The purpose of this post is to open a dialogue on the root cause of the commonly encountered phenomena of final bud swell, often encountered in the last two weeks before harvest.
Many new growers are warned not to harvest early, as the final bud swell, occurring in the final two weeks before harvest, can pack on significant weight, resin, and aroma.
Growers are also often encouraged to flush at about two weeks from harvest, and cease fertilizer treatments. The intended purpose is to make the plant use up as much stored energy as possible before harvest, improving smell, burn, and effect.
After extensive reading into plant physiology, I've developed a hypothesis that may explain the phenomena we often see in the last two weeks.
Plant nutrients, whether synthetic in a bottle, or organic in a bag of worm castings, enter the plants roots and xylem as mineral ions, inorganic matter. Most nutrients gain access to the inner root via active transport; that is, to overcome the concentration gradient, the plant must spend energy on moving the ions manually. So, rather than just getting sucked up with the water, which is passive, nutrient absorbtion is mostly active and requires energy from the plant.
Further, once within the root, the nutirent ions are then converted to other forms(assimilation), which also has an energy impact. Creating amino acids and proteins from ions and photosynthetic products is a lot of work!
So, that being known, one can well assume that making nutrients unavailable to the roots, and subsequently eliminating energy use from assimilation, should decrease or eliminate the energy expense of nutrient uptake and assimilation.
Growing flowers, and production of resin and terpenes are also metabolically taxing activities of the plant.
So, perhaps by dropping all that energy consumption that was being spent on pulling in nutrients, is now made free to produce larger flowers, more resin, and more terpenes, resulting in what we see as a magical bud swell in the weeks before harvest.
This should be an easy enough experiment to conduct, and I'll be doing so with my current multistrain grow. I'll simply keep feeding one until harvest, and stop feeding the other. More samples would be great, why not give it a shot?
Oh, and for those using organic nutrient lines or supersoil. This applies to you just as much as the synthetic fertilizer users. Organic nutrients are identical to synthetic nutirents as far what actually enters the plant. A nitrate ion is a nitrate ion, it doesn't matter where it came from, ans the plant will only let specific ions in. And if my theory is correct, the point is to force the plant to live on reserved energy and put all of its effort into building buds. So you should give it a shot too!
Discuss!
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