What’s needed to finish these girls?

[Makeminefullgrown]

I’m really hoping I didn’t make a fatal error….but I’ve got a bad feeling.
My 1st indoor grow…jumping back into the scene after a 25.yr hiatus. Way back then I grew outdoors for 8-9 seasons and was much luckier than I can explain.
Anyway my facts: 3 Super Skunk autos grown in 100% Ocean Forest, under the new HLG 320xl LED. Made some mistakes early and kinda got things dialed in. Fed Fox farms bottled nutes at reduced rates once flowering began.
They are now on day 97 since sprouting….that’s getting ready to be 14 full weeks. About 3/4 weeks ago the buds just slowed way down. They have shown very minimal progression over that time.
2 of the 3 appear a bit closer to ripe but have had that “one more week” look for the past 3 weeks.
The third plant has had long stringy white hairs for weeks….a few may turn orange over a weeks time but it’s just not moving at a typical pace.
I’ve titrated the nutrients way down anticipating them finishing out.
I don’t flush plants at the end, so I don’t have to build that step into my timeline.
**Here’s where I may have screwed up royally…..about a week ago I defoliated and before I knew it I had whacked almost every fan leaf. Since then all the other leaves are dying and yellowing at a rapid pace. I’m very upset with myself and should have known better.
My gut tells me I’ve had some sort of lockout for last month, and I should have flushed a month ago, let ‘em dry and continue to feed. But I didn’t….
I would really appreciate if someone could look at my pics and tell me what the heck the best move is right now.
I watered yesterday and only gave water. Also as of this morn about 75% of the trichs are cloudy and I may have found a handful of ambers on all 3 plants combined. I don’t harvest a plant unless it’s ripe….which generally means no white pistils…..don’t care what the trichs look like until the plant is finished. That’s just me and my preferences.
Thanks in advance to helping a fellow grower.
There are 3 pics and each is a different plant.

 

[Phytoplankton]

Overall they look real good! Sounds like your pretty close to harvest, so there won’t be much if any damage.

You’ve got a bit of a head scratcher, I’d say she’s hungry or locked out, except I see burnt leave tips, which is normally a sign of excess nutes (or sometimes too much water). Defoliating that late in flower probably wasn’t a good idea. Its been found the flushing, (except to cure lockout and reset the soil) doesn’t accomplish anything , other than depriving the plant of nutes when it need them. I would try feeding them again. PH your water to about 6.2. (after nutes and cal-mag). I hope we’ll get some other insight.

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

In a couple days they should be dried out enough for another watering and I was def gonna give ‘em some kind of nute. Lately I’ve only fed Buddha Buds, which is an organic bloom fert but has a smidge of N. I’m wondering if I should go the synthetic route since these plants are living on the edge….I’d kinda like for whatever to be available immediately. I could give ‘em about 1/4 dose of Tiger Bloom.
Shoot I dunno….all I need is for most of those white hairs to recede and darken up….that can happen pretty quick if things are flowing the way they’re supposed to. But I’ve been staring a hole in that one plant for last 3 weeks and it has done almost nothing….I just don’t wanna chop it looking like it does.
Maybe someone with a jumbo size brain will share some wisdom and right this ship…

 

[Phytoplankton]

I like your plan, give em some synth nutes and they should respond quickly.

 

[BakedARea]

They look so close. Good luck to the finish line and welcome to !!!

