I had 5 white widows and 7 ak47s just chopped maybe a hair early but with bad weather rolling in I decided to cut them. Now I’m gonna spend the rest of the night figuring out how I’m gonna fit as many of them as possible into an 8x4 tent lol.
yeah man.. and I was running out of light so that big pile in my table in the basement all still has to be checked for bud rot. I’m gonna be up all night. Luckily I have the day off tomorrow
congrats on the grow - looks like a years supply of smoke and edibles with all the trim.... Careful drying - make sure those colas have enough air space between each other and aren't all bunched up-
Nice haul mate! Whenever I have a decent sized crop to bring in, I use the cheapest form of manual labor known, the adult (21-30) children of my various brothers, sisters, etc and their assorted friends. The problem is they keep coming back long after harvest is done, I need to time it so I have 2-4 plants coming in every month so there is always something for those damn kids to do.
Yeah I’m actually about to go down there and make a little change up. Due to the limited space I think I’m gonna hang the main branches in the tent and the smaller side branches I’ll probably just wet trim and throw in the rack I used last year. I want to prioritize the most mature buds. unfortunately due to my negligence I lost a ton of bud from the 3 ak47s that were over 7ft. I didn’t feel like dragging the picnic bench out there to check the colas after some rainy weather and I’m cutting an awful lot of mold out of them. Those are definitely gonna be dried away from the rest of the plants edit: lol extreme negligence** I just realized looking at the pics that the branches all fell down on the storm and I could’ve reached them without the bench. ♂️
Yeah last year I did it myself but I only had 8 plants and deer basically lopped off all the main stalks a couple weeks before flower so it was pretty easy to manage.. this year I gave my 2 friends each a half of my auto I harvested earlier and they’ll each get 2 oz. Of this harvest once it’s cured. the thing that really sucked was after we got them all chopped I was on my own to check for mold on those aks and I ended up pulling an all nighter cutting out mold and wet trimming them.. each branch on those sumbitches was bigger than my smallest white widow plant. What a task..I still have a few branches left but I’m procrastinating big time the other thing that’s kind of annoying is that my smaller aks that weren’t completely covered in mold all got a little lavender tint to them late in flower which also happened on my amnesia haze autos and when they dried instead of staying lavender they turned like a light brownish beige color.. hoping that’s not the case with these.
I feel you on that one, my spring crop was the first time I had big enough colas where I actually had 2 that got a tiny bit of bud rot on them. I'll do 4-5 plants myself, but anything more than that I call in for help. I do the same, give away an ounce to anyone who shows up to help trim (the max allowed by law in my state.) Plus free alcohol and food for the evening, its usually a good time. I'll cut the plants on a friday evening usually, Saturday, people come by throughout the day to help trim and process. The problem I've found is you can't just give fresh weed away, as people will shove it in a jar, it'll shoot up to like 85% RH and 2 weeks later an ounce of top shelf gelato is just ruined. Sometimes, people are busy, so I spend pretty much from friday evening till sunday afternoon trimming (except my brother, a trich on the floor is like blood in the water for a shark, he'll hoover up anything for his edible making, and like a shark he can seemingly detect that shit from like 2 hours away where he lives) Now I have enough stockpiled that people take from the prior harvest jars which are fully dried and cured. It was stressful though, making the announcement of "check out all these plants coming in" and having people constantly bugging you if its ready yet for the weeks of drying and curing, yet never showing up on the actual trim and processing days. Wanting to give people good stuff, but not sure if you should give it another week or two. BTW what are you expecting out of your autos yield wise? I am growing my first 2 autos currently (seed bank screwed up and shipped auto seeds labeled labeled as photo, and refused to refund my money until I first paid to ship the 18 unused seeds back to them) I have 2 Bruce Banner autos that I'm hoping will come in maybe in another 6-7 weeks (not sure, first time with autos, and trying to juggle them with the photo gorilla glues in that tent, while I plan to run some autos in the future, just kind of trying to learn as I go with these.)
I harvested my autos in July. It was also my first try and to be honest I wasn’t expecting much (which is exactly what I got lol). As this is only my second year growing, last year my plants dried out way too fast so this year I got a tent for drying to try to regulate the humidity since I have a dehumidifier in the basement which brings it down to 45-50% down there so I was really mainly growing them to get a trial run on the tent.. which it turns out I definitely needed. I had the exhaust fan on full blast which sucked the dry air from the basement into the tent and yet again dried them too fast so I learned the hard lesson on those sacrificial plants. as far as yield is concerned it was a bit underwhelming. I grew 4 plants and ended up getting around 9 oz.. but what I didn’t realize was that some sort of insects made nests all along the stalk of the biggest one which I didn’t even notice until after they were dried and I was trimming. So after I trashed that plant I think I ended up with 5.5 oz. Despite the fact that it was over dried it did turn out surprisingly potent. edit: also when they were seedlings a bug ate one of the 2 little leaves when it sprouted so one of them had a very severely stunted growth throughout the entire process. And I also grew them outdoors which I’ve heard people say isn’t ideal for autos.
I did the same thing myself, dried / cured too fast and got the hay smell, I typically shoot for 70% gradually dropping to 65% RH in the tent. It also never helps that every time harvest comes around, there is like a rainstorm which totally throws off the RH, fans etc, so eventually I said screw the garage I'll dry in a basement tent. I am hoping to get 3 ounces of each of those 2 autos, would be nice (but still pissed because each of those spots could have been a photo plant producing 10+ ounces per plant), hopefully that will be the case.
The purple one is one of the white widows. By far the best color out of all the plants. Not sure if it’s just the flashlight, but I’ve noticed when I pop onto the tent to check the humidity it looks more blue now with the purple bleeding through the white frost. I haven’t successfully snapped any pics that do it justice though since my phone likes to try to color correct everything edit* also in the second picture you can see one of the ak plants got a decent lavender color to it but unfortunately in drying it didn’t retain it very well.
Yeah when it's a white sugar coated strain like that , that turns purple , it turns blue too. Just like thee old 2008-2010 permafrost from Mosier.
Yeah I’m definitely liking the looks of that plant.. but I’m starting to think I’ll be trimming all this shit for the rest of my life lol
Harvesting 12 big plants like that all at once seems crazy to me. I did a lot of progressive harvesting. Cut a branch, trim it, cut the next, etc... Sometimes I took breaks between harvest days. So some plants were harvested over a few weeks. It didn't seem to have negative effects on the plant, and let me manage things at a reasonable speed. I had a lot of moldy bud, I tossed a lot, but as I kept finding more and more I tried to save some. Been water curing, and I'll use it for edibles when done. Smoking mold might not be good, but we eat mold all day long. Once water cured and baked, it should be perfectly fine. Good luck, hope processing goes smoothly
yeah that was the plan originally. I cut one plant that was a little sick (which actually makes the tally 13 total), I was gonna cut 6 aks the following week and get them rolling, then the last 5 white widows a week or 2 after that, and then I had another ak that was maturing very slow compared to everything else that I was gonna make a final judgement on at that time.. but then we had a cold snap with 8 days of rain forecasted after we already had over 10 days of rain and crazy wind with gusts up to 27mph a little earlier which absolutely brutalized them. So I decided I had already taken enough risks with the weather and chopped the whole garden at once.