Drying Racks and Curing Boxes

Drying your cannabis incorrectly can ruin your entire harvest; if not done right you run the risk of encountering issues such as mould and botrytis, which can ruin your flowers entirely. Maintaining the right conditions during the drying process makes for a healthier products that’s more potent and produces more flavour.

How to Properly Dry Cannabis Flowers

During the drying process, your plants lose quite a lot of water. There are two clear objectives to keep in mind during this process:

Avoiding fungal infections.
Drying should be slow and gradual so as to not ruin their flavour or effect.

Cannabis that’s been dried too fast can have a bitter chlorophyll flavour and lose strength. The ideal drying period should take between 8 and 15 days; the slower the process, the stronger the final product will be.

What do I Need to Dry My Plants Correctly?

The first 3 – 4 days they should be at about 50% humidity. This allows you to avoid fungal infections and mould. A few days after starting you should begin to gradually increase it to 60 – 65% so you don’t accelerate the drying process to much.
The temperature during the first few days should be at around 20-22. Afterwards you’ll need to lower this to 16 – 18 degrees in order to stop them from drying out too fast. Make sure the temperature doesn’t reach over 25; temperatures over 27°C evaporate terpenes which causes your buds to lose flavour.
Keep the flowers in a room where there’s air flow; a fan not directly pointed at your plants should be enough. Don’t point the fan straight at your flowers or else they might dry out too fast.
Cannabis flowers need darkness when drying so that their cannabinoids don’t degrade.

If you live in an area with high humidity, you can use a dehumidifier to bring it down or an AC unit.

If you grow outdoors towards the south of Europe, getting the ideal 18 degrees is impossible; make sure it doesn’t go over 25°C in order to guarantee as many terpenes as possible.

Drying Cannabis Step by Step

If you only have to dry a few plants and they’ve reached the end of the process in a healthy state, cut them from the bottom of the trunk and dry them hanging upside down in a room with the right conditions. Only remove the largest leaves. This allows the flowers to stay protected. The downside to this method is that they can be harder to trim when the leaves are dry.

If you have a lot of plants, we recommend trimming after harvesting and using a drying rack.

The foldable vertical drying rack allows you to dry most of your flowers easily without taking up much space. The buds are placed on a mesh which allows for maximum airflow. It can be stored folded up, taking up very little space, and it’s available in three different sizes for harvests of all sizes:

92 cm tall x 45 cm diameter
165 cm tall x 55 cm diameter
165 cm tall x 82 cm diameter

The Stackable Dryer is square in shape and measures 70 x 70 x 15 cm, allowing you to dry large amounts of buds. It can be used as an individual tray or stacked. This type of drying rack needs a room with adequate conditions.

If you don’t have an area that you can keep dark or you want to avoid any pungent aromas, we recommend the HerbDryer, an intelligent dryer that dries your cannabis in 8 days. The HerbDryer has a small fan that softly moves air around and expels it out of a carbon filter designed to eliminate aromas. Once you’re done you can fold up the HerbDryer and store it.

Available in two sizes: 30 x 35 cm and 60 x 65 cm. You can replace the carbon filter in order to keep it working perfectly.

What is Cannabis Curing?

Curing is a technique designed to conserve cannabinoids and terpenes in cannabis, producing a more potent effect, as well as more intense flavours and aromas. It involves making your flowers expel the rest of their leftover moisture slowly so that chlorophyll degrades and the cannabinoids and terpenes can mature correctly. Curing your flowers should take between 3 weeks and a month and a half depending on the strain. Indica strains tends to be ready earlier than sativas.

How to Cure Cannabis Flowers

In order to guarantee high quality results, we recommend using a curing box or humidor made out of non-varnished wood. Wood can maintain a balanced moisture inside the box, which makes it ideal for curing flowers. You’ll need to use a different box for each plant so that you can identify different phenotypes at a later date. If you use clones, a box per strain is fine. They come in three different sizes designed for all harvests:

Small: 33 cm x 9 cm x 9 cm.
Medium: 33 cm x 19 cm x 10 cm.
Large: 33 cm x 28 cm x 10 cm.
XXL: 33 cm x 55 cm x 10 cm

During the curing process you should also make sure that the temperature doesn’t go over 25°C and that humidity stays between 55 – 65%; you can use Boveda humidity adjusters during this process.

Using Boveda 58 or 62 can conserve up to 15% more terpenes in your cannabis flowers.

You can also use glass jars to cure, although you’ll need to keep the in the dark so as not to degrade their cannabinoids, use Boveda, and open them more often; an hour a day, more or less.

For the cannabis connoisseur, you can check out the 00 Boxes in our catalogue, made using cedar wood, which is considered the best material for curing cannabis. 00 Box curing boxes come with 136 micron meshes inside designed to catch any fallen resin at the bottom. In order to guarantee the perfect curing process, they also have a thermometer and hygrometer.

If you’re looking for a small, simple model without a hygrometer but with a resin mesh, and made out of cedar wood, you can check out the 00 Pocket Box.

If you have any questions regarding drying and curing your cannabis flowers, La Huerta Grow Shop has a team of professionals on hand ready to help.

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