Hi, i am a first time grower and been wondering when i should harvest my plant and whether i should stop watering with nutes and start flushing. My strain is revolver autoflower from crop king seeds. By the way how is my plant looking for a first time indoor grow? growing under 120 watt cfl and watering with biobizz nutes. Here are some pictures:
Doesn't look anywhere near done. Lots of white pistils still. Check trichomes to know when it's ready to chop and read up on how to properly cure and dry your bud in the mean time. It's taking a while cus you only got 120w on her.
The only way to know if a plant is truly mature enough to harvest is by using a jeweler's loupe or some other form of strong magnification to look at the trichomes. They are microscopic and can't be seen with the naked eye. You need to see about 25% amber in your trichomes overall before pulling. Letting it go longer, just increases the amber in the trichs, and makes your plant stronger. But the thing that determines how your plant turns out...the quality of the bud, the size of the plant and the overall amount at harvest after dry and cure is the lighting you flower with. Veg is not such a big issue and can be handle with CFLs, but they just don't do well for flowering. To get a plant to flower out big and grow like you want it to, you need each plant to get plenty of wattage from a correct spectrum light and have enough space for optimum light penetration below the canopy of the plant. LIGHT makes you grow a big plant with a harvest of several oz. after dry and cure, as opposed to the few grams you'll likely end up with after you take this plant. You are getting absolutely wonderful experience learning to grow the plant right now, so it's going to be a big benefit to you for the next one. But I would first chunk those stupid auto variety seeds and order some normal strains (sativas seem to be easier to deal with). As a grower, I want to be in control of the plant...not the other way around as it is with the auto variety seeds. And part of getting a decent harvest from one of these plants is being patient enough to allow the plant to veg a decent time (we run 10 week cycles both veg and flower, and I take clones about 2 weeks before a scheduled pull. This keeps my veg room resupplying my flower room so I never run out of plants. But to get the most from a plant, you've got to have good strong light and enough space for each plant, and then just give it time and let it do it's thing. A fair light for a single plant would be a 600 watt hps or maybe a 400 watt LED. They both grow beautiful plants. I prefer the HPS because you get better sq. foot coverage with the air cooled hoods and reflectors. The LEDs most are small bodied and only shine straight down which makes it difficult to have one light cover more than one plant. But the LEDs, in spite of their cost, are a lot cooler than the HPS lamps. It's just the HPS lamps grow out some awesome buds...if you have enough of it. We run 4, 1000 watt hps lamps per flower room and generally flower only about 8 plants a run. This gives me huge plants in the end with huge dense tops too. Right now, our per plant weight is usually 4 to 5 oz. and I'm quite happy with that at this point. My son is building me some LEDs to fill in the gaps, just for the added spectrum, to see how much more we can get our plant yields up. But at this point, it's just repeat, repeat, repeat and figuring out how to make yourself a better grower as you do. Good luck. TWW