Rustica in Southeast Alaska: @Kushtaka

[Kushtaka]

Most of the plants this year are the children of a single Aztec rustica that barely grew but pushed out some seeds. I don't think it was even 6 inches tall. My saved seeds did best but I added some Mohawk that germinated. Unfortunately none of the N. Tobacum even germinated. So straight rustica here.



Then just a few days later.


Very happy so far.

 

[Tutu]

Looking good!

 

[Kushtaka]

7/5

7/7 after 1.25 inches rain, wind and 50 degree highs. I expected it to be more beat up. Good to see some tolerance for my maritime rainforest climate. There is some slug damage on a sweaker plant. But overall not much pest damage so far.
I'll need to give them more space next year. I was really expecting another year of weak plants before the seed adapted this well.

 

[Kushtaka]

Transplanted June 1st. Seeded on May 1st under light indoors. I harvested a few yellowed leaves that were heavily shaded 3 days ago. Today I harvested several leaves that had started yellowing. If I don't harvest them they start to get rot spots. I think the yellowing is primarily from lack of light as the canopy is pretty thick. Some of the leaves are completely yellow with no green. It is a pain to harvest with the plants so close but the yellowing might be desired if they cure nicely.

Suckering and forming flower buds.

Since this is my first year with a good number of plants I am going to let them do their thing and see what happens.

Today's harvest. The largest leaf is about 10 inches long.

I left them in the sun while I did today's garden chores. Then hung them in my shed.

The first harvest is at the end of the line. The darker green in the background are some early season greens I pulled to test curing in this location. Not tobacco but no mold on them.

First harvest. Has been hanging for 3 days.

 

[Kushtaka]

August 1st. If I'm lucky I will get 45 more days of summer weather. Then the sun is gone, the rains come, and 50f highs.
The plants are getting taller. Lower leaves are yellowing.


I picked a few more yellowed leaves.


This one is starting to look like savoyed spinach. I assume that is ripening even though nothing has blossomed yet.

 

[Kushtaka]

Well it is time for the newbie game of "is it mold". I have the leaves picked on the 1st towel curing. Those are good. But, the weather has been a bit cooler with several inches of rain in the last week. Checking on my hanging leaves from the first harvest I see some white mold (bottom) where the leaf curled over itself. The black specs at top of frame look like the start of mold but don't wipe off. So, are the black specs mold?

It is apparent that as soon as the leaf starts drying this location will no longer suffice. Mid summer it maintained a better temp. Looks like air cure in the shed is out.

These leaves are nicely yellow but they were never that green.

My options for drying are taking indoors where the missus will protest or use a food dehydrator to quickly dry the leaves with very low throughput. I will try both to see which works better. I dry lots of other herbs that way. My question is what the concensus is on using a dehydrator to dry leaves for storage? What is the effect of drying quickly after yellowing?

 

[StoneCarver]

I doubt that's mold. Sometimes, leaves have splotches and varying degrees of brown. I wouldn't use a dehydrator prior to color curing. After color curing, it wouldn't matter. People's tobacco stashes often dry out (like mine) and need rehydrating before handling. The Appalachian mtns can be very damp and winters can be cold. People would put tobacco up in barns for color curing. I can't see how your shed would be all that much different.

 

[Kushtaka]

August 8th update 10 weeks since transplant

The Mohawk plants in the back are more slug eaten, lighter color, taller, and have less suckers than the Aztec. Not a great view of them in this picture.

This week's harvest hanging in the shed.

Here are most of the leaves from the July 22 harvest. Stems are still drying. The greenest leaf is still green. Need to see some good yellowing before harvest or it won't yellow hanging.

A good portion of last week's harvest rotted towel curing. I won't be trying towel curing again. The moisture is too uneven. I have those partially rotted leaves in the dehydrator as a test. Towel curing might work with undamaged leaves. It was the damaged leaves that browned and started losing water rapidly.

 

[Kushtaka]

First dehydrator leaves to have fully dry stems. I have them sitting in the garage to come back into case.

 

[Kushtaka]

Looks like air cure is the way to go for me. At least when it isn't raining. These are the pickings from the 8th.

The dehydrator leaves that started rotting have a nice tobacco smell. Looks like fermentation will at least bring out flavor.

 

[green_bean]

What kind of dehydrator did you use?

 

[Kushtaka]

It was a food dehydrator. Circular, stacking trays with warm air forced through the stack. Not quite big enough. I also didn't like how the leaf ended up after drying that quickly. Worth the test with ruined leaf.

Slow drying in the shed is resulting in orange/yellow leaf. I am trying splitting the stem to see if I can get the same color faster. It is always humid here. Things don't ever crispy dry outside.

 

[green_bean]

Interesting. Yeah, heard that about humidity. We've been getting a lot of rain lately here. Have 3 fans running in my shed.

