Do cannabis leaves ALWAYS fade during senescence

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Do cannabis leaves ALWAYS fade during senescence

  • Yes

  • No

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Harpua88

Harpua88

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Here's one of my Strawberry Widow plants on Nov 1st. I could not wait any longer to cut it, our house is in a northern zone. In fact it's very unusual to be able to wait that long. We already had a few nights where it dipped below freezing.....and we were about to get a real cold blast. It handled a couple of hours down to 30f just fine, but it wasn't gonna handle sustained 20f.......usually up here harvest time is Sept 15-30th. Beyond that is luck.

No yellow leaves. But......not senescence? It could have made it to Nov 10th.....20th......was it in the process of dying? Eh. It flowered for 100 days......and it was ripe, I even made seeds with it. I pollinated the heck out of it. ;). So it was mature/ripe on both counts. Dying? Well, if it was down south maybe it would have lived until Dec 1st. I don't know.

2nd picture is clearer I think. Looking at my time stamp the pic was Oct 16th. It looked exactly the same 2 wks later, just more ripe. I really wanted seeds so I pushed it to the last possible day. I'm lucky. I think if we had a hard freeze in late Sept/early Oct the seeds would not have been ripe. :(
 
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Harpua88

Harpua88

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Yup you got it… i try to be as literal as i can because i find using the proper terminology important to answering anything accurately. Plus it leaves less room for confusion or error.

i know to some it can be a pita but just how my mind works
That's good. Being flexible is good. It should all be fun too. Botany course........chat room....;)

It's not pita.....it's conversation. And it's all good.
 
Harpua88

Harpua88

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Here's another good question. Do we want to harvest cannabis when it's in senescence? Maybe, maybe not. We don't judge harvest time by how much the leaves are yellowing and dying. Clearly the soil we have has plenty of nitrogen.........indoors we don't have the luxury of nearly unlimited nutrients.

I think this Straw/Widow is mostly sativa. Man if I knew what a late fall we were gonna have I would have planted Columbian gold, Panama red, a couple of Thais.... I wonder how far this plant could have made it if it had more time in a warmer climate. It's actually quite good. For a few reasons some friends up here love it (I still have plenty, and it wasn't the only one), there was another one that was a natural....triploid? Not triploid....not tripod, that would mean it had 3 feet......it split into 3 leaf sets instead of 2 very early....

People up here don't try mostly Sativas. This was me just testing the land and making seeds. They have early varieties so this was very different. I let it go long after everyone else cut. I rolled the dice on seeds. And, I'd say most people don't properly cure. I was trying theirs on Oct 1st. I didn't share mine until Dec 1st and after. So as comical as it is every time I cut up a bud and 30 seeds tink out onto the tray.......one smell and taste and they can tell the difference.
 
Aqua Man

Aqua Man

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Here's another good question. Do we want to harvest cannabis when it's in senescence? Maybe, maybe not. We don't judge harvest time by how much the leaves are yellowing and dying. Clearly the soil we have has plenty of nitrogen.........indoors we don't have the luxury of nearly unlimited nutrients.

I think this Straw/Widow is mostly sativa. Man if I knew what a late fall we were gonna have I would have planted Columbian gold, Panama red, a couple of Thais.... I wonder how far this plant could have made it if it had more time in a warmer climate. It's actually quite good. For a few reasons some friends up here love it (I still have plenty, and it wasn't the only one), there was another one that was a natural....triploid? Not triploid....not tripod, that would mean it had 3 feet......it split into 3 leaf sets instead of 2 very early....

People up here don't try mostly Sativas. This was me just testing the land and making seeds. They have early varieties so this was very different. I let it go long after everyone else cut. I rolled the dice on seeds. And, I'd say most people don't properly cure. I was trying theirs on Oct 1st. I didn't share mine until Dec 1st and after. So as comical as it is every time I cut up a bud and 30 seeds tink out onto the tray.......one smell and taste and they can tell the difference.
I don’t necessarily feel senescence is good or bad per se just a natural process and sooo much depends on so many different variable that again like most things cannabis you cant make an accurate blanket statement one way or the other
 
Moe.Red

Moe.Red

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The answer is in the question… yes always because thats what senescence is.

