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- #921
Phototown Dry/Trim Update
Ghost Train Haze
This plant, as it dries, is going to turn out to be our lowest yielder. She may be a five or six ounce plant at best, now that I can see the buds for what they'll be when they're trimmed. I suck at guessing yields, but there's my guess on this one.
So she is not all the way dry. Here's what I do to dry and cure:
1. Hang buds in tent at around 65% rh and 60 degrees (this is the aim, doesn't always work out like that every hour, lol)
2. Let dry until the buds are about a day or day and a half from being trimmable dry - like when you cut a little bud off the stems and try to smoke it and it won't light all the way and burn right. Not dry, but pretty close. I don't measure, I go entirely by feel on this whole part, but feelwise, all the leaves are totally crispy, the buds still need another day and a half to be dry, and the stems break pretty easily, although not entirely clean breaks yet. Those are what I look for before taking the next step. That's where we are now. A day earlier than I wanted for sure - the buds are not as dense as the other two plants and dried a bit faster than I'd prefer to this point, but that's okay. This cure step makes up for many drying deficiencies in my experience.
3. So now we're ready to take the buds down, which we do. All the Ghost Train Haze. The main stems and super flarfy bullcrap is removed, as are obviously the hangers. That's it. All the small stems and leaf is left on the buds.
4. Now the buds go into the food grade five gallon bucket. If the yield was bigger it would fill the bucket to around 75-80% full, which would be preferable from both a yield point of view and for the effectiveness of this step. The goal in a perfect world is to have the five gallon bucket filled to the same level you would fill a jar when you're ready to jar and burp.
5. And into the tent the bucket goes, sealed tight. Now, for as long as we can stand it, at least five days and up to ten depending on my patience level, we burp that bucket. Just like you burp a jar. Exact same concept. At this point I check like four or five times a day and burp and leave the lid off for longer than will be the case as days progress. Just like a jar.
At the end of this time, we will trim and jar.
I got this method from my Yoda, Sammy, in Oregon on my first grow. I can't explain why it works so well, I just know I've cured any appreciable harvest I've had this way, and what it does is, as I characterize it, it jump starts your cure. It's like a pre-cure on steroids. If you can go ten days, at the end of that time, when you trim the buds, they already smell and taste as if you've had them in the jar for two or three weeks. It's uncanny in my experience. Ideally, if the infrastructure wasn't currently dedicated elsewhere and the yield was bigger, we would first go into a larger container, a big rectangular plastic box that seals tight. Not easy to find, I got mine at Home Depot, Not enough to do that step with this plant, but in that case you go five days in the large container and then pare down the main stems and all and proceed with step 4.
It's not an original method and he didn't make it up. He says he's been doing that way for years till he got big and now has the professionally built out dry/cure room we all dream about. He says trust him, it works. I did, and it does. Just takes a lot of patience. But since I'm rather flush at the moment, in this particular case it's not the slightest problem. It also gives me flexibility and time to trim the Raspberry Parfait, which will be next and likely dry around the same time this stuff is ready to trim. So I can temporarily come up for air and get back to responding to, at this time, the 339 unseen messages in my thing. Lol.
So here's the pics showing the process as described above, in order of step. Then the last picture is unrelated to this post, but it is the bud I lost from the interior of one cola of the Gelato auto that had begun to bud rot. That's all I lost on the entire plant, which isn't bad considering you couldn't see this, it just started, and it's all there was. I'm glad I had dedicated fans on this plant. It's humid overnight here and I often wake up to fog. Then everything burns off real fast and everything dries out. But I'm pretty sure that's where my little bits of mold here and there are coming from. Nothing I can do about that. I check every bud on every plant every day religiously. Lol.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by, and later I'll get back to saying hey!
Ghost Train Haze
This plant, as it dries, is going to turn out to be our lowest yielder. She may be a five or six ounce plant at best, now that I can see the buds for what they'll be when they're trimmed. I suck at guessing yields, but there's my guess on this one.
So she is not all the way dry. Here's what I do to dry and cure:
1. Hang buds in tent at around 65% rh and 60 degrees (this is the aim, doesn't always work out like that every hour, lol)
2. Let dry until the buds are about a day or day and a half from being trimmable dry - like when you cut a little bud off the stems and try to smoke it and it won't light all the way and burn right. Not dry, but pretty close. I don't measure, I go entirely by feel on this whole part, but feelwise, all the leaves are totally crispy, the buds still need another day and a half to be dry, and the stems break pretty easily, although not entirely clean breaks yet. Those are what I look for before taking the next step. That's where we are now. A day earlier than I wanted for sure - the buds are not as dense as the other two plants and dried a bit faster than I'd prefer to this point, but that's okay. This cure step makes up for many drying deficiencies in my experience.
3. So now we're ready to take the buds down, which we do. All the Ghost Train Haze. The main stems and super flarfy bullcrap is removed, as are obviously the hangers. That's it. All the small stems and leaf is left on the buds.
4. Now the buds go into the food grade five gallon bucket. If the yield was bigger it would fill the bucket to around 75-80% full, which would be preferable from both a yield point of view and for the effectiveness of this step. The goal in a perfect world is to have the five gallon bucket filled to the same level you would fill a jar when you're ready to jar and burp.
5. And into the tent the bucket goes, sealed tight. Now, for as long as we can stand it, at least five days and up to ten depending on my patience level, we burp that bucket. Just like you burp a jar. Exact same concept. At this point I check like four or five times a day and burp and leave the lid off for longer than will be the case as days progress. Just like a jar.
At the end of this time, we will trim and jar.
I got this method from my Yoda, Sammy, in Oregon on my first grow. I can't explain why it works so well, I just know I've cured any appreciable harvest I've had this way, and what it does is, as I characterize it, it jump starts your cure. It's like a pre-cure on steroids. If you can go ten days, at the end of that time, when you trim the buds, they already smell and taste as if you've had them in the jar for two or three weeks. It's uncanny in my experience. Ideally, if the infrastructure wasn't currently dedicated elsewhere and the yield was bigger, we would first go into a larger container, a big rectangular plastic box that seals tight. Not easy to find, I got mine at Home Depot, Not enough to do that step with this plant, but in that case you go five days in the large container and then pare down the main stems and all and proceed with step 4.
It's not an original method and he didn't make it up. He says he's been doing that way for years till he got big and now has the professionally built out dry/cure room we all dream about. He says trust him, it works. I did, and it does. Just takes a lot of patience. But since I'm rather flush at the moment, in this particular case it's not the slightest problem. It also gives me flexibility and time to trim the Raspberry Parfait, which will be next and likely dry around the same time this stuff is ready to trim. So I can temporarily come up for air and get back to responding to, at this time, the 339 unseen messages in my thing. Lol.
So here's the pics showing the process as described above, in order of step. Then the last picture is unrelated to this post, but it is the bud I lost from the interior of one cola of the Gelato auto that had begun to bud rot. That's all I lost on the entire plant, which isn't bad considering you couldn't see this, it just started, and it's all there was. I'm glad I had dedicated fans on this plant. It's humid overnight here and I often wake up to fog. Then everything burns off real fast and everything dries out. But I'm pretty sure that's where my little bits of mold here and there are coming from. Nothing I can do about that. I check every bud on every plant every day religiously. Lol.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by, and later I'll get back to saying hey!
