Disclaimer:

This post is about medical/recreational cannabis.
I recommend you don't use it.
It could be illegal in your country.
Be careful!

---

plant no.2 - untouched;
not defoliated in any way

---

Correction

5 days ago, I wrote about lollipopping.
I have since changed my mind.
I have also since found the clip I was referring to, then:
Youtube video of Bugbee explaining, timestamped

I was wrong. About what Bugbee said and about my results here.
When this post is published, I will edit the older post and include a correction.

I don't recommend lollipopping anymore

Under lamps, under certain conditions, it's good.
In my situation here, with this autoflower genetic, it's pointless.

• more work
• lower yield
• unnecessary stress for the plant

The plant in the picture above, was never trained in any way.
It yields more than the other plant, by far, while the airflow seems perfectly sufficient.

---

I apologize for the poor quality of the picture - my phone's lense just can't do closeups any better.
Please vote for this post and maybe I'll purchase a clip-on macro lense. 🧐

---

Final Bud

Above, you can see the final product.
This is what this whole enterprise was about. (And for the experience itself of course, which was already worth every minute)

I took one of the lower, poorer buds, heavily trimmed and dried it aggressively - as I want to try some of that harvest this weekend. It's still dark green and far from dried out, but the moisture levels are below the treshold now, where I'd have to worry about mould.

I'll slow down the drying for the rest of the buds, and cure them more carefully.
There are no hints of any problems. I feel confident enough now, to call it a succesful grow.

Processing

There are other ways to process cannabis;
I'll stick to trimming the buds, drying and then curing them.

And even with this process, there are countless different ways to go about it.
The goal is to end up with dry flowers, that smoke well. While minimizing the loss of terpenes and cannabinoids in the process.

If they dry too slowly, mould and different fungi may ruin the buds.
If they dry too quickly, terpenes and cannabinoids will be lost and there will be too much carbohydrates and chlorophyll left.

I really haven't settled for a fixed method, but for now:
I'll try to get as much moisture out as possible during the first 2-3 days of drying, by hanging the buds and blowing a fan on them, directly. This evaporates a load of cannbinoids and terpenes and my apartment smells like a coffeeshop in Amsterdam. 😟
Then I will remove the fan and slow down the drying.
Then move the buds into containers to slow the drying down even more (and eventually stop it).

Actual fermentation is mostly regarded as undesirable, but I had some heavily fermented weed before and I liked it. Maybe not as potent, but certainly much smoother.

About all the other steps up to this point I was confident, but with these last steps, I have little experience and some bad prior experiences.

I'll try different containers and moisture levels and see what works best.

---

This was the first plant - and will also be the last this season.
I'll refer to it as 'plant alpha' from now on

---

Future

'Plant alpha' still only started flowering.
It's the only photoperiodic plant I have.

The advantage over automatics is obvious: It promises a much larger yield;
While the 2 autos combined will probably end up producing under 25g (just from eyeballing it), this plant could end up yielding more than 50g of dried flower, total, which would be above the legal limit and I'd have to destroy some of it.

The disadvantage is also obvious: This plant has been growing for 4 months now;
It would be much bigger, if I hadn't restricted it with a tiny pot.
It will at least take another 4 weeks to finish, perhaps much longer. This means mid to late October, which brings cold, wet weather.
Flowering is the most important stage, but the sun won't be nearly as intense as earlier in the year, the air will be more humid and we might even experience temperatures below freezing in october.

Initially, I did not expect the automatics to perform this well.
Even the density of the bud is ok. I don't expect the photoperiodic to do much better...

From now on, I will stick to automatics.
Just the fact that they grow and finish this quickly makes them avoid all sorts of problems.
They are simply much better suited for my setup here and overall easier to handle.