The plants don’t look to be crossing into flower stage yet. But they are starting to show a lot of pistils. We need to apply a round of neem oil to help with grasshoppers chomping tiny holes in our plants.
With it being August, it is too late in the grow period to add a trellis? I want to reduce their current height by half, by bending the plants with the netting. I just don’t want to do it if it would result in a reduced yield.
For northeast outdoor growers, when do you usually start seeing regular photoperiod plants switch into the flower stage.
We are also hoping to collect pollen from our one male… This is proving to be a very hard. The pollen can been seen on the fan leaves. But when we bring it inside and flick the stems over parchment paper we don’t see anything dropping.
Totally would prefer to only add netting to help support the buds as they fill out. But this run we don’t want to have super tall plants. We did do the bending during the past month, to help bush out the plants. We haven’t really pruned the plants yet. Was hoping with the netting, we could avoid the need to prune at all.
As for collecting pollen. I was hoping we could avoid cutting up the male plant. But we’ll try this with the sections that haven’t opened yet. Not trying to seed out entire garden. We just don’t have any more of these particular strains, so it will be nice to have more of these seeds for the next seasons.
Attempted pollination on 3 plants yesterday. Just tried not to breath, and also pulled the cola away from the plants as pollen was being applied. We targeted a single mid section cola of the plants. Using a Q-tip. Hoping we didn’t seed the entire garden (fingers crossed). Not the end of the world if we did, but wind was minimal.
That was yesterday evening, and now we’re dealing with heavy rainfall. So that should get rid of excess pollen.
Should we hit those buds with a 2nd or 3rd round of pollination?
It would be awesome if we didn’t need to, as pollen seemed to go poof when we gently tapped the cola. So the risk of over pollenating the garden increases with each new round.
I used the Qtip method to pollinate a few buds on 2 of my autos out on the deck. Was really careful, no wind, 6am.
4wks later I was amazed at the number of seed sites…way beyond what I brushed with the Qtip.
Pollen is tiny, light, and will blow/drift EVERYWHERE.
I’d be surprised if your male is outdoors that all of your plants aren’t pollinated to some degree at this point.
It’s that “poof” that gets ya
I would also probably just leave it. Especially if you feel that your cutting it close time wise. It might just be bs, but it seems like overly pollenated buds take longer to finish the seeds. You can harvest around your pollenated buds if needed and just leave them on the stump for a while.
I like to use my finger tip as i get less of a “poof” effect compared to using a q-tip or small paint brush. It still tends to drift to other plants like a magnet however.
Totally forgot to mark the pollenated colas. But there is good news, as I could see some calyx swelling. Albeit not in the areas I believe I pollenated.
Happy to report that there are swollen calyx on most of the plants. And some on sections that we didn’t try to pollenate, but ok. So it will be the fun task of labeling the seeds according to phenotypic expression (tall and short plants).
We are seeing some white powdery mold. But it seems limited to the lower part of the plants.
Always appreciate the input from the community & TGIF!
“Here they come to save the day!!” 
Trust the OGers, SS/BW…mister 
