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dry rack question
- Thread starter joe guy
- Start date
it's not really much of a difference, i'm experementing now with this concept but basically, i trimmed about a quarter pound the other night, about 2 zips i took off the stems and put on a drying rack, about a zip i trimmed but left on stems, and about a zip i still haven't trimmed...
now standard reasoning and accepted theory says that the stuff i clipped from the stem should be the driest and the stuff hanging with the leaves still on should be wettest...however the oposite seems to be true...
it seems to me that when you dry a plant, the leaves all dry within 2 days and the buds stay wet...if anything they seem to act as wicks....pulling the moisture from the heavy thick buds to the leaves...leaves have tons of surface area compared to buds, so they dry much much quicker...
i always thought the stems would add to drying time but again my experiment shows otherwise...the stem seems to stay moist, but i think it's the buds keeping the stem moist and not the stem keeping the buds moist, so like the leaves, the buds are having moisture wicked from the most moist parts of the plant to the most dry, where it can evaporate easier...the more junk you leave on the plant, the more dry parts it will have with lots of surface area, drying the buds faster, or at least at a similar rate of buds with their stems and leaves cut off. i am fairly certain that tomorrow when everything is fully trimmed and goes into paper bags that i wont be able to tell the difference between the 3...frankly i couldn't right now except for the stems, leaves, and obvious differences in dryness.
so i would venture to say that it is really personal preference...and makes very little difference in the end. i'm sure people will tell you that hang drying with the leaves on is best...but i defy anybody to prove that leaving leaves on slows drying, or that a difference in taste can be distinguished afterward.
you definately want to hang your buds after you cut them, if you were to just lay them all on your floor and trim them one at a time you will find that at the end of day one the buds you are trimming have lost some of their plumpless, gained some stickiness, and all the leaves on the bottom got pressed into the buds, meaning you have to pull them away from the bud with your scisors before you trim them off, a real hassle...but once the leaves are off there is no need to hang...i mean the difference between the too is only the fact that rack dried buds have a slightly more street bud look, the hairs get pressed into the bud, instead of standing out at all angles like Einstein's hairdo...this also happens if you put your buds in paper bags after the first few days, something i highly recomend...
personally i hang my buds right away, then trim whenever i get the time, some doesn't get trimmed till it's all the way dry, some gets trimmed completely and removed from stem day one, it all depends on how much time i have, but the one thing thats been consistant is that the buds always turn out the same no matter how they get processed, they dry in the same 5 days and look identical afterwards...
i would suggest you not worry about how cheep your method is, since the quality of work you do at this stage will decide wether your smoking mildew tasting hay buds or or dank weed you can't bring in public without turning heads...frankly drying pot is not expensive, tie a string from two points and hang plants, clip leaves and stems and put buds on a rack, or shelf, or whatever...the costs are really nothing compared to the price of even one bud...
i would suggest after 2-3 days of drying be it on a rack or as a plant on a string you put them into paper grocery bags...it slows drying down a bit so that you don't end up with the outside of your buds being impossibly dry and the centers impossibly wet...buds tend to dry more evenly in bags...you don't want to put buds in it till they start to get a little crunchy on the outside(to keep from deforming buds and getting them all stuck together by wet piling them in grocery bags).
the hardest part is knowing when it's dry enough to jar...people tend to jar too moist, making it lose it's flavor after a week. the stems SHOULD crack, if they don't it's too moist, and i'm not just talking stems with no buds, the stems should crack in the middle of buds too, although you jar them once they get to that point, if you left them out for another day after that they would be too dry to cure so when they are almost their its important to keep testing often, also you should not just test one...try doing a couple each time, thicker stems and thinner ones...
now standard reasoning and accepted theory says that the stuff i clipped from the stem should be the driest and the stuff hanging with the leaves still on should be wettest...however the oposite seems to be true...
