Fast Buds Tester FF 9 - Mostly Indica

Plants were harvested on 3/18/20. She was hung completely intact, no leaves removed. In retrospect, I am going to start removing all fan leaves before hanging. They can still get a slow dry from all the other plant content but A) they are so much easier to remove wet and B) I think they actually hindered the dry too much. They had last been watered on 3/14/20 so I expected them to be prime in terms of water content. Drying conditions were near perfect RH wise. I remained between 45-50 which is a huge improvement from my last dry. Normally my RH is on the very low end (30s) so I used a humidifier to keep the room even. The temp in the room however was dropping down to 60. I did not want to run the heater because my goal was to achieve the slowest dry possible. I thought things were going great. I had made it to day 7, the longest I had ever gone when I started to get some concern regarding how slow it was actually going with those temps. It was day 7 and it still felt like it could be 4-5 days. I had not encouraged the best airflow and so I decided to open the room up to allow the temps to equalize and to encourage the airflow. I placed my fan in the next room and aimed it at the wall before the actual room to keep it from aiming directly on the plants. This helped bring the plants to a point where they were ready for cure within the next day, day 9 (which I did not love because I then began worrying about missing my cure window). Flower went into the jars on 3/29/20 fully trimmed. RH was pretty high so the buds were left on the rack several times to lower RH. RH stabilized to 65 and a Boveda pack was added to help keep them in the zone. Now lets talk about the weight. As I mentioned in the review of the HPS used, I was a bit disappointed with the performance on this first grow with HPS. I would have expected to double my weight in harvest going from T5's to HPS. The return was about equivalent if not less than my last T5 grow. I know Fastbuds is quality genetics and so I do not believe it is the fault of the plant. Every single plant was a disappointment weight wise. I think my unexpected absence affected the overall performance. The quality of the smoke was the best out of the grow. The smell did not really retain nor did the purple coloring in the plant. Instead it lead to what looked like darker colored buds. This was a nice uplifting and relaxing smoke with a great quality high. At this point we are past week 4 of cure and she is just about gone lol. She was certainly the most potent. She is easily my favorite strain i grew of five (FF3 & FF6 also in the garden). She did receive a few minor seeds from the self pollinating FF3 in the garden but it was nothing of concern.