Harvesting your medical hydroponics marijuana is a make or break process, and so is what you do with your marijuana after you harvest.
Harvesting is also a time to use very creative techniques to increase your marijuana yield and THC potency.
Let’s continue to explore professional harvesting, drying and curing techniques that give you your best buds ever.
One tactic is to do incremental harvesting.
Many hydroponics marijuana growers know that their buds provide different effects depending on when during the bloom cycle they’re harvested.
Incremental harvesting means you wait until your marijuana plants are in peak bloom, and at least 55-75% of the way through their entire bloom phase.
You don’t want to harvest buds until they have resin glands on them.
You harvest a couple of early buds, dry and cure them, and then you smoke ‘em.
You do that every week until you get to final harvest.
Or you can harvest them and cure them, and wait until you’ve done your final harvest and cured it before you sample all the buds to see how the high changes depending on when you harvested.
When you smoke the buds you harvested 2-3 weeks before final harvest, you’ll find they give you a different high than buds you harvested at the end.
In many cases you find you like the earlier high rather than the late high, or equally as much.
Along with medical hydroponics marijuana incremental harvesting, another alternative to waiting until the end of bloom cycle is “selective harvesting.”
There are several selective harvesting strategies, all based on careful monitoring of your resin glands using 10X or stronger magnifying devices so you can gauge the ripeness of your resin glands. I explained this in a previous article.
Some hydroponics growers don’t yet realize that buds aren’t all equally ready for harvest at the same time.
Various factors influence when and where on your hydroponics marijuana plants that your buds will be ripest first.
These factors include root health and development, hydroponics nutrients, hydroponics lighting, C02 levels, root zone beneficial microbes presence, marijuana genetics, how and if you trimmed or otherwise physically manipulated your plants.
Especially if you grow larger hydroponics plants rather than small single-bud clones in sea of green, individual buds on your plants will be ready faster or slower as compared to others.
In a situation in which you’re feeding your plants properly and giving them a perfect grow environment, the buds that are getting the most PAR-intense light are ready the soonest.
PAR-intense light is light delivered in the ideal wavelengths for marijuana plants.
Check out Lush LED and light-emitting ceramic lighting.
Mother Nature is tricky when it comes to ripening your marijuana flowers.
You’ll spend time examining your marijuana buds top to bottom, plant to plant, and see some buds at the bottom of a stem are ready but the ones on top are still fresh and have yield/weight to add.
Or you’ll find that all the buds in the top 25% of your canopy are ready, but those below are not.
Whether you cut all the ripe buds off the top quarter of your plants, or only cut out the ripest buds here or there on the plant as their resin glands start to degrade, healthy marijuana plants respond to selective harvesting by putting more juice into the remaining buds, especially because more light can penetrate into areas of the plant that were shaded before you selectively harvested.
Your bloom season lasts longer than usual because selective harvesting gives marginalized buds a chance to get more light, aeration and development.
If you’re worried about the lack of flushing when you’re doing incremental or selective harvesting, do a mini-flush using only reverse osmosis water for a day before you do a selective harvest.
It’s not as good as using Flawless Finish, but it’s better than no flush at all.
When you do selective harvesting, make sure you accompany it by adding Bud Candy, vitamins, Nirvana, Bud Factor X, and a slightly higher than average base nutrients ppm from pH Perfect base nutrients.
Your hydroponics marijuana plants experience a bit of “shock” when you selectively harvest, so feeding them these healing materials helps them recover so they channel more energy into making the remaining buds bigger and more resinous with THC.
Remember to always keep good records of when and from what part of the plant you cut each bud, so when those buds are dried and cured you will be able to track which buds give you the high you like the most.
One of the main benefits of selective harvesting is that it often increases your total grams per plant because the buds remaining after your selective harvest get more light and have time to grow bigger!
And in almost all cases, selective harvesting gives you more THC per plant, and buds that were cut and their maximum individual ripeness.
Stay tuned for more articles on harvesting, curing and drying your hydroponics marijuana.
It’s all about getting the biggest yields and THC percentages per watt!
