7. Harvest/Cure
A. Setup drying area
Before cutting our plant lets consider where we will dry our harvest. Here is an example of our small dedicated dry tent. You can temporarily convert your flowering tent by using similar methods if you don’t want to invest in a separate drying tent yet.
- Tiny Grow Tent (Optional) I recommend a grow tent for drying. I use a this dedicated grow tent but you repurpose your flower tent as a drying tent.
- Humidity Controller (Optional) – A humidity controller turns a play on/off based on the humidity level.
- Inline Ventilation Fan / Ventilation fan ducting(Optional) – Your inline fan will take out excess humidity from your grow tent, it will be controlled by the humidity controller.
- Oscillating Fan – You need a fan for air movement inside your dry tent. Make sure it is not blowing directly on your buds.
- Paracord – You will string the paracord along the top so you can hang the clip hooks on them.
- Clip Hooks – You will use the clip hoops to grab your cut branches and hand them from the paracord.
B. Let’s cut and dry our plant
It’s time to cut your plant, great job making it this far!
C. Trimming Buds After Drying
After your plant is dry you can finally trim up your buds to prepare them for curing and your enjoyment.
- Trim Bin – All of our trimming happens in this bin. It has slots for our hands to make it a little comfier and catches the kief.
- Small Pruning Shears – These are used to cut branches and cut off buds when needed
- Vinyl Gloves – Our method of trimming mostly uses hands. These gloves are great for knocking off leaves by hand and keep your hands from getting sticky and pungent.
- Paper Plate – used to hold the trimmed buds before we dump it into our Grove bag.
- Comfortable height table
- Comfortable chair
D. Let’s cure our dry buds
Curing is the process that helps get all of the grassy smell out of your buds, dries them out a bit more, and prepares them for storage. The curing process we recommend is much easier than than the “burping of jars” method of lore. The future is here has arrived to simplify this process with the invention of Grove Bags! They are affordable, can be reused and save soo much of your time/energy.
- So all you need to do is take your dried/cleaned buds and put them in a grove bag of the appropriate size, you can leave it in there without anything else and you would more than likely get a very good cure out of the box. 2 months or so in the grove bag produce the ideal cure for us but it is very good at 1 month, and even 2 weeks.
- There are a couple of tips we recommend to get the ideal cure. First you need to get some cheap mini digital hygrometers (one per grove bag).
- You want the humidity around 60% for ideal curing. The grove bag does a great at releasing extra humidity (we grow in a dry climate) but sometimes the buds you put in is just too dry; in that case take a leaf or 2 from a vegging plant and place it at the top of your herb. That should be it, come back next day and check the humidity again, if still too low add an extra leaf…
- YouTube Video: Curing Buds After Trimming
