The Final Four Weeks for the Win

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Welcome Skunkers! Today’s article – The Final Four Weeks for the Win – is all about finishing up your buds with the most resin production you can squeak out. Coincidentally, this will also contribute to your yields. Yields, not in that massive vegetable type growth, but pretty much pure calyxes and resin. Who wants to smoke more vegetable matter? Not me.

Sure, you could get bigger buds by continually pumping them with food through flowering. But, is that what you want? I don’t think so. This is going to be all about finishing your buds in living soil. Using hydro or liquid nutrients changes some of the important points of this article and so will not be very helpful to you. The difference between buds finished correctly and incorrectly is night and day. Make no mistake. Okay then, let’s rock and roll…

Leaves are Batteries for Finishing Your Buds

Okay, serial pruning is bad! Part of the leaves’ job is to supply food that is stored back to the plant when it needs it. Water too. They are solar panels as well, basically eating light and making food with it for the plant. Starting around four weeks before harvest your plant should be starting to cannabilize itself. This is also known as fading. In healthy living soil this progression moves slowly. In hydroponic, or liquid fed plant gardens it moves swiftly.

The Fade is Simply the Plant Cannibalizing Itself for Food and It Is All Good

Your plant selects leaves to cannabilize based on how efficient those leaves are … like, she will cannabilize leaves that are lower on the plant first that are out of the best light … So, if you like to prune your plants like lollypop style, just take off the axial branches and leave the mainstem leaves for the plant to use later. During the last couple of weeks before harvest your plant should be fully cannibalizing leaves to survive. This makes for the highest quality smoke. It also produces the most resin and larger flowers—yup.

Gradually Dropping PPM per Environment

The Last Four Weeks is Where the Rubber Meets the Road

Dropping your PPM value of your plant water is essentially dropping outside nutritional levels. Let me give you an example. Flowering a 10 week plant or a 16 week plant, the final four weeks is where the rubber meets the road. I also want to say here that different genetics require you to tweak things a little bit. Sometimes you will have “Hog” types, extra hungry for food and water. For these you would keep your numbers higher. PPM values higher. Other plants (genotypes) are highly efficient. They are very adept at acquiring nutrients from the soil, processing them, and even storing them. Here’s a standard model of mine:

I normally run my plant water up around the mid 60’s PPM-wise.
Right around four weeks until harvest I drop the PPM of my plant water to the low 60’s.
At right around two weeks before harvest I drop the PPM to mid 50’s.
During the last seven to ten days, it’s just pure groundwater at around 49 or 50 PPM.

That’s how easy that is, right? Now, I want to explain a bit about your nitrogen (N) supply to your plant for those final four weeks. It should be already present in your living soil. Longer term nitrogen. Non soluble, not rapidly available. The N you want here is in your soil already from things like feather meal, bone meal, fur/hair, rice, seeds … You never want to add any additional rapidly available nitrogen during the last four weeks. No blood or fish meal. No guanos or manure. Even additions of things like alfalfa meal should be curbed. This matters huge! It’s the difference between good buds and crazy good buds—believe it.

Finishing Your Buds – The Cherry(s) on the Cake

Another huge problem area from my perspective here is the slamming of P (phosphorous) additions during flowering … Wrong! … Much like the N example above, you want your plants using the P already in the soil plus the plant’s stored P to make it through the last 4 weeks. Dumping higher P on your plants during the last 4 weeks of flowering is very counterproductive. This often has a negative effect on the soil’s pH as well. This of course causes additional problems.

End Up with the Best Buds by Avoiding Excessive P Additions at the End

We can’t really talk about the last four weeks for the win without mentioning things like CO², temps and humidity, and light heights. First of all, don’t ever use CO²if you are growing in living soil. It is overkill that can hyper-metabolize your plants. This causes them to grow faster than they can keep up with, as far as nutrients. Also, I recommend dropping your overall temps by about 5 degrees for the last two weeks—this seems to help with bud density quite a bit. Don’t run the humidity too low during the final two weeks either. 40% to 55% is all good.

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Watering Skills and Timing for Finishing Your Buds

During the last four weeks before harvest the plants’ water needs will increase, so it’s good to get a benchmark on water needs. Time it out one time then use a reminder. I also often use a prewatering dynamic like so:

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In my 3 gallon containers, my flowering plants use almost ½ gallon of water each, every third day for the last four weeks before harvest. About three weeks before harvest I start using 4 cups of water—bottom watered in the tray—the day before they will need a full watering. I love this method and it makes for some extra happy plants! This avoids over watering and gives the plants a little buffer to avoid potentially drying out too much. Over watering and drought stress can both easily fry your top shelf harvest potential.

Lastly here, I do recommend you allow your plants to actually go into drought stress at harvest time. It certainly seems to me after decades of doing this, that the terpenes are significantly pronounced.

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Afterword

Well then, that’s about it for me today. Want some kickass cannabis genetics to grow? Make sure to swing by Kingdom Organic Seeds and don’t miss the Gambler’s section for some way awesome deals. Grab a copy of my latest book on growing all natural cannabis, even in containers, without bottles, and recycling your soil, yup: True Living Organics the Druid’s Edition. You can also get some insider tips for growing Druid style here on my YouTube channel, so subscribe baybee: Rev’s YouTube Channel. Want some more Rev right now? Okay then, here ya go: Weird Cannabis Growing Problems–by the Rev.