“Stella” DarkStar #2

The harvest of my dear Stella was supposed to happen on August 4th, but didn’t begin actually until August 9th. I decided to allow her to dry out a bit before beginning the harvest, but I had some other difficulties which made her dry out a whole lot before I ever even got started. You can tell how dry by looking at the pics and video. Luckily, the dryness was limited to her larger leaves. She was already quite dry on the 9th when I started, and was more so by the 12th when I finished. Even after the advanced drying, her wet trimmed weight was still quite a bit. I’ll list the weights all together in a bit. It took 4 days to get the whole plant trimmed, weighed, and hung up for final drying. She was hung up from August 12th till Friday, August 19th. I got busy harvesting another plant while she was hanging up, and just let her be. On August 19th I took all of her branches down and removed the buds to get the true harvest weight of her buds alone. Let’s get to the weight of the whole thing. The overall wet-trimmed weight of the plant was 18.329 ounces with the buds and branches combined. I was a forgetful idiot and forgot to get the weight of the dry buds on the branches before removing the buds. So all we’re left with is the actual harvest weight of the dry buds alone. The overall dry bud weight, or actual “true” harvest weight of the smokable bud is: 7.317 ounces. That’s a wonderful amount of freshly harvested bud to cure. All of the buds were put into 8 quart sized jars filled roughly 3/4 full, and 1 pint sized jar, also 3/4 full. Each jar has a hygrometer as well as 58% bóveda packs to help aid the curing process. This is the 2nd DarkStar plant I’ve harvested, and both were very large plants. I used a scrog method the first time with a net that spread the whole plant out taking up the entire 4x4 area of the tent. This time I wanted to let her grow more naturally. She got so large that I had to bend almost all of her taller branches over using HST methods. I had to bend 3-5 branches over more than once. By doing that, once her buds began to fatten up she got too heavy and needed to be supported just to stand upright. Toward the end she had to literally be tied up to the side of the tent. Stella (DarkStar) was a wonder to grow, and she gave me a good amount of clones that will soon be harvested themselves. It has been a journey with Stella, and I’m happy that the journey is now complete. Happy growing everyone!