No matter what you’re growing, you’ll soon learn that harvesting the crops is only half the battle.

To maintain great-tasting and usable crops, particularly in dispensaries, proper drying and plant care are an important step even after the initial plants have been harvested and trimmed. And these processes can be a little more involved than you may expect.

Proper and safe plant drying requires a decent amount of space, and the right dispensary shelving, to make sure everything has the room it needs to grow, dry, and bloom before it gets sent out to your customers.

If you’re thinking about increasing the drying space in your dispensary, or if you don’t even have a dispensary yet but want to learn more about what goes into it, here’s a few of our favorite tips for setting up a drying room in a dispensary:

Leave room for branch hanging

The generally-accepted best practice for drying plants is to hang them upside-down. This lets all the water collected through the roots to flow upwards and drain from the plant itself. Line your plants upside down, or at least on their side, on a hanger or on a net by using a basket arm to suspend your net or hanging shelf, and let the water drain upwards (or downwards?) out of the plants to ensure more consistent drying.

Always trim off extra leaves

A fully-flowered plant might look appealing, but it’ll be much harder to dry and get into a sellable state if you leave them too bushy and untrimmed. If you have the space for a trim table inside your drying room, keep one nearby so you can make extra trims and reductions as needed. Otherwise, set one up in your main harvesting area and make sure everyone knows to trim the plants as efficiently as possible.

Keep your racks as flat as possible

When setting up drying racks, you’ll need to keep everything level to help draw water away from the plants without making a mess elsewhere on the floor. Set up a drying rack frame with the appropriate shelf or netting types to prevent mold from growing on your plants while they dry under the heat.

Dry buds and branches separate

If you’re pressed for space, or if you’re concerned about aesthetics when the plant is dry and ready to go, you could save space on your drying shelves by trimming the buds off the branches and letting them dry on their own. It will help make the product more sellable by removing stems from the equation, and can help you maximize the available space in your drying room.

Don’t waste space on unnecessary steps

Whether due to tradition or a simple misunderstanding of the process, a lot of people make a secondary step to ‘cure’ their plants after the drying process. Curing your plants doesn’t help as much as you might be led to believe, and worse yet it takes up a lot of space that you might not be able to spare in your already-cramped drying rooms. Get some plastic storage bins with locking lids and use those to hang onto your dried plants until they can get packaged and ready to go.