I used 10-gallon pots with Pro-Mix soil to plant in. I watered each day and every week I used a 20-20-20 water-nutrient mix. On September 1, I stopped feeding, but kept watering. I came up with a lot of buds. I know marijauna growers who have used these same seeds and picked big ripe, yellow-leafed, red-haired buds. It’s October 15. My marijuana plants have yet to change colors. Are they too healthy? Did I feed them too much?
If you have too much nitrogen, ripening will be delayed. Since you fertilized the plants every week, you produced a large build-up of nitrogen that the plant didn’t use. Despite the fact that you stopped fertilizing on September 1, a bevy of water-soluble nitrogen stayed in the medium. The marijuana plants took this as a cue to keep growing because of the excess nutrients. If there is not a high level of nitrogen in the planting medium, the plants will be prone to flowering. The nitrogen is taken from the big fan leaves to the incipient buds. The fan leaves start to shift to a yellow color as the nitrogen makes its way to the buds. Your plants continued to be green because they had an excess of nitrogen.
To promote flowering and bud growth, you should have used your current fertilizer up until around July 15. At that point, you shouldn’t use fertilizer at all for the next 2 weeks. Then, infuse the medium with a bloom mix like 2-10-10 or 1-9-5 for three weeks. Higher phosphorus is good for producing large flowers while the increased potassium keeps the high phosphoric acidity in check. There should be plenty of residual nutrients in the medium after three feedings. A slightly dryer soil also promotes ripening.
Robert