 

[Kushtaka]

Aug 15 update

Flowers everywhere. Looks like leaf on these will go nearly full yellow. A few of the picked leafs today were wilting just like after they have hung a couple days.

Today's harvest


Last week's harvest

I started splitting the stem after it has yellowed. Splitting before looks like it dries the veins too fast to color completely.

 

[cangrow]

those are big poppies in the background!

 

[Kushtaka]

Thanks! This is the first year that the poppies I have been breeding grew from direct seed. I overseeded the whole bed with poppy thinking maybe I would get a handful of poppies poking through the veg. Turns out I had to weed hundreds of poppies out to let everything else grow. I am hopeful that I will get enough seed to make an old world poppyseed roll.

 

[Kushtaka]

Yesterday's harvest. I let it sit on the hood of my truck for an hour in the sun. Some of these leaves are orange right off the plant and very sticky.

Had to move things around. Previous harvests are on the back line now. Front line is this harvest. Shed smells of tobacco and wet dog. I am hoping that kiln aging will bring out some of the smells and flavor that the rotted towel leaf had.

Some of the leaf was damaged from poppy petals rotting on them. Plants next year won't have any tall neighbors.

I tried making a small twist out of some destemmed leaf. This gets cut in bits for chew.

I am going to try aging as a twist. My goal is to make as much twist like this as I can but it takes undamaged leaf to make it nicely. I hope I can wind it in an ball or coil and jar it.

 

[Kushtaka]

Just returned from a week long trip. Unfortunately the weather cooled off to mid 50s and my color curing/drying leaf pretty much is all moldy. There might be a few leaves that aren't moldy but it will have to wait until daylight to know for sure. Any leaf that was brown and drying is moldy. I had a hand hanging from the first harvest all summer that had no mold but with the cooler temperature it succumbed to the mold. I think I should have pulled colored leaves to dry instead of leaving the hanging. I would have had good amount of leaf to age. I have a few more leaves to harvest but it is clear I will not be able to hang them in the shed any more. I might try towel curing inside.

My question to all you fine folks is how to proceed next year. If I have a good summer I can air cure. If its not a good summer I don't really know what to do. I think inside will be too dry and will end up with dry green leaf. Also the family won't like the wet dog smell of the curing rustica. I had planned on building a kiln to ferment the dried leaf. Can color curing be done rapidly in a kiln to reduce the risk of low ambient temps molding the leaf? Ideally curing is done in a week so I can swap out leaf with weekly harvests. Dry the cured leaf then kiln age it all at the end.

Up until this point air curing in the shed was going well. A disappointing learning experience but good to know the limits of curing tobacco in a temperate rainforest.

 

[JukkaPekka]

You can use mini greenhouse inside your house for colour curing (it will increase the RH and prevent leaves from drying green).

 

[bohdan.zaremba]

Just returned from a week long trip. Unfortunately the weather cooled off to mid 50s and my color curing/drying leaf pretty much is all moldy. There might be a few leaves that aren't moldy but it will have to wait until daylight to know for sure. Any leaf that was brown and drying is moldy. I had a hand hanging from the first harvest all summer that had no mold but with the cooler temperature it succumbed to the mold. I think I should have pulled colored leaves to dry instead of leaving the hanging. I would have had good amount of leaf to age. I have a few more leaves to harvest but it is clear I will not be able to hang them in the shed any more. I might try towel curing inside.

My question to all you fine folks is how to proceed next year. If I have a good summer I can air cure. If its not a good summer I don't really know what to do. I think inside will be too dry and will end up with dry green leaf. Also the family won't like the wet dog smell of the curing rustica. I had planned on building a kiln to ferment the dried leaf. Can color curing be done rapidly in a kiln to reduce the risk of low ambient temps molding the leaf? Ideally curing is done in a week so I can swap out leaf with weekly harvests. Dry the cured leaf then kiln age it all at the end.

Up until this point air curing in the shed was going well. A disappointing learning experience but good to know the limits of curing tobacco in a temperate rainforest.

My basement is 50% humidity, so it's too dry for air curing. I tried the towel curing method for the first weeks of harvest, and it was horrible. Never again. Despite me tending to them at least twice a day (rearranging, wiping off excess moisture, etc), the leaves looked like they were rotting.

Instead, I got myself a wire rack (Costco) with a matching cover (Amazon), and hung my leaves there. For humidity, I just placed trays of water on the shelf, and I got 2 fans from Costco that swivel both side to side & up and down to get some airflow. That was enough to bump the humidity to low 60%s, and my leaves appear to colour cure fine.

As for the smell, my tobacco has a pleasant (to me, at least) hay scent. I am not growing any rustica, so I don't how how that would smell, but I don't think it should be much different