Do you flush your cannabis plants before harvest?

Okay, “flushing is to help increase the fade in the plants” Being able to use up the chlorophyll is a good thing. Rinsing is the better option. Instead of running 4-5 gallons of water through your media, try using 1 full gallon with a seaweed/kelp. This will help remove ( if there is any, NITROGEN) which is directly correlated to chlorophyll. This will increase the plants using the remainder of its nutrition from the leaves. Flushing, I think , is for heavy synthetic users who can push the envelope with CO2 enhancement, VPD, etc. Realistically if looking at ratios : 0:3:3 at 500 ppm’s is what is suggest for late bloom period. This is the same ppm’s fed in early veg. This is why I believe RINSING is the better option. Your plant is coming off 900-1100 ppm’s and you need to get the media down to 500, it’s not going to take 1 week for the plant to utilize that ( it’s going to take longer ). So from 900-1100, 1 gallon of water with kelp would help get the plant into that range or even permit a light feeding pre-fade, instead of flushing EVERYTHING out.

In organic soil it's not necessary, but I do stop feeding about a week before as these nutes would mainly go to waste anyhow - the plant takes a moment to process and utilise them from soil anyhow, and giving a slight assist to fade makes for pretty colours, which is why I also already feed a bit less the last couple times I do feed. However, totally starving your plant while it's still bulking up won't bring any benefit but might affect your yields negatively.

Flushing is to help get rid of excess salts, if your organic there is no excess salts.

just before 17m -- less flushing actually correlated with slightly higher terpene levels, but again, not statistically significant. so it likely does not impact terpene levels at all. And my bad, this is a published, peer-reviewed study... it's the real deal. Like i said this is mostly ppl without any science knowledge extrapolating with an extreme lack of facts and understanding... it's bound to be wrong more than right on anything our senses cannot resolve.. we will even lie to ourselves.. hence the need for blind taste tests.

Hello. I flush because it helps the smoke taste less harsh. Yes, I use dechlorinated tap water. Do an experiment yourself to find out which way you want to go. Grow 2 of the same plant and flush 1 at the end. You decide which is best for you. Good Luck on your choice. Chuck.

https://hightimes.com/grow/new-research-shows-flushing-plants-before-harvest-may-be-unnecessary/ one note.. it says "tended to prefer the unflushed" buds.. but this is bad journalism or not understainding what "statistically significant" means... it was within normal volatiliy given sample size, so it should be thought of as 50/50 as to who prefered flush/unflushed. also, while again not statistically significant, another morsel from the research was that the flushed buds had more Fe in them and i think somethign else... was rlated to coco and how it can leech and release cations that can cause weird imbalances in what the plant takes up in solution. flushing actually made it have a tiny bit extra mieral content bwahaha. the exact opposite of what ppl blindly repeated for decades. there was more minerals in the flushed buds to soem small extent... F'n HILARIOUs!!! lol love it! but irrelevant cause it could have been a fluke too. hightimes is a shit source, but you can find this reaserch on youtube.. i think the phD was intereviewd by the migrow guy? yeah..memory coming back. so you can see the doctor speak about the results directly without this layer of misinterpretation in the article.