 

[013]

part that stick out in my noggin was very slow progress after the defol, any rapid yellowing and dying out of the sugars.

the loss of the fans was a 1, 2 sucker punch since they store up nutes very close to the flowering action (easier to pull stored nutes from fans as opposed to making them via roots) plus the loss of other fan leaf functions such as transpiration but more importantly photosynthesis.

make no mistake - it is the fan leaves that build flowers. I used to hate to see ragged leaves on my flowering chicks but the plant doesn’t mind…. every leaf is beneficial and if she grows tired of any leaf on the plant whether beautiful or ragged then she can / will make the cut by yellowing it out.

since the fans & stored nutes were lost to defol she pulled nutes from the sugar leaves and caused them to yellow out.

hit her with bloom nutes right up to the end, maybe bump light hours down again… shorter days = winter is coming so hurry the efff up. agree skip the flush you can’t wash nutes out of your buds anywsy - a plant takes up what a plant takes up and flushing the soil can’t / doesn’t pull nutes out of your buds

chin up dude, she still looks great & lessons were learned

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

part that stick out in my noggin was very slow progress after the defol, any rapid yellowing and dying out of the sugars.

the loss of the fans was a 1, 2 sucker punch since they store up nutes very close to the flowering action (easier to pull stored nutes from fans as opposed to making them via roots) plus the loss of other fan leaf functions such as transpiration but more importantly photosynthesis.

make no mistake - it is the fan leaves that build flowers. I used to hate to see ragged leaves on my flowering chicks but the plant doesn’t mind…. every leaf is beneficial and if she grows tired of any leaf on the plant whether beautiful or ragged then she can / will make the cut by yellowing it out.

since the fans & stored nutes were lost to defol she pulled nutes from the sugar leaves and caused them to yellow out.

hit her with bloom nutes right up to the end, maybe bump light hours down again… shorter days = winter is coming so hurry the efff up. agree skip the flush you can’t wash nutes out of your buds anywsy - a plant takes up what a plant takes up and flushing the soil can’t / doesn’t pull nutes out of your buds

chin up dude, she still looks great & lessons were learned

Thanks for the encouragement….and you are correct that lessons were learned.
I’m gonna hit em with about a 1/4-1/2 dose of probably Tiger Bloom….it’s synthetic so it’ll be available immediately. I hope they have enough gas in their tank to uptake the nutes and finish.

 

[SmokingWings]

Thanks for the encouragement….and you are correct that lessons were learned.
I’m gonna hit em with about a 1/4-1/2 dose of probably Tiger Bloom….it’s synthetic so it’ll be available immediately. I hope they have enough gas in their tank to uptake the nutes and finish.

At this stage of the game I doubt that removing all the fan leaves made much difference.

I have noticed that when I remove a lot of fan leaves real late in the grow then the remaining smaller leaves stand out, especially if they are turning yellow and pale green.

Many growers have commented that their plants do not take up as much water towards the end. When that starts to happen they take it as a clue that it is getting close to time for the harvest. Something to think about.

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

At this stage of the game I doubt that removing all the fan leaves made much difference.

I have noticed that when I remove a lot of fan leaves real late in the grow then the remaining smaller leaves stand out, especially if they are turning yellow and pale green.

Many growers have commented that their plants do not take up as much water towards the end. When that starts to happen they take it as a clue that it is getting close to time for the harvest. Something to think about.

Thanks for the input…..I fed them a light dose of bloom nute and Recharge yesterday. These next 3/4 days should be very telling. After the feed I spent some time really looking at the trichomes from different parts of each plant. I was amazed at how heavy they stack up in certain spots. Anyway, other than the occasional amber on a sugar leaf, there were none to be found on the calyces. A few clear ones but mostly all cloudy white.
I think they’ve made their last ditch effort to get pollinated and generated a last minute wave of white pistil production.
I’m hoping those pistils will turn orange and recede…:.and at that point they’ll be ready.
I looked back at pics from 7/8 weeks ago all the way to current, and every week in between. They have been progressing for sure, but looking at them every day makes it impossible to see it.
I honestly don’t think I’ve seen anyone take an auto into the 16th/17th week…..yet that’s where these will be soon enough.
Oh well….better late than never

 

[cbdhemp808]

@Makeminefullgrown I haven't read this whole thread, but the plant in the 3rd photo looks a lot better than the first two. Any difference in the environment for that plant? I just harvested a couple plants and the sugar leaves were healthy green and loaded with trichomes, resulting in the stickiest trim I've had to date.

