White Widow Auto - First Real Grow

Day 78 - I'm continuing to keep an eye on trichomes and water with 6.4-6.6 pH water as needed. I'm really surprised I'm not seeing any amber trichomes at all at this point. The buds on plant 1 are so dense I'm kind of worried about bud rot when drying. I've got the harvest tent ready to go at 65 degrees and 50% RH. When I think a plant is ready for harvest I'll give it 24 hours of dark before chopping. As far as my next grow, I decided I'm going to finish this one up and have a day where there's nothing going on in the grow tent so I can do things like wipe any and all dust off my light, fan/filter maintenance, clean up the tent floor, and all of that kind of stuff. I'm definitely going to pop my remaining 8 seeds I have of this strain for my next grow and see what I can do with those. I'm a little nervous about a few different things regarding this strain, mainly herms and keeping a close on twice as many plants as I did for this grow, but I want to try again and see how much I can improve. --- Day 79 - Breaking with tradition on pictures and putting up a couple of only trichomes. Just wanted to note that all plants are showing an amber trichome here and there about 36 hours after the last pictures were taken. I'm going to let the light run for one more "day", or about 17 hours, then all the plants are going into 24 hours of dark before getting cut down. --- Day 81 - Chopped down all three plants at about noon. I also forgot to take pictures as I went so I've only got a picture of the plants hanging. I took off a few of the biggest fan leaves but I think I'm going to have to take a branch off of plant 1. Two colas ended up growing kind of together and there's an area in between them that's all white (from no chlorophyll) that looks like prime real estate for mold. Otherwise I'm going to let them hang whole and dry like that for a few days until I can just pick off the major fan leaves. Then when the stems start to pop when they bend I'll jar things up and go from there. I've been curing my own stash for the last ~4 years so I actually have some confidence in that part. I'll update when things are dry and weighed out. --- Day 82 - I was getting nervous about plant 1 and bud rot so first thing this morning I went and took every cola off the plant. About 5 colas in I made the discovery that nobody wants to...bud rot. I think it's only showing up on this one bud, but I'm not sure if the white areas on other buds are the beginnings of mold or if it's just areas that lack chlorophyll. I posted some pictures to help identify. Update: I decided to wet trim plant 1 to help me keep an eye on any potential mold and to speed up the drying process. I figured it's a choice between buds that dried too quick and buds that turned moldy, so I'd rather have them dry too quick. I separated the buds into two groups, those with areas of white and those without. The white areas don't look like mold, but I don't want to take a chance. I trimmed the two groups separately and I'm also going to dry them separately. The group of buds with no white gets to dry in the tent and the buds with white are just going to sit out with lots of air exposure. I'd rather have nasty dry bud that is usable than moldy bud that isn't. Also, I just had to weigh the main cola and after trimming it was 76 grams wet. I'm glad there's more weight than I was expecting but now I'm pretty much freaking out about plants 2 and 3. Did plant 1 get moldy for the reason I suspect, because the buds were too dense and too close, or was it the conditions in the tent? I don't know for sure and I don't want to assume that the other plants are just going to be fine. I'm about five minutes from heading to the grow store, getting a hanging drying rack, and just wet trimming the entire harvest. Any advice is appreciated. --- Day 84 - No more mold has showed up. I broke every piece of bud off every stem with plant 1 just to get as much air as possible moving through the buds. It's going to look like crap in the jars, but it's not going to have mold on it :) I took every branch off of plants 2 and 3 that were touching another branch so there's no areas where buds are touching other buds. That white growth inside the buds that I was worried about (like in the picture that says "future bud rot?") actually turns green after it's been exposed to air for a little while. The one little part that turned brown/rusty was actually the top of one of the colas and I think it's actually light burn that turned that one little part brown. It's the only place on the entire plant that that brown material has showed up. I was worried I wouldn't be able to cure plant 1 but things are drying slowly even though I've got it all pulled apart. The smell that comes from the buds when you disturb them a little is pretty amazing and it makes me want to do everything I can to keep that smell. Speaking of smell, the grape smell from plant 2 is getting stronger and plant 3 now smells exactly like mashed garlic cauliflower. I was pretty hopeless a couple of days ago but now I feel optimistic that everything I have now will go into jars at some point. Next update will have weights and final results.