Thats not to say that senescence always occurs by the time harvest comes around but almost always to some degree or another
OK, I'm gonna poke my nose where it doesn't belong probably, but here is my understanding

My definition of senescence is aging. It starts as soon as the organism is alive. As soon as you are born you start dying kinda thing.

Senescence (/sɪˈnɛsəns/) or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word senescence can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence involves an increase in death rates and/or a decrease in fecundity with increasing age, at least in the latter part of an organism's life cycle.

Senescence is the inevitable fate of almost all multicellular organisms with germ-soma separation,[1][2] but it can be delayed. The discovery, in 1934, that calorie restriction can extend lifespan by 50% in rats, and the existence of species having negligible senescence and potentially immortal organisms such as Hydra, have motivated research into delaying senescence and thus age-related diseases. Rare human mutations can cause accelerated aging diseases.

Environmental factors may affect aging – for example, overexposure to ultraviolet radiation accelerates skin aging. Different parts of the body may age at different rates. Two organisms of the same species can also age at different rates, making biological aging and chronological aging distinct concepts.


So I answered no because fade is not a prerequisite to dying.

We see this when we pull dead leaves off the bottom of the plant as one example. But dead fan leaves =/= fade.

Anyhow, I got no skin in this fight, just explaining why I said no in the survey.

And anyone that answered sometimes also answered no based on the way the question was worded lol.
 
Aqua Man

Aqua Man

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OK, I'm gonna poke my nose where it doesn't belong probably, but here is my understanding

My definition of senescence is aging. It starts as soon as the organism is alive. As soon as you are born you start dying kinda thing.

Senescence (/sɪˈnɛsəns/) or biological aging is the gradual deterioration of functional characteristics in living organisms. The word senescence can refer to either cellular senescence or to senescence of the whole organism. Organismal senescence involves an increase in death rates and/or a decrease in fecundity with increasing age, at least in the latter part of an organism's life cycle.

Senescence is the inevitable fate of almost all multicellular organisms with germ-soma separation,[1][2] but it can be delayed. The discovery, in 1934, that calorie restriction can extend lifespan by 50% in rats, and the existence of species having negligible senescence and potentially immortal organisms such as Hydra, have motivated research into delaying senescence and thus age-related diseases. Rare human mutations can cause accelerated aging diseases.

Environmental factors may affect aging – for example, overexposure to ultraviolet radiation accelerates skin aging. Different parts of the body may age at different rates. Two organisms of the same species can also age at different rates, making biological aging and chronological aging distinct concepts.


So I answered no because fade is not a prerequisite to dying.

We see this when we pull dead leaves off the bottom of the plant as one example. But dead fan leaves =/= fade.

Anyhow, I got no skin in this fight, just explaining why I said no in the survey.

And anyone that answered sometimes also answered no based on the way the question was worded lol.
Yeah makes sense I can see your point. To me senescence doesnt mean death. its more degradation of function due to cellular aging which leads to lack of photosynthesis in those tissues and thus fade but not death until the point is reached that the degradation is so great that death occurs.

So i cannot help but feel you cannot have senescence without fade or atleast the yellowing is caused by senescence. Im just confusing myself now lol
 
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mysticepipedon

mysticepipedon

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By sight, if you harvest when the flower bracts have 30% or more amber, the leaves are generally not going to be all green, to say the least.

If you harvest at the very beginning of amber, or before amber, it is possible to keep some strains green.
 
Moe.Red

Moe.Red

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Yeah makes sense I can see your point. To me senescence doesnt mean death. its more degradation of function due to cellular aging which leads to lack of photosynthesis in those tissues and thus fade but not death until the point is reached that the degradation is so great that death occurs.

So i cannot help but feel you cannot have senescence without fade or atleast the yellowing is caused by senescence. Im just confusing myself now lol
I think we would completely agree if we defined the terms the same. Even fade can have a different definition. Either way it’s academic at this point.
 
