All of my bud is 62% humidity and under. I was thinking about throwing some clementine skins in with the buds to raise the humidity. There are humidity packs in there but they don't appear to raise humidity very well, in my opinion.
I have a feeling that any rehydration of the flowers after they are dried applies only to fibrous material and not to the resin glands. This is unfounded on anything but intuition I hasten to add.
I sort of wonder from what you wrote if you hadn’t maybe overdried some of your jarstock just a bit? To want to bring the RH up again in the jar I mean.
It’s a head scratcher. I wish you were reaping sticky rewards from your press. You will be so happy you persevered when it comes together for you, you really will.
All I can say on the variables so far is to watch as your next harvest dries to make sure the RH of bud in a jar doesn’t drop below the mid 50’s and have another crack at it.
Someone local who doesn’t know about my garden sometimes gives me bits and pieces of theirs. I tried squishing it and got dry paper and a dry puck. This is why I think there is a point of no return with RH when we’re drying and curing with one eye on the press.
Don’t know. Heigh ho. Hee-haw here we go...
Thanks 420
In my new favourite shirt and blazing one in your collective honour, Stabilisers.
The Garden
Leaps and bounds.
Some thoughts on drying
On wrangling jar stock down to optimal dryness. Assuming that optimal for our purposes is an RH of 58-62% in the jar. Remembering that the measured RH in the jar is only an
indication of moisture content in the flower, not a
measure of moisture content in the flower. There is some specialised gear that will measure moisture content in a dried stalk. I understand optimal is 8-13%. Testing the RH of air in the jar with the flower is a close home hack.
The Sour Bubba I harvested the weekend before last stabilised at 58% in the jar first time out of the fridge and is still there now after four days, so she is on her burping way to curing and being more delicious than she is already.
The White Widow from the same harvest had more density to the buds and took a couple more days to feel as crisp to the touch before I tested it in jars. She has taken a couple of days to transition from fridge to jar.
Transitioning to jars feels like this: crispy buds you think are almost too dry - you break one open into the grinder though and the stalk is still slightly ‘fresh’. You leave this sealed in a jar at room temperature all day (or overnight) and you see the RH which dipped to 56 when you jarred it now sits at 76. So you put the whole lot in one paper bag back in the fridge for 12 hrs and repeat the test.
This morning the (air in the jar with the) White Widow was 72 in the jar so she’s back in the fridge for a second time now. I’ll put her in the jar with the hygrometer again overnight and I expect her to peak in the mid sixties and cure down with regular burps as normal.
For anyone who isn’t fridge drying that’s how the moisture is drawn from the stalk and dried off in a controlled way. All roads lead to Rome of course and just as there are many ways to skin cats (I’m told) there are a lot of ways to dry cannabis slowly.
Seeing flower that is at that point though where you think you’ve over dried it, you find the stalk still too moist then later the same bud you were worried about is now fluffy in the jar just having drawn its own deep moisture to the surface. It feels like a good way to control the transition to air tight jars for the rest of the cure.
What a lot of reading!
Good to see you all.
Go play. Play safe. Come back.
have a good day, good people.
Here’s mine...
for diving in so quickly and showing how it's done!
