Before the tobacco is ready for harvesting, Hudson suggests the preparation of “a supply of sticks for hanging. Sticks 4 feet long and 1 inch square are most convenient; 12 sticks to every 100 plants will be sufficient. For sun-curing, there should be a shed built at one or more convenient points of the patch. This may be done by placing posts in the ground to support the poles, as represented in Fig. 8. The poles _a_ being for the support of the smaller poles _c_, upon which the tobacco-sticks are placed, and _b_ for the cover, when necessary that it should be shedded.”
Mitjen’s translator gives the following account of the Cuban practice. “Tobacco should be cut during the wane of the moon; and although most _vegueros_ say that it is impossible to do this, because the leaves commence to ripen both during the new and the full moon, and would be over-ripe before its wane, we can, nevertheless, assert that we know persons who never cut their tobacco during the first quarter, or when rain has made it again green. These persons have never experienced any difficulty; rather, on the contrary, they are those who always obtain the best prices and the greatest money results. Cutting tobacco during the first quarter of the moon, or when vegetation is renewed in the leaf, is one of the principal reasons why the leaf becomes pricked with holes, and this very frequently even before it is taken from the plantation to the market. The system generally observed is, in cutting tobacco, to take off, at once, all those parts of the plants which may be really or apparently ripe, and to load up the poles indiscriminately, without any division between the pairs of leaves (_mancuernas_). This system is highly prejudicial. The leaves of the same plant are not all of the same quality, neither do they all at the same time acquire the same degree of ripeness. Those of the crown, or the pairs at the top of the plant, immediately next the flower or seed, receive the sun direct on their upper surface, and are the first to ripen, whereas the lower ones, being shaded by the upper ones, remain still in an unripe state; moreover, the lower leaves at the foot of the plant, and even those of the fifth or fourth pairs (_mancuernas_), compared with those of the first, second, and third pairs, are inferior in quality, and, comparatively speaking, may be termed leaves without substance. The contact of these leaves with the upper ones frequently occasions putrid fermentation on the poles (_cujes_) and in the packs (this is vulgarly called _sahorno_), especially if there is much dampness in the atmosphere. When this misfortune happens in a tobacco curing-house all the weak leaves will be lost, and the strong ones will be so injured that the best quality of _capa_ would turn to _tripa_, and that of bad consistency.