Still, nobody has offered an explanation as to why the ash staying black for longer, and it being harsh. You don't understand that I've been doing this for years and years, I've always achieved white ash, pretty much straight off the drying rack. That is the main reason why I started this thread...Because I think there is a significant explanation as to why ALL 4 strains from the run I didn't flush, and fed up through the end up flowering, smoke harshly and have black ash - All 4 of which I've run before, same room, same methods other than the flush, came out totally different. It makes no sense at all. If it's a drying/curing problem..I really don't understand, because they dried on a rack for 14 days, and have been curing for 2 weeks, and usually I don't even have to cure my herbs to get them to smoke cleanly, smoothly, and leave white ash. They crisp apart, trichomes dusting off and all. I truly think it is the nutrients, given all of the circumstances.
Even organic nutrients leave compounds in the flowers. If you think about it from an atomic point of view, if you feed your flowers a lot of nutrients at the end of their cycle, and they absorb the nutrients, the nutrients will be in the flower. They will be utilized to carry out certain metabolic functions, mainly survival, until the flower is chopped. When you chop it, the nutrients don't magically disappear out of the flower. They remain, and I'm fairly sure they don't evaporate.
Flushing a plant, however, would force the plant to use every available nutrient, at least theoretically leaving less of the compounds, therefore less of an off-flavor.
It really makes a lot of sense to me, I just wish I knew the sound chemistry behind it.