The crucial art of drying your cannabis

The drying of your freshly harvested cannabis plant is one of the most crucial steps to having the best effects from your bud. Learning proper drying techniques is very important so that you do not lose out on the months of hard work that you put in when you were growing.

Once you determine that it is time to cut your plant and begin the drying process, you need to figure out if you are going to wet trim or dry trim. I have tried wet trimming and I actually preferred it for a while, but once I learned how to dry my cannabis better, I switched to dry trimming.

I found that when I was wet trimming, my plant dried way too fast. You want to aim for 5-10 days of drying. If your bud dries too fast, the plant will retain more chlorophyl, which can lead to bad taste and a harsh smoke. A slower dry time helps the plant to release gases and chemicals at a constant rate, giving you a more pure flavor and smoke.

Some people trim off all the branches and hang them individually, but I like to cut the main stalk and hang my plant upside down as one piece for it to dry. Doing it like that helps to slow down the drying process and that is what I am aiming for. You also want to keep the drying area cold and at about 60% humidity.

A cold and somewhat humid room for drying helps to maintain the perfect setting for a long and slow dry which really improves the quality of your end product. I have tried drying single branches at a time, or even trimming the buds and laying them on a drying rack, but those methods have always made my cannabis dry way too fast. Plus each time you cut the plant while it is wet, you release different chemicals from the plant that fall onto the buds which can affect flavor.

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Let's talk about airflow. You never want air flowing directly across your drying plant. This will cause the plant to dry way too fast. Another reason I like to hang the plant as a whole and trim it when it is dry is that the larger leaves kind of wrap around your buds, kind of making a protective cocoon that helps your buds dry more evenly. You dont want the outside of your buds to dry and the insides still be really wet when you begin the curing process because that can lead to mold forming on your buds and that will make it so all that work goes right down the drain.

The last thing I want to talk about when it comes to drying is that you want your bud to hang in complete darkness. UV light can degrade your cannabis and it can even convert the THC to CBN, which reduces the psychoactive properties.

This is something that interested me because I like to have a god mixture of amber trichomes on my buds when I choose to harvest. The amber trichomes have naturally converted THC to CBN. The CBN is something I like because it gives a more body high and not as much of a head high.

So for the first day of drying, I hung my plant to dry in the growing tent where my GDP is. That gave the plant about 12 hours of light before I removed it and placed it in a dark room for the remainder of the drying process. I am wondering if this extra time in the light will have done anything to produce some CBN because this plant did not really have as many amber trichomes when I harvested it. It will be a cool experiment if it works and I have manually increased the amount of CBN without having to wait too much longer before harvest.

Hopefully this post helped answer any questions you may have had about the drying process of cannabis. It is a very important part of the growing process that too many new growers dont take the time to do correctly. A lot of the smaller things like wet trim vs dry trim comes down to preference, but one thing you never want to do when growing cannabis is to rush steps in the process.

Harvesting too early, drying too fast and improper curing can be detrimental to your efforts, so it is important to master these seemingly small steps so that you get the best effects out of your plants.