This is very interesting and much appreciated Hafta. I've been thinking on the subject quite a lot of late and did some reading on grapes that is front-of-mind for me when now taking up cannabis culturing again.
I pick a few hundred pounds of middling to poor quality grapes from my suburban 'vineyard' each year, (3 massively extravagant, almost wild plants that have nearly encircled the house over the 20 yrs since planted) so I watch the ripening process up close and with some interest. My recent reading on the topic is quite clear, all processes, vegetative, fruit set, ripening, are dependent on the soil, yes, the climate/atmosphere, yes, and the light... but it's not the light hitting the fruit, especially during ripening, that's critical. In fact, light's overall impact on ripening is low and goes down as the process matures, and is almost completely a process between leaf surface and light flux, not the fruit directly being hit by light. Temperature impacts the fruit ripeness directly, mostly, and I think with fruits, that's where we might get things confused as laymen.
For example an Apple. We associate redness with ripeness, but they are related by correlation only, not causation (mostly, 'ripeness' is something of a moving target as a term to some). The redness is an accumulation of pigment that is a defence against UV damage, as with humans, but unlike humans doesn't recede quickly because the apple is stuck there in place, thus there is little reason for the apple to develop such an adaptive process as reducing the pigment. I think we, lay people, have wrongly associated redness with ripeness casually in our minds and subsequently associated direct light upon the fruit as critical ripening action. Anyway, ripening, engorgement and sweetness in most fruit, it turns out, are in subtle ways influenced by light, but via the leaf, not by directly striking on the fruit, and light has a decreasing impact on ripeness over time, prominence over which is taken up by temperature very soon after fruit set.
Now, obviously, we're not growing fruit, we're growing cannabis. And light, especially UV light, appears to impact the development of trichomes. But trichomes are developed by and within the plant, the THC is developed by the plant and is not found in trichomes alone in testing, just mostly. My point really is that I believe its possible that we growers may have made some of the same assumptions we have about apples, with cannabis and focused exclusively on light directly hitting the flower as the sole ripening process to our detriment. It doesn't seem to me yet proven that the trifecta of bud 'ripeness', swelling, hardening and THC content, is solely accomplished by light flux striking the fluorescence alone.
This leaves all the other, previous processes out of the discussion, but I thought I'd wonder aloud about ripening itself as an extreme example, and question to ask. Truly, I don't know the answer.
awesome photo!
