What's your curing technique?

Nice I’ll have to try that, thanks.

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I’m sold on dry trimming over wet a barbecue Teflon brush works pretty good at brushing the sugar leaf from the buds.

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Will do! As soon as I harvest, I’ll try and water cure some. It’ll be interesting to water cure and then vape.

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Hang full plant til almost dry. Limb and put in paper grocery bags for a few days more to slow down the drying process; until dry enough to put in jars. Don’t put in jars, put same paper grocery bag into freezer. Sublimation will draw moisture out of the plant ever so slowly. A good freezer cure takes about a month. But you can store indefinitely. Smoke is smoother, taste and smell are improved over jar cure. Way less hassle.

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Interesting technique. I may have to try it on a branch or two.

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There was a whole thread on freezer curing on another forum. I tried it once, but I just put the buds in a card board box. It didn’t work out to well, because my freezer ( old fridge from the 90’s) would drip condensation when going through the defrost cycle. The buds got damp so I stopped experimenting. Recently though, I was out of bud while waiting for some plants to dry, and pulled out a paper lunch bag full of sugar leaves and small buds I was planning on making edibles with. I sifted through the stuff for a few buds to smoke, and to my surprise the little nugs were so tasty! Much better than the buds I jarred up were lol! Almost tasting like grape candies. Needless to say I picked through the whole bag for all the little buds I could scavenge. Bag was in there for a good four months. Definitely a technique worth looking more into.

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My last harvest I dried in my flower room. 55-60% RH and 60-65F. Had to use the AC to get those temps since it was summer. All 3 different strains smelled great. I also changed up my nutrients the last 3 weeks using Jacks Finish and Epsom salts. Not sure which had an influence. But ill be doing both moving forward.

They dried around 12 days give or take a couple days. Cant remember.

I big leaf and cut down in sections since I scrog and end up with massive plants. Kind or hard to cut down all in one piece.

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IME I find that it is easy to go too far and lose all the smell. I don’t wait as late as some of these people say to jar. I jar while there is still a bit of moisture in the center of the bud. I can tell by squeezing the larger ones. You want that moisture to spread all thru the remaining buds and they will do that if you stop them from drying so fast.

My environment is seldom stable and high enough for days at a time to keep it at 62% and so they tend to get dry on the whole plant within about 3-4 days if hung whole. I could put them in a large plastic bag I suppose (just occurred to me) and let the moisture spread evenly and then dry a bit more before breaking it all down and jarring it closer to target.

What has worked for me is to jar and let the moisture spread until they are soft and then dump them and let them dry a bit more, repeat until ready to cure at 62% Have always had smell come back if it disappeared and cured correctly when done this way. It is easy to get too dry.

The freezer cure is interesting. I should like to see some pics and a controlled experiment…might at some point myself. OTOH I have dried in a fridge and the smell/taste gets in everything. Not sure this would not.

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If anyone has experience drying/curing in a dry environment, I could really use some pointers. Boveda makes my crop smell weird. I will be reading this thread after work, but I did not want to forget to post here.

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I’ve never successfully dried and cured cannabis before, and this method really resonated and made sense to me. Huge pain in the ass, but it’s working so far! I jarred after day 3, the buds were still quite damp, and I just let keep letting them moisten and then dry, using a hygrometer in each jar. They’re starting to hold somewhat steady, and the smells are just incredible so far. This is the first time I’ve grown non-grassy, non-hay-like weed. It was a huge pain in the ass, though. I’m manning those jars at least every hour, and I’ve been on a reduced sleep schedule to help stay on top of it. This seems the only surefire way to do it without having to rely on experience and intuition. Dry it ‘until it snaps’ is a dangerously unspecific instruction, leaning on the side of over-drying, which is what I’ve always done. This is like taking baby steps to the finish line, instead of hoping a giant leap will get me good cannabis.

edit: one thing I wanted to add was that I can feel the chemical reactions taking place. When I went to burp the jars, the buds were giving off a tremendous amount of heat. The jars were warm to the touch the first few times they fully re-moistened. No doubt this speeds things up a lot, but I can also imagine that is one of the bigger risk factors for mold. When I felt the intense heat, I increased my ‘jar manning’ duties accordingly.

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I dunno what the weather where you live is like, but if it’s not too dry, you could probably just leave those buds in the jars with the lids off for like a week. Or kinda how you’re doing now, with the burping. Open, close, open, close… It’s surprising how much moisture is in those flowers, though. This winter has been insanely dry (they said on the news the other day that at this point last year, we’d had fifteen inches of rain; it’s only rained once, like a half-inch, this winter), those Starkillers I harvested were only hung for five days before I trimmed and jarred. I thought,”Fuck, these dried out too quickly,” when I trimmed them, but they’ve actually pulled through. Very good. Nice and sticky. I’m actually still burping them, but I’ll probably seal them up for a couple weeks tomorrow or the next day.

