As a beginner grower, your first harvest is an incredibly exciting time. You have spent many weeks and months to get to this point. You have grown this huge, beautiful plant, or maybe you’ve grown many plants. And now you get to reap the reward.
We know what it’s like to be new growers, learning all the stages of growing weed. This series of articles is all about the process of harvesting your cannabis.
Harvesting Cannabis: is the plant ready?
First, you must make sure your plant is ready to be harvested. For beginners, if you are a day or two early, or a day or two late, you should know that is perfectly okay. There is no correct, exact date. Your plant is alive and it is moving through time.
Nevertheless, revert back to the previous article to learn when to harvest your cannabis plants. You particular strain will have a give flowering time, which you should be tracking. Then, in the final weeks, you simply pay attention on a daily basis to see how your plant is ripening along. And you chop it down when it looks like this under a microscope:
Harvesting Cannabis: Cutting the stalk of the plant
After you’ve determined that your plant is ready, you will need to cut it down. You should use a tool made for cutting thick plant stalks. Or you can use bolt cutters or a pipe cutter. You can check out your local hardware store for these types of items, or order them online.
Cut the stalk at the bottom, and remove the plant from the soil. It is now time to prepare this plant for the drying process.
You may hang the entire plant, or you may remove branches, fan leaves, and break the plant down into more manageable sizes. It is up to you, and your decisions will likely be based on your available dry space.
If you have the time, and only a few plants to deal with, it’s a great idea to remove any unnecessary foliage. Those giant fan leaves, you can yank them off.
If you have really long branches, you can separate them from the plant. That way, you wont have to hang a giant tree. Instead, you can hang those individual branches.
Some go as far as snipping off every little branch on the big branches and hanging those. I’ve seen some commercial growers use wire hangers, and they will hang multiple, small branches, 8 to 12 inches, on the wire hanger. They then hang a series of these hangers on an a vertical wire rack.
The point here is that after you chop down your plant, you will want to prepare it to be hung in your drying space.
Hanging your cannabis plants in the dry room
You must have a separate space for drying your plants. This space must be dark, cook, and temperature controlled. In addition, you must have a way of regulating the humidity in this space.
Dialing in your drying methods is a really big deal. This is where you can majorly damage your crop and ruin great weed. But get this part right, and you now have a way of generating good weed for the rest of your lift.
But the drying period will make or break your hard work. Drying your weed correctly is that important. Therefore, we will take a deep dive into this activity in our next article.