We have finally made it to the end, here is the harvest of the 2021 Outdoor Grow series. We started out the harvest with the Carl Sagan, which was the furthest along the entire time. When we are harvesting plants, we take the branches in batches. Our first harvest I chopped down an entire plant at once, which means that we had to get it all trimmed and ready to be hung at once, and by the time we got to the last of it the leaves had started wilting, which makes is an incredible pain in the rear. Now we just take an armload at a time, get those trimmed up and decide when we are ready to do the next batch.
Sam and Lindsay worked on this plant while I was working at my day job, which is why you wont see me in the footage much. There was only three small spots of PM on this plant, and no mold or rot at all. When we harvest a plant, we remove any of the larger leaves, specifically all of the leaves that do not have any trichomes on them. We are not going to do a full wet trim this year, there is just too much to do that with and honestly we prefer dry trimming it. Once all of the large leaves are off and we have checked each branch for issues, we hang it on a string in the kitchen until there is a bunch of it, then I will transfer it all into the garage to dry.
Now, you may or may not remember when we reviewed the EnviroKlenz air cleaner a few months ago, but you can actually see it in the lower right area of the screen working away. I mentioned in that review that I wanted to talk about it again when we were in the middle of harvest, as the aroma from harvest can be strong enough to knock you on your rear. I am happy to report that it kept the smell to a very manageable level, which was really great to see. We have actually been using it nonstop since the unboxing, and it is still helping our allergies every day. You can see the plant shelf slash rabbit enclosure that we have along the wall, and along with all of our cats and dogs make winter even harder with the house closed up. I know that it is expensive, but it is something that I would have bought with my own money outside of the sponsorship, it has been working that well.
Here is the string over by the kitchen where we stage all of the trimmed branches, and we just fill it up until there isn’t any more room and then move it out to the strings in the garage, and then just keep repeating that cycle until the plant is harvested and hung up to dry.
Next was the Diesel Dough, and we harvested it in the exact same way. Lindsay and Sam both wore gloves this harvest, while I went gloveless as per usual. I don’t like wearing gloves and don’t mind washing up after, while both of them didn’t want to have to deal with the stickiness on their hands. It is a pile of work pushing through all of this plant matter, but it will be worth it in the end.
We get asked pretty often about our drying process, and once everything is trimmed up here it goes into the garage for around a week. Our humidity in there ranges from sixty percent all the way down to thirty percent depending on what the weather is doing, and around the five day mark I go out and try to snap small branches. If they aren’t ready, the twig will just squish and bend over, but when the plant is ready the twig will make an audible snap. At that point I pull the branches back down and trim off all of the flowers into 13”x9”x3” Tupperware containers.
Each container also gets a mini hygrometer, and then closed up. I like these as they are not quite airtight, and we check the humidity inside of them twice a day until it stabilizes below 60%. This usually only takes a couple of days, at which point the flower then gets put into jars to finish up the curing process. A mini hygrometer goes into every other jar and then sealed up tight. We check on them once a day and burp the jars to let fresh air in for another week or two, and what I am looking for here is the humidity to stabilize between 50 and 55 percent. I swap the hygrometers between jars each day, so that I can check all of them. Once the humidity stops moving, the jars get put away to finish the curing process. The flower will get better and better over the next six to eight weeks, until the curing process finishes, and everything completely stabilizes.
The last plant I took footage of was the Duct Tape, which so far has turned out to be Lindsay’s favorite. We have had a lot of questions about final weights, and while we haven’t fully trimmed all of this up yet, any of the leaf that is still on them is covered in trichomes, and once it is removed from the flowers will be used to make kief. I can go over what the final cured weights ended up being with the sugar leaf on there, and the final trimmed flower weight is between five and ten percent below that.
With the Carl Sagan, we ended up with 574 grams, or 20.25 ounces. If you remove ten percent of that, you end up with 516 grams or 18.2 ounces.
The Diesel Dough ended up at 552 grams or 19.5 ounces, and if you remove ten percent of that you get 496 grams or 17.5 ounces.
The Duct Tape finished with 556 grams or 19.6 ounces. Removing ten percent from that leaves 500 grams or 17.7 ounces.
Finally, the Cactus ended up with a total of 591 grams or 20.8 ounces, and removing ten percent from that we end up with 532 grams or 18.75 ounces.
The Lemon Kush was a complete loss due to powdery mildew, but it was a bonus plant anyways that was fun to watch grow.
With everything down, that gives us a complete weight of 2273 grams, which is 80.17 Ounces or just over five pounds untrimmed, and removing ten percent from that gives us 2044 grams or 72 ounces, which is four and a half pounds.
Not bad at all, and this is right at where I was hoping harvest would be. We do not need massive harvests anymore as we also grow indoor in the winter now, and this was a very manageable amount to harvest for us.
This is not quite the end of the series, and there is one more video I want to make to cap this all off. Once the flowers are completely cured, I am going to pull our a jar of each and trim it to our standards, to show you how we do it and what our flower looks like when we are done. This has been the longest series I have made by far, as we bought these clones in the middle of April and started recording, and we took the last plant down on Halloween. Thank you all for coming along on the ride, and I am really looking forward to getting started with indoor.