Jay Brown - Growing Marijuana Indoors

1. Cut plants for harvest and hang to dry or begin curing process (read on for details).

2. Empty soil medium and drainage rocks from five-gallon pots into trash bag for disposal.

3. Flush the lava rock residue remaining in the plant pots in the yard or garage (to avoid clogging drains).

4. Sterilize containers with a water and bleach solution of about one cup of bleach per two gallons of water.

5. Add about 2” of fresh drainage rocks to sterilized five-gallon containers, then fill containers halfway with fresh soilless mix.

6. Transplant vegetative plants to large containers, and then fill pots with soilless mix to about 2” below the rim. Follow these steps again for one-gallon vegetative containers to prepare them for new clones.

Sterilization between crops is crucial. You can break that rule a few times and get away with it, but if you don’t sterilize your plant containers and tools between every crop you risk getting a virus or disease or pest that can destroy your entire harvest — all because you were too lazy or undisciplined to follow the correct protocols.

Once the cannabis plant is ready for harvest, it must be cut down and dried. The time to harvest plants is when the buds become full and sticky with resin. If the top buds feel hard when you squeeze them, instead of soft and pliable, they are ready for harvest. (Don’t squeeze them too often because it damages the white hairs and THC glands and retards bud development.) Do not try squeezing lower buds because they often seem soft even when the plant is mature. Another sign of a mature cannabis plant is when the white hairs that split out of the flower pods turn red or brown. For the best view of the resin glands/crystals, use a 15-power magnifying glass. Resin glands start as pointed capitates, like a stiletto, and when the glands are mature they will develop fat heads. The heads are a clear transparent color when juvenile and turn cloudy or opaque when fully mature or overripe. Harvest when the majority of resin glands are still clear to obtain perfectly developed buds. Practice all of these methods for timing your harvest, and of course use your nose to smell the delightful scent of a mature cannabis flower/bud. If the plant is mature in all of the above tests and there is no scent, you have probably waited too long to harvest.

If you remember from the beginning of this book, it is resin glands or crystals that you are growing, not the plant material itself. Any part of the plant with a heavy coating of crystals is the part you want to keep. Usually just the buds are taken but there is some smokable crystal that can be harvested from associated leaf that surrounds the buds. Any green parts that don’t have crystals should be trimmed off and discarded. Those parts of the plant offer no THC, and they make the buds taste bitter when smoked.

Cutting your plants is the stinkiest time of all, so if you are concerned about odors you must compensate for them. You can use aerosol deodorizers or put some fabric softener sheets in the dryer. Brew some coffee. Bake some bread. Fry up some bacon. Do anything you can to mitigate the smell of freshly cut skunk weed. If you have properly sealed and vented your grow room, it is an excellent place to cut up your weed. The smells will stay in the room and be vented through a carbon filter or ozone generator to your catch basin, be it a chimney, garage, attic, window, or whatever. Whether you are cutting a large amount or a small amount of herb, pick your time well so that no one comes to your front door. If someone does, don’t answer it.

Here are the basic steps to drying your weed:

1. Remove all of the buds from the plant.

2. Trim each branch and remove excess green leaf from the buds.

3. Crisscross wires over your hooded lamp reflectors and hang the buds on the wires, or hang a screen horizontally over the lamp hoods and lay the buds on the screen.

4. Leave the weed to dry for a minimum of three to four days. In about seven days, the buds will begin to taste better. In 10 days, they can be stored in a baggie, although a glass jar is better for long-term storage.

Purists say you should dry your plants with the leaves on and trim the plants only after they are dry. But that is messy and in my opinion not worth the effort; I have never been able to taste any difference in drying plants this way if the buds were of good quality to start with.

While you can smoke your bud with a basic drying method, to get the best out of your plant, you should also cure it. Cured buds taste smoother and milder than dried buds, and they are preferred by cannabis aficionados.

To cure your weed:

1. Follow the regular steps for drying your bud.

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.

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 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.