01/30/14, 04:44 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2013
Location: southern hills of indiana
Posts: 2,533
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Well,I was raised working in tobacco and I learned a couple things on this thread.I will add some if you care to hear them. We were in Indiana and it's called burley here. In the south they raise different kinds than we do/or did.Our understanding of the harvesting process down south was what we called "priming". The way I understood it was that the leaves were stripped from the plant while growing in the field. Starting at the bottom as the ripen and were housed in the barn.
Here,raising burley we would first" burn the bed".This was done to kill any weed seeds and it was late winter/early spring.In later years they started "gassing" the beds.You would then sow seed in this bed and cover it with thin muslin called a tobacco tarp. This protected the tender plants from frost and sun burning.When it was time to plant you watered the bed to make it easy to pull plants without damaging them and they were rolled in burlap to keep them moist.
After planting and the crop growing it had to be wormed.You had to look at every plant for worm damage,find him and throw him on the ground hard enough to bust him open.If you didn't get all the worms a skunk would and do a lot of crop damage as he did.The next big thing was "topping" As soon as the crop started to bloom you went out in the early morning dew and broke the top out of the plant.This was done early so it would still be brittle from the night air.It was done to make the plant put it's energy into the remaining leaves. We always left 21 leaves.
After topping "suckers would grow from the base of every leaf. They had to be removed 3-4 times to keep the plant storing energy in the leaves. The other option was to spray "sucker dope".It would keep the plant from growing suckers.(Mant people sprayed too heavy and turned the top leaves yellow)This was bad because the plant rippens from the bottom up. If sprayed too heave you would have plants that were yellow on top and bottom and green in the middle.
The tobacco was cut and put on sticks(5 plants to the stick.It had to be done in the heat of the day as to not damage the leaves from being brittle)
It would lay out on the stick(driven into the ground to keep it from getting dirty) for 3-5 days to wilt down.Once it wilted down it was "housed" and hung in teires to cure.Once it had cured it was taken down "in case" and taken to the stripping room.We stripped 7 grades. Trash,lug 1,2, red 1,2,3 and tip.Norman,the guy we raised tobacco with used to make "twist". He had a wood box maybe 6x8x16 and it had molasses,brown sugar,honey and some other stuff in it and the lid had cup hooks on it.He would lift the lid when he got to the stripping room and every once in a while he'd find a leaf he liked and at the end of the night he would twist the leaves and hang them on the cup hooks and put the lid back in place so his twists were soaking in the mixture.I also saw Norman showing how to strip 21 grades!
Keep in mind that one drop of pure nicotine will kill a horse.In some states it's legal to hunt deer with poison tipped arrows and that's what is used.And if you are only doing a garden size plot of tobacco you'll want to "prime it"
Wade
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25Likes
Wish I had some I would send it to you and you could bribe someone into smoking it . Bad as i need money I would hate to smoke a pipe full in one setting for twenty bucks . 
