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 Drying and curing is one of the most important parts of growing cannabis. For me, drying and curing is a, is a bit of an art form. It does take practice. And you know, a lot of us in the homegrown environment might not have those ultra ideals that we read about online. You know, not everyone’s gonna be sitting with a humidify and a dehumidify and a controlled rim.

How do we do it? What’s trying and curing we’re gonna learn all about that today. So, adine, why do you think why do you think it is so neglected? Do you think it’s just the rush at the end of the, at the end of the harvest, like, oh gosh, I’m done with that. Yeah. I think when people are seeing that crystal line power nag on the, on the end of a, on the end of a grow, you know, they’re like, in, in your mind, you’re like, I’ve made it.

I’ve made it through the pests. Yeah, I’ve made it through the bad rots. I’ve, I’m here, you know, I’ve done it. And then you chop it up and you hang it and you forget about it. Dude. It does happen. I, like you can fully understand, I mean, you’ve put in so much work to that point and you literally look at it and you’re like, okay, obviously like, duh, it’s just drying, like put it in the room.

And, and like also on the other hand, people don’t really have these like you know, these like water moisture testers that you can get quite, quite easily and they think, you know, it’s. And I mean, all the facilities use those kinds of things and they probably go like, oh, I don’t have one. So it’s, you know, I’ll just do it the old fashioned way, let it dry.

But I guess as you have more and more volume to dry, there’s more and more risk of things going wrong, right? Yeah. It gets harder, takes up a lot of space. So you’ve got to have space ready for when, when the end of harvest comes. You have if you’ve done a couple plants or maybe you’ve grown a couple big plants, you know, like if you’ve got a, if you’ve got a.

A two kilo tree that’s gonna be super hard to, to hang and to hang and dry. So I think the, I think the important What kind of, what kind of space? Okay. So if, you know, in terms of prepping the space it’s obviously a key part and not, not messing it up. Are you recommending just like line drying or putting it in a tent or those like dry racks are quite nice with fans or, yeah, I think if or no fans, If you’ve got the space like a good, a good cupboard is always good, you know, but you do have to then get some kind of ventilation going in there.

Alternatively, for me, the way that I found to get the best the best results once again, like I don’t, I’m not using a dehumidifier slash humidifier. I am using some air movement and an and a small extractor fan, and then I take a 1.2 by 1.2 by two meter grow tent. Turn it onto its side, so then it’s two meters by 1.2 tall, and then I run.

A whole bunch of lines on it, and then when I’m cutting my plant, I’ll physically cut the plant to make sure that there’s a sort of a V on each end of the, you know, we’ve got the butt hanging down, but then I’ve got a V at the top. As I’m trimming my plant down, I’m actually thinking about how can I hang this plant?

Okay. And that’s, if the plant is larger, it’s always better to, if possible, just ch chop it at the base and hang, hold plant. Okay. But like a lot of the time, that’s not possible. And then I’m hanging in lines as stacked as possible, but still allowing air movement between all the lines as much as possible, making sure that I, I put my extractive fan on onto my backup for load shedding, because when load shedding hits, You know, you and all your air movement cuts out and it’s day two of dry, you’re sitting there with like a hundred percent humidity in that tent, you know?

So if you can’t do that, I’d suggest then opening it up. But making sure you’ve got everything hung super neatly and in a enclosed environment. And then I also, like my grow space tends to be a little bit hotter. Then, then say my, then like, say my, my living space. So I actually do my drying indoors, like in my, in my lounge area because it’s the most it’s the most it’s sort of the coolest, the most consistent space in, in the house.

It does stink up the house for two weeks or for, for for seven to 14 days or, or, or however along the dry takes. But at the end of the day, that’s that’s worth it, you know, a little bit of it just don’t invite too many people over during that time. Cause they’re like, I just wanna, I wanna reiterate on one of those points.

Obviously it’s just like, you gotta, you gotta bring it back down to this roots of like what you’re actually doing when you’re coming to the drying phase. Like you’re doing that plant and there’s actually a tremendous amount of moisture in that plant. You know, if you, if it. It comes off the tree to what you’re getting dried.

You know, it could be a, a pit fraction of, of the percentage is just all that water’s leaving and that water needs to go somewhere. It’s coming into the water VA as as water vapor into the air, into the room. And essentially if you don’t use that extractor fan to pull that out, you’re now exposing yourself to a massive risk of like damp.

And now, cuz when the water’s in the plant. You’re fine. It’s generally okay, but when the water comes out, the plant and the leaves start to sweat in that, especially in that initial phase of drying, like that’s where you can have develop things like mold and you know, listen, you would never dry fruits and vegetables in like a.

