Cosmic Crop 2018

[cosmicfolklore]

Thanks guys,

I do hear about the fears of pests in the tobacco. I have never had deer or animals mess with the tobacco, and i have watched rabbits eat the clover on the grass around the tobacco, and lots of deer pass through here. But, tobacco doesn't set well on an animal's stomach. Not even the goat eats it, and he eats poison ivy like a champ.
I get aphids, but I am not worried about those. I can wash those off at harvest, and they don't kill the leaves or plant. They do trigger niconoids the the plant because of their sucking action, and makes the plant more flavorful. Win/win. But, I do get these little bastards, hornworms, tobacco worms, tomato worms, whatever you want to call them, they are the same jerk of the pest world. I have sprayed a thuricide that affects one particular bacteria in the hornworm's digestive system. It is considered an organic, because it is very specific in what it does, and it doesn't affect people at all. It can be used on leafy vegetables and fruits. However, it is slow acting. And, just looking for them and pulling them off the plant is way more effective.
I use long tongs to pull them off, because the squirt their gut churn all over you when you touch them. The horn is harmless, they are merely disgusting. But, they can be tricky to find, as they will hide in a Virginias ruffly folds. Here are some pics...

Here is a black one that has died from the thuricide. They just starve to death...

Here is one hiding in the ruffly folds...

They aren't impossible to control, but as you can see checking over a whole acre of tobacco would be time consuming. There are usually one per plant and can eat anywhere from three to six leaves a day, not to mention that they usually just graze over a leaf as they move on, leaving a half eaten leaf behind. So, you have to be vigilant. Your only other options are to rely on thuricide and let them eat a few leaves as they die, or use a harder pesticide that makes you crop no better than a commercial crop.

It is something to consider. There is a little work involved, but it's not like backbreaking or anything. More like finding waldo on each and every plant every day. This year has been the worst. For the past five years I may see a handful all year, but this year it has been one per plant, per day.
I will also till the soil really well after I cut stalks to kill any larva in the ground. And, I will use a light pesticide just on the bed, one that won't affect the worms and beetles, just larva. Then I will plant the winter peas right in behind the tobacco.
So, there ya go, tobacco's worst pest.

 

[wiooi]

Cosmic this thread is exactly what I have been scouring the inter webs for! Wow you are doing an amazing job and no every detail is awesome not boring at all, I may have to PM you I have a million questions but I will try to thoroughly read this a couple more times..
Thanks!

 

[peckinpahhombre]

This is awesome. Learned a lot.

 

[wolflarsen]

Cosmic - Thanks for taking the time to put this thread together for us. It has been a great inspiration and is very much appreciated. I grew one tobacco plant as an experiment this year and look forward to going for it next season.

 

[lawdawg]

Very enjoyable to see this process documented in real time. Those little inch worms, or their cousins, ate up my brussel sprout plants pretty bad last year. A little back yard gardening shows how challenging it can be to farm crops.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I could just leave the crop and harvest what naturally ripens on the stalk and keep making reds from them, but Mrs. Cosmic is pushing me to get the peas planted for an early Spring harvest. Green peas are our favorite veggie, and they will help condition the soil for next year's tobacco. So, I cuts stalks on a third of the crop and picked leaves. I will go over how to push them to yellowing using your flue at the end of this post.

But, here is a wheel barrel full of leaves just before i sort them by size, wash, and bundle them into hands.

I had to then empty the flue kiln/barn/thing (still not sure what to call it) and hang them while I steam and stack the leaves for storage. I used Mrs. Cosmic's laundry rack to hang them. Here is a picture of the red Virginias just out of the flue thing. They are all fermented and nicely red. I tried a test pipe full, and they are going to be very fruity and sweet when I am ready to use them. But, some got a little too red or brown, so I will sort them by shade.

