Im almost on my first harvest my question is as follows. I watered my plant on sunday and i plan to chop on the following sunday should i not water it until chop or should i water again 3-4 days b4 chop. Ive read it helps the drying process if your plant has little water in it when chopped.
generally for me, might be different from others. I put the ladies under no light for 3 days. on the first day i water them once, and the other 2 nothing. (after flushing for 2 weeks.)
I wouldn't go a week without water. Never noticed a difference between drying times, let one of mine go till she was droopy from lack of water and she still took 6 days to dry. Another girl I watered 2 days before cutting and she dried in 4 days. The main difference is the first one had lower temps and slightly higher humidity (I use a drying box, so all other conditions were identical) Your temps and ambient humidity have the most impact on your drying times (as well as your methods), more so than depriving your plants of water IMO. My advice, for what it's worth, is to water them when they need it and harvest 3-4 days after that.
The added benefit of drying it out is it stress the plant giving it a boost of resin production and the dry soil is easier to get rid of. 4th grow(Apprentice) - BC Big Bud 1200w
dryness can definitly increase alcaloid production in other plants, capsacain in chilis (got a bhut jolokia with fruits dried on the plant, just lacking a victim ) and such, Im not sure how it is with cannabis... maybe it produces the most cannabinoids when running at full power, maybe it increases production if stressed towards the end. maybe it doesnt noticably change the cannabinoid content. I think the one thing thats most likely to happen is a change in aroma by changes in the production of terpenes and such. terpenes evaporate and are replenished all the time, which I assume means that a higher percentage of the final content is produced during the last days of the grow than that of the active cannabinoids since I dont know of cannabinoids evaporating, only degrading to different solid substances.
Kool kool all usefull advice i think im just gunna water it today and then harvest in 3-4 days should b enough time for it to dry
What I've read is that by not watering for a bit before you chop the plant (after it starts getting dry) produces a lot of resin on the buds to help protect and coat the flower to try to help protect it from the "sun" AKA your light. The basic idea is that it assumes there's a drought, or heat wave and coats itself with extra resit to protect the flower. Again, this is just what I read, but it seemed to make a decent amount of sense to me.
But if there is any last second resin production, how would it possibly be mature enough (milky/amber) to make a difference or am I missing something?
in 1 day i missed watering ive noticed a difference my whole room smelled like mj i opened my box it had a dankier aroma and the nugs look better but im new so you guys r probably right