Anyone know how to cure tobacco the old fashion way?
 

I've aquired some old traditional native tobacco seeds and hope to grow a nice size garden full this coming summer. I think I got the growing part down, but I don't know anything about curing it. I've seen on public t.v. documentaries of the Cubans growing tobacco down in Cuba. From what I remember seeing they had these long huts where they would hang the plants upside down all across the ceiling rafters.

I wonder when you consider the tobacco ready to cut and hang, and how long to cure it at this stage? Anyone know?

I cant wait to roll my first cigar! Or make my first twist tobacco!

What's weird about all this is, I don't even smoke or chew tobacco!

I don't know much as it isn't grown here. I have some friends on a farming forum who grow it and have shown how they harvest, cure and sell it. 2 different ways. Flue fired and barn cured, depending on where you are and/or use. I have seen U-tube videos too....James

Read up on the Amish tobacco growers in southern Maryland. They usually strip and size the tobacco during the winter months. I think they cut it in August spear it onto laths and hang them in the tobacco barns until December.
They usually start by steaming the tobacco beds in March. They plant the seeds then and transplant them in May. They have this mule pulled contraption that has 2 people sitting on the back dropping the plants. It is pretty cool lookong.
You might want to invest in several children. Growing tobacco is pretty labor intensive.

First, I would urge you to reconsider starting if you don't smoke since tobacco use is habit forming and has deadly consequences for health and longevity. Appearantly nicotine is not real harmful by itself even though it is very addictive, some users have said it's more addictive than cocaine, but, the smoke has all kinds of harmful effects.

It seems there is all kinds of information on tobacco culture on the internet. Drying it is the easy part. Hanging it upside down under a shed seems to do the trick.

You are not going to need a garden full of the stuff. 8 or 10 plants will get you started. There is a huge amount of hand labor in tobacco growing.

COWS

If I were wanting a cigar I would find me some burley seed It is used more for smoking than a dark fired or regular air cured . :cowboy: Here they grow a type that can be fire cured or air cured and then the burley .There is no flue curing in this area . Tobacco loves nitrogen and lots of fertilizer The old timers planted on a three food square grid .

Most I ever raised was 11 acres so I know a little about it :eek: Not many folks will chew a air cured tobacco . And for those not in the know after the tobacco factory get the tobacco they must wash it or something intense . Because the lest of ones worries is some non smoker or one use to those wimpy ready roles firing up a cigar or pipe with home grown in it . That stuff is stout enough to repel mosquitoes at a quarter mile . The burley at about half that distance . :hysterical:

You an't lived till you have hung tobacco in a big ,tall shaky barn .If you aren't afraid of high places the top man is the place to be . That stuff is sure pretty growing though . Now the old hands use to use a tobacco knife and split the plant then put it on a stick ,but most times we used a spike .One winter I sawed out over a thousand tobacco sticks out of hickory .

After frost time transplant your plants about 3 foot apart keep weeded suckered and wormed .
When plants get big and start shooting way up or right before they bloom break out the top . If i remember right this will be about ten or eleven leaves high . Blooms are pretty . Now If one has time to let it stand or right before first frost it will take on a little yellow color or called getting ripe .
Now it needs to be some what warm or the plants will be brittle when you cut them and break apart . So when you cut it let it lay in the sun till it wilts then spike it and get it out of the sun before it sun burns .

Now if you want dark fired that is another lesson :cowboy:

Not many city folks ever smoked real tobacco . It took 75 years to get my Grand Pa and my uncle missed 90 by one day but it got em :croc:

We plant a few rows every year for the worms only. I set alot of Bush hooks.

Homegrown tobacco rolled up in brown paper makes a potent smoke..I remember it well.

ummm I'm laughing cause my first encounter with the Funny stuff , was me and the brother sampling some of the neighbors crop, and utilizing Brown paper in the whole fiasco...

In the early spring the tobacco beds need to be tended and got ready for seeding. Daddy always used big logs around the edge of the bed so there would be some height later on to lay the cotton muslin over the top of the young plants and attach the covering to the logs to keep it in place. Sow seeds thick and barely cover with loam/dirt. The seed bed dirt has to be loose as a goose so the plants can be pulled roots and all without damaging them. Also a good bed to sow the baby lettuce and tomato seeds. With the cotton lawn covering nailed down the rabbits go wild trying to eat it off to get at the lettuce. Don't have to go rabbit hunting. They come to you. If you've got a good dog chain him next to the tobacco bed for a couple of weeks so he can keep the rabbits at a distance.

