Harvesting and Curing Your Weed, Don't Forget To Burp Your Buds

Harvesting and Curing Weed

Burp Your Buds? How to Dry Your Cannabis Plant Buds Like a Pro from CannabisNet on Vimeo.

I have been writing about my Grow Box over the past few months and finally came to the point where I could harvest one of my babies. I don’t expect to get too much from this one plant, perhaps a half an ounce or so, however I think it’s important to explain to people who are new at this how to go about harvesting.

Harvesting is a big day for most growers. You’ve gone through months of waiting and taking care of your plant until it was ready to produce bud. Then you had to wait for those buds to mature. Patience is the number one challenge for all growers.

Nonetheless, you’ve gone through the checklist and now it’s time to harvest. So before we actually get into the harvest aspect, let’s quickly walk over the basic things to look out for to know when it’s ready to harvest.

The Harvester’s Checklist

Before you can start to harvest you need to ensure that your plant is ready for harvest. Usually, the time frame can be anywhere between 1 and a half months to two months after the plant started flowering before you can harvest. However, there are other tell-tale signs to help you with your decision.

60%-80% of the Pistils have turned red/brown - This is a good sign telling you that you are close or ready to harvest. Make sure that this applies to all of the buds on the plant.

Terpenes have turned color – To be more accurate, you can use a magnifying glass to observe the color change in terpenes. When most of them have turned to a hazel color, you know you are ready to harvest.

Some of the leaf is dying – Getting close to the last part before harvesting, you’ll notice some of the leaf have died off. This is because the plant is focusing all of its energy into the buds and can discard some of the fan leaves.

Once you have gone through your checklist, it’s time for harvesting.

cannabis plants

Harvesting Steps

The first thing you’ll want to do is to start trimming the bush. Get rid of all the major fan leaf and strip the plant as much as you can.

Once you have done this, you can cut the plant at the stem completely. Now you have two options to the harvesting process;

Wet Trimming

Dry Trimming

Some people like to Wet Trim, while others prefer dry trimming. It really comes down to preference however I have found that I do some of my major trimmings when the plant is still wet and then leave it up for drying. Once the plant is dry, I go a second time around to get rid of anything I missed in the first session.

Wet trimming will make your scissors get stickier than when you do dry trimming, but I find you get to hold onto more of the “kief” on the plant when you wet trim. Unless you have a trimming tray that catches your kief in the dry trim phase, I suggest you do as much as you can during the “wet stage”.

If you dry trim, keep a container on the bottom to collect the sugar leaf and the kief and smoke a bowl of that once you’re done trimming.

Drying

Now that your plant is trimmed, you will want to dry it. This process can take anywhere between three and seven days to complete depending on your area. Hang your plants upside down on a hanger or if you have dry racks, by all means go ahead.

You don’t want the area to be too humid and you want to be able to control humidity. Many people use closets. One of the most important things to remember is that you don’t want direct sunlight or any light really to shine onto the plant.

After about four to five days, test to see whether your plant is ready for the curing process. You’ll know that your plant is ready by bending one of the stems to see it break, but not snap off. If it bends, it still isn’t ready to rumble.

Curing

Now that you have finished the drying process, you’ll move onto the curing stage. In this stage you’ll place all of your buds into a hermetically sealed jar and stash it in a dark place for a period of ten to fourteen days (minimal). There really isn’t a thing as “over-curing” but there definitely is a thing called “under-curing”.

In this process you’ll have to burp your weed every day for about an hour. To burp your weed, you simply open up the jar, shake the weed around or even spread it over a newspaper for a bit to allow the humidity to escape. This will help mature the cannabinoids and give it a better smell and taste to it and can drastically increase the potency of your stash.

Do this for about two weeks and you should be ready to smoke your first bowl of your newly grown stash.

And that is a very quick run-down of harvesting and curing your weed. If you have any questions, feel free to leave your comments below and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Curing Cannabis Correctly, Make Sure You Burp Your Weed Harvest