weedstash
CategoriesCulture, Guides, List by

Top 10 Ultimate Weed Stash Hack

Maybe you have heard of a few or use these stash hacks yourself.

Maybe you have used similar stash hacks forever and didn’t realize others hadn’t. Whatever the case may be, here are the 10 best tricks in no specific order.

You need just the right amount of water.

Keeping weed at the optimal hydration level (about 55-65% relative humidity) can feel downright impossible. If left exposed to the open air, valuable terpenes are lost and flower will burn fast and hot. Overly dried flower also has the bad habit of crumbling into dust. Get it too wet and it won’t even smoke or worse yet, it could start to mold!
Once a stash has succumbed to things like molds, mildew, fungi or other pathogens, it is a complete loss. Don’t even be tempted to smoke the ones you “can’t see anything wrong with” if there is any evidence of corruption. The risks are simply too great to roll that dice. Drying out is an altogether different problem though.
Once a weed is dried out, it becomes harsh and burns up significantly faster. Nobody wants to smoke old, crumbly weed. We want sticky nugs that snap apart but slightly hold their shape when shoved in a bowl. Yet cannabis can be re-hydrated and return to being sticky. Many a stash has been saved by trying one of these following hacks. I have used all of them to keep my own stash in peak condition but each has its own time and place.

Citrus Boost!Lemon Skunk stash

Method: Take a small bit of citrus peel and stick it in with the weed. Must use real peels, extract doesn’t do the same.

Benefits: This hack infuses the citrus terpenes (like Limonene) into the cannabis. Since the peel has a high water content way higher than cannabis where cannabis should be at, it will rehydrate a dried out stash.

Drawbacks: Lemon peels rot. When they do, it creates the perfect breeding grounds for molds, fungi and other harmful pathogens. It can also over saturate cannabis of too much is added to a stash. This has the side effect of making the weed difficult to light and produce little smoke.

Q-Tip Quality!

Method: Simply wet a Q-tip (any cotton swab will work) and drop it in with the stash. Keep an eye on when it dries out so you can  reuse or replace the swab.
Benefits: This method preserves the unadulterated taste of pure cannabis. It also provides a low cost alternative (although way less cool) to getting a humidifier. Because swabs come sterile, mold issues are kept to a minimum if replaced often.
Drawbacks: Cotton swabs are disposable for a reason. Reusing swabs leads to cross contamination and can also be a breeding ground for mold, fungi and other pathogens.

Cotton Balled!landrace 2

Method: Similar to the Q-Tip method except that a moist cotton ball is taped to the top of the container. Reuse or replace once it dries out.
Benefits: Taping the cotton ball to the top of the container keeps it from coming in contact with the stash. This prevents cotton fibers from getting caught in the bud and limits cross contamination. Cotton balls also come sterile so there is no risk of additional contaminants being introduced to the stash.
Drawbacks: Replacing tape over and over can get to be a chore so it is tempting to simply reuse the cotton ball for extended periods. Doing so exposes the user to the same dangers of mold, fungi and pathogens through cross contamination.

You also need the right kind of storage.

Regardless if the stash comes from a legal dispensary, a guys basement or Snoop Dogg himself, you need somewhere to store it. In the old days, Ziplock baggies were the standard. Today, people can obtain legal cannabis from dispensaries that use medicine bottles. While the medicine bottle is mandated by many states for sales, they still suck for keeping a stash. Here are a few suggestions for ways to store weed that is better than the old Ziplock or medicine bottle.

Mason Jar Madness!

Method: this glass container is sold in most stores across the world. This is a simple glass vessel with threading that allows a metal ring and lid at the top. It is air/watertight, reusable and cheap.
Benefits: They comes in several sizes, produce and airtight and watertight seal, and are easy to store or obtain almost anywhere. In addition to that, they are easy to clean, don’t rust or otherwise break down over time.
Drawbacks: Glass is fragile and has a tendency to break when exposed to extreme temperature changes.

Divided Stash Storage!

Method: Use two different sized containers to store your stash. The first is a small “daily” jar that keeps what you typically consume in a day. The second is “the vault” where you store your remaining cannabis. Load bowls from the daily jar and only open the vault when needed.
Benefits: This method reduces stash moisture loss from cycling the air in the jar. It helps budget or regulate the amount of product consumed in a day. This method also helps maintain stash security by not advertizing you have a pound of weed every time you load a bowl.
Drawbacks: Unnecessary if you get a jar that is too small or don’t buy more than a day or two worth of product at a time. It also adds one more step to the smoking ritual.

