HARVEST TIME APPROACHETH

So after much scientific examination, I have determined that the time has come to harvest one of my baby girls.

After over nine weeks in flowering at 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness, adding nutrients for a few weeks of flowering and also adding molasses to the waster, I noticed that one of the plants had stopped bud growth.

At week 9, after a thorough watering with molasses water, I noticed that both plants growing more fan leaves around the bud sites, not sure why, but this also led me to harvest.

You can see that the bud growth is very mature

Week 8 bulletin board post

Check out my grow journal message board post at Rollitup.org.

I've been adding molasses to the water I use, supposedly this allows the buds to fill out!

We are within range of harvest, I'm just getting to the end of week 8, so the nugs are bursting with trichomes:

I need to hook up a better magnifying glass to inspect the trichomes, I'm pretty sure they are getting cloudy by now!

Also I have trimmed the bottoms of both plants and I've hung the little scraggly buds up for a tasting this weekend, this of course will be the topic of an extensive post this weekend.

Check back tomorrow for more pictures of the girls!

Small buds? Ask Ed

I have two plants that are on the verge of being harvested
and sadly, they are a bit spread out -- I am attributing this to the fact that I have used low-power CFL's for the entire grow, but I wanted to know for sure if this was the reason for a small yield. One thing I have read about is removing the smaller bottom buds in order to focus on the top buds, but Ed Rosenthal in Cannibis Culture explodes this myth.

courtesy of Cannabis Culture.com:

Will pruning during flowering increase bud size?

I have a White Widow plant growing indoors that is going into its final stages of flowering ? it should ripen in about two weeks. However, I think I made the mistake of allowing the plant to keep too many branches during the flowering process, and this one 16-inch plant has well over 50 flowering heads. As a result of this, the main tall branches have not budded out as fully as I would have hoped for, while the majority of the buds are small and relatively insignificant.

However, the plant looks very healthy, and is covered in crystals! What can I do to increase the yield at this late stage? The cycle is set at 11 hours of light (down from 12) and some of the hairs are just beginning to turn brown. If I cut some of the smaller buds off, will it help the larger ones grow?

Alex,
London, England

Ed writes:
It's too late to do anything to increase the size of the individual buds. The plant has already expended most of the resources it will use for flowering. Now it is filling out the infrastructure it has already built. Removing some buds now will not make much difference to the remaining ones because the plant does not have much more energy to spend on them. If you removed them now, you would be losing all the resources the plant has already allocated to them.

The buds may not be as cosmetically alluring as larger tighter ones, but you can see from the crystals that they will be potent when used.

On future crops you could manicure the plant a couple of weeks before flowering, two or three weeks after changing the light cycle.

This brings us to the obvious topic of pruning, which we will investigate tomorrow!

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