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

@Makeminefullgrown I haven't read this whole thread, but the plant in the 3rd photo looks a lot better than the first two. Any difference in the environment for that plant? I just harvested a couple plants and the sugar leaves were healthy green and loaded with trichomes, resulting in the stickiest trim I've had to date.

All 3 plants are the same strain from the same seed pack. All grown together In the same environment. Plant 1 and plant 3 are both closer to ripe. The middle plant (#2) has just been slower to ripen. Tons of long hairs and they’re just not receding.
My big mistake was a massive defoliation about 2 weeks ago. There was some yellowing on some of the big fan leaves but nothing terrible looking. Once I got happy with the scissors all the remaining small fans and the sugar leaves started yellowing big time. What a dumb dumb thing for me to do…..I took away their reserves and stressed the hell out them all in one motion. I hope they’ll finish up…..chopping plants with a lot of white pistils is something I’d never willingly do. I can’t believe it but I just gave all 3 a once over with the microscope and may Have found 4-5 amber trichs…..most everything is milky white.
And to add insult to injury the amount of golden retriever hair that’s stuck in those buds is a sight to see. I never thought I’d wash buds but I’m gonna have to.

 

[cbdhemp808]

Why so much defoliation? If that's a technique to boost your buds, I'm not familiar with it. I'm an outdoor greenhouse soil grower in the tropics. I tend toward letting my plants do what they naturally do, except I do some pruning early in flowering to remove small lower branches, foliage and tiny buds low on the branches, and to open up air flow for the big branches. I also use photoperiod lighting in my veg/clone house.

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

Why so much defoliation? If that's a technique to boost your buds, I'm not familiar with it. I'm an outdoor greenhouse soil grower in the tropics. I tend toward letting my plants do what they naturally do, except I do some pruning early in flowering to remove small lower branches, foliage and tiny buds low on the branches, and to open up air flow for the big branches. I also use photoperiod lighting in my veg/clone house.

I wish I knew what got into me and made me get so scissor happy. I was reading about taking fan leaves to open up a pathway for the lower buds to get direct light. I just way overdid it.
I couldn’t believe how fast the remaining leaves turned yellow or died. I just worry about what will happen if all the leaves die off before the buds are finished…..will they still be able to progress?? All the buds are still technically blooming and pushing out new white pistils.

 

[cbdhemp808]

If it was me... you've got mostly milky trichomes and some amber ones... I would harvest now. I would trim immediately after harvest and carefully clip out all sugar leaves that have changed color from green to yellowish/reddish/brownish. This would be my best move, because I live in a high-humidity, high-mold environment, growing outdoors, and dead material on a plant is the starting place for mold. If you feel you have no mold/bud rot risk, you could wait a couple more days or so for more amber trichomes. The full ripening of the buds means cannabinoids are maximized, but harvesting a bit early means only a slight reduction in cannabinoids.

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

If it was me... you've got mostly milky trichomes and some amber ones... I would harvest now. I would trim immediately after harvest and carefully clip out all sugar leaves that have changed color from green to yellowish/reddish/brownish. This would be my best move, because I live in a high-humidity, high-mold environment, growing outdoors, and dead material on a plant is the starting place for mold. If you feel you have no mold/bud rot risk, you could wait a couple more days or so for more amber trichomes. The full ripening of the buds means cannabinoids are maximized, but harvesting a bit early means only a slight reduction in cannabinoids.

This is my first grow indoors…also my first auto flower and first time using LEDs. I did grow 8-9 yrs in row a long time ago and managed to harvest some great plants every yr. We would get the plants established under fluorescents and outside they went. They were on some remote private property and we may have visited them once or twice a month. So seeing the plants daily is a big paradigm shift for me.
We never pulled plants that were still showing white hairs. Of course this was 25 yrs ago and I don’t ever remember anyone discussing trichomes as an indicator for harvest either.
The buds are rock hard…..I just wonder if those hairs will darken and/or recede during the drying process?

