The disaster may not be serious enough to put you through the five stages of grief. However, it’s still natural to experience a period of mourning – when you discover that your treasured weed stash is so dry that you’re sure you see a tiny tumbleweed or two rolling through it.
Hold off on the grieving, though, at least until you try to rehydrate your bud.
It’s not that difficult, and it usually works. Here are several different techniques to try.
Before Starting – Prevent Dry Cannabis
Do you keep your pot in an airtight glass jar? If not, you definitely should; that’s probably why it dried out in the first place. A zip-loc bag isn’t good enough; in fact, it can cause your stash to dry out even faster than usual.
Assuming you don’t have that airtight jar, get one (and be sure it’s completely clean) before continuing. You won’t just be using it to hold your weed once it’s been reborn, you’ll be using it for the rehydration process. In effect, you’ll be making a humidor, the same device used to keep fine cigars moist and fresh. It just won’t be made of expensive wood or be suitable for display in a millionaire’s study.
Using Your Humidor to Rehydrate Weed
Each of these techniques involves putting your bud into the glass jar, along with something else that contains moisture which can be absorbed by the pot.
Iceberg Lettuce
This is one of the best choices for rehydration, because this type of lettuce is about 95% water and it won’t affect the taste of your weed. Peel off one palm-sized lettuce leaf from the head and place it into the jar. Leave it there for two hours or so before taking it out, and your weed should be rehydrated. If not, mix the buds around a little and repeat the procedure once or twice more, each time with a different leaf.
Damp Paper Towel or White Bread
The paper towel method is similar to the lettuce one. Moisten (but don’t soak) a sheet of paper towel and put it into the jar with your pot for an hour or two, and repeat with a different moist towel if necessary. A third alternative is to moisten (again, don’t soak) a slice of white bread to be put into the glass jar. These are each preferable to the techniques that follow, simply because they don’t any “foreign” flavor to the weed.
Fruit
The suggestion you’ll hear most often is to put a piece of orange peel (just a slice of the outer layer, not the entire peel) into the jar and let it rehydrate your stash for a few hours, replacing it with a new slice if necessary. Some people prefer using lemon peel, lime peel or banana peel instead. This will work just as well as the methods we’ve already discussed, but may also transfer some of the fruit’s flavor to your pot. There are people who use fresh herbs like thyme or mint instead of fruit, but those will affect the flavor even more.
A better choice is apple peel (or even a small piece of the fruit) because less of the apple’s essence will be picked up by the bud. As a bonus, apple’s water content evaporates more slowly, leading to even rehydration.
Fresh Flower
Freshly-cut bud is quite damp, and a small amount is often enough to rehydrate the rest of your dried-out stash when putting into the sealed glass jar. Just be sure to remove the fresh herb when its job is done.
For each of these techniques, it’s crucial not to leave the moistening agent in the jar too long, and not to take it out and use it a second time after re-moistening it. If you do, mold could begin to form on your buds – and that’s a much more serious problem. For the same reason, be sure to take the weed out of the jar, and clean and dry the jar completely, before using it for storage.
Seriously dry weed may require repeating the procedure for as many as 24 hours before rehydration is complete, so be patient.
The Risky Approach
This method works quickly, but you have to be really, really careful to pull it off.
Boil a pot of water, then take it off the heat and cover it with a clean cloth, making sure the cloth is tightly attached to the rim. Then put the dry weed on top of the cloth; steam penetrating the cloth should rehydrate your plant in an hour or less, depending on much you have.
The key is to stay close to the process the entire time, so you can rotate the buds regularly to keep them evenly moistened and remove them as soon as they’ve been sufficiently rehydrated. Otherwise, you’ll end up either with roasted pot, or weed that’s too soggy to use.