There is such a thing as drying too quickly. In that case, the taste will remain grassy. Be patient. It takes at least a week to get the chlorophyll to break down enough to make a difference. Depending on conditions, drying can take about 5 to 15 days.
Do not be tempted to use heat to speed up drying. Microwaves and heat both degrade THC. In fact, these are not even worth trying, no matter how convenient and tempting it may be.
Hanging some nice bud to dry using a hanger and inexpensive clips. PSYCHONAUT, WIKICOMMONS.
Hanging
The easiest way to dry Autoflowering Cannabis is to hang your harvest in a dark spot where there is air circulation. The temperature should be between 15 and 27°C (60–80°F). The humidity ideally should be 50%. There should be no direct light, and actually, darkness is much preferred. Easy.
You can hang your harvest in a cardboard box, open drawer, a closet, or the like. Clipping to coat hangers works great, too, as the whole crop can be easily moved.
The hanging process is where drying can be speeded up. Ensure good air circulation to remove the moisture that evaporates and to prevent molds attacking the still damp plants.
The brown paper bag trick
A drying method used in humid areas is so easy and so effective that it is my go-to method for beginners and advanced Autoflowering Cannabis growers, no matter what the humidity. Any brown paper bag will do the job, provided it isn’t coated with wax.
Place your harvest on the bottom of the bag so that no individual piece touches another. Flowers touching each other increase the chances of fungi (aka mold) growing. Mold is the enemy of your harvest. Don’t fill the bag, only lay down a single layer.
Carefully close the bag by rolling down the top a couple of inches. Use a binder clip to keep it shut. There should be plenty of air in the bag. The brown paper will absorb the moisture from the flowers.
You can place bags on several layers of newspaper (if you can find any!) to absorb this moisture or, better, hang the bag. Either way, by adding air circulation to the outside of the bag, you can finish the job in less than a week, though it will depend on the amount of moisture in the harvest as well as in the air.
Drying with food dehydrators
A lot of tomato growers dehydrate their crop for convenient storage. These dehydrators are great for drying Autoflowering Cannabis, provided you do not use the heat setting. Many dehydrators have a control switch for this. If not, don’t use it. It will cook your harvest, and it will not be any good.
Again, make sure not to rush. Again, if you do, your harvest will continue to hold some of that chlorophyll you are trying to degrade. I advise use of a dehydrator for harvests only after you learn how the crop reacts to simply hanging or bag drying.
MANICURING OR TRIMMING
Once dried, you need to further clean up your harvest. This is done by carefully removing the remaining leaves, branches, and stems. Leave the tiny bract leaves and perhaps the sugar leaves right below the flowers.
Actually, most harvests undergo two manicuring sessions. First, after you harvest flowers but before you dry them, the large leaves that don’t hold trichomes can be removed. Do this first trimming within 24 hours of cutting the limb. This way the leaf cells in the leaves you want to cut will still have turgor—the fan leaves will stick out, and they will be easier to hold and cut without damaging the trichomes.
After drying, you need to manicure your crop, that is, trim off all the leaves except those coated with trichomes, as in this pretty trimmed cola. GBD/DAZ MEPHISTO.
The second trimming is after the crop dries. Remove all the small leaves. To do so, use a very fine pair of nail scissors. It is important to remember to avoid touching and thus damaging the trichomes. These are like little balloons, and they are very easy to pop open. If you must hold them, do so in your palm, not between thumb and index finger. This is an art.
Trichomes lost due to poor handing during manicuring. You don’t want to lose trichomes while harvesting and trimming. CANNABIS PICTURES.
Your plants’ flowers will be sticky. You might want to wear gloves as it is very difficult to wash off any residue. The flowers will also have a distinct odor which will increase whenever you break open trichomes while cleaning your flowers. There are special soaps that will help clean hands (and equipment).
CURING
After you dry your product, you can use it. However, it is best to take one more step, curing. The dried Cannabis is further dried and any remaining chlorophyll is degraded. Curing improves taste and is a step you should follow. It is not difficult. It may be what distinguishes your crop from commercial products as few commercial retailers have the time to cure properly.
To cure your harvest, carefully place it into sealable glass jars. When filling jars, do not pack or in any way smash your harvest. Instead, pour in enough to almost fill the jar and then seal it. You should be able to see the dried buds move around when you shake the jar.
Close and store jars in a cool location, out of direct sunlight, where you will have access for the first 2 weeks. If possible, open the jar up to 3 or 4 times a day to burp it, letting any gas buildup escape. Then close and shake it very gently.
After a week of daily burping, most of the chlorophyll dissipates. You can skip a day or two if you must but do check your jars regularly.
After 2 weeks or so, you can open the jars every few days. Eventually the jars won’t produce gas when opened. This is the indication that the harvest is finally cured. You can see why most commercial operations don’t do this. It’s a lot of effort, and it takes 4 to 8 weeks. However, this effort is well worth it in terms of taste. And, if you decide it isn’t, then you can skip it to future harvests. It is your hobby.
