To me, the beauty about hang drying the whole plant is that you don't have to worry about curing as much. A nice slow dry will make all the difference. In fact, I leave all of the fan leaves on as they hold a lot of moisture. The longer it takes to dry, the smoother the smoke, and the less concerned about curing you'll need to be.
I cut at the base and hang the whole plant until the buds are crispy to the touch on the outside but still have some "spring to them". Close to being fully dry. That's when I trim it. I usually end up leaving more sugar leaves on going this route vs we trimming. It usually takes my plants 2 weeks to get to that point, but there are so many variables like how big your plant is and the relative humidity of your drying space.
Then I jar them. The whole process of curing to evenly distribute moisture goes so much quicker after a slow dry. I'd say in a week or less I jar them up for good. Always stink and always a smooth smoke.
My old grower pal always said to me from the beginning: For the smoothest smoke, dry them as slowly as possible without letting mold start. I'm finally coming around to it.
I'm a big believer in the longer dry method... my first grow I happened to dry in conditions that averaged 60% humidity, and happened to do post-dry trimming so they were leafy... I did cut them down to individual branches, but nothing further... it took 12 days solid before I could jar.
Then the next grow happened to fall with drying time during winter and the humidity dropped like a stone the last day of drying... those buds only dried for about 3-4 days before they had to be jarred. By coincidence, I was trying for a variety of different methods as I went along, so this time I intentionally trimmed while wet, instead of when dry, which means I increased the evaporative surface exposure drastically!
There really was a big difference... the second batch was acceptable, but didn't burn nearly as nicely, didn't taste as good, and didn't cure up much at all either because they dried SO MUCH when the humidity dropped in the last night, I would have had to catch it mid-day, and I missed the window. Obviously one could argue that I simply didn't cure and that's why, but my first batch tasted and smelled amazing immediately out of the closet, before curing. So I'm a believer.
--
My question is this... if it's better to leave the branch system in tact, is it even better to leave the roots in tact too? Why doesn't anyone do that? I've heard that hanging them "upright" is better for encouraging the leaves to spread for easy trimming... but the downside I see there is that there would be less tenting and therefore a little less of a 'humidity dome' effect on the buds as they dry. Anyway, I was figuring that instead of hanging them upright, couldn't you just stop watering them in the pots and just let them dry? I assume there's some reason this isn't done, because I NEVER see it, but I was wondering what that reason would be. I guess it's kind of like a slow death, rather than a clean death... maybe that causes the plant to trigger emergency plans to hermaphrodite or something...
