I've heard about the ice and extended dark.. I knew some old timer that swore that the best thing he did in late flower was kicking with buckets or pickin em up and dropping em along with dumping buckets of ice water into his soil and letting the ice melt on the soil surface. He grew wicked weed but also ate his dogs milk bone treats so idk what to think...
Even in soil I never truly "flushed" the plants by definition, I would just start watering straight tap with 10% - 15% runoff. With soil taking so long to leach nutrients at least the plants had something to feed off of in the last crucial few weeks.
That's what I was asking about in the other thread regarding using a carb/sugar additives in flower in a sterile UC reservoir. Does it increase quality or terps? or is it just there to feed a microbial herd that I don't allow to grow in the first place...
I've also seen quite a few different videos on how guys are saying to look at the state of the trichs on the inside of the bud not the outside to tell when to chop. Apparently by judging cloudy/amber trichs on the outside the bud isn't fully ripened and that huge last 2 week push is actually interpreted a week or two earlier than it should be. The example used was fruit. A peach can look ripe on the outside, but hard on the inside.
I'm going to take some buds apart once Im getting close and see for myself if there is that much of a variance in the trichs from inside and out. Oddly enough this never occurred for me to check before. I have friends with a large setup who always strip all their fans at 6 weeks (on an 8 week strain) and say that it helps with light penetration, cuts down on humidity issues, and assists speed up the flush. I'm going to try it out on half of one of my systems and see how one side does compared to the other. I'm growing from seed so its not a true comparison, but I'm interested to see how the plants react.