A damp humor. Imagine like dry bull on, you know, you, you kind of want that maldi. Yeah. If you want that off, if that fan goes off, it’s a disaster. You know? So, yeah. I just wanna reiterate on, on that moisture level. It’s got got, you’ve gotta take that moisture out, but then, like Dean, you were trying to you were alluding to, it’s like, Now don’t take out too much water.

Like how do you know when to stop? No. So my new drying method that I actually, that I actually did this season is I made sure that I didn’t have any indoor going so that I could use my tent to do my drying in. Okay. So I was prepared, but then I also grew a whole bunch of different varietals. So stuff was actually finishing at different times.

So now all of a sudden I had this sliding scale of, okay, cool, plants being chopped, but then plants being. Three to four days dried and then plants being close to, to finished dried. So, so what I did for, for what I did for, so it’s exactly that. You’re trying to dry it out to a point, but you’re not trying to dry it out so much that it’s bone dry, crispy, and then all the terpenes have evaporated off in its ruin.

Cause you, you can’t add the water back, right? No, you can, you can control the moisture. You can control the moisture in the, in the processing process, but you can’t by moving it, say from the hanging space to what I’ve been doing, I’ve been hanging it on its stems in the, in the drying space for, in the tent for say, four to five days.

Then when I’m, it’s starting to dry out, but I’m bending the stems for the stem test and seeing, so when it’s, it’s fully dry, the stems should crack, crack slightly. Okay. But I’ve been, after four or five days, the plant is still bendable on some of the big enough. But then what I’ve then been doing is I’ve been cutting all the buds off the stems.

Okay. So literally taking a pair of scissors and cutting between all the little buds to remove the sticks from it, and then you left just with the individual buds that you’re going to. You know, that, that would then be trimmed normally, and that’s called shucking. Okay. But then from the shuck, I’ve been taking the whole plant and putting it into a drying rack, which I have hang up in another gro tent, so mm-hmm.

One horizontal gro tent, one vertical gro tent, the drying rack’s hanging in the, in the gro tent. And I found if you’ve put the, if you just take the bud from the tree and you put it into the net, it flattens the one side of it. Okay. So now you’ve gotta like, Flip it every day. It was too wet for the net.

So that’s why if you hang it up first, let it do 60% of it’s drying, hanging, and then the remainder of it’s drying in the net. I found that you’re getting this beautiful dry and a uniform dry across the board because sometimes if you’re hanging it on the stick, still some parts is. Dry. Some pots aren’t dry and it’s not this uniform dry.

Across the board. You’re wanting to have everything drying out at a very similar speed so that when you jaw that stuff up or start to trim, everything’s ready. Okay? So stage, stage two would always be kind of just getting that everything shucked, removing all the stick matter, removing all the big fan leaves and putting it onto the drying rack.

And then my third stage would be, my third suggestion would always be sort of a processing, a processing suggestion, because processing can take quite long. Mm-hmm. Especially if you’re doing it yourself. So then I, I, I would highly advise white paint buckets. They’re like 50 bucks from Mambos or whatever, plastics warehouse, and they’re big, you know, and then you take your, your untrimmed buds when they dry, you put them into a paint bucket, you keep that sealed, you burf it once a day.

So this is after about seven to 12 days, depending on how hot your environment is and, and, and you know, how dense it was. And then into the paint bucket. And then when I’m ready to trim, I’ll literally keep the paint bucket sealed, take a couple bags out, trim those up, and then get more from the paint bucket.

But you’re constantly having everything controlled. And sealed so that it’s not trying out, because if you just got your pile of weed on the table and you’re trying to dry through it and it’s taking you two days, you know you’re gonna then ruin all that weed in that, in that trimming process. Mm-hmm. So it’s kind of just about having full, having as much control as you can master using whatever you have at hand.

In order to, to dry. But you know, like if you have a cupboard that could work. If you’ve got a tent, it’s more ideal. You’ve got a controlled pantry area, that’s probably the most ideal, you know, but it’s, it really depends on what you’ve, what you’ve got and what you can, you know, this kind of space that you have.

But if you’re gonna go and spend, you know, 30 grand on an indoor grow system, you might as well. Just invest into some kind of solution. But I, I must say, during the whole drying process, I pull P piece off and smoke it. Like when it’s five days dry, I’ll try it when it’s like eight days dry, I’ll try it.

And that’s just because it’s like interesting to see how the actual flavor and the effect changes over time. So that’s more of like a out of interestate kind of kind of thing. But what I have found is, you know, if you do a really nice try, You get it, that it’s still quite, it’s not a hundred percent where you want it to be yet, but you’re bucketing it up and your bucket is 50% full and you’re rotating that every day.

