Second Grow - Aero - AlphaKronik F2

4/14/2020 - Starting to feel like a crazy person. These girls are just not finishing. The very tip top of several buds is completely amber, visible to the naked eye, while only a couple inches lower I'm still seeing almost zero amber. I read another piece on determining ripeness through additional indicators, and they also show that I have a little time. My pistils are pretty much all faded, and the top-most pistils have retracted into the calyx a bit. Waiting on the rest of the bud to catch up. I don't mind a little bit of this harvest getting couch-locky (separate it out for night time) as long as I'm getting the majority of the flowers up to primo goodness. It would be a shame to harvest early and put all this waiting to waste. I dimmed the lights a bit last week hoping that would simulate decreased daylight-- or at least save some cash-- and convince these girls to finish up. I also dropped PPM to 1100 max, often pushing it down to ~800 PPM on top off. Leaves have stopped dying for the most part, and the fade seems to be setting in more normally now. There's a decent amount of brown in the top layer of the canopy, and remaining leaves are fading at a rate more commensurate with the ripening of the flowers. In other words, I'm not worried about these girls making it to full ripeness, just getting tired of waiting. Odor is medium/low, but I'm hoping that points to me keeping temps down and not losing valuable terps more than anything! If they smell really strong, it means all that odor is being lost from the plant. I'm getting real thirsty for these buds, but holding off chopping for as long as I can stand. Can't wait to dry/trim/cure these girls, squish some for rosin, and hash out/press the larfy buds. Tons of time for it right now anyways. 4/16/2020 - Tonight I took a sample bud from each plant to check ripeness. I trimmed away a couple sugar leaves to get a clearer view of the trichomes, put the loupe to my eye, put the bud to the loupe (under ripe), then went and apologized to my neighbor for the extreme gassy odor. Holy hell, @Alphakronik-genes you breed some nice ladies. 4/17/2020 - Things have literally progressed overnight. Amber trichs have made their way further down into the canopy, and I feel like they're definitely going to finish up just fine. The Alphakronik is maybe a five days out from 48 hours of dark. The other two ladies in the tent are just a few days ahead of that. May chop those without light deprivation. Gotta start prepping for harvest now!