STORAGE
One of the unfortunate characteristics of Autoflowering Cannabis is that it becomes much less psychoactive when it is exposed to bright light and oxygen in the air. As such, it is important to store your harvest where this deterioration is minimized. The recommendation is a cool, dark location and always in a glass container.
There are now humidity control packs designed specifically to keep Cannabis at the right moisture level once dried and cured. Developed to keep cigars and pipe tobacco moist, they resemble sugar packs and can be placed into a jar where it will keep the moisture at a constant level. They are often sold at dispensaries and will surely be found at tobacco stores, or they can be ordered via the Internet.
Some growers vacuum pack their harvest. These packs can be kept for a long time provided that they are kept cool and in the dark. The only possible problem is the degradation of the plastic by terpenes. I do not suggest that you keep vacuum packs in the freezer as the THC will continue to degrade and trichomes will become damaged as they turn into ice crystals.
Of course, once you know how easy it is to grow Autoflowering Cannabis, there may be no reason to save a harvest. Simply grow a new one.
7
ENJOY YOUR HARVEST
THERE ARE LOTS of ways to use your Autoflowering Cannabis harvest once it has been cured. You may think smoking is the only method to ingest Cannabis, but never underestimate what someone who has used Cannabis can invent to improve the experience. (Someone said being high on Cannabis is the Mother of Invention.)
If you are new to Cannabis, you need to learn these methods. If you are returning to Cannabis from long ago, you will be amazed at how things have changed. Hopefully, you will be pleasantly surprised.
DECARBOXYLATION
This is absolutely key: There is an extra ring of molecules on THCA that has to be removed in order for cannabinoids to be effective. This process is known as decarboxylation and occurs when THCA is heated to 105°C (220°F). You must decarboxylate Autoflowering Cannabis for it to become chemically available, that is, to turn the THCA into THC. It is not hard. In fact, under some methods it is automatic.
Dry heat
The most common method of decarboxylating Cannabis is with heat. Heating Cannabis to 154°C (310°F
) for 7 minutes will completely decarboxylate it. Lower temperatures work but require more time. However, lower temperatures do preserve more of the terpenes. Some suggest heating for 35 to 45 minutes at a temperature of 105°C.
Beware that if you cook at temperatures above 149°C (300°F), both the cannabinoids and the terpenes will degrade and have less of an impact. In fact, THC boils at 156.6°C (314°F).
The easiest way to decarboxylate with heat is in an oven. Preheat it to 105–115°C (220–240°F). While it warms, line a cookie tray with parchment and spread the harvest out so all of the material is heated at the same time and the same temperature. Bake away for 30 to 45 minutes.
Heating with oil
Using a slow cooker is another way to decarboxylate your Autoflowering Cannabis harvests. This is great for making salves. Add the dried harvest to any kind of cooking oil or lecithin, depending on the recipe. Since you do not want to overheat, determine the proper temperature using water and a thermometer. In general, 4 to 6 hours at the low setting should work. Easy.
You can also use your stovetop burner. Place equal parts cooking oil and harvest in a thick pot such as a Dutch oven or a ceramic pot. This method requires simmering, and some people add a few cups of water with every cup of oil so monitoring the temperature is easier—water boiling at a very slow simmer should be the right temperature. In addition, since the chlorophyll and herb-tasting terpenes are water soluble, they will bind to the water and not the final product.
After decarboxylation in a slow cooker or on a stove top, strain your product through cheesecloth. If you used an oil that solidifies, next place the mix in the refrigerator. Once hardened, you can lift it out of the water. If you use an oil that stays liquid at room temperature, you must wait until the water separates into its own layer and then use a spoon to retrieve the oil.
Finally, strain as many times as you want to remove as much of the particulate matter as possible. How much remains will be determined, for the most part, by how you finely you grind the Cannabis before decarboxylating it.
Vaporization temperatures of cannabinoids in Autoflowering Cannabis. WINNI CASACOP.
Smoking and vaporizing
Smoking and vaporizing temperatures automatically result in decarboxylation. You do not have to treat your harvest in any way other than drying if these are the methods you use to ingest the Cannabis. There are all manner of devices and implements for smoking. There are many flower vaporizers on the market.
Smoking—Smoking is the most common method of ingesting Cannabis. It is the most obvious and so well-known that not much else need be said. It involves burning Cannabis in all the ways tobacco is used—pipes, water pipes, chillums, cigarettes, blunts, and so many more ways. Clearly the process decarboxylates the product.
Vaporizing—There are two forms of vaporizing Autoflowering Cannabis. First, there are lots of commercial Cannabis oil products produced by washing and soaking Cannabis with various gases such as carbon dioxide and butane. These result in oils with high concentrations of cannabinoids. Making these are beyond the purview of the amateur gardener. Methods of using these products are known as vaporizing.
Rosin from pressing flowers between wax papers. GDB/DAZ MEPHISTO.
There is another form of vaporizing which more and more Cannabis connoisseurs are employing. This involves heating the dried flowers just short of actual combustion, to bring the various acids such as THCA and CBDA to a boiling point. When each hits their boiling points, they change to vapors that can be inhaled. Different temperatures result in the release of different compounds, and modern commercial vaporizing instruments can be set to specific temperatures.
