This is northern lights started from seed. It started to flower inside, and re-vegged when outdoors. It actually did pretty well overall, and is the largest plant that I started from seed.
We're starting to get frost warnings and there was already some bud rot so I decided to do a very rough trim to look for rot and any insects (found a lot of eggs 🤮) and then bring it in to dry.
Off the plant and into a bowl:
Bud rot:
Some nice buds
Not too shabby
I didn't wash these ones (or harvests from previous years), but I did wash another plant recently to compare. Very little came off, but I suppose mold spores are not visible.
The eggs were very visible on the leaves so i got those off pretty easily in trimming.
Eta: we haven't had any mold show up in our previous harvests after drying and curing, and we end up storing for maybe 18 months at most before we use it all? So I think we do a pretty good job removing a large amount of bud around the mold (mildew?) and avoiding contamination.