Late on flushing. Any hail Marys tricks?

Potatosito said:

I'm picking up that this topic is like politics and religion lol.
The argue FOR flushing is PERCEIVED improved taste and reduced synthetic chemicals in your smoke. (I prefer organic vegetables for this reason).
The argument AGAINST flushing is that the plant is being starved of nutrients in the maturation phase of the grow, leading to reduced yield and I'd suspect likely reduced terpenes.
Ultimately, I guess it's personal choice and I plan to go organic after gaining the skills to repeatably produce healthy plants and maintain stabile growing conditions. But with this next batch of clones going into flowering I'm going to try my own experiment and decide for myself.
Thank you for all the replies though!

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No, it's bro science vs science.

31.50 flushed and fed for various periods, the results.

Jfc I don't subscribe to flushing but I do give them water for 4/5 days before harvest.

Lmao well guess I learned something new. I thought flushing was still a thing. I just started indoors two runs ago and flushed both 5 days prior to chop. Always heard it would cause plant to use the nutes stored in itself so wouldn't be present when smoked. Don't slap my fingers too hard. Lesson learned

Potatosito said:

I have a bag seed from Durban Poison, but the herm-donor had to have been some serious pineapple smelling strain, so I didn't have any flowering time estimation. My other store-bought Durban Poison seeds state 9 weeks...
I'd been taking it easy on nutes since completing week 4 and the leaves had been yellowing out, but for whatever reason after completing week 6, I started fearing that they would starve before proper harvest time so I fed them a dose. The very next (2 days ago) day I used the higher magnification half of the loupe and noticed some amber trichromes I flushed the hell out of her and I've been letting her soil dry out since. I'm planning to put her in darkness tomorrow night and harvest her 2 days later.
Are there any tricks I can do to further deplete the bloom nutes?

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Trich-checking is an extremely unrepresentative spot check, at best.
+90% of trichs are inside the flower. Those microscopes are only useful for pest identification
You have to look at the overall state of the plant and as a rule of thumb count 9-10 weeks from flip to harvest (unless you grow landrace sativas).

You could try to feed some more and keep it alive for a couple of weeks more, there's still a decent amount of actively photosynthesizing foliage around the flowers and it could produce some more mass, especially the lower flowers.

You can't flush 2 days before harvest, you have to do it at least a week in advance, and at least 2 weeks if using molasses based ''organic'' bottles nutes.
But looking at the starved plant, I wouldn't say flushing would do much at this point

Flushing is stupid please realize a plant wont stop taking nutes or water all of a sudden because you think it's finished or you set a harvest date lol
It will take less as less mass is being produced in the final days, that's it.
You as grower are responsible to adjust to those new conditions just like you start any grow and go up in feed, here you go down, but cutting nutes to 0 is not good practice of growing, no matter what magic nutes company told you.
You will only have a rough smoke and product if you overfeed or underfeed.
Keep it steady and dialed the whole grow, you'll have a killer product, it's shown time and time again.

In an 8 weeks flowering strain, I cut nutes x 25% week 7, and another 25% in week 8. So the last week, they get 50% of full dose.

bluegill said:

The facts are that, while there are trichomes inside and outside the calyx structure, the largest concentration will exist on the outside. This makes sense when the surface area and volume on the inside/outside are taken into consideration. All things considered, verifying the flowers' maturity absolutely requires viewing samples of trichomes on the buds and making a determination of ratio of amber:milky. And each kola, and flowers on each cola, can mature at different rates, and each strain/grow has different genetics and different maturity rates. You can assess a plant's general maturity based on the flower times and outward appearance, but as to the quality and amount of THC - truly depends on the trichomes. And to get scientific about it and narrow it to percentages requires extensive testing.

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Over complicating things is not very helpful for an inexperienced grower seeking guidance, they have enough to worry about.
Getting scientific about gardening is not the gardener's job, it's the scientist's job!

Nobody is ever going to that insanely thoroughly check, let alone lab test, every single flower on a plant numerous times, and then slowly harvest by disassembling it flower by flower, it's gardening not engineering.
If I should check every single plant I grow the way you suggest, I'd have to quit my day job and stop sleeping just to have time for that!

That's simply incorrect, the majority of trichs are on the inside unless the buds are extremely small and fluffy.

It's not possible to reliably assess anything by a spot check of 0.0000001% of the total populace. Especially not in the case of cannabis maturity, because the trichs on the outside show more amber than the trichs on the inside and trichs on leaves mature faster than trichs on calyxes, and lower flowers swell and ripen slower than top flowers.

Anyone with normal eyesight can tell overall amber levels with the naked eye (as an integral part of the overall assessment of the plant's status) it's a skill you have to learn but it's pretty easy to *know* how golden the shimmer has to be for it to be just right, and people have been doing this without microscopes for 1000's of years. Not much different from learning to pick out a ripe avocado, no electronic measuring instruments or number crunching needed.

You look at trichs for maturity not THC level or as you mention ''quality'' which doesn't actually mean anything in this constellation, since it's a 100% subjective and unmeasurable parameter.
THC peaks in the milky trichs and begins to degrade, mostly to CBN, when they turn amber, so the scientific THC farmer chops too early forgetting about the 112 other known cannabinoids and their combined effect.
Desired maturity level is of course a subjective matter, modern commercial hash makers go for 0% amber, traditional commercial hash makers go for +50% amber.

Grow some tomatoes. You'll come back to the Cannabis plant with a brand-new vision.

Potatosito said:

Forgive my ignorance, but what's the counter argument to flushing synthetic nutes?

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I know im late to the party, but Dr Bruce Bugbee did a study on flushing and the results showed that there was very little to no difference between flushed and not flushed. Only reason I can see at all to flush is if your going to reuse an inert media like coco or peat, then flushing would, sooner or later flush the nutrients out of the MEDIA, but it will not flush the nutes that are absobed out of the plant.

If you grow in soil most likely your plant is not eating nutes but shit from bacteria

I tried flushing once in hydro and the plant has weeks worth of food in it selfe.after 2 weeks i think i got first signs of deficencies

It would be interesting to know how much difference flushing makes to the yeild?

There's no doubts in my mind that plants pack weight on in the last throws of flowering so not feeding them doesn't make sense to me?

Between the point of me thinking hmm they're about ready to actually harvesting there's a ton of branches collapsed.

From one day to another plants can gain enough weight to collapse.

When I start giving them water it's only after I consider them ready.

Star Dog said:

It would be interesting to know how much difference flushing makes to the yeild?

There's no doubts in my mind that plants pack weight on in the last throws of flowering so not feeding them doesn't make sense to me?

Between the point of me thinking hmm they're about ready to actually harvesting there's a ton of branches collapsed.
View attachment 5377660View attachment 5377661
From one day to another these gained enough to collapse.

When I start giving them water it's only after I consider them ready.

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From my ppm monitoring daily,you can see in my last diary she stops eating in late flower.

amneziaHaze said:

From my ppm monitoring daily,you can see in my last diary she stops eating in late flower.

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I've also observed this to, usually before harvest they're only needing 0.7/0.8ec and they're slow to take it up.

Its actually a bonus in one sense, the lack of transpiration helps lower the humidity at the end of flower.

I quit feeding my wife during the 8th and 9th month of pregnancy. We're just flushing to get the best possible child.
Ended great! My son had a small penis.
Words of advice - to avoid small penis, stop flushing.

Hot Diggity Sog said:

I quit feeding my wife during the 8th and 9th month of pregnancy. We're just flushing to get the best possible child.
Ended great! My son had a small penis.
Words of advice - to avoid small penis, stop flushing.

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Genetics?