White Widow Auto - second grow

Best time is week 3— before the flower. You are past that, so now would be fine, but only a very light defoliation.

They look fine and healthy - I just chopped an auto that was so dark all the way through growth it looked like N tox - it grew strong and had no issues (60g dry) Your girls looking healthy and I expect the leafs will start fading nicely in say 3 weeks as the buds go into overdrive production mode. They dont look damaged at all, none of the growth looks unhealthy so I reckon you are good.

Firstly, the seeds in all the plants will be hermaphrodite due to hermaphroditism being a dominant genetic. Basically, hermaphrodite pollen breeds hermaphrodite plants. For "normal" plants, you need to breed with pollen from a pure male and fertilize a pure female plant. So unless you are interested in breeding a line of hermaphrodites, those seeds should be/are useless. Harvesting earlier will not result in less seeds, just smaller immature seeds, but still the same number of seeds. If your plants are well seeded it is probably too late to affect any changes by removing the hermie plant, but I would be anyhow as the buds will be rubbish and full of hermie seeds too. For me, a hermie is an instant cull, no matter what. Unfortunately, now that your plants are growing many, many seeds, they will actually stop producing trichomes as trichomes are a defence mechanism to protect the unpollinated embryonic seeds from over heating. The longer the embryonic seeds stay unpollinated, the more trichomes develop and the more potent the flowers. Once pollinated, the plant does not need to protect any embryonic seeds, therefore trichome production ceases and the plant will invest all of its energy into growing the seeds. If you are relatively early in flowering, some newer parts of the flowers may be seedless, but even at this early stage, a decent amount of pollen will ensure whatever flowers there are already, will be fully seeded and there is a high likelihood that there will be enough residual pollen in your grow space to continue fertilizing any new growths, but removing the hermie plant asap can reduce the incidence of further pollination/fertilization. If it were me, I would remove the hermie asap, continue growing and hope for the best. Then again, if they are all heavily seeded, starting over might be a painful but more realistic option. Hope this helps, Organoman.