it seems to me that when you dry a plant, the leaves all dry within 2 days and the buds stay wet...if anything they seem to act as wicks....pulling the moisture from the heavy thick buds to the leaves...leaves have tons of surface area compared to buds, so they dry much much quicker...
i always thought the stems would add to drying time but again my experiment shows otherwise...the stem seems to stay moist, but i think it's the buds keeping the stem moist and not the stem keeping the buds moist, so like the leaves, the buds are having moisture wicked from the most moist parts of the plant to the most dry, where it can evaporate easier...the more junk you leave on the plant, the more dry parts it will have with lots of surface area, drying the buds faster, or at least at a similar rate of buds with their stems and leaves cut off. i am fairly certain that tomorrow when everything is fully trimmed and goes into paper bags that i wont be able to tell the difference between the 3...frankly i couldn't right now except for the stems, leaves, and obvious differences in dryness.
so i would venture to say that it is really personal preference...and makes very little difference in the end. i'm sure people will tell you that hang drying with the leaves on is best...but i defy anybody to prove that leaving leaves on slows drying, or that a difference in taste can be distinguished afterward.
you definately want to hang your buds after you cut them, if you were to just lay them all on your floor and trim them one at a time you will find that at the end of day one the buds you are trimming have lost some of their plumpless, gained some stickiness, and all the leaves on the bottom got pressed into the buds, meaning you have to pull them away from the bud with your scisors before you trim them off, a real hassle...but once the leaves are off there is no need to hang...i mean the difference between the too is only the fact that rack dried buds have a slightly more street bud look, the hairs get pressed into the bud, instead of standing out at all angles like Einstein's hairdo...this also happens if you put your buds in paper bags after the first few days, something i highly recomend...
personally i hang my buds right away, then trim whenever i get the time, some doesn't get trimmed till it's all the way dry, some gets trimmed completely and removed from stem day one, it all depends on how much time i have, but the one thing thats been consistant is that the buds always turn out the same no matter how they get processed, they dry in the same 5 days and look identical afterwards...
i would suggest you not worry about how cheep your method is, since the quality of work you do at this stage will decide wether your smoking mildew tasting hay buds or or dank weed you can't bring in public without turning heads...frankly drying pot is not expensive, tie a string from two points and hang plants, clip leaves and stems and put buds on a rack, or shelf, or whatever...the costs are really nothing compared to the price of even one bud...
i would suggest after 2-3 days of drying be it on a rack or as a plant on a string you put them into paper grocery bags...it slows drying down a bit so that you don't end up with the outside of your buds being impossibly dry and the centers impossibly wet...buds tend to dry more evenly in bags...you don't want to put buds in it till they start to get a little crunchy on the outside(to keep from deforming buds and getting them all stuck together by wet piling them in grocery bags).
the hardest part is knowing when it's dry enough to jar...people tend to jar too moist, making it lose it's flavor after a week. the stems SHOULD crack, if they don't it's too moist, and i'm not just talking stems with no buds, the stems should crack in the middle of buds too, although you jar them once they get to that point, if you left them out for another day after that they would be too dry to cure so when they are almost their its important to keep testing often, also you should not just test one...try doing a couple each time, thicker stems and thinner ones...
I have a drying rack and used it exclusively for a while. Did a good job, but did flatten the down side of the bud. So I would say it hurts bag appeal, but you gotta do what you gotta do. I haven't used it for a year or so now and just hang dry it all. Now it does work good for popcorn if you've got a bunch.
joe guy
Member
Mr sloth and sneaky thanx for the info and i never thought of the leafs and stems working that way before but sounds totaly true. I left decient amount of stem to check for snapping but left the leaf on to kinda act as a guard for the trics but very intersting idea there i think ima have to add that to my reasoning behind leaving them on ..lol thanx again guys.. So do u recomend the bag before the jar allways? or is it a play it by ear deal?
T
TribalSeeds
Racks are ok for smaller buds. I dont like putting big buds on them unless they are pretty dry already.
