After several months of hard work and countless efforts, your plant are today ready to be cutted. But they are not yet ready to be used. Let’s speak about how to handle your precious buds after the harvest. The best thing is to take care immediately of the leaves, and eliminate them, both the big fan leaves and the little ones all around the buds. This job can be done with scissors or with an electronic device. In this second case the job will be much faster, in the first case you will get a little ball of hashish for your instant pleasure. Hard choice uh?
Once the plant has been cleaned it’s the moment to find a dry cool place to hang them. A cantine or an equivalent place would be the ideal choice, the humidity should be around 40-50% and the temperature around 16° centigrades. In these ideal condition, the buds will be dried in 7-10 days. When the temperature is higher or the humidity lower, so we have the conditions like in an apartment, the buds can be dried in 4-5 days.
The plant is usually hanged upside down, in this way the buds will dry closing their leaves and calixes on themselves, protecting the internal cells of resin for a longer time. We have to consider that we have to leave about 5% of water in the buds, that is the perfect proportion for conservation. The bud have to be soft and a little bit elastic and doesn’t have to break instantly. A good method to understand if the plant is ready is to break a stick close to a bud. When the plant it’s ready the stick will break instantly and completely.
Now the plant is in the condition to be burned. The resulting high is a weird one, it’s not properly high or stoned, it’s a little bit a combination of them, that lasts really short (30-45 minutes). This is because once we’ve cutted the buds from the plant, we still have something alive, and chemical transformations are still happening in the buds. The THC is the top production of the cannabinoids and it’s also one of the most complex cannabinoids at a molecular level. For this reason is necessary to let the buds sit for a few more weeks (pref. in a jar ermetically sealed) so these reactions have all the necessary time to be completed.
The bud will be completely ready to release all its power after 20-40 days after the harvest. After that, the marijuana will loose THC constantly (5-10% less every month). The best wy to keep it good for several months is to use a jar. In this case can be good to open the jar(s) constantly every 2-3 weeks to change the air and to check that there is no mold in the jar itself.
And, at the end of this post, we have to answer to a question that we hear really often: “I’ve just harvested and I don’t want to wait: how can I make a joint now?”
We strongly discourage this practice and we invite do not use it but with a few buds for temporary use. You can use the normal oven or the microwave, in both cases at about 3/4 of their power. Just put the buds in for a few seconds, and take them out immediately when they start to steam. Let them sit for 10-15 minutes and enjoy. Rememebr that in this way you will loose a little bit of power and all the aroma.