Ok, I haven't mentioned temperatures or times yet, but as in cooking there are ways to push colors and flavors.
If your allow them to ripen on the stalk, meaning that there is a striation of yellow in the leaf before you pick it, sometimes it is more subtle the further up the stalk you pick, and hard to photograph with a measly iphone. But, you will just jump to curing. Put them in at 130F till wilted and slowly increase your temperature to 170F and leave them till they are the correct colorization. Sometimes this will take about 4 to 6 weeks. You just cure by eye.
To get a lemon Virginia with a citrus flavor and stronger nicotine that you usually get in a pipe tobacco, you will have to wilt them to a yellow in the kiln. This is best for leaf harvested from further up the stalk. Here I am curing mid-seco to ligero, and I have sorted the leaf by position on the stalk.

Put them in the kiln quickly, as ambient heat in the field can scorch the leaf. I then will leave them at 100F till all leaves are yellowed, 30 hours to 80 hours, depending on the individual crop. Go by eye.

Then slowly raise the temperature over night to 130F, and you will just cure them at this temperature till the stems are dried. This will set the yellow color. You just have to go by eye and nose on a lot of this. It is a combination of art and science, using intuition a lot of times.
Anyways, I still have leaf in the beds. So, it is an ongoing labor of love. ::

 

[jpmcwjr]

Great stuff, Michael. As you know, I am Mr. Humidity guy, so any info you may post re that will be read with interest.

 

[bluto]

Times like this , we need smello vision

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Thanks guy,

JPMCWJR, humidity is an anomaly to me with this. Outside, it has stayed around 80-90%, inside it is a little more of a mystery. My humidor style gauge shows it at 40-50%, but my digital dry bulb says 70-80%, and the leaf gets bone dry. I have calibrated the humidor hygrometer several times, but it will show 80% for a few hours and then start dropping. But, if it is so humid, then why does the tobacco always come out bone dry, and I mean that if a leaf fall out of the bundle, it just shatters on the ground like very thin glass. But, when I leave it on the rack outside, the leaf will absorb some ambient moisture and become a little less fragile. I still have to steam it to make it pliable enough to stack flat. After steaming it is about 65%, which is how I always store it. I even jar it at 65% because it is dry enough to smoke at that measure, and does not require any anti-molding treatments. So, I am not sure of the effects that humidity plays on the leaf in the heat. Does it need humidity? Does it slow the enzymes from just turning to crap too fast? I am not sure.
Also, as a side note I have played with mold preventatives. Calcium propionate has been an odd chemical. It tastes like crap when I think I may be putting too much. Too little and it just makes the leaf stink, like a rotten orange. I am not expert at using it, so I just shelved it. Then I tried vinegar, but it smells like cat piss, and every attempt to just spray a little on the leaf causes mold to rapidly set in. I did some research and vinegar has no known mold inhibiting qualities. Spray a thin syrup of honey dissolved in some spiced rum is the only thing that I have been able to use that shows any results.

I just figure that I will enjoy the leaf with no additives. It is an all natural, uncased product, and left at 65% it is perfect, IMO. I may use the honey syrup on twists in the future, because it doesn't add too much of a flavor, and it makes the leaf slightly sticky enough to stay rolled. Plus, in twists, if you don't add anything the juices squeezed out of the leaf in the process does want to mold.
I can't give you much more than that, JPM, I just don't have the knowledge yet on what the humidity is doing to the leaf, in any scientific terms. I am still very much a novice at this.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Bluto, the smell when I open the kiln every day to add water is heavenly. I add just a splash of apple cider vinegar to the water to increase the effects of the heat, so the vinegar mixes with the tobacco smell after it starts to color and varies from a fine men's cologne smell to the smell of a fine shade leaf cigar sniffed fresh out of the humidor.

 

[jpmcwjr]

Yo, Michael-
Here's what I like to use.....see below

When given temperature and dewpoint, the vapor pressure (plugging Td in place of T into Clausius-Clapeyron equation) and the saturation vapor pressure (plugging T into Clausius-Clapeyron equation) can be determined. The RH = E/Es*100%.
Clausius-Clapeyron equation
LN(Es/6.11) = (L/Rv )(1/273 - 1/T)

