Hi guys, Apologies in advance for the long post. I'm nearing the end of my first grow. The strain is 'Seedsman Auto Blue', approaching around 12-13 weeks from seed now, and around 8-9 weeks since flowering began. It's an organic soil grow. The plant has not changed much in appearance over the last few weeks. Pistils are now probably 90% orange. Fan leaves are still mostly green, but I'm pretty sure this is from using time-release nutrients meaning there's been too much nitrogen throughout flowering for them to yellow off. Sugar leaves have been yellowing in the past two weeks, and on the higher colas the yellow is almost at the point of receding into the bud, and a little bit of purpling occurring on the ends of calyxes. I'm not sure if the buds even seem like they've shrunk a little. I stopped feeding and began flushing about a week and a half ago as it looked to be on track at the time. Going by all that, it at least looks to the naked eye 'ready' to harvest. What's causing the confusion for me is the trichomes. Every time I look at them (using a 60x loupe) I seem to see something different. Overall I seem to have a lot of amber and clear 'stalks' with no heads on the more exposed parts of buds and sugar leaves; a mix of clear to slightly cloudy small trichomes covering the outer surface of buds; and larger, more definitely clouded trichomes deeper inside the buds. There's also a few (maybe 5%) of amber trichomes (with heads) mixed with both the small clear ones and the large cloudy ones, but only on the top colas, and they've been increasing quickly (from 0%) over the last half a week. Additionally the trichomes can change from looking very clear to very cloudy depending on lighting. I can't get any decent pictures of the trichomes with my equipment unfortunately but here's some recent (4-5 days ago) photos of the plant's top colas. They look pretty much the same now, except even more of the white pistils have turned orange and the upper sugar leaves are more yellow. So I guess what I'm asking is, could some of you with more experience give opinions on harvesting this weekend (4-5 days from now) given the provided information? I don't want to mess up my grow now after this long because I'm very proud of the plant! I'm looking for a less racy, more calming high but without being too sleepy, so I don't want it either under- or over-mature. I've been quick drying a tiny test bud once every 2 days for the last week and although the first two were a touch too racy, today's was almost bang on, especially considering it wasn't cured. Thanks and apologies again for the long post. TL;DR plant seems ready to harvest in every way except for trichomes being a mixed bag of colours and appearing different in different lights, on different buds etc
I only read the tldr lol Using the pistols color can be useful for you. If you still have white pistols then your plant is still chunking up some. ive harvested plants at 4weeks flower up to 1 week past ideal harvest date. In my experience, peak potency is at about 6 weeks on an 8 week strain...so many variables though so take advice with grain of salt.
Thanks for the reply. I decided to harvest yesterday, about 12 weeks from sprouting I think (autoflower). I checked the trichomes and they all looked cloudy with about 10% amber, which is what I was looking for. However now after trimming, all the trichomes look clear :/ I'm feeling pretty annoyed about it. All the pistils were orange though and I hadn't noticed any increase in growth for 2 weeks.
Well I've had a few quick-dried (dehydrator) buds and they have varied from being pretty nice to a little paranoid/racy and once or twice caused a bit of headache. But yeah I'll be holding off final judgement until I've tried the properly dried and cured buds. I just made a journal thread about the grow if you're interested what the buds looked like at harvest!