If you’re a first-time marijuana grower, you probably think that once your plants reach maturity and are healthy, your mission is accomplished. Not so fast.
You need to properly dry and cure your marijuana buds to preserve their freshness, improve their flavor, and cancel out pest activity.
Whether it be indoors or outdoors, you gotta admit that converting marijuana seeds into healthy plants takes some effort.
Once you get the massive yield that you toiled for, the next critical stage is drying and curing the marijuana buds.
If this process is executed poorly, you end up having low-quality buds, ruining your smoking sessions, or worse, having customers cancel you.
Post-Harvest
After harvest, marijuana buds typically be holding excessive moisture, which encourages mold formation and other pest activity.
Drying is the system of minimizing moisture in marijuana buds to ensure that they are high-quality and not overwhelmed by mold.
Curing refers to the unique storage system that enhances the flavor and aroma of marijuana buds and also improves potency.
The drying process may be executed via smoking or vaporization techniques, all done in the drying room, and the buds might be handled separately or collectively.
If you skip drying and curing, you greatly minimize the flower’s shelf-life, not to mention that you also affect its taste and potency.
Can I Smoke Freshly-Harvested Flower?
Freshly-harvested marijuana typically contains high water content, and so, if you roll a joint with it, the hits are rough and heavy.
And if we’re talking unusually high water levels, it can be a struggle to get the damn thing to burn, and there’s nothing to write home about the flavor, either.
And so, avoid smoking such flower.
Trimming
When harvested, marijuana is both bud and leaves, but the leaves need to go. Trimming is the process of eliminating marijuana leaves from the bud.
When done expertly, it not just improves the potency, flavor, and scent of marijuana but also enhances the physical beauty of the bud.
Flower may be trimmed after harvest or after drying. It’s an essential process that ensures a balance of nutrients and discourages the proliferation of microbes.
Most people prefer trimming buds after harvest because the buds are the easiest to handle in that state, and there’s also minimal loss of resin.
You might get the urge to smoke the trimmings, but they are mostly leaves and would make for a tough smoke that would irritate your soft throat tissues.
But there are other ways of using trimmings. For one, you may infuse it with cooking oil or butter, and then use it for preparing edibles.
Also, you may prepare hash, infuse it with a skin ointment; or prepare cannabis tea, milk, juice, or water. You are going to be as flexible as your creativity allows you to be.
It’s important to work with experienced people, not just competent people so that your bud achieves supreme beauty.
What Factors Affect Marijuana Drying?
Different circumstances affect the swiftness of drying marijuana flower.
If the marijuana buds are massive and heavy, you’re going to take more time to dry them, and if they are small and light, you take less time.
If the buds are held separately it makes for rapid drying as opposed to putting the entire branch into the drying rack simply because the branch holds significantly more water than individual buds.
If the drying room is having great temperatures, it is faster to dry marijuana buds as opposed to low temperatures.
Ensure that the air in the drying room contains low levels of water because excessive moisture would make the drying process longer than it needs to be.
If your bud is bouncy, not spongy, that’s how you know they are properly dried.
Curing
This process typically involves putting your flower in mason jars and putting them in a dark and dry place. The jars need to be halfway filled to improve airflow.
But most importantly, you must check up on your marijuana bud, every two days, making to sure to remove any low-quality bud.
After at least two weeks, the flavor is well-formed, and the potency is greatly increased. You may start consuming your buds or put them on sale.
