I'll throw out a few things that I learned this year. I'm up in Salem so we have a bit shorter season that you will have down south. My largest plants, Blue Dream and Snoop dream, were 8 and 9' tall. Unfortunately, once we started getting rain in September, everything started falling apart. I built a 12' tall greenhouse as protection against the rain. Even though I was dragging the plants out when it was sunny, and aggressively trimming away any mold, I still lost a massive amount of product to mold. Some of the kolas were 18" long and as big around as your wrist. But once you started cutting out the mold, would be lucky to save a third of it. My smaller plant, a Cherry OG, gave a yield of 2 pounds and it was only 5' tall. I'm guessing that we lost at least a pound from the larger plants, probably more like a pound and a half. The reason I waited for the larger plants was because they were not maturing as fast as the smaller plant.
Next year, I will be looking for auto flowering plants so we can harvest before the rainy season. The greenhouse was partially destroyed during one of the storms. Planning on rebuilding, but not nearly as tall since the shorter growing season won't yield the tall plants.
To answer your question about flowering stage, my plants were flowering early to mid August. The large ones still weren't fully mature at 60 days. We did have a cool and wet period in there where growth seemed to stop. The buds then started to grow and mature after that, but we were getting into October by then.
My plants were really too tall to light dep without another significant investment and covering and uncovering daily. You may have a different schedule and can afford the time.