The tobacco field has to be plowed and a rake run through it. Don't want no rocks or dirt clumps falling around and damaging the tobacco plants. The stalks of a tobacco plant are succulent and tender even into adult stage. The plants are ready when they're about 6" tall and have a couple sets of leaves. We used a tractor pulled tobacco setter. Daddy sat on the left because he was right handed and I sat on the right because I was left handed. The plants are held in your lap and you pull out the strongest and best ones as you move through the rows. The plant goes into the ground through an opening in the setter. The setter plows down into the dirt, you place the plant root down and slightly lay the plant on its side so it won't easily break off as the back of the setter comes over it adding water and fertilizer mix and covering it over again with dirt. We usually had a spotter walking behind the setter readjusting any plants that looked in trouble. Even with that you sometimes had to peg plants later that got damaged and put in new plants.

We usually plowed the tobacco using a mule pulled plow and then after that it was up to us kids to use the hoes to keep the fields chopped out which is what we called hoeing the weeds. We also had to keep the suckers and tobacco worms pulled off. About August the tobacco would be ready for topping and generally the adults did this because us kids was too short to reach that high. It's cutting out the top of the plant where the leaves get little and clumpy and the yellow flowers grow. All that has to come out. After that the plant leaves start yellowing and getting ripe. About September the plants are ready to cut, spear, and hang on tobacco sticks. This was an adult job too. The sticks were taken to the tobacco barn and hung from the rafters down by positioning the sticks between the rafters. Us kids helped with this after we were big enough to handle a stick of tobacco. It's really heavy. There's shutters on the barn to help with the air moving through and drying the tobacco. A lot of rainy weather will bring the tobacco in case. This is when it's moist and leathery feeling and generally how you want it when you strip the leaves off and tie it by hand. We called this stripping tobacco. You grade the leaves, tie in hands and hang these on tobacco sticks again. These are then put flat down onto pallets ready for taking to the tobacco warehouse. You keep it under cover of roof and hope it stays in good case until sold. You keep your tobacco sticks to use next year.

This was the old ways back in the 50s and 60s of raising tobacco for a cash crop. I've probably forgot as much as I ever knew about raising tobacco. People nowadays bale the tobacco and it's much easier to get the tobacco ready for market. Daddy did all the spraying and fertilizing and didn't want us kids to be exposed to that. It always made him very sick when he did it. He died of major heart failure when he was 62.

Thanks for the headup Cows. I actually use to be a smoker at one time. I quit 24 years ago after watching my Ma die from lung cancer. Decided that is not the way I want to die! I smoked from the time I was 15 and quit when I was 30. So I really don't have any plans on being a smoker again.

Wow, is homegrown really that much stronger? I'd thought it be the other way around. I thought I read somewhere that the tobacco companies cook a lot of tobacco down and add it back in the other tobacco to make it more potent to keep you hooked on nicotine.

================================================== ======

Really don't know that I would start up smoking again. Whenever I'm around someone who is smoking, my heart starts beating faster and harder and I'll get somewhat kind of dizzy just from inhaling second hand smoke. So, I don't know if I could ever take up smoking again. But I'm going to grow some anyway. It might be a good barter item if things get really rough in the upcoming years. Plus like I said, I remember it being beautiful plants and I would like to grow some just to be growing it for show and tell.

In the early spring the tobacco beds need to be tended and got ready for seeding. Daddy always used big logs around the edge of the bed so there would be some height later on to lay the cotton muslin over the top of the young plants and attach the covering to the logs to keep it in place. Sow seeds thick and barely cover with loam/dirt. The seed bed dirt has to be loose as a goose so the plants can be pulled roots and all without damaging them. Also a good bed to sow the baby lettuce and tomato seeds. With the cotton lawn covering nailed down the rabbits go wild trying to eat it off to get at the lettuce. Don't have to go rabbit hunting. They come to you. If you've got a good dog chain him next to the tobacco bed for a couple of weeks so he can keep the rabbits at a distance.

The tobacco field has to be plowed and a rake run through it. Don't want no rocks or dirt clumps falling around and damaging the tobacco plants. The stalks of a tobacco plant are succulent and tender even into adult stage. The plants are ready when they're about 6" tall and have a couple sets of leaves. We used a tractor pulled tobacco setter. Daddy sat on the left because he was right handed and I sat on the right because I was left handed. The plants are held in your lap and you pull out the strongest and best ones as you move through the rows. The plant goes into the ground through an opening in the setter. The setter plows down into the dirt, you place the plant root down and slightly lay the plant on its side so it won't easily break off as the back of the setter comes over it adding water and fertilizer mix and covering it over again with dirt. We usually had a spotter walking behind the setter readjusting any plants that looked in trouble. Even with that you sometimes had to peg plants later that got damaged and put in new plants.

