The legal limit here is 4 plants; with some help I can usually get thru the trim in a few hours. Makes for a great social gathering too…
I prefer to trim when wet, and I pull individual branches off the plants from the bottom up leaving as much of the skeleton in tact as possible. I also buck the individual buds off the branches and trim things down to roughly to size of my thumb. I lost a big chunk of a harvest many years ago, so I’m fixated/obsessed on airflow and space around the buds as they dry in the Cannatrol.
once they are done in the Cannatrol, I give them a final trim if necessary but I usually don’t need to do that. I store them in a CVault after the cabinet has done its magic, burp pretty frequently, and occasionally pull all the weed outta the CVault and refill it just to inspect the weed, and make sure there ain’t no fucking mold or powdery mildew at the bottom.
here is the trimmed weed from above, evenly spread out on the Cannatrol trays. After the 4 day dry cycle, I turn all the big buds over to avoid flat spots.