of fungal infections but this was white/grey and furry and left a white stain on my groundsheet. Il post a pic later. I have croped my main plant and its been drying for 20 days so far, my 2 clones are being cropped today and il be washing the tent fully for the next grow which will be citral skunk and fast ryder 2 (redish looking plant from the bulldog cafe amsterdam, could be a bitch to diagnose p deficiency lol!!!!)
I must say that you all are doing fabulous job by giving the information regarding plants grow. That will be really much beneficial for me as well. I also looking forward for further details. Really appreciated you.
it could very well be calcium deficency. check out this thread if you haven't already. super helpful info in there
[quote name='"rubyluise"']I must say that you all are doing fabulous job by giving the information regarding plants grow. That will be really much beneficial for me as well. I also looking forward for further details. Really appreciated you.[/quote] Hi thanks, il post a new link to my new grow soon this is now a dead thread, the plant was croped and smoked
[quote name='"WaltWhitman"'] it could very well be calcium deficency. check out this thread if you haven't already. super helpful info in there[/quote] I used calmag for 2 weeks and the problem got worse, I found mould in my tent. Doesnt matter anymore to be honest the plant was harvested over 2 months ago I think.