Newly harvested marijuana crop smells great with buds looking fluffy. Your cannabis looks great enough for consumption; however, can you smoke it now? Before you can eat cannabis, it must be cured first to come up with the best final product. Keep reading to learn more about curing weed:

Trimming, Drying, and Curing Weed

After you harvest weed, it must be trimmed of its leaves, dried much of its plant water weight, and cured in controlled environmental conditions. When you cure weed, you must vigilantly monitor humidity and temperature over a long period to unlock your harvest’s full potential.

During the drying and curing process, green chlorophyll breaks down in the cannabis buds and the plant’s terpenoids and cannabinoids start to mature. Thus, these compounds undergo chemical changes that improve the weed’s flavor, psychoactive properties, and smoothness.

Ideally, the curing process requires a temperature of around 70 degrees F with 60-65% humidity. If your cannabis is too dry, it will look brittle and dusty and you have probably stopped the curing process in its tracks, arresting the weed’s flavor and potency. As a result, you will have weed that is not good on the lungs and tastes like fresh-cut grass. If it is too wet or if the conditions are too humid, your buds can develop mold which can spread to ruin the entire crop.

Steps for Curing Weed

The following steps offer a rough outline of how to cure weed:

• Trimming. Before drying, you must trim off the leaves and other plant biomass. Trimming after drying can be much harder.

• Stalk drying. Buds left on the stalk can be simply hanged dry. Also, you can use drying racks if space is at a premium. The drying process should take from 3 to 7 days.

• Weed during. You can be sure the weed is dry enough when the small buds break off them with a snap. Bigger buds still bend and are still elastic. Place the weeds into quart-sized, wide-mouth glass jars ensuring minimal exposure to light at control environmental conditions.

• Bud checking. After curing your weed for at least two weeks, its flavor and cannabinoid profile develop. Check the buds at least once every 24 hours to check for moisture.

Drying and curing marijuana can take up to one month after harvest before you can smoke it. You can use different method variations, especially if your area has extreme temperature and humidity. Also, you can use a hygrometer for measuring humidity or humidity control packets which control the enclosed jar’s relative humidity.