Freeze!

Method: Take any amount of cannabis you don’t plan to use immediately and put it in the freezer in a sealed container. Freezer bags are commonly used for this method. Freezing the weed prevents loss of hydration over extended periods.
Benefits: People have stored weed in freezers/fridges for years and still had a pleasant experience. Freezing cannabis makes trichomes brittle and easy to break off for ice wax and other concentrates.
Drawbacks: Just like meat, weed can get freezer burn if it is not sealed correctly. Cannabis can also be exposed to many bacteria and other pathogens from decaying food nearby (I’m looking at you Strawberries!) so keep a tight lid on it. Frozen trichomes also break off much easier than at room temperature.

Silicone Serenity!

Method: Instead of glass or plastic, use a silicone container. There is a wide variety available online, at dispensaries or at head shops built to suit your needs.
Benefits: Silicone wont shatter/rip/shred/cut/melt under normal use. It is even safe to touch with a warm dab tool when frozen (just not a red hot tool). Wax and other concentrates can’t stick like they do to glass or plastic. They also come in a wide variety of colors and shapes.
Drawbacks: Can be very expensive, especially when getting something airtight and cool looking.

We have all had times when there isn’t enough to go around.

Sometimes there is more month than money and we are faced with some hard choices. Do you share what you have and possibly spend days without THC or keep it for yourself? These tips can help you make that decision without alienating yourself or getting caught holding out. Just don’t get mad if someone else uses these tips too. It’s just a matter of making the most of what you got.

Twice Smoked Weed!

Method: This requires that you can suspend you weed in the pipe itself (best with screened metal pipe). You store a nug in the middle of the pipe so that every hit has to pass over the nug before making it into the users mouth.
Benefits: The stored nug gets coated with a layer of resin (poor man’s wax) and therefore gets additional THC added to it. It also makes it easy to carry around a second bowl for personal use if you are limited on how much you can share.
Drawbacks: Your delicious weed gets coated in resin. The terpene profile is destroyed and if left for several days, the nug gets dried out. Can make smoking the stored bud feel really harsh.

Double Cup It!

Method: Using two soft drink cups (one small, the other medium) you place the stash in the bottom of the larger cup. Put a lid on the smaller cup and then place it inside the larger cup. It now looks like you simply have a medium drink.
Benefits: This method is almost undetectable without physically removing the lid or getting help from a canine. Larger cups also hold progressively larger quantities for those long road trips to base camp. Works especially well for stealthily moving concentrates
Drawbacks: Limited on size to about an eighth to a quarter ounce of flower. Also doesn’t provide an odor barrier by itself so additional precautions are needed if that bad is stanky.

Grind it!

Method: If you want to make a little bit go further, you can grind it. This is especially helpful with dense, tightly packed nugs. You can use a small chunk of herb as a screen to cover the bowl hole which prevents the ground material from being sucked through.
Benefits: Increased surface area makes weed burn better and produce denser and more flavorful smoke. It also increases the overall volume which can turn a single small nug  into two small bowls.
Drawbacks: It can be easy to suck it though the bottom of the bowl so a screen of some kind is needed. Ground product burns faster than solid nugs and dries out faster. Grinding also releases many of the terpenes trapped within a nug so don’t grind more than you are going to smoke in one sitting.
I hope these tips were helpful. Be sure to share them with friends if you liked them. I would love to know what tricks you use to keep your stash safe and in top condition. Thanks for reading.

strains
CategoriesAnalysis/Opinion, Culture, Science, Strain Reviews by

Landrace Strains: Discover the Power

There has been a lot of talk about Landrace (LR) strains over the last few years. From Acapulco Gold to Malawi, people across the world claim to have landrace variants of many popular strains. These cultivators claim that their genetics are some of the oldest known to man. They take pride in the native, indigenous or heirloom nature of the cannabis strains under their care.
As humanities scientific understanding continues to grow, we have found that CBD may be better for treating pain and muscle spasms than THC. Without access to strains that had not been selectively bred, people would not have been able to create strains like Charlotte’s Web or LSD. Breeders needed to combine plants with new characteristics than what the market had available so they turned to the untapped potential of landrace strains.

What is a Landrace Strain?

