Cannabis Drying Mistakes: The Rookie Errors That Ruin a Harvest

The most common cannabis drying mistakes are harvesting with wet soil, drying in a room that's too hot, too dry or too humid, handling the buds too much, hanging up plants that already carry mold, and rushing the whole thing. After months of babying your plants, harvest day finally rolls around, and whatever strain you grew, you'll want to dry it before you smoke it. Plenty of growers treat drying as the boring part, but drying your weed properly is crucial if you want top-shelf quality: get careless here and you can throw away months of work and your entire harvest.

In our guides to drying and curing cannabis, we covered the basics of drying freshly cut buds to perfection. This one is about the mistakes people make once it's time to get hands-on with their drying buds, mistakes that, like we said, can wreck flowers you've spent months looking after.

Watching the color of the resin up close is key to harvesting at the right moment, when the buds carry as many cannabinoids, terpenes, flavonoids and other compounds as possible. During flowering, the trichome heads go from clear to milky as they fill up with compounds, and they finish with a gorgeous amber hue.

As a rule, the sweet spot for harvest is when most trichomes are milky and a few have turned amber. That's when cannabinoid and terpene levels peak, so flavor, aroma and effect are all at their best too.

Once you've hit that window, it's time to chop. A common rookie mistake, and one that can drag out drying by several days, is harvesting while the growing medium is still wet, in other words when the plant tissue is holding as much water as it ever will. If you want your buds to dry properly in the shortest reasonable time, harvest when the medium has been dry for at least a day, so the plants are holding less water internally.

Along the same lines, if you want to speed things up, the smart move is to trim your weed well before you hang it to dry. Strip off as much stem as you can, too. Less plant mass means the buds dry faster.

Whether you're cutting the plants down, trimming them or hanging them up to dry, don't handle the flowers more than you have to. The trichome heads, where the compounds behind your weed's flavor and high are made and stored, are fragile and snap off easily when you keep pawing at the buds.

In fact, charas is made by rubbing fresh flowers between your palms until a thick layer of resin (hash) builds up on your hands. That's exactly what you want to avoid if you're trying to keep your buds in perfect shape.

Whether you're about to trim or hang the plants whole (if you prefer to dry trim), inspect every bud carefully for infection, especially fungi like botrytis (bud rot) or powdery mildew. Hang up a plant with any kind of fungal infection and it can spread while it dries, leaving you with the nasty surprise of a moldy, ruined harvest.

Now your flowers are cut, trimmed and ready to dry. Keep in mind, though, that the relative humidity in your drying space will decide both how fast the buds dry and how good they turn out. What you want is a slow, even dry, with no spikes in temperature or humidity, in a space kept as stable as possible.

The ideal humidity for drying cannabis is 50-60%. Go lower and the plants will probably dry too fast; go higher and you're inviting mold, and the whole process can take forever.

Like we said, besides keeping humidity in range, you need to keep the air in your drying room from going stagnant. Lots of growers use their indoor grow space as a drying room and leave the ventilation running throughout the dry. That keeps air moving properly, and with a carbon filter installed you also keep that loud smell under control.

Just like humidity, the wrong temperature can ruin your flowers, and so can drying them in daylight. Anything above 25 °C (77 °F) can dry the plant too fast; the ideal is around 18-20 °C (64-68 °F). On top of that, drying plants in the light degrades part of what's in the trichomes and drags down the final quality of your buds.

The ideal setup is a relatively cool, well-ventilated, dark space. That way you dodge most of the things that can make drying cost you quality.

How to dry freshly harvested buds the right way

Freshly harvested cannabis is holding a lot of excess moisture that has to come out. So the real question is: how do you dry weed?

Drying is what turns freshly cut buds into the best version of themselves. First, they need to hang in a dark room for about a week. Give them more time rather than less.

Drying them properly does a few important jobs: ultimately, it improves quality and extends shelf life. That said, a few factors will affect how long drying takes:

- Bud size

- How the plants were trimmed

- Temperature, humidity and airflow in the drying room

A slow dry goes a long way toward helping cannabis hold on to a broader, fuller terpene profile. Drying for longer also cuts down on the harshness you feel when you smoke, so if you want strong, tasty buds, patience is the name of the game.

For a great end result, plan on a drying time of roughly 7 to 12 days. As the buds lose moisture, they gradually shrink and start losing weight.