I am going to revive this a little. Continual white pistol growth is signaling that you have not altered the environment, lighting, nutrients appropriately. It is the transition to ripening. If the plant doesn’t get an idea that seasons are changing, the plant keeps growing more pistils and growth.
It means you missed the appropriate time to make those adjustments. You will need to lower light intensity, temps, humidity, nutrients, and possibly even lights on time. The goal for Pistils is to all be brown/orange before harvest. This is for dense and potent buds. But if you don’t make the proper changes at the proper time, you extend flowering growth which shows up as new white pistils. If temps remain higher you can even consider this foxtailing growth to air out the buds. New buds that push out the dense buds to air them out.
Consistency tells the plant what’s happening or coming up. Just a small blip of change for a day isn’t going to alter her. She needs 4-7 days of seeing a temp drop to make a shift ect. Same goes for all reductions that would signal her to transition.
So it is Not what indoor growers want to see. We control everything and extended white pistil growth is an indication of operator error in the grow process. You must make small adjustments and give consistency after making adjustments for the plant to properly transition her phases.
Time is not the only factor determining harvest and that is where the confusion happens.
If you were to drop temps for 3-4 days around week 5-6 and then pick it back up to where is was before the drop, you may see pistils brown and recede early during that cold time. But once the temps went back up she makes more white Pistils and stops browning pistils so much anymore. Because you tricked her into thinking it was time to mature but then told her with warmer temps that ooops cold weather isn’t coming to back to flowering. Had you kept the temps where they were when you lowered it, she would have continued gracefully into maturation and continual browning of the pistils. Then you could use trichomes as the signal.
Typically we say don’t go off pistols, but pistols are important to pay heed to. They Should be all orange/brown before trichomes are white amber. But we as home growers always see white pistil growth and figure it’s not significant. No pistil growth is a quality thing, it tells the consumer how well the cultivator did to guide the plant properly through her phases. You can get more potent bud from a plant that has no white pistils and trichomes are on point. Because think about it, you let the plant grow buds instead of focus resin. By the time you harvest with white pistils, you lost all that grow time of the plant being in resin production. So you will sacrifice max potency potential if your harvesting with straight standing white pistils in your buds.
Now, you will notice the colas closer to the light will always have pistils maturing slower. And the buds at the middle of the canopy level will seem to be maturing perfectly. That is because the top colas are warmer, more humid, get more light. Which all stalls maturation, or continued white pistil growth. So, that is why they say to look to the middle canopy buds for harvesting because the top buds just don’t mature the same rate, also why they say to harvest half and leave the others to go further and reduce the intensity for the remaining buds that need to finish more.
Am I painting a good picture of how pistils and the conditions we give and when and consistency plays a role in new pistil/bud growth? Wrap that up in a ball and ask yourself if you took the cultivars harvest times and made a plan for adjustments.
These posts are what leads growers to understand that cannabis is more complex. You don’t get to say it is easy until you understand all aspects of cannabis growth and we never stop learning. This is a critical topic because I see a lot of people ignoring pistils and focus trichomes. But pistils are a critical signal for us as growers to really pay heed to. That is, if we plan to grow the most chronic bud that our seeds can produce.
There are a lot of variables to what I am saying. I can’t elaborate further or I’d take all day. But this is it rolled into a ball.
If you want harvest on time to the cultivar and have the most potent and quality buds, you need to implement this info into your process and start altering your grow plan to incorporate shifts. If not, I call it a Continuation pattern.
I am not innocent, I extended pistil/calyx growth but I payed attention to it and made proper adjustments. But I added a week to my harvest window.
Good luck and happy growing
