should i let her get 24 hrs pitch dark before cutting? should i flush her real quick?
or am i good to cut
I'm not sure how your growing, but I grow outdoors with organic fertilizers and lots of composted soil. It kind of sounds like your messing with the hydroponic nutrients so the rules might be different for you. I haven't needed to feed my plants since mid-summer and as far as watering goes, I continue to water as needed up until the day I harvest. My plants are to big to put anything over them so I don't do the 24 hrs pitch dark thing.
When drying my goal is get the moisture content / relative humidity between 60% to 70% as quick as possible then keep it at that range for several weeks or however long I intend to let that batch cure. A week before I'm ready to consume my weed I lower the humidity to 50%. If I'm going to store it for a long period (6+ mo), I'll go as low as 45% RH and use distilled water to bring it back up to 50% when I take it out of storage. I don't have first hand experience with really long term storage, as the longest I've stored my stash was 2 years and that only because I hid my stash a little to well.
Best advice I can offer is to wear gloves, pluck the leaves off with your fingers on your first pass, then use the scissors to shape the buds on your second pass. Also if you use the same two fingers (e.g. index and thumb) and are able to deleaf several colas, in about 20 min of plucking your fingers should be dark brown and covered in hashish. Roll that stuff into a bowl and smoke asap. Its the bombist shit, especially when it's fresh and doesn't any chemical additives.
Its also a good idea to have a few piles. One for dead yellow leaves and fan leaves and another one for small sugar leaves that are covered in trichomes that are visible to the naked eye.