GrowLow

@GrowLow, hi. I checked the pictures and.. yes.. they are far from ripe. A ripe bud looks much different, you can find many examples on here, maybe check out the top growers or diaries of the month. You will recognize an obvious difference in ripeness. All the pistils (the white hair) should shrink and turn orange/brown.. the buds also had a lot of swelling to go for. It is right what you say about the trichomes (the crystals on the bud and sugar leaves) but.. when harvesting we dont consider the trichomes on the little leaves we can see in your picture but look straight at the bud. Those trichomes on the leaves lose colour due to touch by hand or other leaves or other environmental factors. A nice thing about growing is the learning experience 👍 Enjoy bro one more thing: most of the time, in my experience, the average flowering times given by most breeders are quite accurate. Your strain is quite special so I dont know about this one. To consider there is, that flowering does not start at the day you flip the switch but when you see the flowers starting to form. Maybe you trained them just a day before the switch which stunted them a bit and so they took a bit longer to change their hormones and things from growing & schock to flowering.. its like a trauma i know the colour of the fan leaves suggests they are ready but I think you started to flush them too early and starved them of necessary nutrients for growth and ripening. Stay strong 👊 another thing that just came to mind: when looking at other grows for comparison, dont just look at the pictures in the week of harvest, also look at the weeks right before.. see if you find the stage you chopped yours in reference. I think in some cases you could be 4 to 5 weeks off (they really look great and I think if you do it like this again, just with more patience in the end, you will be a very happy person) 👽

@@@Spaceman, Thanks a ton for taking the time to comment in such a detailed way. I'm checking out some comparisons now per your suggestion. And you are right, I did count the day I flipped to 12/12, so your opinion that I'm early is probably correct. The info of looking at trichomes directly on the buds versus the leaves is something I'll take with me into the next grow for sure. Those did throw off my judgement. To be perfectly honest, I was actually surprised I had gotten them this far given my lack of experience. I'm very satisfied knowing that this grow brought me a lot of experiences and new knowledge (including your thoughts and suggestions!), even if I sold it short some by taking it down early. Thanks again! I have some White Widow seedlings maturing now as I prepare them for their first transplant, so if you see me stepping on any landmines in that grow, I'm all ears!

@@@@Spaceman, This is my first grow as I'm sure you saw, I researched as much as I could about when to harvest and most were saying that when all the trichomes were mostly cloudy and a few amber started to appear that that was the best time. On three plants, most of the trichomes were cloudy, and I did start to see some amber on them. Especially one plant was far more ready than the other three as it had a LOT of amber. Since I have to dry in the same tent they were flowering in, I chose to harvest now, I'm sure you're correct that they could have gone longer (breeder said 63-73 days,and I went on 63). On my next run I will have a separate drying space from my flowering space, and so if certain plants become ready before others, I can harvest them as they are ready, instead of all at once. I'm adding a couple of pictures now of the one I thought was most ready so you can see what I mean. I'll add notes with them with your name on them so you can see which I mean. Thanks for the comments bro, I can use all the critique I can get! EDIT: Added some pics for you to look at. Let me know if you agree on this particular plant or if you think even this one was too early. Thanks dude! (If you look at the pic of all four before cut down, this is the plant in the back left corner with the most color)

@OrganicChronic,That light exposure thing makes sense, because on some of my stems the top side looks purple but not the bottom. Does that necessarily mean too much light? At this point I cannot move my light any further away, since it's at the top of the adjustments. The next set of plants I'm going to flower I will be sure to keep shorter by topping and controlling the veg time and canopy better.

Wow, looking great! It looks like a bat rack in those dark pics - got some Louisville Sluggers in there!

So THIS is what my plants are supposed to look like! Hah! The structure of your plants looks super similar to mine, Indica dominant? Mine have had purple stems from very early on, despite feeding Cal-Mag nearly every watering. I've read it's possible that that could be genetic though, so maybe I'm fighting a non-existent enemy.

@OrganicChronic,Read the latest updates and look at my pics when you get a chance. I kicked myself in the nuts pretty hard. Let me know if you think this is recoverable. Good news is the clones look great and I'm not killing with too much of anything, so if all else fails, they can rise from the ashes of this grow!