N1ghtL1ght

N1ghtL1ght

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But in plants it's different, you can't take a general definition here. The body of animals and plants greatly differ. Animals have organs and so, they divide their body and the whole system must work together. Now plants just have shoots, roots and leaves, and they just recreate a copy of these in their search for either water or light. So they have this pronounced lateral or distal growth, and are able, in times of need, to destroy some of their older parts and then use some of the building blocks to grow more at the tops.

Oftentimes, "the fade" is attributed to senescence but in reality is due to a mismatch of a nutritional demand of the plant vs what's being fertilized. Outside plants that can survive the winter, like trees, they have to fade their leaves because the colder temperature make it gradually harder to grow. Even yellow leaves can still absorb light but when the chloroplasts have become dysfunctional then the chlorophyll-molecule will raise dangerous oxidative species, which can poison a plant from the inside out (it's the same as photodeath). Thus, these plants completely recycle their leaves given that the breaking down of the chloroplasts alone offers a great deal of energy to the plant.

Now annual species usually have a few timers in place that controlls (via the Circadian clock) that their lifecycle through spring, summer and autumn is optimized in order to carry seeds to the next year. This is done, for example, by an initial phase of not being able to flower until maturity is reached - this naturally prevents a young sprout to flower in spring (where days may also be as short as in autumn). Now for summer this danger isn't present (except for true aequatorial strains) and the length of flowering is set in such a way to still be successful before freezing cold arrives.

So this is where the typical working 6 weeks veg and 10 weeks of flower are derived for indica-type of strains or hybrids.
The aequatorial sativas usually are harder to flower out, have way longer flowering times and respond more sensitively to environmental changes such as the light regiment, spectrum and temperature, also fertilization. Usually growers can start them under short photoperiod already like 14/10, they may take longer to mature and may need 11/13 or 10/14 (longer nights) to incite them to not throw new flowers when the other parameters can't be controlled. These strains may even react to regional weather patterns like the monsoon.

Now nowadays you can have all kinds of genetics set everywhere, and most people don't know about the origin of what they grow. So all outcomes are very likely, like, as in the above example, the plant may have still expected to have another month before it would start to fade. The Circadian Rhythm is present in every plant cell and gives a timer of roughly 24h (+- a couple minutes) that itself can be reset daily by blue light. Apart from this impulse this timer is kind of very precise (for biological systems) and can even operate regardless of temperature or many other influences.

edit:
to further elaborate on this
and the length of flowering is set in such a way to still be successful before freezing cold arrives.
thing is, for plants it's not only important to just complete the seeds, but also to maximize the amount of seeds - as that then offers a greater evolutionairy viability. Alot of what plants do can be roughly understood by using "evolutionairy play theory", as the sheer amount of plants and their sessility forces them into this harsh optimization. So their natural incentive is grow and flower as long as possible, and then to finish at the right time.
And when that isn't possible, like far up north where there isn't much summer, then the autoflowers were more successful. So, since Cannabis was able to adapt to 3 totally different climatal regions on earth, the way it flowered also changed greatly. All this is just a reaction to the various environmental parameters at hand.
 
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N1ghtL1ght

N1ghtL1ght

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Ah I forgot to mention "repair". There's alot of repair going on in leaves as the sun emits harmful rays. Now the older leaves get, the more the plant "looses its interest" to repair these. That's also quite natural because typically older leaves may be gradually more in the shade - overgrown by the newer leaves. The chloroplasts they become gerontoplasts, actually they have several stages.
Also hormonal feedbacks and photoreceptor inputs are tremendously higher in the new shoots, so it's like the plant recreates itself constantly anew to react to the outside world.
The same is with roots, these can take up water only for a set period of time, then not anymore.
And the plant is even dying in the inside - the xylem consists of dead cells. These transports water upwards - so it's still functional for the plant and I guess, economically for it to use these.
 
Dirtbag

Dirtbag

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I would have just shrugged it off if not for this post.....Lots of stuff happens I can't figure out and I don't bother with the fine details of why. You can clearly see in one of my above pics the green on the left and the other 2 have faded like normal for me at 10 weeks...I scoped the buds yesterday and they're not ready but they both look the same with few amber and still some clear heads
I've seen a lot of variability in clones from the same mother, some grow bigger, some smaller some produce more weight, taste better, ripen differently etc. I think a lot has to do with how metabolically active they are, which is determined by a host of variables.
I had a shishkaberry plant that was fairly predictable and always grown under the same conditions but once in a while it simply refused to ripen properly. Same with my bubba kush cut.
 
