Harvesting questions

[tryin2gethigh]

Hey hey so i'm a first timer and i wanted to know if you could continually harvest off of a couple plants (3-5)? Do I have to cut them down or can is there a way to just get the flowers and not harm the plant? I know its a little vague but hope yall can help! thanks!

 

[rnwy29erclr]

Hey hey so i'm a first timer and i wanted to know if you could continually harvest off of a couple plants (3-5)? Do I have to cut them down or can is there a way to just get the flowers and not harm the plant? I know its a little vague but hope yall can help! thanks!

sure you can do a perpetual harvest, i know somewhere on this forum there is a link that explains this method,

rnwy

 

[TorturedSoul]

Hey hey so i'm a first timer and i wanted to know if you could continually harvest off of a couple plants (3-5)? Do I have to cut them down or can is there a way to just get the flowers and not harm the plant? I know its a little vague but hope yall can help! thanks!

Some people put the lights back on a vegetative schedule and revegetate their plants, but most often only to get clones if they didn't already take cuttings. You could conceivably do that but continue to (re-)grow them in vegetative until they built back a canopy and then switch back to flowering and harvest again. But (for various reasons) such a practice is considered to be inefficient and not the best way to go.

Or are you asking if you can grow the plants, bud them, and continually pick buds off in much the same way that you can pick beans off of a pole bean plant for an extended window of time?

If that's what you're wondering... No. Not really. Although I've seen a few sativas that seemed to want to continually produce flowers (especially if one used a slightly longer lights-on time than the standard 12 hours), we do not pick individual flowers - we pick buds, which are clusters of many flowers (IOW, there are no "bud fruits" - although there are certainly fruity buds). It's like if instead of picking a tomato or two off of a tomato plant in your garden for dinner, you picked entire clusters of fruit at a time. Having picked a cluster of tomatoes (think of the entire cluster as one bud), the fact that you notice that a couple of them could have stood a few more days on the vine doesn't help you.

Now I have seen plants where most of the buds were fully-mature (come to think of it, the pistils are withered when we harvest, so would they technically be "over-ripe?" But it's the trichomes on the buds that we're actually concerned with. Anyway...) but some portion of them weren't quite ready. In that case many people will cut the bulk of the plant and then cut the rest of it a few days (whatever) later. But that's about as close to "continually harvesting off of a couple plants" as you're likely to see.

Now a continual - perpetual - harvest is something else. That means keeping your flowering room going, having a separate veg/clone area, and placing more plants into the flowering room on a regular schedule - every week, two weeks, three weeks, or whatever the grower wishes. Say you're growing a strain that flowers in nine weeks. You place three plants in the flowering room. In three weeks, you place three more plants. In three more weeks you place three more plants. In three more weeks, you place three more plants - and harvest the first three that you placed into flowering. Three weeks after that, you again place three more plants - and harvest the second set of three that you placed. Another three weeks and... Well, you get the picture. The flowering room is kept full but every three weeks there is a harvest as plants are ready.

Alternatively, a grower might place plants of different strains that have different flowering times into the flowering room and harvest each strain as it becomes ready (replacing them with more of the same - or even a different - strain). But for a new grower wishing to try perpetual harvesting, sticking with one strain in order to learn both the general aspects of growing (and his/her chosen nutrients, etc.) and the behavior of that strain.

Since you're a new grower, I trust that I will not offend by asking if you've read this site's mega-FAQ? It's actually a comprehensive collection of FAQs/articles/threads. The site is full of information, but that mega-FAQ (and the forum that it is in) is an excellent place to start. It will likely cover most of the questions that are going through your head now and will also provide you with knowledge you need to ask even more questions (lol). Here is a link to it:
How to Grow Marijuana Everything You Need to Know

It's in the How to Grow Marijuana forum. Another useful forum is the Frequently Asked Questions one. The names point to lots of beginners' information - and they do have that; but there is plenty of information in both of those forums that can be of use to people that have been growing for a while, too. We try not to classify things by skill-level around here. If you're in over your head it doesn't really matter if it's an "expert area" or a "beginner's area" and if you're grasping the concepts you don't need to be placed in an "advanced area" - although you will be participating in threads that cover more advanced topics and asking more difficult questions. But hopefully, you'll still visit the more basic threads - to answer and help teach.

Have fun and good luck on your first grow!

 

[tryin2gethigh]

wow. Thank you so much! That's what i needed to hear! Great info. Thanks again!

 

[w4nn13]

Yea TorturedSoul is defo the man, I had no bud to smoke on my first grow a AK47 said 7-8 weeks flowering was still going strong by week 11, so between the 7th and 11th week I cut some bud of it every 4-5 days just the bud that was not looking the best or was blocking to close to the light, that was my continual - perpetual - harvest for around 5 weeks that lasted till I cut her down as 10 weeks was enough really and I had some more ladies ready to go in grow tent, so there you go that about best you can do really but if I had the smoke in first place I would have still done the above but only waited a longer to time to dry it out before I smoke as I was quick drying it in around 12 hrs buy stirring it in a cereal bowel on top of toaster then sticking it on top of my pc fan for a good few hrs. not great but when you have nothing to smoke it hits the spot.