Harvest Window

[Timmeeeh]

Thanks for taking your time to try to help me. That's awesome.

💪🏼

I'm growing photoperiod Power Plant in a substrate that I would like to call living soil, although I haven't yet seemed to have gotten it 100% dialed in. My ladies are in the middle of their 9th week. They're running a tad bit late, but it clearly won't be much longer. The colas have been fattening up quite nicely over the last 5-7 days.

I have a few geneal question about the harvest window. I'm well aware that the "tell-all" is trichome color, we're not there yet. Still about 40/60 clear/milky.

Q1) Conventional wisdom (also documented throughout the GWE website), suggests that the pistils should be darkened and curling inward at harvest. Mine are probably 90% orangish-brownish, but mostly standing straight. Does this seem odd? Should I expect this to change, or may it just be a trait of this phenotype?

Q2) Since in theory, living soil should never be depleted of nutrients, should I expect to the same type of senescence that I would see when flushing a soil grow before harvest? In other words, will the ladies canabalize their leaves if the living soil is still providing the roots with all of their nutrient requirements?

Q3) Generally speaking, how long is the typical cola fattening phase? Would they theoretically continue to fatten even once the trichomes are well past their optimum, amber(est) harvest window? I have no intention of going that far, I'm just curious if anyone has experience in this matter. Is there a good rule-of-thumb pertaining to the length of the cola fattening process?

Thanks for your time, growmies. I absolutely love this forum.

[Bluey]

Hey Timmeeh

Buds all mature a little bit differently. Not unusual re the pistols. They will likely curl very soon, but it varies on how much will curl.

Living soil can easily be depleted of nutes from over and under watering, too small a pot, temps out of range etc.. I dont flush grows before harvest although I have tried it and all it seems to do is save a few nutes. That process is not naturally occurring in nature either. Some plants will scavenge N from the lower leaves regardless, some won't. It won't make a difference to the buds though.

Buds will stop growing and focus on reproducing. We typically harvest them late in this stage. Too late and the trichomes will start to break down and the flower at this point is dying. The whole plant is dying, typically, at this very late point. The later you aim for the more chances of seed from hermie. Most will hermie at late stage to varying degrees but some sativas wont. Most growers aim for an all cloudy to all amber and somewhere in between. Some strains an early harvest with clear and cloudy is desirable. I mix it up a bit simply by staggering the harvest.

Typically I harvest to suit my available time to trim, dry and burp jars.