I kinda play it by feel. The paper bag is optional and some say that it takes the flavor out of the bud, but I haven't noticed that when I've used the bag method. I like to trim the fans off before hanging, but as sloth said, it's one of those things that I will get to it when I can. It's just a pita to trim once its all dry IMHO. So I try and get to it before that point. The buds dry from the outside-in, so it seems to me that they are pretty dry, seems too dry to me, when they are ready to be jarred or bagged. Last couple of small harvests I did this and put it straight into the jar. At first the hygrometer read high 40s, 48 I think, but after a few days it rose to 58%RH. Just right IMO.
joe guy
Member
Ive heard about using the hygrometer in the jar ive been lookin at wallyworld for a one gal mason jar so i can have one plant in one single jar and only have to buy one or two meters.. But thanks for the heads up on the fact that tbe rh will eventualy rise back to the perfect zone im on day 2 of the rack run found them at the 99 cent store they are for toys or laundry ect ill get a pic of it some time today pretty cool for a buck i got two and three level ones...
If you use a pancake turner and roll your buds every so often they will not get flat on one side. You don't have to flip them just turn it up at about 30-40 degrees and slide it around under the buds. Do this a few times and then even the buds out on the screen so you have no piles. Do this a couple times and they will not flatten out. This will also clean the buds of the stray leaves that you clipped during trimming. Because of this I put a tray under the rack to collect these.
ok so i reported above about my last harvest experience, i feel like i have gained a little insight on the issue, i believe the reason my destemmed buds were moister than the stemmed ones was that the stems kept each bud suspended and spaced away from the others, but when i destemmed them and put them on a tray to air dry them the buds were touching, though not stacked and not touching too much, they were nevertheless much denser on the tray than they would be on a drying rack and that explains why they dried slower for me, despite reason saying they should dry faster.
that means to me that you gain a bit of controll by trimming them from their stems first, because you can dictate how long it takes them to dry by how far appart you space the buds on a tray or rack...the downside being some surfaces will stick to the buds and remove crystals and the outsides will be flatter(though people on the street seem to be more comfortable with that)however ive found paper bags don't stick to buds really and neither does that netting those shoe racks people use are made of...though put your buds on a towel to dry and they will stick to it like burrs!
i like the paper bags because the buds don't stick the the paper, they stick to themselves rather than the paper, but the paper seems to act like a powerful wick and environmental control device, i firmly believe that bags help a bud dry more evenly, so that the outside doesn't get crispy while the inside is still wet, the inside dries at the same basic rate as the outside, the big fat buds dry at the same speed as the little buds, and once they reach the humidity of the atmosphere in the air they stop drying, your average house would probably be around 55 to 65% humidity, and the bags seem to equalize out at that basic humidity as well, i notice when i water all my plants and the room is more humid, like last night, the bag acts as a wick again but this time to equalize the micro environment with the outer environment by increasing the humidity in the buds and likely the moisture in the paper the bag is made of...i think that lies at the heart of the it's success...ive read cardboard is of similar consistancy and yeilds similar results...namely, that unless you live in a very dry climate, it's hard to overdry you buds with bags, wether you leave them in for a week or a month, if the humidity in the room is 60% the whole time, your buds will likely be at that same temperature, regardless the amount of time it spent in the bags.
one example to this would be chereo's or chips or oreo's...they are sealed in the bag at the exact right humidity...and they stay that way...but if you leave a tray of oreo's out on a summer night the next morning you will find them soft and gross...this is because the cookies remoistend to the humidity of the environment...people that think leaving weed in these bags too long will over dry it are following the assumption that the oreo cookies, which are relatively low moisture, would keep getting drier when left open, in a paper bag or otherwise, despite the humidity of the room...i suppose basic physics would say that it's not physically possible for that cookie to get drier than the air, unless it was at a vastly different temperature maybe or was less dense than air, which cannabis certainly is not...