Rosins
Home gardeners can make an oil called “rosin” by pressing flowers. There are now commercial presses that squeeze the rosin from flowers, but these may be too expensive. All that is needed are an electric hair straightener; parchment paper; if possible, an inexpensive digital temperature gun (these infrared thermometers are available via the Internet and at art hobby stores); and a ratchet or trigger clamp.
Place small pieces of fresh (not dried) flowers in folded parchment, leaving enough room for the rosin to ooze out of the flower and still be held on the parchment. Heat the parchment packet to between 85–104°C (185–220°F) in the hair straightener.
Under extreme pressure and with a bit of heat, the chemical compounds in the flower are squeezed out onto wax paper from which they are then collected for consumption by vaporizing or even smoking.
This is where the clamp comes in: use it to very slowly put pressure on the blades of the hair straightener while the flowers heat up. Aim the heat sensor of the temperature gun on the blades to get a heat reading. If you don’t have one, just observe and you will see the oils oozing out when the temperature is right.
Tinctures
Tinctures made by immersing plant materials in alcohol are an excellent way to create a stable long-term extraction of medicinals. If your intention is to include THC in a Cannabis extraction, then dry heat decarboxylation is necessary prior to starting any recipe. The harvest is placed in a jar and covered with a relatively high-proof alcohol of choice, then stored in a cool dark place for, say, two weeks to a year. Then it is strained, stored, and typically served for use from a dropper bottle.
There is a whole industry developing to manufacture and sell tinctures and salves. Tinctures are ingested. Salves are rubbed on the body. You can make your own both with your harvest and using the remnants of flower vaporizing, which will still contain active compounds. Various bases are used, ranging from coconut oil and emu oil for salves to grain alcohol, vodka, tequila, or brandy for tinctures.
Edibles
Eating Cannabis, or foods made with it, is a very popular method of using your harvest. It takes longer for the cannabinoids to take effect, but the effects last longer, often considerably longer. You can pretty much use any cooking recipe and add ground flower or use Cannabis infused oils.
The first key to edibles is decarboxylation, which should take place while cooking. The second is a cautious approach. Go easy, eat less than you think you need. Figure out how strong your harvests are so you can try to standardize things.
Canna butter—Cannabis is fat soluble, so Cannabis infused butter is a great way to prepare Cannabis for eating. It can be used in any recipe that calls for butter, everything from Bullet Coffee to Brownies. There are lots of variations. You need to test it so you will know how strong yours is and how much to use for psychoactivity.
STOVETOP CANNA BUTTER
18 to 30 grams Cannabis, finely ground
1 liter of water
250g of organic butter
1. Mix the Cannabis and the butter, add to a saucepan with the water, and bring up to a simmer, stirring to mix things. Keep on low simmer for at least 3 hours, and preferably up to 12 hours.
2. Strain and refrigerate.
3. Separate from the water after the butter solidifies.
CROCK-POT CANNA BUTTER
1. Mix ingredients and cook at low temp for 3 hours. Cool and separate as above.
CANNA BUTTER CHOCOLATE MUG CAKE
4 tablespoons white flour
4 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoon cocoa
1 egg
1 to 2 tablespoons regular or bittersweet chocolate chips. Marshmallows or any berry, optional
This is a great example of how to use canna butter.
Enough canna butter for an individual
1. Microwave the mix for about 4 minutes and enjoy!
Infused Milk—Another fat-soluble product is milk, and infused Cannabis milk is also a great thing to have on hand for use with other items.
BASIC INFUSED MILK
0.5–1.0 gram Cannabis, finely ground
1 liter or quart of milk
1. Mix milk and Cannabis in a double boiler, or in a steel bowl placed in a cooking pot filled with water.
2. Simmer and maintain at the lowest heat for 3 hours.
3. Strain, preferably through a few layers of cheesecloth.
CANNABIS MILK SHAKE
Use infused milk with any recipe for a milkshake.
Cannabis Infused Coffee or Green Tea—Green tea and coffee make great carriers for Cannabis.
GREEN TEA
1. A few tablespoons of infused Cannabis milk and green tea.
2. Add a few drops of vanilla or peppermint.
CANNABIS COFFEE
1. A few tablespoons infused Cannabis milk or butter with coffee.
2. Add a few drops of vanilla or chocolate.
CANNABIS SYRUP
470 ml (3 cups US) water
235 ml (2 cups) sugar
30 ml (2 tbsp) vegetable glycerin
2 grams Cannabis, finely chopped
Cannabis syrup is a great way to add Cannabis to drinks or to put on anything that requires a sugary taste. Talk about a lovin’ spoonful of medicine!
1. Melt the sugar into the water, add Cannabis, and boil for 20 minutes, ensuring that the Cannabis does not burn. Reduce to simmer and add glycerin for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Strain through several layers of cheesecloth. Use cautiously until you know its strength!
Firecrackers—This is a popular recipe item with lots of variations, which are all discoverable on the Internet. Firecrackers can be stored in a cookie tin and consumed at a later date.
DIY Autoflowering Cannabis Page 10
