drys best with the more air the better,just keep the rain off. our barn was just a old wood barn good roof,walls with space between boards, doors wide open. up in the amish country there barns are huge with wall boards that they open every few feet for air then close when there done with the tobacco crop.
the way its done here in this area is you have hundreds of what you call tobacco sticks.they are around 5 feet long and around 1in. by 1.5in. and you drive them into the ground in the tobacco row so far apart,then you have a thing called a spear with a point on the end that fits over the end of the stick and a thing they call a knife, its looks like a hachet you chop the plant off at the ground and put the stalk of the base end about 8in or so up from the end on the point of spear and push down and thread the plant down on the stick around 8 plants or more so when you hang them in the barn they can be spaced apart some for air. barns have a frame work inside that you hang the stick up end to end.you start at the top frame work and work your way down,takes 3 or 4 helpers to pass they up.
anyway you can spear the plant on a stick and hang them that way to cure in a outdoor shed with the doors and windows open the more air the better. only the outside tobacco that face the open door or windows gets weathered and is mixed in with the tobacco when you grade it and send to market.
thinking back years ago when farmers would grade there tobacco and getting it ready to take to market it had to look pretty, they were proud of the way it looked. after all there would be your next door farmers there and they would all see your crop and they all seen how well you took care of the crop when it was growing.
the basket that was used was a flat square with some curve up on the edge and about 4x4 or so and you would strip the leaf starting with the bottom, the bright, bunched together stem to stem untill you had a hand full then take a leaf and wind it around the stem end and fold back into the group to hold together. they called it a hand because it was all you could hold in your hand to do that job.as you made the hands you placed them side by side in rows around the basket packing layers and layers about 4 foot high or so with the leaf stem ends pointing out,it was pretty.
also you can only grade tobacco when its in[ case ] thats what its called when on the right damp day the tobacco leaf is like a soft rag and when its dry it will crumble in your hands. so if your crop does well and you have cured some only handle it when it is in case or you will have crumbles. farmers have been known in dry times to spray tobacco with a fine mist of water and pack a pile down and cover it with plastic to bring it into case and some times when it was in case they would pack a pile down and cover it so they could keep working with it before it went back out of case, other words the day warmed up and the tobacco dryed back out.when you open that pretty pack of tobacco and you see all that nice cut strips in fine little pieces, that was not done with dry tobacco.
now days you just grade it and its put in a square box and packed with a jack and pressed into bales like a bale of hay and tied with a string and took to market. i loved to watch the buyers from the tobacco co. bid on the tobacco and if it looked wet it didn't do very well, thats when some farmers had spray it to bring it into case so they could work it but got it to wet,bad thing, because they buy it by the pound.
not many tobacco markets around anymore,farmers have to truck it to other towns now.
i think most tobacco is imported now days.
o well, better get out of here,don't want bore you guys
They were horrible.