in fact, depending on density and other properties of matter, all the objects in the room do their best to form an equilibrium with the environment...temperature, humidity...obviously a hunk of aluminum is not going to gain much moisture but were you to take a clean sock, leave it in the middle of your room for 2 hours and put it in a jar with a caliber 3 you would find it's the same humidity as the room is, as likely your comforter, your carpet, your drapes...they would be limited by the materials they are made from. i feel that paper bags work so well because they are the right material and thickness to naturally pull moisture from what is inside it and then stabilize at the relative humidity of the room... it doesn't over dry weed or facilitate faster drying, it creates a micro environment within itself, with the properties to both dry as with hang drying, but also to equalize humidity from inside the bud to out, and from small buds to large, in the same way that jarring weed does... the only difference is that with bags one can even out the dry, so that he doesn't end up with the smaller buds being dry at day 4 and the big buds dry at day 7, they all dry together, are of the same texture and smoke similarly, so jarring seems to be even more effective, rather than spending the first to days in a jar redistributing moisture from the inside to the outside (because logic will tell you the first 2 days of jarring they aren't curing, the outsides are too dry to cure and the insides too moist, it's only when they fully equalize, that the entire bud is at the right humidity to start curing.)they start curing immediately, because the entire bud is already the same humidity, the center is just as dry as the outside after 3-5 days in bags(after hanging or rack drying 2-3 days), so i see much less yo-yoing with the humidity levels in my jars.
common sense says that should be better for flavor, terpenens evaporate when pot is overly dried, so air drying them till they are really crispy on the outside like i always used to do, but still bendy and moist at the center, would seem at least slightly detrimental to the terpenenes on the outer surface of the buds, sure when you jar them moisture from the center rehydrates the crispy outsides somewhat and smell returns after a few days of jar curing...however if the buds never got crispy on the outside in the first place? if they dried at the same rate but much more evenly? reason and experience say that the outsides would have more terpenes, and hence, a better flavor and smell from the very onset of curing, it doesn't take 2 days to equalize before the smell returns like with hang drying, usually jars smell nice within an hour or two of being filled from the grocery bags. i believe this also contributes to a better taste, because those first 2 days in traditional jar curing they aren't curing, not until humidity stabilizes do they begin to cure, so during that time things are still breaking down in the center of the buds, albeit slight, and terps are still evaporating from the outside of the buds, so even though it's probably not even at a level detectable, i would think that when jar curing, you would get a better cure with buds that were already at 60% humidity on both the outside and the inside, vs buds that were 50% humidity on the outside and 70% on the inside and had to spend a few days forming an equilibrium. that is why i believe that bags are essential to getting the best cure...
that means to me that you gain a bit of controll by trimming them from their stems first, because you can dictate how long it takes them to dry by how far appart you space the buds on a tray or rack...the downside being some surfaces will stick to the buds and remove crystals and the outsides will be flatter(though people on the street seem to be more comfortable with that)however ive found paper bags don't stick to buds really and neither does that netting those shoe racks people use are made of...though put your buds on a towel to dry and they will stick to it like burrs!
i like the paper bags because the buds don't stick the the paper, they stick to themselves rather than the paper, but the paper seems to act like a powerful wick and environmental control device, i firmly believe that bags help a bud dry more evenly, so that the outside doesn't get crispy while the inside is still wet, the inside dries at the same basic rate as the outside, the big fat buds dry at the same speed as the little buds, and once they reach the humidity of the atmosphere in the air they stop drying, your average house would probably be around 55 to 65% humidity, and the bags seem to equalize out at that basic humidity as well, i notice when i water all my plants and the room is more humid, like last night, the bag acts as a wick again but this time to equalize the micro environment with the outer environment by increasing the humidity in the buds and likely the moisture in the paper the bag is made of...i think that lies at the heart of the it's success...ive read cardboard is of similar consistancy and yeilds similar results...namely, that unless you live in a very dry climate, it's hard to overdry you buds with bags, wether you leave them in for a week or a month, if the humidity in the room is 60% the whole time, your buds will likely be at that same temperature, regardless the amount of time it spent in the bags.
