*** Harvest Day ***
Date: 6/18/22 - Day 69 of flower (W10D6)
Strain - Purple Haze photo clones x 4
Grow space - Vivosun 48x48x80 tent in basement
Light height and reading - 36 Hours of darkness
Extraction - AC Infinity 6" extraction fan with Controller69
2x 6" oscillating fans + Tower oscillating fan + 12" floor fan (on ceiling)
Nutrients - Stout MSA, Mega Crop, Hydroguard, z7, Purpinator, Big Bud, Bud Candy
Medium - 8" Netpots with clay balls in RDWC system (5x13g buckets)
Water - Carbon-filtered well water (100ppm/8.1pH)
Pests - Spider Mites (Sprayed with SNS 217-C + Lady Bugs)
Weekly temperatures
The pump on my dehumidifier stopped working last week, which means I have had to empty it manually. Even emptying twice daily it filled up and shut down a couple of times. Overall, it stayed on long enough to keep these ladies out of trouble through harvest.
So I ended up keeping these girls in the RDWC system for 84 days without changing. When I finally removed the plants and drained the system, it was pretty dirty. Next time I'll drain it at least once, at flower week 3.
Every time I harvest, I think about how hard/long/tedious this would be by myself. I understand why people call it trim jail. Fortunately, with my wife and son helping out, we were able to get all the plants harvested, rough trimmed, washed and hung in one day. By myself it would have taken a week easily.
As it was, we made a nice Saturday out of it. We ordered sushi for lunch and had a pleasant day listening to tunes and trimming bud. By the end of the day, though, we were all exhausted. We left most of the cleanup for the next day.
Thanks to all of you that hung around on this grow. It's been quite the ride, and I'll admit I doubted several times whether I'd get to harvest. Well, here we are, and hang on for a LOT of pictures
The plants were in the dark the last 36 hours, from Thursday night until we chopped on Saturday. Here are the final tric shots after the 36 hours of darkness, right before chop.
I want to give a shout out to
@Sierra Natural Science - I found the spider mites about 3 weeks ago and thought I was cooked. Luckily, I had the SNS 217-C and used it as soon as I found the little buggers, drenching the ladies four times in the next weeks or two. It got rid of 95%+ of the mites, allowing the ladybugs to take care of the rest through harvest. We found very few signs of any mites on the plants, and no webs. I highly recommend the SNS 217-C, especially if you need something to help with mites in flower.
The ladybugs were everywhere. We released some outside, some upstairs on my wife's plants, and there's still plenty crawling and flying around the basement. We pulled them out of our hair and off our hands/arms/necks all day. I sure an glad they don't bite or anything.
The other good news, no seeds! Last grow I had a few seeds and was worried some of the pollen would be in the tent. There were some super swollen calyx, especially in the larfy bud, but no signs of any seeds. YAY!
I usually chop the plant at the base and hang upside down above the table to trim the branches. Since these ladies were so tangled in the net that wasn't possible. We still ended up processing one plant at a time, which gave us a few breaks between.
- First we chopped all the branches off above the first net, untangled them from the second net, and laid them out on the trimming table.
- Then we wet trimmed all of the branches. We left most of the sugar leaves on and a couple of fan leaves as well. All of the large fans were removed. We also made sure there was airflow between the buds and the stem, by pulling the bud away from the stem and pinching out the little fan leaves between the stem and the bud. This leaves a little air pocket around the bud, allowing airflow while drying. We ended up with four 1 gallon zip locks stuffed with trim, which we'll make bubble hash out of soon.
- After trimming all of the branched we weighed to give me an approximation of the finished weight. I use two different formulas (below), and for the last grow the final weight came in right between the two numbers.
- After weighing, we took 15-20 minutes to get as much of the finger hash off as possible. These were some VERY sticky ladies, and by the time we were done with a plant we could not even put down the trimming scissors. We ended up with a huge ball of finger hash
- Next each bud was washed in baking soda/lemon juice and rinsed twice. I put airstones in my buckets to get plenty of agitation in the water. While the buckets after an indoor DWC grow are not nearly as dirty as after a soil grow, I did want to get rid of as many bugs as possible. Also, I believe that washing the buds help with the dry and cure.
- After washing, each bud is hung on a hanger with a binder clip. I try to stagger the buds on the hanger to keep them from touching each other as much as possible. Again, I want as much airflow around each bud as possible.
- The hangers stay in the basement for the first 4 hours or so, then we bring them upstairs to the drying closet.
Here's the harvest tally. All told, we ended up with almost 11 pounds wet, nearly 5 kilos. There's some larf in there, but even that seemed pretty dense. I'm estimating a little over 2 pounds dry, about 1 kilo. I think the difference in weight for the plants was the difference in how they were spread out. Jolt and Jazz were spread out further and therefore had more weight. I was surprised to see Jolt, who we had to cut off 1/2 of, end up being the heaviest.
I'm hoping the drying will take 7-10 days. I used this closet to dry my last harvest and it worked really well, keeping the drying buds around 60f and 60% RH for 10 days. There's an A/C duct in the closet and I used a humidifier set to 60% to keep the humidity up after the first day or two. Of course, that was April and this is June, so the closet's going to be a little warmer this time. I could try to push the upstairs A/C a little cooler, but it's 20 years old and on it's last leg. I'm actually lucky that that closet seems to be a few degrees cooler than the rest of the upstairs, staying around 65f. I'll probably have to put the humidifier in there today, but I think this closet is going to do OK. I'll check back in a week or two with a final weight and wrapup for this grow. Hope all the dads out there had a great Father's Day weekend and have a great week everyone.
. I did find the drain plug was loose so that may have been the issue. Either way, I'll go down and empty it tonight manually just to make sure it stays on.
Tonight I'll drain the res and fill it with plain pHed water. Then on Thursday I'll turn off the lights for good. 36 hours later it's chop time
greenhouse is complete in a sence.