Landrace Strain 1
A landrace strain never been crossed with a different phenotype and has grown in its natural environment for as long as people can tell. Like the Giant Tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, these plants have spent a long time in genetic isolation. Cultivators have taken the best of each generation and bred it with the next for many human lifetimes.
This isolation (and the resulting ) makes these varieties highly stable and extremely vigorous since only the best were kept. Over generations, people grew the plants that performed best for their environment. In the jungles of Durban South Africa, the plants needed to be able to grow above the trees so only tall plants grew well enough to survive.

Where Did Landrace Strains Come From?

Historical records (some dating as far back as 2900 B.C.) tell us cannabis has lived with humanity for thousands of years. Cultivated for food, fiber, and for religious and medicinal purposes, cannabis is one of the oldest known agricultural plants and has many uses.  According to the best available research, cannabis originally evolved in Central Asia and spread to nearly every region of the planet thanks to humans.
Outside of Asia, landrace strains are the result of escaped cultivars (strains that were selectively bred by humans) which gradually adapted to their environment over time. Over the centuries, other cultivars would have interbred with these feral escapees.  Due to the complex nature of the winds and plant/animal interactions, even the wild plants native to Central Asia are not believed to be untouched indigenous strains.

 Why Are Landrace Strains Important?


Not all cannabis is created equal in the eyes of growers. Plants that produce large colas full of cannabinoids like THC are traditionally prized over low yielding variants. Over generations, certain traits get bred out of or in to the genetic lines. People use this to make bigger and stronger plants than could be obtained otherwise.
This breeding method also has the effect of removing many of the less understood compounds. Since the same trichomes produce THC and CBD (and only one is psychoactive) growers selectively bred out the ability to produce CBD. That way all of the trichomes could focus on producing THC instead of some deciding to make CBD.

Where Are the Real Landrace Strains?


In today’s cannabis market people rarely see the pure landrace strains. On sites like Leafly and Cannafo, most of the sativas (the red tiled ones) are not pure sativas. Instead, they are sativa-dominant hybrids that exhibit strong sativa-like attributes. Same thing goes for indicas and hybrids. Landrace strains also exhibit these hybrid traits but to different degrees.
Landrace strains were embraced worldwide during the 1960s and 70s by growers who began collecting them in their own local gardens. Once the landrace strains were removed from their local growing environment, they became heirloom variants. For marketing reasons, most breeders don’t differentiate between landrace and heirloom.
These heirloom strains were then propagated in places like Hawaii and California. As the landrace movement grew, people who hunt for these hard to find strains became sought after. People like Arjan Roskam, founder of Amsterdam-based Greenhouse Seeds, and his colleague Franco Loja have spent millions obtaining these landrace varieties for use in their selective breeding.

What Landrace Strains Are There?

Here is a short list of some popular landrace strains:
Malawi Gold:
landrace 2Malawi Gold originated in Southeastern Africa. Grown on the shores of Lake Malawi (the third largest lake in Africa) the plant was adaptable to its local conditions. It’s genetic flexibility was perfect for the wildly changing environment which is why many phenotypes can be found in the market today. Aromas and flavors given off by the phenotypes of Malawi Gold help differentiate between the varieties. Two main phenotypes exist. One gives off a fruity smell while the other is a woody one. The fruity plants are normally smaller than the woody ones.
Afghan Kush Indica:
The plant is medium height with dark, broad leaves which makes it perfect for growing in the northern Afghani mountains. Its heavy, sweet aroma and taste mix with spices and incense to create a deep flavor. New smokers often find that this strain gives a very potent high that easily turns sedating. Perfect for people that are having trouble sleeping.
Hindu Kush Indica:
Cultivated in the Hindu Kush Mountain range for generations where it grows wild, the flowers of the fertile hillsides and valleys make the world’s finest hash. Years of selective breeding for resinous, indica-dominant plants with feral varieties have resulted in short, stocky bushes covered with huge, shiny trichomes. Known to relieve symptoms of pain, nausea, and stress while providing a pleasantly strong, earthy scent.
Lambs Bread Sativa:
Also called “Lamb’s Breath” Lamb’s Bread produces a bright green and sticky flower with a sativa dominant high. The effects have been known to help generate energy and positive introspection. Stress melts away under the warmth of the Lamb’s Bread buzz. This plant comes from Jamaica and it has been reported that Bob Marley himself enjoyed it.
There are literally tens of thousands of strains across the globe with a small percentage of them being landrace varieties. Because of the geographical nature of the landrace title, most strains retain the name of the area where they originated. Yet some places have made more of a name for themselves than others and it can be far easier to obtain their seeds or clones