does putting plants in complete darkness for a week or so at the end of flowering cycle improves the harvest? secondly, i have heard that you can cut the fan leaves off of plants towards the end of flowering, is that true or bullshit?? would it do more damage than good? thanks
I have found you will get a lot of crazy ideas from different people on how to peak-out a harvest. Several days of no light will definatly kill your plant. I think I read Hashmulph(sp)--the organic soil guy here-- uses 24 hours of darkness before harvest. He has his shit together so I would trust his advice. After all a flowering plant is protecting itself from the looming winter, long cold nights accompany winter, and we should try and replicate nature when possible. When it comes to leaf chopping; less is more. Near the end of flowering most of the big sucker leafs will yellow and die anyway. It is best to remove dead/dying material from your grow area. Like Rumpleforeskin--another with his shit together--says(loosely translated): 'I agree not to chop off leaves if the plants agree to make fat buds'. I follow this advice.
p.s. I should say I recently pulled my first indoor crop. I experimented and took them all at different times with different methods. The one word of advice is to let the plant wilt from a lack of water. It seemed to make trimming easier and they dried faster and more complete. The time it spends hanging in darkness is a dangerous time for mold. You want to limit that time as much as possible.
I did 48 hours on two of my plants once, and they turned out fine. I don't really like using a period of darkness before harvest though. I'm sceptical on whether it actually enhances the plants, or if they just seem more taxed with thc because you haven't touched them, and there's no heat degrading the thc. I just try to make sure my plants aren't to close to the light, especially right before harvest, and give them a nice week of flush.