Harpua88

Harpua88

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Would you all consider that outdoor one I posted "in senescence"? I really don't know how much longer it would have lived/flowered/ripened......and died.....if not for the fact that it was Nov 1st and up north (Upper NY State near Canada). Throw in the fact that I fully pollinated it and I was really surprised at how long it went. I pollinated it on the early side. I think the male I chose dropped pollen around the middle of August. Different strains behave differently, but most don't just stop flowering and focus only on seed once pollinated. This one kept flowering for another 70+ days. Although I also wonder whatbit would have looked like if I didn't pollinate it.
 
Aqua Man

Aqua Man

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Would you all consider that outdoor one I posted "in senescence"? I really don't know how much longer it would have lived/flowered/ripened......and died.....if not for the fact that it was Nov 1st and up north (Upper NY State near Canada). Throw in the fact that I fully pollinated it and I was really surprised at how long it went. I pollinated it on the early side. I think the male I chose dropped pollen around the middle of August. Different strains behave differently, but most don't just stop flowering and focus only on seed once pollinated. This one kept flowering for another 70+ days. Although I also wonder whatbit would have looked like if I didn't pollinate it.
Its a process thats in play all the time. Its not a plant thing per se it can be a single leaf showing senescence
 
Dirtbag

Dirtbag

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Would you all consider that outdoor one I posted "in senescence"? I really don't know how much longer it would have lived/flowered/ripened......and died.....if not for the fact that it was Nov 1st and up north (Upper NY State near Canada). Throw in the fact that I fully pollinated it and I was really surprised at how long it went. I pollinated it on the early side. I think the male I chose dropped pollen around the middle of August. Different strains behave differently, but most don't just stop flowering and focus only on seed once pollinated. This one kept flowering for another 70+ days. Although I also wonder whatbit would have looked like if I didn't pollinate itit.

Could be for sure, it doesn't always have to be yellow leaves, yours appears to be showing anthocyanin pigmentation which is only really noticeable when chlorophyll degrades. Some plants will fade out yellow, some redish, some purple.
 
RootsRuler

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Yup you got it… i try to be as literal as i can because i find using the proper terminology important to answering anything accurately. Plus it leaves less room for confusion or error.

i know to some it can be a pita but just how my mind works
Sometimes I get accused of being a grammar nazi but it's annoying listening to someone trying to explain something without using the proper terminology. I get that you may not be an expert but at least learn a few terms so that we can get to the heart of whatever it is you're trying to explain and try and bypass as much of the 20 questions part when it comes to trying to understand the issue in its entirety.
 
Harpua88

Harpua88

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Could be for sure, it doesn't always have to be yellow leaves, yours appears to be showing anthocyanin pigmentation which is only really noticeable when chlorophyll degrades. Some plants will fade out yellow, some redish, some purple.
It was definitely cold. I don't know what other factors were at play genetically and time-wise, but of the 3, 2 turned purple, 1 stayed green. None of them turned yellow....

Wait, it could be for sure...? ;)
 
Y

yobbocrack

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In which way do you mean?
As the only difference is the type of medium being used, but i am over looking it either way senescence is going to happen at some stage....whatever happened to the "harvest window period"
 
W

WyattTerp

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Waiting for trichs to amber is agonizing and the agony births desires to make plants color up faster, to make them fade faster and to make the trichs amber up faster. Faster doesn't always equate to better but we just can't seem to leave the ripening process alone. We supplement UVB, we turn lights down, we drop temperatures, we stop feeding, we flush ... we even have nutrient brands selling products that speed up senescence. Do our end of life mgmt techniques lead to less resin, less oil, fewer cannabinoids, terpenoids or flavonoids? I'd love to learn techniques that speed up the plants EOL without limiting or degrading its oils and resins. Anyone have a list of EOL techniques that can do this?
 

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