Harvesting a struggling plant or just letting it fight

Well, you have answered your question yourself - "flushed them last feeding and they didn't seem to like it" Not sure why you flushed during the middle of flowering, but to me your plant looks like she is suffering with an over all general poor health, which can probably be linked to flushing the substrate mid flower and removing any nutrients in the substrate that she was feeding on and being in need of, for growth and trichome production. The fact she has "CBD" genetics does not mean she should have less trichomes, it will mean the chemical composition of the trichomes will have more CBD and less THC. Unfortunately I really can't see this plant achieving much more in the way of flower growth or size, I would say a general lack of health and flushing mid flowering have combined to limit this plants potential to give you a great harvest amount. Add defoliation into the mix and "shazam" a recipe for lower yields. Although you say you didn't do any "heavy defoliation", removing any healthy green leaves will just reduce your plants ability to produce energy via photosynthesis, which then further slows growth and can limit flower production, especially if done during flowering. Each leaf is like a "solar panel" feeding into your plants "energy grid". Fewer solar panels = less energy = less growth. It is that simple and plant biology 101. Also, if you are wanting to harvest some rip-snorting flowers, you might need to invest in some better lights, 3 x 32 watt lights are really not adequate for luxuriant growth or mega trichome production. "Flushing" really needs only to be done for the last 7-14 days before harvest when growing in soil and is as simple as just giving plain water for the last week or so before harvest and does not really mean having to pour gallons and gallons of water through the soil. Complete saturation and leaching everything out of the soil is more likely to cause a metabolic shock to your plant, which can lead to the plant "shutting down", hardly something you want to occur right before harvest. Flushing is a process of removing nutrient salts and by just giving plain water for the last week or so will give ample results. Combined with not giving any nutrients in this period naturally. At this point, I would be thinking about harvesting. For your next grow, either getting some better lights may help, otherwise try just growing one or two plants with your current lighting set up, but grow horizontally, SCROG style, so that you have a main flowering canopy that is even in height, meaning you can keep your lights closer to the main flowering area and not have to worry about light getting 3-4 feet down to the bottom of the plants, as what occurs with a vertical growth pattern. I would also suggest buying some seeds from some of the bigger and longer established breeders, their genetics are well proven and will give better results for those new to home cultivation, meaning more time can be spent learning about feeding, watering etc and less worry about the plants abilities. Breeders like Barneys Farm, Humboldt Seed Organization, Dinafem, DNA, TH Seeds, Dutch Passion or my personal favourites, Sweet Seeds, all have plants that will virtually grow themselves, with very little input required from the cultivator, meaning more time can be spent learning the basics and fine tuning your techniques. Starting with easy to grow plants while learning the basic principles, will lead to every harvest being better than the last. Also, try and stop taking in every bit of "advice" your friends or youtubers give you and just go with what you have already learned through YOUR OWN experiences. By now you should have a good base to build upon, however, if you are always seeking quick answers or relying on urban myths perpetuated by arm chair experts, this will just lead you around in circles. Sometimes it is better to switch off from millions of channels of theories and just rely on what YOU FEEL to be correct and is specific to YOUR GROW, in YOUR conditions, with YOUR plants, with YOUR equipment, with YOUR methods and with YOUR chosen nutrients and substrate. When new to anything, it is easy to want to try and know everything one can, getting advice, good or bad, from multiple sources. In the end you generally end up with some facts, a lot of half truths and (mostly) a whole lot of BS! I have been cultivating for private reasons for 35+ years and still learn every time I grow. My foundation came from mainly traditional agriculture, nothing to do with cannabis specifically, learning about plants, their functions and needs. When it came to cannabis cultivation, 95% of the things other home growers were telling me was nonsense and roughly 5% of my knowledge base came from books. (Imagine, if you can, this was in the days before the interweb!) Since then, this journey is now based 100% on my experiences from 100% my techniques. Refinement in techniques and wisdom come very slowly, over many, many years. These days there is very little I take from forums, youtubers (mostly garbage) or Mr Google and rely almost entirely on what my experiences have taught me so far. Each time I grow I like to try new products or techniques and have found to only change one aspect at a time per grow. Once you add multiple variables, there is no way of telling which one produced the desired effect, or the not so desirable effect. So my advice to you is - stay with what you have learned, listen to others advise with a bit of scepticism, stay away from youtubers and experiment a little each grow. Once you have found a product or technique that works for you, stick with it and refine the method until you are 100% happy or prove to yourself that it really wasn't as good as first thought and ignore those that will try and persuade you that their method is better and you are doing everything wrong. Your goals and desires will no doubt be different to theirs and trying to incorporate massive changes before fully exploring your own findings, will, as I said before, leave you running around in circles and scratching your head, wondering what went wrong. Cannabis cultivation is a journey of learning. Trying to run before you can crawl will lead to disappointment and confusion. Start simple, keep it simple and most of all, keep an open mind. Your plants will "tell" you if they are happy or not. Write down everything you do to them and straight away. Thinking you will remember will lead to big blank patches. Add some cannabis inhalation into the mix and it gets even harder to remember what you did to plant G and not to plant D and F. Until I started my own, real, Grow Diary with a pen and book, I thought I could remember everything - well that didn't work! I have now 10+ years of notes about EVERYTHING I have ever done to each and every plant that I have grown since starting with diaries. When I say everything, I mean everything! Soil mix, planting times/dates, moon phases, germination times, seed descriptions, feeding, dates of any training/topping, harvest dates, weeks in flower, first primordia, flower descriptions at harvest, growth rates - you name it, everything gets written down as soon as it is done. If you are keen, send me a message and I will give you the whole list; even the list took years of refinement! Having a diary also allows you to trace what you did with plant K in 2015 when you grow another plant K in 2021. This way everything you learned then, you can transfer to the new plant and be one step ahead already. I can guarantee you, with notes from 2015 to add to the 2021 plant, results will be superior and you can relax and study plant E more closely, knowing plant K is already mostly worked out, despite small phenotypic variations. It was not until I started keeping a dedicated grow diary for myself, that did I see a rapid escalation in results. I now have a basic "formula" of what works for me and in my conditions and this is infinitely more relevant to me and my situation than any youtuber ever will be! Remember too, try new things in your situation every grow, something you thought was "pretty good", may with a little experimentation and tweaking, turn into something truly awesome! Knowledge is power!! Hope this helps and that you made it through my long winded reply! ,......... Organoman. 😎