Es = Saturation vapor pressure

L = Latent heat of vaporization = 2.453 � 10^6 J/kg

Rv = Gas constant for moist air = 461 J/kg

T = Temperature in Kelvins

Bad joke, I use F not K nor C, and many other variables I can't measure, nor do I grok the equation. I googled for a bit to see what I could find, and the only one that looked promising was in English measures, i.e., Centigrade. I don't speak Centigrade, though.
But this underscores why the big boys in tobacco use an actual moisture meter. As to RH, unless it's in an enclosed small area (such as a Mason jar!), so the air can equilibrate with the moisture in the tobacco, it's not real useful. As the temperature climbs, the air can hold more moisture, which is why temp is noted in each case. (I use 70º F as an average temperature here).
Long story- a guess- could the heat be driving moisture out of the leaf and into the air so that there's no equilibrium between leaf moisture and air? And if you took said dry feeling leaf into a jar with air around 70º, would it not come into equilibrium in a couple of days? Somewhere between 70-80% RH at room temp? (another guess)

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I’ve never been good at word problems in math. Ha ha. I don’t worry about it too much. Inside the kiln, I can’t really turn up or down the humidity. All I can 100% control is the heat. Except, I would like to drive the temperature up about 170F. When it starts getting cooler at night, it might need an extra boost of heat.

 

[jpmcwjr]

So, if a train leaves Cleveland traveling at 45 mph, East bound, and another train leaves Miami at 60 mph, Northbound, which one breaks down before reaching NYC?

 

[cosmicfolklore]

jpm, the answer is perique. ::

 

[jpmcwjr]

42. But you can retake the exam.... An airplane flying South from Saskatchewan at 480 mph......

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Humidity was getting rather high, so I was keeping an eye on the Viginias from the previous curings. I started to notice that some were getting a powdery white around the stems. UGGG!! So, I culled through the stacks, pulling only the most fragrant leaves, and anything without a perfect color, any sign of white powder, or if I just didn't like the looks of the leaf, it got tossed.
I would have preferred to age the leaf for a few years before shredding them. But, I was afraid that this Fall was going to be just too wet to do that. I keep a dehumidifier in my room, but it is just not very effective. I just need to build something to keep the tobacco in that is kept very dry. Plastic bags in a large plastic tote is just going to keep sucking moisture out of the air. When I opened it, there was condensation on the sides of the plastic. So, now I need a humidor to keep the tobacco dry.

So, I was sorting leaf by leaf, sniffing each, and tossing anything irregular. Out of about 20 pounds, I kept 8 lbs, and got it all shredded down.

My shredder cuts it down to a very consistent large 2mm ribbon.

I also tried to use calcium propionate one more time. Having seen where Woodsroad still insists it works, I tried using what he suggested at about 5%. It smells so godawful. But, after I dried it out, I couldn't detect any odors. I was worried. Why go through all of the effort to get the most fragrant tobaccos, just to spray something on it that might foul the aroma, but it didn't. I dried the tobacco in the oven using a very large kettle that I picked up just for this. It holds 8 lbs perfectly.
I then took all of the culled leaf to the burn barrel. Now, you want to talk about aromas... It smelled like I had just lit a 1 foot wide cigar, with the aromatic smoke wafting into all of my neighbors yards. It definitely had a cigar smell, with the fermented leaf.

All of the most recent lemon cured Virginias are still stored as whole leaf. I will go through the effort to keep it dry for a couple of years. But, the reds were all shredded, cased with a light CP spray, and jarred up. It hadn't went through a couple of sweats, but we will see how it does. I will crack the first jar in a few years. If anyone is wondering, eight pounds is one jar shy of filling three dozen pint jars.
I ordered some perique to blend with the lemon VA, but I probably won't process any of those for a few years.

 

[bluto]

Have you grown orientals .?

 

[cosmicfolklore]

Have you grown orientals .?

Yes. Did you have one in particular you wanted to know about. There are literally hundreds of Oriental varieties.

 

[cosmicfolklore]

I didn't make a big deal about them or post any pictures, but I did grow a bed of Japan8, Semois, and a few cigar leaf varieties and rustica. But, I have tried to grow Izmir and a few others with poor results. But, Jitter suggested that I not use my best soil, so I may try it again.

 

[bluto]

The reason I ask is , wondering about your blending and pressing operation . You must have a nice selection to choose from for making various English Balkan style , that tobacco camp fire could have made a kinda Latakia ( tobaccokia )