The drying/curing process is definitely kind of a pain in the ass. But so important. I actually lost about half of my very first harvest, some Prayer Tower, Clusterfunk and Goldstar, because I thought I fucked it up. It didn’t get too dry, it got too wet. I’d left the humidifiers on and it got unexpectedly hot one day while I was at work. When I got home, the plants were straight-up sweating, just dripping moisture out of them. I thought I could save them, opened the drying tent and cranked up the AC, but they just kept stinking, smelling really bad. It smelled like poison, actually, and I couldn’t sleep haha. I ended up getting out of bed in the middle of the night, just because I couldn’t take the smell, and throwing the plants in a garbage bag and left them in the parking lot of a Burger King down the street from our house haha.

Looking back on it, it was probably just the Appalachia in those Prayer Towers, that nasty funky “Chem” smell haha. I was a nube…

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I’m in the desert. I am actually in the low teens indoors. When I want to smoke test a bud, I’ll cut it off the plant and let it sit out for an hour or two and it will be dry as a bone. If I left a jar open overnight, I really think it would completely dry out. I do, however, have vented jars that I made for mycology that I’ve been using overnight, as a kind of medium between on and off. I think tonight I will use normal lids since things are normalizing a bit.

There is a big benefit to that, though. If things are too moist, I can dry them nearly instantly. If a jar is too wet, I can just stick it in front of a fan for 10 seconds and the humidity goes down, literally, by 30% in the jar instantly. It makes for super fast corrections, which has helped me prevent mold. It just means I have to be super attentive, though. I think even laying out the buds for more than an hour would turn them into dust.

I am so close to being done, though! Now I know why people say that the work doesn’t end with the chop…

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Hey, I started doing that on my jars during early cure too.
So my mycology jars have 2 7mm holes drilled in them, covered with layers of micropore tape and a tiny bit of polyfill in between them (like a tiny pillow in the hole). They don’t let the humidity climb as quickly as a truly sealed jar.

Start using your substrate mixed into your soil 50/50… best crops I’ve ever had since I did that.

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Laying the jar on the side can help keep any moisture evenly distributed and if the jar is only about 2/3 full works best. I sometimes use a coffee filter for the top with the ring to let some moisture escape in the first few hours after jarring since definitely do not want sweating which can lead to mold.

@Eudamon hope it is worth the effort. :slight_smile:

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I like to trim em up,hang with about 7 days dry time, slight fan circulation, 72 degrees or so.
Jar, freeze, check daily for 10 day. I got some stored 5 years still smells great and smooth smoke.

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I pre-trim and hang till dry in a cool dark place with good circulation . When I can snap a leaf off Its time to tub and let cure some more . Sometimes weeks or months until I can finish trim if it feels dry I toss flour torts in the tub I’m working on overnight . After trimming I bag and seal with a Boveda 62% until needed
So far no problems keeps the weed real nice . I do open the tubs to check and leave open overnight when humidity is right . This works best for me I work at my own pace and can control the cure for nice easy smoke . I don’t like coughing my lungs out lol I’m still trimming .

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Hello guys, my problem is the humidity, usually between 90 to 95%. With some exceptions …

This year I will start cleaning with the live plant, because there are many and they are big.
Can anyone comment on this?

Afterwards, I hang the entire plant, for 7 to 15 days, without a fan.
It is as if it had not dried, but it has color changes …

Then I put it in a paper bag and in airtight jars, opening a little bit every day …

As the humidity is always high, after a week in the pots, I take it out and put it in the fridge or freeze …

However, I would like to evolve in this and improve the taste …

Someone posted something about curing in the freezer, does it work?

My biggest doubt is in the cure, because I already lost a lot to the mold …

Whenever I open the pots to burp, due to the high humidity, it is as if they hydrate themselves again …

If someone has already commented, I apologize, but the topic is too big.

There is someone else who lives in a similar climate, who can give you some tips …

hug

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If possible to reduce your humidity to closer to 60 % would speed your process up huge .

In regards to freezer cure you’ll need the weed at max 65% I aim for 58/60 then freezer ziplock leaving a bit of air in the bag important step. I’ll then put those freezer bags into a vacuum seal bag don’t over vacuum you’ll want it compressed but not to the point of a solid brick . Toss in the freezer and forget it’s there for long term storage and cure.

When ready to consume I’ll take it out and give it time to adjust to room temp depending on how it was stored determined if it needs a few hrs to sit open or be smokable .

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The simplest thing you could do is buy a fan. Oscillating fan would be best, but a stationary one would work, too. You don’t want it blowing directly on the plants; I always put mine of the floor, beneath where the plants are hanging. You just want some air movement. That’d probably lower your humidity levels ten percent.

And if you can afford it, buy a de-humidifier. I have the opposite problem, too dry where I live, so I’ve never bought a de-humidifier, but I’m sure you can get one pretty cheap.

Also, if you hang the plant in pieces, rather than hanging the whole plant, that’d probably help. I always hang the whole plant, but I don’t live somewhere where the humidity ever even gets close to 90%, like you do.

If you can’t do either of those things, I’d say just let them hang for like 28 days, maybe longer. You don’t wanna be sealing up weed that isn’t dry enough, even if you are burping the jars.

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I hang dry with fan on them for 1.5-2 wks. depends on my environment then I jar it…once it’s in the jars I’ll take off the lid for a day or 2 and seal it back up again…I repeat this process for about 1.5-2 weeks till its fully cured…I dont burp every day like some people do. I also put my jars back in it’s original box to keep it dark and put in a nice cool place…Basement in the summer and garage in the winter.

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