[00:00] It's definitely strong smelling. I'm trying to figure out what it smells like. It smells kind of funky, a little skunky. I'm surprised how this turned out. I was neglecting this throughout the summer a little bit, so it's nice to see some big smokable buds on it.
[00:27] All right guys, so I have a, what is this, Animal Mints. Sorry I'm a little high. We just did a smoke review, but we got this plant, it's about ready to cut down. I want to give you a quick demonstration of how to wet trim and why you would want to do that. So if you have the time and the space, dry trimming, you can typically get a better product. But if you're pressed for time and you have a lot of plants to take down, what you're gonna do is cut it off wet. I'm just taking a branch just to show you guys, but normally you can take down the whole plant. You can start by taking down some of these big fan leaves, but with wet trimming, you're gonna get in here and all these little sugar leaves that you would normally wait for the plant to cure, we're gonna trim those off wet.
[01:11] So you do want to make sure you can hang these. If you lay 'em on anything flat when they're wet, they can get kind of malformed. So you won't have this nice shape when it's all dry. You're gonna have a flattened bud from it laying on the table. So just gotta get in here. You can wear gloves, you can hold it from the stalks so you don't get quite so sticky. But get in here with your scissors and take all of these growing tips off.
[01:41] So if you have a bunch of people and you have a large amount of plants that you're trying to take down in a short amount of time, you can get a little system going with these. You still want to hang dry 'em for a couple of weeks or, you know, however long that takes for you. I know it's been really humid here, but once the branch is ready to snap, instead of bend — you can kind of see how these just kind of bend. So once you get a snap when it's dry enough, that's when you are ready to put in the jar.
[02:10] So just take all these little sugar leaves off. This is also gonna help get better air flow. You may get a bit of a faster dry, can help prevent mold. And you get some of that kinda plant material, like that grassy, hay taste, out of the bud once you get some of these little sugar leaves off.
[02:36] So after they're cleaned up, we're just gonna hang these branches and see how they look. This is Animal Mints. This one's grown in this bale of straw. I gave it some blood meal and some worm castings and that's it. And this has been kind of bearing this heat in the greenhouse. All right, so that's how and why I like to wet trim, and if you guys have your own way of doing it, I'd like to hear about it.
[03:16] So welcome back to our third episode of our Straw Bale installment. This is Animal Mints here and this has taken us all the way up through harvesting this bale of straw. This has weathered our high temperatures here in Southern California. I think it was about 110 degrees. It's missed a few waterings. So aside from the initial blood meal treatment, we gave some worm castings to this plant a couple of times. But other than that, that's all I've really given this besides water.
[03:47] There's been mushrooms growing out of this thing the whole time and we dug down a little bit, put some topsoil in and put this plant in here. It was about a mid-sized plant. I think it came out of a five gallon pot when we ended up putting this in the bale of straw — five gallon, I think it was a little smaller than that. As you can see, this thing is collapsing in on itself. I've added some top soil, kept this thing wet and yeah, mushrooms growing out of it. You can see what this is looking like inside. It's soft. It's kind of a — oh, some grubs and stuff. So bugs, lizards, all kinds of stuff running around through these.
[04:24] Like a lot of you lately, I've been trying to maximize things I have on hand and go with low cost methods. So aside from the little bit of soil that I had laying around from last season, a couple of scoops of worm castings and I think I split a small bag of blood meal between three bales. So each bale was about $15 and this didn't get much else than water. So really happy with this thing. This is this Animal Mints.
[04:53] I'm gonna take it down. We got a little fall storm coming in, so you'll have to forgive the missing limbs. We were doing a dry trimming tutorial earlier today, so we have two or three branches missing, but they trimmed up nice. So we're gonna get this plant outta here and get all of this spent straw into this raised bed with some soil and maybe some chopped up wood and stuff at the bottom. So stay tuned for next time.