We usually plowed the tobacco using a mule pulled plow and then after that it was up to us kids to use the hoes to keep the fields chopped out which is what we called hoeing the weeds. We also had to keep the suckers and tobacco worms pulled off. About August the tobacco would be ready for topping and generally the adults did this because us kids was too short to reach that high. It's cutting out the top of the plant where the leaves get little and clumpy and the yellow flowers grow. All that has to come out. After that the plant leaves start yellowing and getting ripe. About September the plants are ready to cut, spear, and hang on tobacco sticks. This was an adult job too. The sticks were taken to the tobacco barn and hung from the rafters down different levels by positioning the sticks between the rafters. Us kids helped with this after we were big enough to handle a stick of tobacco. It's really heavy. There's shutters on the barn to help with the air moving through and drying the tobacco. A lot of rainy weather will bring the tobacco in case. This is when it's moist and leathery feeling and generally how you want it when you strip the leaves off and tie it by hand. We called this stripping tobacco. You grade the leaves, tie in hands and hang these on tobacco sticks again. These are then put flat down onto pallets ready for taking to the tobacco warehouse. You keep it under cover of roof and hope it stays in good case until sold. You keep your tobacco sticks to use next year.

This was the old ways back in the 50s and 60s of raising tobacco for a cash crop. I've probably forgot as much as I ever knew about raising tobacco. People nowadays bale the tobacco and it's much easier to get the tobacco ready for market. Daddy did all the spraying and fertilizing and didn't want us kids to be exposed to that. It always made him very sick when he did it. He died of major heart failure when he was 62.

Soulsurvivor I think we both getting a little rusty ,maybe we should plant about 20 acres :runforhills:

Didn't youall burn that plant bead first ? Those things you hang tobacco on are called tear poles .
We had a later model setter it took the plants in rubber covered jaws and set the plants . If that tractor driver got in a hurry you better be fast cause those fingers came up and by quite fast . Now these guys run four row setters

Trust me about that stuff right out of the barn being stouter and anyone with a good nose can smell it burning from that quarter mile too . :D 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 . :runforhills:

Few years back I worked the barn some because the guy was short handed ,but have hid the last few years . I also worked some one winter In the warehouse unloading trucks on the buying floor . Now that is some work putting it on those baskets as they called them . That stuff had to be in a certain way ,each row did . Another thing gone forever though .

Now here all tobacco is contract grown . Guys planting ten to forty acres of the stuff .

Now how they fire it ,those barns are real tight some of the new barns may have a few vents at the top . After the tobacco is hung and let wilt on down some they dig trenches in the floor and fill with slab wood and cover with sawdust lots of it . They leave a few bare spots so they can light the slab wood ,and once it starts burning they close the doors and it will smolder and burn right along . Sometimes that green tobacco will form a gas in the top of the barn if they don't guess the time to start the fires just right and the whole thing will go up in flames .

They keep firing the tobacco until they get to color they want lots of times it is real bright and waxy feeling or dark and waxy .That is the process for dark fired I think this goes for snuff and chewing .

I know there are two ways tobacco is cured, here in South Carolina they do what is called flue cured, stripping the leaves starting at the bottom as the leaves ripen. My wife's granddad grew what's called burley in the mountains of North Carolina. They cut the whole stalk down and speared it and hung the entire stalk to dry. Not sure which way it's done for cigars.

Flue cured, some real high grade leaves, top price per pound, were always called "wrappers"....whether it was for plug chewing tobacco or cigars I don't know. I do know that alot of the family made their chewing tobacco from flue cured type tobacco, that was air cured under a shed, sted of with heat in the barn.

You could do it either way. The main difference in air cured or flue cured is the length of time it takes to remove the moisture of green tobacco.

But to make a cigar, the leaves will have to be at a certain point of moisture so it doesn't crumble away on you. ( And I don't know what that is )

It was referred to as being "in case" here in the mountains. You couldn't strip the leaves off the dried stalks that had been hanging in the barn for a couple months until the humidity hit the right point.

After a set of rainy, foggy fall days usually late November, early December, the dry leaves would re-absorb enough moisture to be declared "in case", and the stalks got handed back down of the barn tiers ( little skinny, horizontal poles that only little skinny guys dared climb up 3-5 layers high :D ), and the leaf stripping party would commence. Leaves got graded into "tips", and "cutters" (mid-lower leaf), twisted into "hands" and put on baskets in the old days, and later on, packed into bales (like hay) in a plywood box baler with a bumper jack for compression, and loaded on the truck to go to market.

Much of that is bygone days now. You'll see the old white oak marketing 'baskets' ( a mostly flat tray looking deal about 3'x3' ) around some, but only the old timers know what they are.

http://www.inseason.com/graphics/961...basketback.jpg

Andy you calling me an old-timer :sob: Here we called it coming in order instead of case . Yep there was a certain way that tobacco had to be put on those baskets

Personally I think the very best way to process it would be to bury it in the ground and pee on it.

