Have 3 chavetas, about 7 cigar molds (from 44 ring gauge panatelas through 54 ring gauge Torpedos), a couple different types of pectin (for binder/wrapper glue), hardwood rolling board, a tuck cutter ("la machina"), a couple of antique tobacco shredders for making pipe tobacco out of trimmings, and several giant ziploc bags full of my home grown/dried/fermented Havana leaf (2 varieties) plus 3 other cigar-associated strains (Monte Calme Yellow, Madole, Hungarian Szamosi) leaf. All of which now needs to age for oh, about 2 or 3 years before it will be any good.
I rolled/pressed/wrapped a couple a few months back just to try the hardware out and put all the you-tube videos on rolling/wrapping I've watched to the test. Produced a couple of decent looking cigars, all things considered. Actually weren't horrible at all to smoke, but I wouldn't call them "smooth." To be expected, with no curing whatsoever.
General impressions: tobacco is easy enough to grow, though the trickiest part is when they're in the seedling stage. The seeds are so small they're like bean sprouts at first. VERY sensitive to drying out as well as overwatering/drowning. Good thing the seeds are cheap and you get like 200 per $2.25 pack! But once they get a few inches tall, and you put them in a big black plastic nursery pot filled with Miracle-Gro, and you water the heck out of them, fertilize, & keep them in full sun in the summer, MAN do they grow like crazy & get BIG!
Picking is easy enough, stringing the leaves up on wires is easy enough, but from there on in the constantly lurking nemesis is MOLD, MOLD, MOLD. During the couple of weeks the leaves are about halfway brown to when fully brown, if it rains for more two days or more and the humidity is real high, MOLD will start to form and form fast, and if you have all your leaf hanging in a barn then close all the doors, but if you're hanging them in the patio like me, you have to grab everything and stick it all in the garage (door shut) until the high humidity passes.
After it's all fully brown/dried & tied into hands & you've avoided the mold nemesis to that point, when you're mimicking the pilones-stack-fermentation process by putting the hands in a heated fermentation chamber (big plastic storage container wrapped with R-13 insulation with a lightbulb inside, you have to watch the humidity there too, as too moist = MOLD and rot. Too dry and the leaves will get so brittle they'll break and crumble when you try to move them for any reason, thereby ruining the leaf from a "long leaf filler" perspective. Very tricky to maintain the ideal humidity in the couple of weeks in the fermentation chamber! DAILY inspection required.
Will also add that I did not grow anything in shade, so I will not have any real thin, fine-veined wrapper leaf. (Wrapper is shade-grown, under giant white tent-like structures, which results in thin leaves with fine veins.)
But like I said, I do have a decent bit of good looking, non moldy leaf that now needs to cure for at least a year or two, ONLY THEN will it have half a chance of actually being of decent cigar quality. (None of the tabacaleras "skip" the years-long curing process; if it wasn't necessary for producing good leaf, they wouldn't do it.)
From March to September of last year, I believe I was tending/watering/doing something to those plants or leaves EVERY DAY.
But it was a lot of fun in its own way. I think it will be pretty neat if I can actually end up some day with some passable looking, passable tasting cigars that I made completely by myself from seed.
Then again, looking back on it all, I might have saved a lot of time & money by just buying a couple of boxes of good cigars. I'm not sure yet if I'll be doing it all again in 2010. Maybe just a LITTLE . . . just a FEW plants!
