Harvest time - natural death

With fertilizers it seemed that I had to keep a close eye on pistils and trichomes to assess optimum harvest. Using amended soil water only it seems that as the plant reaches peak harvest the whole plant tells the story - much easier to read?

Is this experience generally shared?

Yes my plants let me know when to harvest every time. I still scope them out , but you can tell by the plant condition. that they are ready.

I have not taken a flowered plant all the way to its natural damise, but its something i had thought of doing. I do use 100x scope to watch trichs, I also have a single touching bud ill mark and ill feel and squeeze it. Watching The bud fill out, this is the only bud ill finger n fondle instead of grabbing n touching all my tops.

Do you have photo examples of the flowers and entire plant at it's natural death, thus correct harvest time. I always waited for the fan and other leaves to yellow out as it sucks nitrogen out of itself. Is this the correct deal?

It depends on the fertilizer, if your nitrogen is depleted in an early stage of flowering, the fanleafs will also die off. Then there's still a long way to go before flowers actually ripen, and will take way longer as the plant's progress slows down with all the leaf damage.

Once i've seen outdoor plants almost dried when harvested, and it was very nice stash but really mellow too. A great deal of potency was gone, but the flavor was great. Ideal to smoke pure joints or mix it with hash!

I don't use fertilizer. Water only. No photos. I found when using fertilizers amber trichomes would start to appear after the expected number of days but the plant looked like it was happy to keep growing for weeks more

As an annual, cannabis reaches a point of senescence were the leaves yellow and the plant begins dying naturally. It is during this phase that we harvested. The flowers will mature at this time and you can just keep an eye on them for the stage of development you prefer.

Senescence will occur with living soil regardless of the nutrients remaining in the soil. If one is using small volumes of soil and just a chemical free system rather than real living soil then there can be some manipulation of senescence (apparently).

We often grew a half acre at a time so cut down the plants when about 25% of the trichomes were going amber. We found that by curing the whole plants hanging that most of the trichomes ambered post harvest.