Making own Cigars

The best advice would be to move away from Needles, aka Death Valley's Door.

Lacking that, in Needles' dusty wasteland you will be dealing with some dreadfully dry conditions. So dig round the garage for a 40 or so quart ice chest with a fairly tight fitting lid. Take an old sock & fill it with unscented kitty litter. Soak the sock in the sink. Throw that in your cooler. There's your leaf storage. If you have one of those evaporative coolers, instead of a refrigerant air conditioner, do your work near that. Think tropical. 

Get a starter kit from WholeLeafTobacco.com, advertised there as "cigar blends", for under thirty bucks. The heat sealed vapor proof plastic bags Don uses are head and shoulders  better than anything the other leaf merchants dream of. As soon as you pull a leaf out to throw in a cigar, fold over the end of the bag to keep moisture in. Carefully observe how damp the leaves are when they first arrive. That's how you want them when you work. Filler just dry enough to make a bit of a crunchy sound as you bunch them. Binder damp enough to wrap tight round the filler. Wrapper damp enough to lay flat round the bound bunch, and then to shrink tight once it's bound.

Now set to work. Your starter kit will include filler, binder, and wrapper, all in a proven blend. It also includes enough cigar glue for the batch. The incredible teensiest amount of glue powder makes a magical amount. All you will need is a pizza cutter or an ulu, a cutting board, and a spritzing water bottle.  WLT's web site claims you can make 20-50 7" cigars from one batch. Don't fool yourself into making 7" cigars. Aim for 48 ring x 5". Think hand sized. These are much easier to make than mandingos, and you will get that much more practice out of your batch of leaves. Buy yourself a corona and let that be your model. Hold it in your hand a lot, to get a feel for the bulk and shape you are aiming at.

There are a million how to vids online. Unfortunately, nearly all of them show a skilled torcedor rolling with incredible rapidity; and most of them only show the wrapping process; while exactly not a one of them show leaf prep. Bunching is twice as elusive as wrapping. If learning to make a good cigar requires ten units of learning, I'd say that blending takes five, leaf prep one, bunching takes two, and wrapping just one. That's nine. The tenth unit is of course unobtainable. Bliss Cigar has some instructive bunching vids set to music at

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKQPvIbslAFFDYDGi-EivRQ

Best rolling discussion is presently here:

http://www.botl.org/forums/cigar-rolling-tobacco-growing.247/

Best leaf prep tip I can give you is think ahead. Unfold your wrapper, remove the stem, spritz it, bag it, put it away. Next day, stretch it out, spritz, bag, and stash. Next day, stretch again, flat as can be... and go. Half that for binder. 

Good news about Needles is, once you roll a stick & set it on the windowsill, it will dry out in a couple hours. Here, it's been raining night and day for a week. If it doesn't rain four days straight in Summer, that's called a drought. Damn hard to dry a stick in these conditions.

Enjoy.