Partially harvest, then flower the rest longer?

[buddy_boy]

Pretty much as the title says...

Single plant, final few days of flushing. What I was wondering is if you can harvest the fully developed upper buds, then add the flowering nutes and maybe go for several more weeks to develop the lower buds. I was thinking they'd get more light/nutes now the plant is quite stripped. Or would it be so stripped it's bound to die, or at least not grow much?

Certainly you wouldn't lose much by trying this. If the plant dies etc., well the under-developed buds could still be harvested, probably no worse. I just want to know if this is almost certainly pointless/stupid, I don't have much experience growing stuff (obviously....). But I've often read of people doing a partial harvest (with hydro) of an individual plant, but that's all the detail they said and I wonder what/how they do it.

Thanks.

 

[grow_right]

i do this when i am desperate for the girls to finish. i take what i want, then allow the rest to carry on.

 

[buddy_boy]

How about if I'm taking "most" of the plant? And just leaving the lower part of the plant to grow more. Naturally I have to cut off some pretty thick stems for the buds. I want to remove a bunch of the fan leaves around what's harvested too. Can a plant even survive after that abuse?

It is NL, this is its 11th week of flowering (incl. 12 days flush) and is due for harvesting now (looks a bit past due). I think it's about 3'/1m high.

 

[lobsterbush]

Sure you can do a partial harvest. But I would be carefull with adding more nutes. What kind of medium and nutes are you running?

 

[buddy_boy]

Sorry for being so dumb, but how will it grow without nutes? A very simple hydro system that doesn't exactly fit into a category but is closest to DWC I guess, but without the "deep water" and the culture lol. DNF nutes.

This isn't my first grow at all (hard to tell eh?), but I've been doing everything the same way each time lately. Wanting to break out of the rut a bit and increase (good quality) yield, only one plant this time after all. Objective is to turn the popcorn into steak. Maybe it's not worth the effort, the popcorn isn't useless when it comes to begging time.

Suppose I cut off the top half of the plant, as an example of ruthless partial harvesting. Is it possible the plant won't die? It seems to me it should die, but I really don't know... I thought you had to be careful "pruning" after flowering, and this is pretty extreme pruning.

I didn't want to go to the trouble of starting the leftover plant with nutes for a few more weeks, then having to flush for another 10+ days etc., only to find out nothing worthwhile happens, and I'm no better off than now. When I could maybe have been starting a new grow instead.

 

[lobsterbush]

I can't really advise you on feeding in hydro since I have only grown in organic soil. But I can say that from my experience the lowers won't really grow much more, just mature a little more with the added light, and get a little more dense.

Maybe you should ask in the hydro section about feeding after the main chop. Good luck

 

[sneaky101]

I can't really advise you on feeding in hydro since I have only grown in organic soil. But I can say that from my experience the lowers won't really grow much more, just mature a little more with the added light, and get a little more dense.

Maybe you should ask in the hydro section about feeding after the main chop. Good luck

What he said from my exp. but every time I let the popcorn mature like you are asking, I never added any nutes. Just gave them more time.

 

[paulo73]

Same here

Same here

What he said from my exp. but every time I let the popcorn mature like you are asking, I never added any nutes. Just gave them more time.

I had plants, mainly long flowering time sativas, that the branches seemed to mature individually so i had to do several harvests. But i stopped feeding them before the first harvest.

 

[bmaster]

Buddy boy
I've harvested the top half a number of times, because I believe you should leave on as many leaves as possible till you're very close to harvest. Naturally the lower buds take longer to finish and the lack of light doesn't allow them to finish and change to the nice colour the tops get.

I should add, that I believe you should use a ripening nutrient even after flush to allow the plant to continue to get nourishment. It's lower on npk than regular bloom nutes. A good one is botanicare cns17 ripe.

 

[dansbuds]

I've done it a few times & never really seen a big enough difference in the buds left to fatten up to make it worth the extra time . yeah they get a little denser but they don't get alot bigger .

just my opinion

 

[buddy_boy]

Thanks guys.

I have to contradict something I asked above, because while flushing (on the third batch of just pH-adjusted water now) there have in fact been a helluva lot of new bud sites. So yes, as you say, it does still grow without nutes. Part of my problem, and why I specifically keep the plants short, is my 400W HPS can only reach down so far. And this is a dense plant. An astonishing (to me) amount of half-developed lower buds, many more than I've ever had. Which led me to the initial Q.

I think I'll decide what to do after I harvest the good stuff and see what's left of the plant. If I carry on, I won't use any of my regular nutes at least.

 

[Smokin Joe]

Add about 2 tbl spoons of molasses per gallon of water. Theres just enough micro to see you through. Like others have said they wont get much bigger but will get better

 

[GadgetGuy]

That would be a tough call considering my electric bill, but I usually have something ready to go right in behind the current grow. I usually use every little bit of the bottom for butter though so I don't mind light airy buds.

 

[buddy_boy]

Just a follow-up... I was disappointed with the yield of this plant, but "tests" lol show the quality to be very high. Maybe I'm spoilt by previous grows, but this thing grew fast and was like a small tree trunk-wise very quickly, with lots of massive leaves and then bud sites, so I expected more. Should have pruned a lot more leaves for a start.

My problem is vertical height, only have 4' from bench top to the 400W lamp. Tall plant means the largest cola got too close to the lamp too quickly, yet too much of the rest of the growth was quite far away.

I am going to try SCROG now. I think I have enough experience to not screw it up. It sounds exactly designed for the vertical space problem I have. Funny I never ran into this before (plant height), but as I get more experienced (mostly with the nutes) I have noticed the plants getting bushier and taller (all have been the same type, from seed).