2. Place buds in a baggie or sealed glass jar and leave them to sweat for one or two days.
3. When you remove the buds, they will be damp again. Place them to dry over your grow room lights again for 24 hours.
4. Return buds to the plastic or glass container.
5. Check the buds after one or two days to see if they seem damp; repeat the process of sweating and drying until they no longer feel or smell damp. When the bud branches snap rather than bend, the buds can be put away for any length of time in any kind of container, and they won’t incur any rot or bad taste.
After a month or more in storage, the buds can be considered cured and will taste the best they can for months and even years to come. Cured cannabis loses its green color and becomes the more familiar brown shades reminiscent of outdoor weed.
Rub It Out
My Jamaican friends showed me a trick for improving the taste and burning qualities of freshly harvested weed. When cannabis is very fresh to the point of dampness it is usually cut up with scissors in order to roll a joint without the pot clumping into a mound of wet leaf that does not burn well. Instead of using scissors, try placing the damp weed into the palm of your hand and use the palm of your other hand to grind and mash the cannabis bud into little bits. It takes a few minutes, but the results are well worth the effort. By mashing the weed with one hand into the palm of the other, you effectively grind the resin on the surface of the fresh leaf deep into the leaf itself. Even the sweetest cannabis leaf is a little bitter and burns poorly until it dries out, but this process will sweeten up the bitter taste of the leaf and improve the burnability of the not yet dry weed by blending it with oily THC resin glands. In a side by side comparison test, you will find a dramatic improvement in the flavor and burnability of fresh cannabis joints after “rubbing out” your uncured smoke.
Breeding
Breeding plants is a hobby for the advanced cannabis grower who wants her pot to be all it should be. My best weed has always been the weed I bred myself. Often that dynamite cannabis came from two lesser strains. To breed cannabis, you must place a male plant beside a female plant so the pollen from the male flowers pollinates the female flowers and makes new seeds that possess traits of both parents. The seeds from a pollinated plant will vary widely, with some producing dynamite plants and some producing lesser plants. It is a simple matter to throw out the crappy plants that are stunted or smoke harshly and keep the good ones for your garden by cloning. Only one plant is required to give you hundreds of seeds. Do not try to pollinate a plant in your grow room unless you want the entire crop to be pollinated. Even if you sprinkle a tiny bit of pollen over one single plant in your grow room, the pollen will scatter and fertilize most of the other plants in the room.
Usually, the female plant is available from your personal garden. You must buy seeds to get a male plant because, unless a grower is breeding, male plants are usually thrown out as soon as they are identified. Once you have a male plant and a female plant, follow these simple steps to create new custom marijuana strains:
1. As soon as the male flowers, it should be taken out of the budding room and kept alive by natural lights or grow lights. A flowering female plant should also be removed from the budding room. The male and female plants must be covered if necessary to keep them in a 12-hour light/dark regimen.
2. Place a dark page of a glossy magazine under the male plant. When you see that yellow pollen has dropped from the plant onto the magazine page, it is time to place the two plants together.
3. Put the plants as close to each other as possible and gently shake the male plant to release its pollen over the female plant.
4. Pollinate the female several times a day for a couple of days, and then dispose of the male plant in your private yard or compost pile. (Not your garbage can — unless you are looking to get busted.)
5. Sprinkle any pollen on the magazine page over the female plant.
6. Place the female back in the budding room. Hopefully, you can do so before any pests from outside settle onto the plant and get carried into the grow room.
The female plant will begin showing swollen seed pods within a few weeks. A few weeks after the seed pods swell, the seeds will begin breaking open from their husks and will turn from white to yellow and finally to dark brown. When the plant is ready to harvest, the seeds will be dark and waxy and ready to germinate.
The best way to de-seed dried marijuana is to break up the buds and use a magazine or any other rough surface to roll the seeds away from the bud bits. Newspaper is not recommended for this task if you intend to smoke any of the weed bits that are left behind on the magazine. The newspaper ink will make the smoke taste bitter and is not very good for human consumption in any form. Use one hand to lightly sweep the visible seeds into a bowl or onto a table, and use your other hand to shake and vibrate the magazine to free more seeds from the buds. Rotate the magazine as you work so that the seeds are always rolling away from the pot bits. Seeds can be kept many years and even decades if they are dried and stored properly. They should be stored in an airtight container in a cool, dry place.
Vacations
If you are going away for a few days or weeks and want to keep your garden alive, have a trusted friend take care of your room. If you prefer to keep things to yourself, simply bury some water crystals in the soil of your plants before you leave. Water crystals can be purchased at any hydroponics store. They are placed in a bucket of water and become a gel as they absorb many times their weight in moisture. They are then mixed into the soil and provide at least a week of water for growing plants. When using crystals to keep plants alive, turn off extra grow room lights so that the temperature is kept as low as possible, thereby causing the plants to use less water.
Another trick is to purchase a garden hose timer, which is available at hardware stores and hydroponics stores. A garden hose with timer attachment is connected to a water faucet that is turned to the open position and the timer will turn the hose on every day or two, for a set period of time, to automatically water the plants. A manifold is plugged into the hose when it reaches the grow room and smaller “spaghetti hoses” run from the manifold to deliver water to the individual plants. It takes some practice beforehand to learn the correct settings, but once set up timers can water a garden over a period of weeks. I don’t suggest this method of watering anywhere other than a concrete basement with a floor drain in case the timer fails. A safer method of automatic watering uses a reservoir that holds a limited amount of water, say 30 or 40 gallons, such as a plastic garbage can. A regular hydroponics watering pump on a timer can then be used to water plants from the reservoir over a period of days or even weeks. The water pickup in the reservoir should be lower than the drip emitters to prevent any water siphoning down to the plants when the pump turns off.
Light timers should be set as usual and will turn off and on repeatedly while you are gone. Timers must be the type that will turn on again automatically after a power failure. To minimize the need for watering the plants, don’t use an air conditioner or dehumidifier during your absence and set your grow room to cool itself with vent fans only. Turn off unnecessary grow lights while you are away to keep the room as cool as possible, which will keep the plants dormant to some degree. The plants will resume vigorous growth when you return from vacation and turn up the lighting to full strength.