 

[Roy Growin]

You are far enough into flower that they will ripen anyway and you will never know whether you forfeited a gram or two, but I doubt it
Good work, she looks great

 

[SmokingWings]

If it was me... you've got mostly milky trichomes and some amber ones... I would harvest now.

I am with that unless the grower wants to wait another week or two to find out if the buds get bigger.

I would trim immediately after harvest and carefully clip out all sugar leaves that have changed color from green to yellowish/reddish/brownish. This would be my best move, because I live in a high-humidity, high-mold environment, growing outdoors, and dead material on a plant is the starting place for mold.

Molds and mildews take 3 to 4 weeks after infecting the plant before the colonies get large enough for the grower to see them.

Bud rot could be in the buds already and the grower will not know until harvest when they start to inspect the buds and sometimes start to break apart the buds. But even then, the problem has already been there and unnoticed. That is one of the bad parts about Bud Rot, it is hard to see when it first started about 4 or 5 weeks before harvest because we don't break the buds apart until it is to late.

 

[Phytoplankton]

Normally when I get bud rot I'll see that some of the leaves on the buds will turn black/grey very quickly and when pulled the leaves just fall out, a sure sign of rot. Just had to pull a Northern Lights auto with huge buds because I found two small patches of bud rot. Probably pulled a week or two early, the trics were cloudy, but little amber, however to save the crop I had to do it. I have two smaller do si dos that are fine and they have about two or three weeks to go. Be watching them like a hawk!

 

[Makeminefullgrown]

My 3 plants are small enough for me to know fairly intimately….I spend a good amount of time daily plucking my golden retriever’s hairs out of the buds.
I’m keeping the RH in the upper 30s/lower 40s and there’s a good flow of air both under and over the plants….so I’m hoping bud rot is not gonna happen.
2 of the 3 would be fine to pull today but the 3rd one just has too many stringy pistils…..I can see it’s kicking off that last wave of pistils. The other two (that are closer to ripe) did the same thing, now they’ve stopped and the hairs are receding and turning reddish/orange. The trichs are at the same point on all 3, so I’m gonna give them all one more week and harvest the 2 for sure, and all 3 possibly.
It’s just hard to believe they are all the same strain…..the difference is extreme. Same smell though…..which for some reason has reduced quite a bit. I know if I touch a bud it really stinks but otherwise they are almost odorless. Beats me what’s going on…..the trichs are piling on and have great big round heads that are Snow White. You’d think they would stink up the room. They are skunk strains for crying out loud. I want them to stink.

 

[cbdhemp808]

The buds are rock hard…..I just wonder if those hairs will darken and/or recede during the drying process?

The hairs are called stigmas – one of them is a stigma. They are the filaments that receive pollen during pollination. All knowledgeable growers will tell you to look at the trichomes to determine the ripeness of the flowers and to determine the best harvest time. I think hardly anyone harvests when trichomes are all clear. The exception would be for hemp, which is a legal classification where the grower is harvesting early to make sure THC does not exceed 0.3%. This, of course, is total bullshit. It's just a legal classification placed by govt entities who are still – after all these decades – trying to control and suppress this magical healing plant. When the trichomes are past being clear, the grower can choose when to harvest. People talk about different types of high produced from buds harvested when trichomes are mostly white vs. mostly amber – this is an area I have no experience with. I usually go for mostly white with a little bit of amber; however, in my situation, I have mold/rot problems especially during certain times of the year. Some old time growers still follow what you are saying – to harvest based on how many stigma have turned brown. I also key in on this, because, in a mold-prone situation, mold likes to get started on dead material, and brown stigmas are dead material. So, sometimes I will harvest early, when some stigmas have turned brown, but the trichomes have not yet reached the optimal ripeness. To answer your question... don't worry about the stigmas after harvest. Yes, they will dry just fine.