They flush because it was a commonly held belief for decades. "they" gave reasons like 'it lowers mineral content which makes it taste better' type statements without ever actually proving it. Imagine buying into it.. it does make sense superficially even sounds science-based... yet, it never was. So, faced with the fact you did somethign for 10-20 years,potentially, and it was utterly useless, how would that make you feel? Nobody is dumb for this... anybody can fall for it. It is someting repeated throughout history ad nausuem. We as a species fall for it over and over again. Like in USA some small faction was eating horse dewormer to fight against covid, ffs... LOL anecdotal knowledge is only sometimes true and not something you should put blind trust into, and mostly only correct about stuff we can easily resolve with our basic senses. Most things we can't actually see what is going on or feel or hear etc.. we are quite clueless to 99.99% of reality that sorrounds us. In the absence of knowledge we follow the crowd. Take THC.. it is mostly colorless and odorless, but the culture projects all sorts of attributes to smell and color related to potency... it may be correlated, but the smell itself has nothing to do with a mostly odorless molecule, obviously... it may correlate with the health of the plant which would be a correlation to higher THC %, but a particular smell or color on a plant does not cause anything on its own. Zero causality and only potential correlation it is nice to be lazy at end... when i am hand-watering i might not mix nutes up the last irrigation or 2 on occasion, but i it's purely because i am lazy. I know it will only make a fraction of a percent difference if that, given timeline and the fact my canopy is usually highly functional (healthy) at that point and won't deteriorate much in 5-7 days. I don't even pH it, but my tap is 7.0, which is good enough.. it'll lower in substrate with leftover nutes present. it's funny, just a couple years ago my comments would have been blasted left and right, and was.. i was insulted and told that i should follow becuase he grows good weed and i should just blindly accept it as realtiy. Why would a pro do something useless for so long? What could i posibly know that this long-time grower with lots of success doesnt? Well, that guy clearly never took an advanced chemistry or biology class in his life, that's one thing, LOL. It's easy to get fooled by this stuff if absent of any real science knowledge. It's not something you can guess at unless you are einstein, and only matbe he'd still need some foundational knowledge to extrapolate from.. can't learn it through diffusion or willing it to be. Who knows, many still might try to blast what i say, but they stay a bit quieter now. I think it's finally sinking in and newer ppl aren't as influneced by the misinformation out there cause there's something better to trust. My early anecdotal exp i miscalculated flush and missed it.. buds turned out as good or better than normal, tasted better, and i quit doing it. That alone is not enough to trust. no matter if correct, it's lucky without real evidence proving consistency in causality with suitable sample sizes. This is never about personal feeligns for me... it's about pursuit of truth and knowledge... we all believe somethign that is wrong in any randomly chosen moment of our lives... i pride myself of dropping false knowledge like a bad habit even if i cheerleaded it before, because i am not personally attached to it... Being wrong is never a bruise to my ego. I want to be corrected. i want to know the truth. ppl are more afraid of being wrong than anything else it seems, so they often cling to any commonly held belief. We will be inevitably more often wrong than right until we gain the appropriate amount of knoweldge on any topic.. being wrong is not shameful in any way unless it is willful ignorance... Willfully not trying to learn is shameful. it leads nowhere but teh same places we've already been and this is basically still the dark ages, fcs. Around same time or shortly after my mistake, i found or was passed a youtube vid link and had found slightly informal experiments with qualified ppl and equipment to do it right on my own, but with this question it's not really demanding an extravagent experiment. Either, it has more shit in the buds or it does not comparing flushed to non-flushed... a black and white answer is pretty easy for this question vs. most research topics that are much more complicated and 90% of the time proven false at a later date. With any complicated question, it is safer to wait and see further studies' results. Initial studies are fodder for local tv news broadcasts.. some sensational dreck for ppl to see and ooh-aaahh about or say -- "well, they said the opposite last time." which is really them just not realizing the context and continueingn to be fooled by the same dreck initial studies, lol. However, something black and white like measuring mineral content is no problem to trust. we've done it before and do it well as a species. old, proven methods done well repeatedly. just as yu can trust how your pH pen works, EC meter or your hygrometer work.. becaue life is causal.. it is not mystical.

Edit......... "in normal amounts and at normal intervals"....... That is, there is no need to drown your plants with gallons of water, just water as normal, at normal intervals with plain water for the last 10-14 days and this is all that is needed for a "flush". The main thing is to stop all ferts/nutes for the last 10-14 days before harvest. Hope this helps, Organoman.

I just stop all fertilizers/nutrients for the last 10-14 days before harvest and use just plain water in normal amounts and in normal quantities as my pre-harvest "flush" routine. Even though I only ever grow organically in soil, there is a noticeable difference in taste and aroma when this is done, compared to not stopping with ferts/nutes until only a day or two before harvest, even with organics. I would never grow without this 10-14 day "nutrient free zone" before harvest time ever again. I have been growing for 35+ years and can definitely tell the difference between flushed and non-flushed - it makes a big difference - all for the better!