Sun curing Prilep 66-9/7

I am currently sun-curing my Prilep 66-9/7, to be used for pipe tobacco. For the third priming, I took some detailed progress photos and logged some data to share here.

I string primed leaves front-to-front and back-to-back onto a wire as tightly as I can fit them. I harvest in the afternoon (Day 0) and the leaves wilt a bit over night. The following morning, the leaves go into the full sun and I move them between two locations once a day to make sure they are exposed to direct sun as much as possible. Each labelled photo below is from the morning of the indicated day. Once the stems are fully brittle, I wait until the following morning when everything is in high case again to take the leaves of the wire, sort out any trash, and bundle rest. The process took 12 days this time.

Results at the end. Everything cured very nicely with minimal trash.

Here are the environmental conditions while curing. I'm in the Houston, TX area. The leaves were in the sun, the thermometer and humidity sensor obviously in the shade. I had to save the leaves from a rain shower once, but otherwise we had warm and sunny days.

Average Temp: 86.4F
Average RH: 74.7%

Excellent documentation as well as results. I've added this thread to our Index of Key Forum Threads.

Bob

There is an impostor in my Prilep. One of the plants grew easily twice as tall as everyone else, with an entirely different appearance. It has a much thicker stem and bigger leaves and it is taking a bit longer to mature. It lived without fertilization or irrigation, just like the Prilep around it, and it still out-competed its closely spaced neighbors. I did not notice any difference in the seedlings at planting time. I only seeded a single variety for this batch, so who knows what snuck into the nwtseeds Prilep packet. I'm going to sun-cure it with the rest, just to see what happens.

Every time I’ve planted Prilep, I’ve had one turn into a “monster” version of the plant- after curing, it smelled the same as the rest.
Genetic variation of some sort, I figured.
Too bad my season is too short for seeds, because I’d like to see if the mutant larger plant has larger offspring, as well…

johnny108 said:

Every time I’ve planted Prilep, I’ve had one turn into a “monster” version of the plant- after curing, it smelled the same as the rest.
Genetic variation of some sort, I figured.
Too bad my season is too short for seeds, because I’d like to see if the mutant larger plant has larger offspring, as well…

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Interesting. I thought of keeping seeds, too, but ended up topping the monster so I wouldn't have to mess with bagging the rest of the seed heads I planned on keeping. Here's a photo of the thing with the Prilep flowerhead in the foreground.



Nothing suspicious 3 months ago at time of planting:

crasch said:

Interesting. I thought of keeping seeds, too, but ended up topping the monster so I wouldn't have to mess with bagging the rest of the seed heads I planned on keeping. Here's a photo of the thing with the Prilep flowerhead in the foreground.

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Any chance you could overwinter it? Tobacco plants are naturally perennial, so you could continue growing it next year and get seeds then.

TigerTom said:

continue growing it next year and get seeds then

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It is most likely an error—a stray seed acquired somewhere along the supply chain. It's why seed should be saved only from a "typical" plant of a specific variety. When tobacco blossoms of a specific variety are properly bagged, the resulting seed is presumed to be homozygous.

Bob

deluxestogie said:

It is most likely an error—a stray seed acquired somewhere along the supply chain. It's why seed should be saved only from a "typical" plant of a specific variety. When tobacco blossoms of a specific variety are properly bagged, the resulting seed is presumed to be homozygous.

Bob

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Right. However, I didn't mean he should use to save seeds as an example of Prilep, but as a possibly unique plant with its own qualities.

crasch said:

There is an impostor in my Prilep. One of the plants grew easily twice as tall as everyone else, with an entirely different appearance. It has a much thicker stem and bigger leaves and it is taking a bit longer to mature. It lived without fertilization or irrigation, just like the Prilep around it, and it still out-competed its closely spaced neighbors. I did not notice any difference in the seedlings at planting time. I only seeded a single variety for this batch, so who knows what snuck into the nwtseeds Prilep packet. I'm going to sun-cure it with the rest, just to see what happens.

View attachment 60516

Click to expand...

Interesting. My initial thought of those leaves was “those look like big Prilep leaves” and I’m still partial to that idea even after seeing the picture of the plant. The spacing of the leaves on the stalk is throwing me off a bit though. It could still be a genetic mutation/variant of Prilep that grew vertically very quickly with the same number of leaves per plant as any other Prilep…resulting in large spaces between leaves. Your cured Prilep looks excellent and it’s making me wish I had grown it this year. First year in a while I haven’t. Sun curing is nothing short of a pain where I live though and I’ve gotten to the point of just leaving the leaves out through rain, wind, hail, etc…it’s actually the morning dew that seems to wreak havoc on my sun cured varieties (NE Ohio).

Great observation about the leaf spacing — that's really interesting. Genetic variants can definitely surprise you like that.

I've seen sun curing setups in various tobacco-growing regions in China, especially in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces where a lot of oriental and sun-cured tobaccos are grown. The morning dew issue you mentioned is actually a big concern there too — many farmers use simple frame structures that allow them to cover the leaves quickly if there's heavy dew or rain. Some also use semi-sun curing methods where they start with sun exposure and finish in a more controlled environment to get more consistent results.

It's always a trade-off between the unique flavor sun curing gives you and the unpredictability of weather. Your cured Prilep looks fantastic though — definitely worth the effort!

Have you tried any hybrid approaches, like starting with sun curing and finishing with a bit of flue curing to stabilize the results?