Durban has been bucked down and tumbled. Entire time spent (in two chunks) for just this plant was about 2.5-3 hours from cut to cure bucket. Chop was maybe 30 minutes to cut and hang, about an hour and a half, then 30 to 40 minutes to inspect and move into the bucket for curing.
I didn't grab pics, but I will when I do the Strawberry Lemonade this evening.
I gotta say, this tom's tumbler worked fecking excellent. I wanted to give it as untrimmed as possible and see how it handled it all. Knowing full well I may have to snip a bunch manually if there were issues. (Narrator Morgan Freeman: There weren't.)
Out of the mess I fed it, it cleaned up 99% of everything. The only things I found were:
1) Smallest nugs (popcorn size, maybe a hair bigger but not much) were cleaned, but if something was going to get missed, it would be on something this size. Just big enough they didn't fall through with the trim, but not quite a full bowl size. Most likely because of their weight, and unless something a little bigger hit it in the right spot, it might miss a crow foot or something. Meh, I'm not overly concerned with that much.
2) Even when everything is dried as specified, there will still be those random .05% of leaves that just weren't quite "crispy" yet. Easy to pick off, but when you have a bucket volume of buds it can take a few minutes to sort and inspect it all.
Those sound like major issues, but really they aren't. We're talking about the above 2 points consisting of less than 1% of the flowers. A plant like this would have taken me at least a full hard day to wet trim (it was pretty leafy) by hand, not to include chopping and bucking down once dry, etc.
That Super Lemon Haze from the last Lab grow took me 2 days to wet trim by hand, so I would say this is definitely a roaring success thus far.
Now for the 99% part of the harvest.
This worked out so damn good. Seriously! It's gentle enough that you're not losing flower like you would with a "cutter" type of trimmer. Meaning that it's not shaving off bud. Win. You do get some kief, but that's mostly from the leaves. The trim comes out pretty much ready to go into the decarb process. Another win. Bag it up and go.
If you're not familiar with how this thing works, here's a vary simple, basic big picture explanation.
First, you chop and hang your branches to dry, taking off the big main fans. (Easiest if you just take them all off a day or two before you want to chop. Leaving all the sugar leaves/mini-fans from the flowers.)
Hang to dry, and wait until all the leaves are dried and brittle. This is a big step, and probably the most important of all. You have to know your drying environment, and also be sure to cut as similar of size branches as possible. It won't be perfect, but you don't want to cut one entire main branch off the plant, and then take side branches individually in other places. (If that makes sense.) Overall, try to hang as similar sized as you can. This helps it all dry as evenly as possible and you don't end up with some over dry, some under dry, and some just right.
The directions recommend hanging the entire plant. Cut at the base and hang it up. Probably works fine, but unless you have the space for it (I sure don't) then you're down to selectively cutting as similar size of branch as you can.
Then you wait.
Mine dried 2 full weeks, and was just right. There may be a couple tiny sticks that were a tick over dry, but nothing serious. (A couple branches just weren't much there, but whatev.)
Once dry, you buck it down and toss it in the tumbler. This is a hand crank model (which honestly wasn't bad at all) and there is a sweet spot to the rotation speed from what I found. Too slow and there isn't enough to crumble most leaves. Too fast and you get that "round up" effect. You remember those rides at the fair/amusement park? The one that spins, you stick to the side, and it raises up to like a 45* angle? You know the concept... centrifugal force, physics, gravity, blah blah blah. Not to mention it will send what manages to crumble off (which isn't much when too fast) flying in whatever direction and make a mess.
I also found that switching directions from time to time seemed to help mix it up a little more so that it wasn't always the same buds hitting each other. It probably mixes itself just fine, so maybe it was just perspective and not necessarily a necessary move.
I cranked on it for about 10 minutes, maybe a couple more. Elapsed time of about 15 minutes as I did stop and switch arms/direction a few times.
The end result? Well, if you can't tell yet, I was impressed. Damn impressed. Even better than my best case scenario of hope, really. Met and exceeded my expectations.
Product comes out looking very, very nice.
The real key is making sure it's dry, and the leaves are crispy crunchy. This is crucial. If they aren't, they (obviously) won't come off. As the gentle tumbling action just mixes your buds around and in doing so those crunchy leaves just crumble right off.
All in all, first run of it is a damn fine success. Great balance between cost, effort, and result. Less force than a trimbag, significantly less cost (and maintenance, too!) than an electric dry or wet "shaver" type trimmer, and excellently trimmed product in the end.
Gotta give a huge thumbs up to this. It was a great purchase and is an excellent tool.
I need to give it a few more runs to confirm, but I would be surprised if my current opinion were to lower any at all.
Oh, and for the tally, the DP pulled in 11 zips of dried and trimmed flower, and just over 6 zips of larf/trim. More than I thought she would run (she looked about an 8zip haul), so that's good. If the rest prove to be similar, I'll be quite content as that puts us in the 2.5lb range for the run.
