First, a huge
to everyone for all the great feedback, opinions, and well-reasoned discussion as regards how to handle the harvest.
In the planning stage of this journal, we had a lot of back-and-forth discussion to define the parameters for this grow. Unfortunately, chop time wasn't one of them.
Because trich color seems to generally be accepted as the most accurate way to judge bud maturity, we wanted to hear other opinions before making the final decision.
The discussion that took place pertaining to this issue contained some of the most intelligent, educated, and well-reasoned posts that I've read *anywhere*.
For the record, in a message I received from HGL, they strongly feel that both groups should be harvested when the first group is ready. HSS has not weighed in on the issue.
I've decided to chop each individual plant as it reaches 50/50 cloudy/amber trichs. I'll document the exact time for each plant so that weight correlation can be performed on the fully mature plants, both individually and as groups.
It would be silly to not acknowledge that the 50/50 method is subjective in comparison to a calendar date, but the few days range of the 50/50 method should average out across the 8 chops.
I'd think the plants would finish randomly, so that the chop sequence may switch between groups as opposed to one complete group being harvested before the other.
Handling it this way will let us do in-group comparison as well as group to group comparison, and it should also help to reduce the effect of variations caused by different phenos, while preserving light to light finish time and yield comparisons.
I like the idea of looking at the final results as many ways as possible, so we'll look at gross yields as well as applying a time factor to normalize the results.
Harvest times will be clearly reported so that people who are factoring speed heavily will have clean data.
To wrap things up, I believe the plants should come down when they're individually ready because the qualities of taste and effect are *essential* to judging the performance of grow products and gear, and we'd be sacrificing that if we took a few down before they were done according to our criteria.
