Yellow spots on dried leaves: too fast or are my plants unhealthy?

[Pflanzenfreund]

Hello
It is my second attempt at producing tobacco.
I tried different methods on drying my tobacco leaves but i had little success so far. The first batch i just hung indoors but they dried still mostly green. It was hard to get some informations, the book i bought was of little help and the German forum seems to be offline. Luckily i found this forum and i spent some time soaking up knowledge

My next attempt was drying some leaves in a cardboard box and some more outdoors under a roof. I managed to get the leaves in the box to a good amount of yellow with just some green around the ribs. They too dried too fast beginning from the tip leaving yellow spots and a green tint to the backside so i tried to hang them indoors with some wet towels but at night the humidity dropped under 60%. The leaves outdoors instead got moldy during a few days of rain.


These are the leaves i tried to dry in the cardboard box:

The colors are a bit off though.

My last attempt so far was trying to get the left over leaves as ripe as possible but i harvested last week due to a bad weather forecast. The leaves looked ripe to me but i might have harvested too soon still.
This batch i put inside a plastic bag to yellow. The bag is not 100% airtight but my hygrometer shows 91% humidity. Still a significant portion of the leaves dried brown with yellow spots with even less success at getting them to yellow. :

I guess i still have failed at providing a proper humidity. The plants had some stress due to getting dry and lacking in nitrogen. I also had some white tobacco flies and other small green sucking insects at one point.

 

[Alpine]

Welcome to FTT. It has been my experience that leaves harvested too soon are extremely difficult (sometimes impossible...) to cure properly. In my first year, I lost a good half of my tobacco, and the main reason wasn’t not enough humidity or low temps: the leaves were simply not ripe enough! Can you post some pics of your leaves before the cure? That would help the diagnosis.
But don’t be discouraged: we all lost some baccy in our first year, you simply must go on with experiments and see what works in your environment.

pier

 

[Pflanzenfreund]

Yes i will try it again next year and then i make sure they are ripe enough. I did not take any photos though.

 

[jimbob]

I seem to be having similar problems and was wondering if the fault could be coursed by the foliage feed that I have been using called miracle-gro. I've tried heated box's ,misting and all the same methods as you, they have turned partly yellow and dried a strange light green and wondered if there could be some chemical in the feed which might be responsible, have you been using a foliage feed

 

[burge]

I try and wait for the sale to buy my leaves. In Canada with exchange 20 dollars US works out to 40 dollars a pound. Every little bit helps. I do know I am not set for growing and if living elsewhere would want to ink a supply and then see what I could produce. Best time for the sale traditionally is Black Friday and I urge you to stock up