Drying / curing necessary when no intention to smoke?

Hi all, I've been reading this site a bit while I do my first balcony grow (not my first grow ever, but anyway). Now they are getting close to being ready and I'm deciding what to do exactly. My intention is make a tincture, because I'd rather not smoke and I'm curious if anyone has any thoughts whether drying/curing is still a necessary process?

peace

I believe you should still dry the bud when it is finished due to the fact I have read that the THC is not psychoactive until the bud has dried I am no scientist though just going off of what I have heard.

I thought this might be the case. When I make my tincture normally I put the chopped up buds in the oven for about 5 minutes before adding the alcohol, doing this seems to really activate the THC so I was hoping that I could do it just in one step.
I'm still interested to hear anyone elses' opinion or experience.

That's probably such a rare approach to harvest you'd be best just to do both methods and compare for yourself... just my 2 cents.

dry and cure necessary-

in my opinion.the results will be much stronger. just air cure is fine. hang complete plant in 75 degree, 70%RH dark room for three weeks. should be close. trim and use.

happy growing.

thanks for the words.. I will experiment with some and dry the rest

Hey guys I'm no scientist either, but don't people make fresh bubble hash or ice water extraction wax straight from freeze dried or wet trim.

I believe they do..... Drying and curing help to bring out the smooth smoke and flavorful taste for smoking, when doing medibles or other means of use it's just the cannanaboids that we are after, no leaf material. So if its not the leaf material we are after why do we need to wait for it to dry and cure???

Freeze dry it and the trichomes will dust right off, just an example.

Sorry I was out for a few days, anyone want to chime in about the points PakaloloHui raises?

Hi there LogMK3,

I was recently forced to do a very early harvest on an Easyryder I had growing outdoors. I had no time to dry it or cure it. It just needed to come down and I couldn't attend to it. Under the scope it was about 2/3 white and 1/3 clear. It probably had 3 weeks to go, which is a long time with Easyryder. I cut it, chopped it fine, and did a double alcohol rinse. I let that dry in a large glass pan out on a porch that gets so hot you can't walk on it with bare feet. The result was a thin amber coating on the bottom of the pan that resulted in a fine tan powder when scraped with a razor blade. The time from cut to scrape was probably 10 hours. About 8 hours after that, I smoked a BB sized dose to see what I had. It was a nice clear cerebral high that wasn't too strong but it lasted about as long as I normally expect from properly harvested and cured bud.

In no way am I saying this is the new cool way to harvest. I'm just saying what worked in my particular situation. It was a different result, but no better or worse than stuff I grew and treated properly. It was just different.

Sometimes an emergency results in a good experiment. After this, I will be much less worried about an early harvest if it's needed. I might not have gotten what I set out to get, but I got something interesting and effective that I didn't expect.

Dry and cure......never disrespect your buds.

Thanks for the story bill6567, I made tincture from about 13g of fresh buds. If I assume that 75% is water, that's equivalent to 3-3.5g of dried bud. I had it in the oven for 5 minutes @ 100C, then another 5 mins @ 150C (with dried bud I only do 5 min @ 150C). I'm very happy with the results, but it is very time consuming to cut up fresh buds so I will dry them a bit to hopefully make that job easier.