one example to this would be chereo's or chips or oreo's...they are sealed in the bag at the exact right humidity...and they stay that way...but if you leave a tray of oreo's out on a summer night the next morning you will find them soft and gross...this is because the cookies remoistend to the humidity of the environment...people that think leaving weed in these bags too long will over dry it are following the assumption that the oreo cookies, which are relatively low moisture, would keep getting drier when left open, in a paper bag or otherwise, despite the humidity of the room...i suppose basic physics would say that it's not physically possible for that cookie to get drier than the air, unless it was at a vastly different temperature maybe or was less dense than air, which cannabis certainly is not...
in fact, depending on density and other properties of matter, all the objects in the room do their best to form an equilibrium with the environment...temperature, humidity...obviously a hunk of aluminum is not going to gain much moisture but were you to take a clean sock, leave it in the middle of your room for 2 hours and put it in a jar with a caliber 3 you would find it's the same humidity as the room is, as likely your comforter, your carpet, your drapes...they would be limited by the materials they are made from. i feel that paper bags work so well because they are the right material and thickness to naturally pull moisture from what is inside it and then stabilize at the relative humidity of the room... it doesn't over dry weed or facilitate faster drying, it creates a micro environment within itself, with the properties to both dry as with hang drying, but also to equalize humidity from inside the bud to out, and from small buds to large, in the same way that jarring weed does... the only difference is that with bags one can even out the dry, so that he doesn't end up with the smaller buds being dry at day 4 and the big buds dry at day 7, they all dry together, are of the same texture and smoke similarly, so jarring seems to be even more effective, rather than spending the first to days in a jar redistributing moisture from the inside to the outside (because logic will tell you the first 2 days of jarring they aren't curing, the outsides are too dry to cure and the insides too moist, it's only when they fully equalize, that the entire bud is at the right humidity to start curing.)they start curing immediately, because the entire bud is already the same humidity, the center is just as dry as the outside after 3-5 days in bags(after hanging or rack drying 2-3 days), so i see much less yo-yoing with the humidity levels in my jars.
common sense says that should be better for flavor, terpenens evaporate when pot is overly dried, so air drying them till they are really crispy on the outside like i always used to do, but still bendy and moist at the center, would seem at least slightly detrimental to the terpenenes on the outer surface of the buds, sure when you jar them moisture from the center rehydrates the crispy outsides somewhat and smell returns after a few days of jar curing...however if the buds never got crispy on the outside in the first place? if they dried at the same rate but much more evenly? reason and experience say that the outsides would have more terpenes, and hence, a better flavor and smell from the very onset of curing, it doesn't take 2 days to equalize before the smell returns like with hang drying, usually jars smell nice within an hour or two of being filled from the grocery bags. i believe this also contributes to a better taste, because those first 2 days in traditional jar curing they aren't curing, not until humidity stabilizes do they begin to cure, so during that time things are still breaking down in the center of the buds, albeit slight, and terps are still evaporating from the outside of the buds, so even though it's probably not even at a level detectable, i would think that when jar curing, you would get a better cure with buds that were already at 60% humidity on both the outside and the inside, vs buds that were 50% humidity on the outside and 70% on the inside and had to spend a few days forming an equilibrium. that is why i believe that bags are essential to getting the best cure...
joe guy
Member
Well sir sloth u sold me esp. With the two magic words experience and reason.. Gona head to 99cent store and grab me some lunch bags(gona feel like a kid again.. May get sponge bob or cap. America lol but yes your ideas make total sence and for that post my friend i thank you. U helped me out and im sure alot more trolls to afraid to ask...
TwoOne6Strong
New member
Sweet