I and my family grew Burley tobacco (we called it 'backer') in the mountains of NC for decades. We used the same techniques that others have described here, but we had different names for some of the products and processes. When the leaves were too moist, we said it was "too high case",but when it was too dry, we simply said it was too dry, or we called it "chambly". Our grades for the leaves, starting at the bottom and working toward the top of the plant, were "ground leaves, smokers, bright red, dark red, and tips". We also had our lower quality grades which were "green" and "trash". If I remember correctly, there were about 111 government grades, with letters such as C, X, B, T, etc naming the stalk position, and numeric grades such as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 describing the quality, and letters such as L, F, K, R etc naming the color of the leaf. The numbers and letters were put together to name a grade such as C2L, X4F, T3D, etc. I may not be remembering all the details correctly, but at one time an FFA team of which I was a member was the NC state champion tobacco judging team, so we had to learn and understand all of the nomenclature for all of the 100+ grades. We would cut and put the 'backer' in the barn during August-October, and it would be usually cured by October-November. We always tried to have all of the backer 'graded', 'handed', and 'packed' by Thanksgiving, but quite often it would be mid-December by the time we were finished. The markets were usually open through sometime in January.

If it was too dry to tie in hands, first they used a wore out broomsedge broom...flick a little water among the tobacco on the grading sticks, then when hand sprays come along....mist a little.....now in the bulk barns, starting with sheets and then to bales....they turn on the fans when it's raing or throw a water hose under the racks and turn it on.
We used baskets down on the coast also, still got some in a barn, up in the rafters. Nearly all our sticks went to Tennessee in 1991.....four cent a stick.
We cropped our leaves of the stalk as they ripened, just as they were going from green towards yellowing....if you were real lucky you'd end up with a barn that'd cure out frog-eyed....buyers loved that speckled looking baccer for some reason.

I'd make sure I hung my baccer in the shade. Then, you need to strip it off the stems, lay it on a clean sheet, mix up some syrup....some folks would mix in a liquor like a little whiskey, for flavor, then you need a gum, or a clean nail keg. Some folks would sprinkle the syrup on it, stir it on the sheet, let it dry a little, twist it andthen twist it around on itself and bign to layer it in the keg...some would sprinkle their syrup miture between layers.....when you fill your keg you gotta press it...My uncle had a bracket under a barn shed that a pole fit in that pivoted on a bolt, the pole was 8 or 10 long, it had a little leg a couple feet from the bracket, than went on top of a lid that fit in the keg....you put weights on the end of the pole, it's supposed to do more pressing with less weight....keep adding weight till you can't see the leg drop any,let it set a month or two...you'd have to pry it out the keg, he'd put his in mason jars before summer and keep it a dark place..keep for years

I forgot to tell you, if you take a twist out and let it dry good, you can take your sharp Case or Old Timer and shave it into some pretty fair pipe tobaccer!

In the mid 50s we had an elderly neighbor that grew a small patch and made his own chew. If I remember correctly when the harvested tobacco reached the ripeness and moisture he wanted he coarsely shredded it, augered 1X4 inch holes in a good sized live sugar maple limb and pounded the hole full of the shredded leaf as tightly as he could.

After it had been in there long enough he cut off the limb, cut it into chunks and split out the plugs. This is approximately how he did it, been too long for me to remember all of the details exactly. Never heard of anything like it, before or since. And I for darn sure never tried it.

One of my uncles told of a man that done twisted tobacco sorta like that. He bored similar sized toles in blocks of green sweetgum, packed the baccer in with a tamper, and then sealed it with a dry peg. My uncle said that the wood would dry and shrink and "press" the baccer and then the old feller would split it out as he wanted it.

You are the only other person, other than my uncle that I've known to tell about fixin baccer like this.

Heard it was always a good idea to wear gloves when harvesting them because apparently you can get nicotine poisoning from handling the leaves barehanded.

Some folks do get sick, especially when suckering and topping. I got a cousin that did, and she can't go in my uncles grapevines, she breaks out in a rash, has repiratory reaction.

Yep, yep, yep, nope. We didn't ever fire tobacco. It had to dry naturally and then come back in case for stripping. The entire stalk was cut and speared onto the stick for hanging in the barn. When it came in case we took down the sticks of tobacco and moved it all to the stripping parlor. We graded and tied hands for "ties" "colors" and "tips". We didn't get real caught up in dividing out the hands anymore than that.

The only time our tobacco touched a nice basket was at the tobacco warehouse. We removed the tied hands from the sticks, keeping the 3 grades separated and placed the hands in the baskets provided by the warehouse.The tobacco buyers never seemed to have a problem with our simple grading. We took our sticks home to use the next crop. The tobacco seeding bed was burned in the late winter and we did this as a "last" thing to the process. The bed could finish wintering out and would be ready for planting early spring.

Sorry about my double post up above. I'd edit it but don't have an edit button.

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

Folks still raise a few million pounds here in Hart county-- A lot of it is small crops yet--but dissapearing fast--

This has been very interesting. I guess I just never knew the process tobacco went through before it got to the consumer.