Mm-hmm. And then you start to trim, and then after your trim, you get it jarred up. Within three weeks of that jarring date, you’ve got a, a beautiful turian profile. If you didn’t try it out too much in those seven to seven to 14 days, and I mean, A lot of guys on the internet are gonna go read about drying and curing, and it’s gonna say like 14 days dry, you know?

And everyone’s gonna be like, it has to dry for 14 days. And that’s a bunch of Ps. Like it dries for as long as that specific plant needs to dry. Mm-hmm. And you need to look at it. Every day to see how dry is this plant? You know, physically feel the but and like fill this butt. Okay, cool. That feels like it’s getting relatively dry.

Mm-hmm. But then go down the bigger stems to the larger buds and bend it there and see. Okay, cool. There is still a bit of moisture, but I feel this could be dry quite soon. That’s a good time to shock it. Because you don’t wanna over dry. Like, I was sick recently and I had a beautiful, beautiful plant that just went four, five days too long hanging.

And like, the whole experience of the plant has changed. You know, it’s mm-hmm. Flaking when it’s dry, when I’m trimming it now, the buds are beautiful and dense and I have a, I like shoved everything super tight, you know, and then put a cap on it to try and get some moisture going. But like, I just, it was just too long, you know, three, four days.

And boom. That’s a, that’s a huge plant. It was a massive plant. Dan Danzo. Well, I mean, I still smoke it, but it’s not it’s not a, it’s not ideal, you know? What’s this add like, on, on the time span? It’s not just 14 days, like set, or 12 days or 13 days and like, and then furthermore to like how it, you know how it feels, but like if you have a specific purpose for it at the end of the drying stage, like at the end of the drying stage, like say you want to.

Do some rosin extraction and it’s going into a press, then you might wanna actually keep it like not too dry. And if it’s going into another extraction method, then you maybe wanna make it more dry. So it depends. If you want it smokable, you wanna like right in the middle. So it also depends on your, you know, what, what, what, like you know, what you wanna do with it and where it’s gonna go and, and what the end product of this is.

I mean, if you’re going to put it into edibles, I don’t think it really matters, you know, like I wouldn’t be in there checking it every single day for Yeah, you’re gonna oven it anywhere in, in edibles, you know? Yes. But I like that point on the rosin because like if ro if you’ve, if you’ve dried too hard on on and you wanna make rosin, you’re just gonna press that oil straight back into the dry leaf matter.

You know? So like your end goal is highly important and I think for most people who are growing for flower, you know, you’re wanting, there’s nothing worse. Then spending months and months and months and months and thousands of rans growing this thing. And then when you, you finally show it to your mates and then they just like take it in their hand and they just crumble it and dust, dust, dust dinner.

Yeah. You want it to go in that grinder and just stick that grinder up or that pair of scissors needs to be like stuck together. You know, when you flex your, your, your seasons harvest. So like it’s, it’s, it’s just, it seems, it seems like such a minuscule timeframe, but. Personally, I’ve seen personally for many years, I messed it up in my early days of growing.

I’d grow the weed and then I’d hang it up in this garage that was like 30 degrees Celsius and then I’d get to like smoking the butt and it’s like, I’m like, this is an indoor though. But I did everything, you know? I did everything right. What is wrong here? And it all actually just came down to that I was growing good weed, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t processing it correctly.

So processing now is something that I pay a massive amount. Processing time of year is literally like, you know, you are processing, you don’t do anything else. Well, I don’t do anything else. I just like pro process for like two weeks straight because, you know, okay, cool. Months. From September I’ve been working on these plants.

In the outdoor sense now, it’s, you know, March I could put in two weeks of effort because I’m only gonna be doing this again next, next September, or getting started, you know, so you can ruin your whole year’s supply of weed by not, by not paying attention to the drying and the, and the curing process.

And just on, on the curing, we spoke a lot about drying. Mm, nothing better than a three or a five liter consult jar. Big boy, fill it up fill it up you know, three quarters of the way with a little bit of breathing room, seal that bad boy up, label them, which is important. You’re not gonna remember them all.

And, and and open that bad boy once or twice, a once or twice a day. And you’ll, you’ll have, you’ll have dank at the end of the day, but just make sure when it gets into that jar, you’ve paid attention to that, that drying, that drying process because Yeah. Yeah. I, I can’t get over. I must reiterate that it is highly important.

Yeah. Make sure you guys run that last mile hard and don’t. Don’t, don’t give up. It’s not the end until it’s like they’re ready to be smoked. Guys, if you enjoyed the episode, make sure to like and subscribe. Leave a comment below if you have any special drying techniques or any special curing techniques.

We always love to hear it and we always love to reply. Make sure to check us out every Friday with a new podcast and until next week, these guys. Peace guys.