I see it's been a month since I last posted....my bad!...as they say. Our summer here has been horrible - I live in the northwest corner of Ireland, about 100 yards from the sea, and have rarely seen the sun in months - literally!! We have rain here almost every day, and the temps never went past 60F all summer. In the meantime, my crappy tunnel - no longer a tunnel, but just a windbreak - is holding up fairly well, all things considering. I've been reading the forum about curing burley - I' haven't dealt with burley before, but found that some of my leaf has begun to turn yellow on the plant - I've strung those few leaves up in the shed:
I'll give the rest of them a couple of more weeks. I see from some of the blogs here that sometimes you do air cure with the green leaf, and I may have to end up doing that, depending on what weather rolls in.
My Amersfoort was grown outside, and still looks healthy, although none of the bottom leaves have begun to yellow:
On the bottom left of the photo, you'll see some Virginia that I grew outside, as I ran out of room in the 'tunnel'. I've already started flue curing some of that.
I'm on my 7th flue curing run, being a lot more careful about waiting until the leaf was ripe before priming it. I found that my chamber does a lot better with less leaf, and my runs end up being about 60 or so leaves at a time. Each run has taken about a week, and most of the leaf is curing fairly well...with one or two bad boys, as seen in this photo:
The Virginia in the tunnel is about 3/4 primed now.....this year, I did twice as many burley plants as I did last year. The Hickory Pryor that I tried in the tunnel didn't do well - it's barely 2 feet high, the leaf is small, etc. I even tried some of this in my greenhouse, but it didn't do well there, either.
When my flue curing is done, I'm going to try my hand at kilning (although did I read, somewhere in the massive amount of info on this site, that flue cured tobacco does not do well when kilned??? That statement keeps bubbling up through the depths of my mind, but I've never been able to find that info again.....)
I'm pretty pleased with my results thus far, this year. For me, the trick was germinating a LOT earlier than I thought necessary - I planted my seeds in mid February, far earlier than I've ever done before. But, amusingly, I've had little trouble with my flue curing. It's funny, I had a 'diary' of my runs, starting from my first attempt in 2014. It shows that, in 2014, I was running out to my chamber (up in the shed) about every hour to see what was going on...LOL. Now, I'm basically a 'set and forget' kind of curer - my color cure basically takes about 3 days, and then (as per something I once read in one of DGBama's posts), I let the humidity tell me how to move on. The vent I put in my chamber was a Godsend, as well, and made all the difference in the world.
I am hoping that my burley turns out successfully this year. My basic blend is now 50/50 burley/Virginia, and if all is well, it's actually quite possible that I could be somewhat 'self sufficient' with all of this.
Next year, my plan is to do all of my tunnel with the pot arrangement that I did this year. It worked a treat, and the difference between the potted side of the tunnel vs the 'good' side of the tunnel, is amazing. Plus, with the pots, the weeding issue goes right out the window - I had no weeds at all on the potted side, which is a plus for any lazy gardener......
Strangely, my plants flowered about 6 weeks or more ago - sometime toward the middle/end of July. But the flowers are just sitting there, with no indication of wilting or anything else. Not a pod to be seen! But one of the things that gardening teaches you is patience.....I've been a bad student, but am finally learning......
