OK we're at week 13 now as I've been a bit lazy because not much is happening at this stage. She is absolutely chunky and dense with trichomes everywhere but mostly white pistils so now I just wait.
I'll update this quickly to week 12 then I'll do week 13 straight away...
freddd how many stars do you give the slug 33, I am a bho guy myself, but would convert since there are no chemicals involved. do you think it squeezes out most of the oil? thanks
@SHAMMYDOG, oh yes the slug is excellent it gets as much squish as anything, I get about 20% or 10-15% for the lower quality stuff. I'm about to start a reddit thread where I'll be juicing a lot of my current Moby Dick, you can find it at Reddit/r/slug33 should be some stuff up in a few days. I used to just use ethanol, but the slug is a lot of fun to use. Especially with some mods. https://youtu.be/FaFni3zeK54
@RastaMouse, Hey thanks Ganjaman, I'm pretty pleased considering how she looked at 9 weeks. Her two sisters are in my DIY grow they are growing totally differently.
@Salgeezi, thanks man. Yeah this is a good question, the answer is that it comes from experience but that experience has to come from working with a healthy plant, because defoliating needs a healthy plant and root system.
Next one needs to believe that defoliating heavily is a good thing. This is too high a bar for many people. This is not a blind belief like religion, it's a belief based on evidence that one has seen.
Now I'm still working it out myself but basically if the plant is healthy it appears that it's not really possible to over defoliate, up to a point of course. So the question is not how much to defoliate the question is 'what do this big frikken leaves do exactly'?
Do they provide magic stores of goodness which are necessary to pump up the flowers later? This is what our emotions tell us, but our logic tells us no. I'm still working this out. But I can say this my very first grow was the OG Kush, take a look at that at day 50 it was this massive bush and I knew shit about defoliating, by the time I finished it looked pretty poorly, looks how sad she looks at the 50 day scrog. I thought at the time I'm not even going to get 2 zips here, but look at the result, 13 zips, that's madness. So because of that and only because of that I just completely let go on my Think Big and that pulled 18 ounces.
Now as I said I'm still working it out and I'm growing smaller plants with more variety these days, on my current DIY grow I have two orange buds, I might treat them differently and see.
Oh one other thing is that I don't have exhaust just an open room and it's quite humid here so defoliating helps there too completely separate.
I haven't been growing long enough to think that I have all the answers regarding defoliating. I mean on my current Moby Dick I'm leaving a lot of large fan leaves around the outside because they are not covering anything. However I did cut a bunch off because I'm still not sure about whether it causes some sort of beneficial shock to the plant. Does cutting a bunch of mature leaves alter the hormones and signals in some way? Possibly, there's so much to find out.
Freddd Question... I have a friend running a system similar to yours , but his ppms keeps going up, he keeps adding straight water to his rez, maybe a gallon every other day, but still it climbs up. He is in flower, is this normal?
@SHAMMYDOG, Hey shammy, I have my new DIY shallow water culture diary, it's been designed to avoid all the normal problems that people get with DWC. Check it out.
Freddd
