what is your reason for hanging stems to dry and then trim?
Hi Tony, I used to spend ages taking a branch off, then removing all fan leaves. Then I'd take the time to clip away all the sweetleaf - collect that and freeze it for canna-coconut oil, and then once manicured, I'd cut off each and every bud, grade them and brown paper bag them so I could hang them on the sock hangers. All with wet bud... all stems and leaves removed.
Long winded and really took ages especially with the bigger plants..... and I've had a few of those!
On the face of it, it does seem easier removing all the leaves immediately as they stand out, but if you cut say 5-6 stems off and work through those, the leaves start getting limp and more difficult to trim off... lots of tangles.
I would also get worried about degradation of terpenes while piles of wet bud were sitting around for days, and of course, there's the threat of the dreaded mould setting in...... I'd harvest late at night, so after a long manicuring session, the last thing I wanted to do was grade them and bag them up to hang....
Now initially for time reasons, I cut a branch off, chop the stems off, and just remove the fans. I'd do a rough clip of any small leaves, but then just hang them. I can get a plant down in less than half the time.
I was fortunate with the White Widow and the Blue Amnesia, they went that long that most of the larger leaves had dried and I had plucked them out. The Glueberry was a lot more leafy, and the Night Queen, leafier still. They all took about 3 leisurely nights each to harvest, and they were all vastly different in size and yield.
Leaving a fair amount of crystal laden sweetleaf on them allows the buds to dry more slowly as the leaves dry and wrap around the bud a bit.
Leaving the buds on the stem, again slows down the drying process. The slower the better in terms of final smoothness/harshness.
Once dry I'll clip the buds off the stem, do any final manicuring and jar up. The manicuring is much easier on dry leaves compared to wet.... the clippers don't keep getting jammed up with resin as often!
I think too much fiddling removes a lot of the trichomes.... which is why I don't brown paper bag them anymore - just cuts out one big handling step.
Same for anal manicuring.... (I meant
over-zealous manicuring...... not..... ahem.....) it's great getting loads of sticky balls of scissor hash, but I'd rather all that goo stayed on the bud really.
It makes me cringe when you see those trimming machines in action, they're hammering all those valuable trichomes off..... no wonder dealer weed is so shit compared to the home grown stuff!
with 18 oz could do a lil run of each 
top smoke repot 
